Jpn_gardens

ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES / ENGLISH 244: JAPANESE NATURE WRITING

JAPANESE GARDENS

David Landis Barnhill

To be published in The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, Continuum, 2005

Garden design has been a spiritual art form in Japan for a thousand years, one in which the Japanese have explored various conceptions of nature. Influenced by both Buddhism and Shinto, the aesthetic complexity of Japanese gardens have been seen as a sign of the Japanese reverence for nature. However, the relationship between Japanese gardens and what we call “nature” is complex and raises questions about the specific quality of love of nature in the Japanese tradition.

There are various types of artistic Japanese gardens. The first type we can call “symbolic.” Starting in the Heian Period (794-1186), gardens were constructed as representations of various types of spiritual realms. In some cases they suggested the paradise of Pure Land Buddhism. In other cases, influenced by Shingon Buddhism, they were topographic mandalas, cosmic diagrams of ultimate reality. Still other gardens suggested the fabled Daoist islands of immortals. In all cases the assumption is that there can be a direct correlation between the natural world and the divine, and that conscious human design can in a sense make the sacred present in the concrete world of trees and ponds.

In the medieval period (1186-1603), Zen Buddhism became the primary influence in Japanese gardens. A new form of garden developed, which we can call “microcosmic.” These gardens represent lifelike scenes of nature in a miniature way. Perhaps the finest example is at the temple Daisen-in in Kyoto, where a composition of rocks about three-feet high suggests a huge mountain and a waterfall, with a narrow bed of gravel suggesting a river and isolated rocks serving as islands. There is also a large rock clearly signifying a boat. The scene presented is not one of some paradise distinct from this world but rather a realistic setting in the mountains. But religious reality is not absent because, as Buddhism’s Heart Sutra says, “form is emptiness and emptiness is form”: this very world is ultimate reality. The gardens are not merely clever miniatures but religious microcosms. They cultivate in the viewer a state of mind liberated from conventional assumptions about space and time, large and small, near and far.

Another garden form is the “dry landscape” (karesansui) or rock and gravel garden. The most famous example is at the Zen temple of Ryōan-ji. This garden is about the size of a singles tennis court and consists of a flat expanse of gravel broken only by five earthen mounds that hold a total of fifteen rocks and some moss. There are no trees or flowering plants. Some observers have said the mounds represents islands in a sea, mountain peaks breaking through cloud cover, or even a mother tiger leading her cubs across a river. But this type of garden is not realistic or representational. Because of that we might be tempted to call such gardens “abstract,” but they are not abstractions from the concrete world of nature but rather elemental distillations of it. The basic components of Japanese garden design – rocks, plants, and water (in the form of flat gravel) – are concentrated into their most elemental form. As with the microcosmic gardens, the rock garden is meant to be viewed from a veranda of the temple bordering one of its sides. Meditation on the rocks and gravel is considered particularly conducive to the stillness and open awareness prized in Zen.

Late in the medieval period another form of garden developed in association with the Way of Tea (chadō). The tea ceremony (cha-no-yu) developed out of the drinking of tea in Zen monasteries, a custom brought from China that helped meditating monks remain awake. Eventually, a highly ritualized form of serving tea to a few guests developed. The ceremony became a kind of choreographed dance of enlightenment. Each person brings to the occasion an absolute focus on the present based on a deep tranquility and a recognition of the unlimited value of every moment. The tea house is simple and natural, exemplifying the aesthetic ideal of wabi (aesthetic rusticity and tranquil appreciation of the simple and natural). The approach to the tea house and the ceremony needed to cultivate a spiritual state of mind, and tea garden (roji) developed in order to accomplish this. The garden does not function to display conventional beauty, but to nurture a meditative state of mind: it is spiritually therapeutic. It works by having the viewer walk through a garden that is highly subdued, usually only rocks, moss, and some evergreen plants organized in a subtly aesthetic way. Once the participant enters the tea house, the door is closed and there is no view of the garden, for now he is to focus all attention and value on the tea ceremony.

In the seventeenth century the “stroll garden” developed. As in the tea garden, the viewer walks through the landscape, but these are larger gardens in which spring blossoms and fall colors provide a rich but still subdued beauty. The most exquisite example is Katsura villa, just outside of Kyoto. Walking through the garden, the viewer encounters a variety of aesthetically composed scenes in a subtle rhythm of stimulation and quietness, turns and pauses. The garden exhibits the two major aspects of a Buddhist world view: change and interrelationship. Subtle framing techniques emphasize the interrelatedness of rock, water, tree, and building, while stone steps and bridges tie together divisions in garden areas. Strolling through Katsura is like walking in a holy cathedral, a sculpture park, a landscape painting by Monet, and Walden Pond – all at once.

These various types of Japanese gardens demonstrate the beauty and religious significance of nature. But from a Western perspective we can ask whether they are “natural.” Japanese gardens are minutely maintained, with pine trees trained to appear like old trees growing on a mountain cliff (including tying branches to a pole and pulling them down so they are horizontal, as well as plucking older needles so the tree is very open). This approach to design we can call “formal naturalism.” It is formal because the design and the maintenance of the garden reflect a preconceived ideal of what a garden should look like – very little is left to grow on its own. But it is naturalism because the design is based on naturalistic principles. Rather than the stiff symmetry of formal French gardens, Japanese stroll gardens display a more dynamic asymmetrical balance, and they are intended to reflect the essential nature of the objects.

Western observers have tended to distinguish “nature” from that which has been subject to human control, and in this sense Japanese gardens are certainly not natural. But we need to recognize the assumptions are at work in Japanese aesthetics. In East Asian religion, the ideal is to act according to our nature, but our nature is obscured and distorted by our desires and delusions. Left by themselves, humans do not act according to their nature. It takes rigorous spiritual training to uncover our true nature. A similar idea is at work in garden design. The gardener training the pine tree is not distorting the pine but helping it manifest its true nature, which is exemplified by trees subjected to centuries of harsh conditions on a mountain cliff. In addition, nature and culture are not assumed to be separate spheres. Humans are part of nature, and culture is interrelated with nature’s processes. The question is whether individual behavior and particular cultural activities conform to nature’s ways or to human self-centeredness. Thus the “idealized” nature in Japanese gardens can be considered to be the true nature of nature.

There is, however, a significant limitation in Japanese garden aesthetics. As John Elder has pointed out, Japanese gardens tend to put high spiritual value on specific, often walled-in spaces. This concentration of value runs the risk of devaluing all that is outside the confines of a garden. The technique of “borrowed scenery” (shakkei) integrates the garden with its surrounding landscape (for example, by using trees in the garden to frame a distant mountain peak). In addition, Buddhism proclaims that all places interpenetrate and all of the phenomenal world is the Absolute. But for most viewers, the garden remains a special place of beauty and value, and the mundane world they return when they leave the garden is left neither to our sense of natural wildness nor cultivated according to formal naturalism. All too often, it is subject to human exploitation and degradation.

ES/English 244 Home Page

Assignments, attendance, participation, contact

Books

Schedule

Study Aids

> Major Western Views of Nature

> "Nature"

> Issues in the Study of Japanese Nature Writing

> Bits of History

> East Asian Buddhism and nature

> East Asian aesthetics and nature

> Japanese gardens