Powerful rock piles at the Yuyuan Garden in Shanghai. (©Stephen Mansfield)
The poet, Yang Wanli (1127-1206), maintained that, "The beauty of Suzhou gardens has no peer in the Southeast of China." The gardens that sprang up in the southern Yangtze River area were unsurpassed in their mastery of space and form.
The main elements of these gardens were their rocks, the earth's bones, and water, its veins. Pine, bamboo, plum, chrysanthemum, and lotus were favorite plants and trees. Deep and long submersion in lakes shaped their rocks into fantastic forms, full of holes and scooped surfaces, effects much loved by the Chinese.
In their designs, painters and gardeners deliberately imitated each other. The latticed windows of the pavilions and corridors that run through the gardens are designed to show landscaped images as framed paintings. Many of the windows, carved with flowers, plants, and birds, are artworks in themselves. Moon-shaped entrances in walls also act as frames for viewing special rocks or trees.
From Chinese Models to Japanese Visions
These ideas were not lost on early Japanese landscape designers, those who created Nara (710-794) and Heian era (794-1185) gardens. Early landscape designs in Japan may have been closely based on ancient Chinese and Korean models, but, under the growing influence of Buddhism, they began to mirror images of Amida's Western Paradise, as visualized through a Japanese perspective.
The Heian-era garden had already begun to incorporate optical effects that projected the foreground into the distance and, under the sway of Buddhist teachings on the ceaseless cycles of birth, death, and rebirth, turned the seasons into dioramas of eternity. Symbolism and design had come to be used not only to add depth to the garden, but through an unfolding of associations, to expand the spatial aspects of the mind.
In a pre-enactment of later designs, Nara and Heian-period gardens created rescaled versions of landscapes from remote parts of the country into a compressed tableau vivant of nature. Popular recreations included the islands of the Inland Sea, the coast at Sumiyoshi, and Tamatsushima in Kii Province. With the rare exception of landscape gardens like Motsu-ji in the northern city of Hiraizumi, or Nara's older, meticulously reconstructed To-in, only the excavated foundations of such gardens have survived to the present day.
Japan Breaks from the Prototype
Japan's genius was in confidently disengaging from the prototype, while retaining aspects of it that served its aesthetic ends. It was not so much an embellishing of Chinese gardens as a departure from them.
A fine example of innovation, of the assertion of Japanese concepts and features in landscape design, is found in the garden of Tenryu-ji Temple in Arashiyama. Completed in 1339, the design, the work of Zen priest Muso Soseki, incorporates a dry waterfall, and the idea of the shakkei, or the borrowed view, the requisitioning landscapes and features beyond the garden, an effect that draws them, from a perspective point of view, into the garden.
In a later age, other garden forms with distinctive Japanese characteristics would emerge, among them the courtyard, stroll, and tea garden. Such new, homegrown ideas were, arguably, successors to Japan's purest form: the dry landscape garden. Stone gardens evolved as much from religious and aesthetic preferences as from changing socio-political conditions specific to Japan in its medieval era, principally the ascendancy of a warrior class and their aesthetic of frugality.
Marc P. Keene, in his book Japanese Garden Design, makes a strong case supporting the view that the confined, almost escapist designs of stone gardens were a response to the turbulence of the times. "Gardens, in keeping with the nature of society in general," he writes, "became withdrawn, tightly enclosed, and introverted."
Stone Gardens in an Age of Turbulence
Curiously, this backdrop of social instability was matched by a period of economic growth and a flowering of the arts. In a climate of fear and uncertainty, Zen temples became unofficial sponsors of the arts, providing a relatively safe haven for those still able to contemplate the finer things in life: the creation of Noh dramas, linked verse, and gardens.
Fantastical scenes, miniaturized depictions of Japanese landscapes incorporating themes from the newly adopted practice of Zen Buddhism, became appealing fixtures. Elevating these stone tableaux from the merely pictorial or sculptural were a host of superimposed concepts, central posits of Japanese Zen aesthetics, such as yugen (unfathomable depth), koko (precious simplicity), seijaku (absolute stillness), and mu (nothingness, empty space).
While the blueprint of Chinese gardens, with their islands of celestial rock, bonseki (miniature gardens in shallow trays), and the cultivation of dwarf pines, influenced later stone garden designs, an attachment to rocks predates Japan's earliest gardens by a good millennium.
Japan's native religion, the animistic creed of Shinto, placed much stock on certain distinctive features such as ancient trees, waterfalls, prominently placed boulders, and rocks as spirit zones, sites where the gods congregated.
Sacred Stones and Shinto Roots
Even in the pre-Shinto era, sacred stones known as iwa-kura (seats of the gods) were believed to spiritually cleanse an area. Straw ropes were tied around the rocks, the area cleared and covered with gravel or sand in an arrangement more deliberately sacerdotal than a dry landscape garden, but with common Nature-derived elements. Cones made from salt, a symbol of purity in Shinto, were later created in the grounds of shrines.
Japanese Zen appears to have requisitioned the powerful iconoclastic and didactic potential of rocks to enhance its own gardens, infusing them with meanings that would hold fast within a new religious context.
Buddhist Triad Rocks (sanzonseki), clusters of rock representing Mount Sumeru, the mythic center of the Buddhist universe, and arrangements of seven stones representing the compassion of the Buddha, are examples of consciously applied concepts. Gardens attached to Zen temples gradually and deliberately assimilated elements that would turn them into incarnations of a Buddhist worldview.
Zen Meaning and Modern Form
This is represented at its least ambiguous in rockwork that symbolizes, for example, stone clusters representing certain stages in Zen enlightenment. The indeterminate nature of gravel and sand, materials that require constant maintenance to preserve the patterns raked so ephemerally across their surfaces, readily suggests the Buddhist notion of impermanence, the flickering presence of a metaphysical world.
Stone gardens have passed effortlessly into this domain of art, their crisp verticals and horizontals, compositional framing, and tightly controlled field of vision inviting parallels with modern photography and architecture.
Straining to conceptualize gardens, however, can be a peculiarly counter-productive endeavor, one that can diminish their intended effects, the sheer pleasure to be had from viewing them. It is perhaps more liberating to view successful stone gardens as works of art in their own right, aesthetic accomplishments, or architectural complements to contiguous structures.
In this context, the art of the stone garden is clearly far from extinct. A Buddhist temple, private residence, or even a hotel will, if it has the financial means and requisite vision, still commission the layout of a stone garden, and, if the design is executed by one of the modern masters, the result will be an enduring work of spatial sculpture. And the design will be indelibly Japanese.
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Author: Stephen Mansfield
