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Type of Japanese garden

The Japanese dry garden (枯山水) or Japanese rock garden, often called a Zen garden, is a distinctive style of Japanese garden. It creates a miniature stylized landscape through carefully composed arrangements of rocks, water features, moss, pruned trees and bushes, and uses gravel or sand that is raked to represent ripples in water. Zen gardens are commonly found at temples or monasteries. A Zen garden is usually relatively small, surrounded by a wall or buildings, and is usually meant to be seen while seated from a single viewpoint outside the garden, such as the porch of the hojo, the residence of the chief monk of the temple or monastery. Many, with gravel rather than grass, are only stepped into for maintenance. Classical Zen gardens were created at temples of Zen Buddhism in Kyoto during the Muromachi period. They were intended to imitate the essence of nature, not its actual appearance, and to serve as an aid for meditation.

Stone gardens existed in Japan at least since the Heian period (794–1185). These early gardens were described in the first manual of Japanese gardens, Sakuteiki ("Records of Garden Keeping"), written at the end of the 11th century by Tachibana no Toshitsuna (1028–1094). They adapted the Chinese garden philosophy of the Song dynasty (960–1279), where groups of rocks symbolized Mount Penglai, the legendary mountain island home of the Eight Immortals in Chinese mythology, known in Japanese as Horai. The Sakuteiki described exactly how rocks should be placed. In one passage, he wrote:

"In a place where there is neither a lake or a stream, one can put in place what is called a kare sansui, or dry landscape". This kind of garden featured either rocks placed upright like mountains, or laid out in a miniature landscape of hills and ravines, with few plants. He described several other styles of rock garden, which usually included a stream or pond, including the great river style, the mountain river style, and the marsh style. The ocean style featured rocks that appeared to have been eroded by waves, surrounded by a bank of white sand, like a beach. White sand and gravel had long been a feature of Japanese gardens. In the Shinto religion, it was used to symbolize purity, and was used around shrines, temples, and palaces. In Zen gardens, it represents water, or, like the white space in Japanese paintings, emptiness and distance. They are places of meditation.

The Muromachi period in Japan, which took place at roughly the same time as the Renaissance in Europe, was characterized by political rivalries which frequently led to wars, but also by an extraordinary flourishing of Japanese culture. It saw the beginning of Noh theater, the Japanese tea ceremony, the shoin style of Japanese architecture, and the Zen garden. Zen Buddhism was introduced into Japan at the end of the 12th century, and quickly achieved a wide following, particularly among the Samurai class and war lords, who admired its doctrine of self discipline. The gardens of the early Zen temples in Japan resembled Chinese gardens of the time, with lakes and islands. But in Kyoto in the 14th and 15th century, a new kind of garden appeared at the important Zen temples. These Zen gardens were designed to stimulate meditation. "Nature, if you made it expressive by reducing it to its abstract forms, could transmit the most profound thoughts by its simple presence", Michel Baridon wrote. "The compositions of stone, already common in China, became in Japan, veritable petrified landscapes, which seemed suspended in time, as in certain moments of Noh theater, which dates to the same period." The first garden to begin the transition to the new style is considered by many experts to be Saihō ji, "The Temple of the Perfumes of the West", popularly known as Koke dera, the Moss Temple, in the western part of Kyoto. The Buddhist monk and Zen master Musō Kokushi transformed a Buddhist temple into a Zen monastery in 1334, and built the gardens. The lower garden of Saihō ji is in the traditional Heian period style; a pond with several rock compositions representing islands. The upper garden is a dry rock garden which features three rock "islands". The first, called Kameshima, the island of the turtle, resembles a turtle swimming in a "lake" of moss. The second, Zazen seki, is a flat "meditation rock," which is believed to radiate calm and silence; and the third is the kare taki, a dry "waterfall" composed of a stairway of flat granite rocks. The moss which now surrounds the rocks and represents water, was not part of the original garden plan; it grew several centuries later when the garden was left untended, but now is the most famous feature of the garden. Muso Kokushi built another temple garden at Tenryū ji, the "Temple of the Celestial Dragon". This garden appears to have been strongly influenced by Chinese landscape painting of the Song dynasty, which feature mountains rising in the mist, and a suggestion of great depth and height. The garden at Tenryū ji has a real pond with water and a dry waterfall of rocks looking like a Chinese landscape. Saihō ji and Tenryū ji show the transition from the Heian style garden toward a more abstract and stylized view of nature. The most famous of all Zen gardens in Kyoto is Ryōan ji, built in the late 15th century where for the first time the Zen garden became purely abstract. The garden is a rectangle of 340 square meters. Placed within it are fifteen stones of different sizes, carefully composed in five groups; one group of five stones, two groups of three, and two groups of two stones. The stones are surrounded by white gravel, which is carefully raked each day by the monks. The only vegetation in the garden is some moss around the stones. The garden is meant to be viewed from a seated position on the veranda of the hōjō, the residence of the abbot of the monastery. The garden at Daisen in (1509–1513) took a more literary approach than Ryōan ji. There a "river" of white gravel represents a metaphorical journey through life; beginning with a dry waterfall in the mountains, passing through rapids and rocks, and ending in a tranquil sea of white gravel, with two gravel mountains. The invention of the Zen garden was closely connected with developments in Japanese ink landscape paintings. Japanese painters such as Sesshū Tōyō (1420–1506) and Soami (died 1525) greatly simplified their views of nature, showing only the most essential aspects of nature, leaving great areas of white around the black and gray drawings. Soami is said to have been personally involved in the design of two of the most famous Zen gardens in Kyoto, Ryōan ji and Daisen in, though his involvement has never been documented with certainty. Michel Baridon wrote, "The famous Zen gardens of the Muromachi period showed that Japan had carried the art of gardens to the highest degree of intellectual refinement that it was possible to attain."

During the Edo period, the large promenade garden became the dominant style of Japanese garden, but Zen gardens continued to exist at Zen temples. A few small new rock gardens were built, usually as part of a garden where a real stream or pond was not practical. In 1880, the buildings of Tōfuku ji temple in Kyoto, one of the oldest temples in the city, were destroyed by a fire. In 1940, the temple commissioned the landscape historian and architect Shigemori Mirei to recreate the gardens. He created four different gardens, one for each face of the main temple building. He made one garden with five artificial hills covered with grass, symbolizing the five great ancient temples of Kyoto; a modern rock garden, with vertical rocks, symbolizing Mount Horai; a large "sea" of white gravel raked in a checkboard pattern; and an intimate garden with swirling sand patterns. In the last century, Zen gardens have appeared in many countries outside Japan.

Chinese landscape painting was one of the many Chinese arts that came to Japan with Zen Buddhism in the fourteenth century. That the Buddhism of Zen influenced garden design was first suggested not in Japan, but in the West by a Hawaiian garden journalist Loraine Kuck in the 1930s and disputed as such by a scholar of Japanese garden history, Wybe Kuitert in 1988. This was well before scholars jumped on the bandwagon in the 1990s to deconstruct the promotion and reception of Zen. The critique comes down to the fact that Buddhist priests were not trying to express Zen in gardens. A review of the quotes of Buddhist priests that are taken to "prove" Zen for the garden are actually phrases copied from Chinese treatises on landscape painting. Secondary writers on the Japanese garden like Keane and Nitschke, who were associating with Kuitert when he was working on his research at the Kyoto University joined the Zen garden critique, like Kendall H. Brown, who took a similar distance from the Zen garden. In Japan the critique was taken over by Yamada Shouji who took a critical stance to the understanding of all Japanese culture, including gardens, under the nominator of Zen. Christian Tagsold summarized the discussion by placing perceptions of the Japanese garden in the context of an interdisciplinary comparison of cultures of Japan and the West. Zen priests quote from Chinese treatises on landscape painting indicating that the Japanese rock garden, and its karesansui garden scenery was and still is inspired by or based on first Chinese and later also Japanese landscape painting. Landscape painting and landscape gardening were closely related and practiced by intellectuals, the literati inspired by Chinese culture. A primary design principle was the creation of a landscape based on, or at least greatly influenced by, the three dimensional monochrome ink (sumi) landscape painting, sumi e or suiboku ga. In Japan, the garden has the same status as a work of art. Though each garden is different in its composition, they mostly use rock groupings and shrubs to represent a classic scene of mountains, valleys and waterfalls taken from Chinese landscape painting. In some cases it might be as abstract as just a few islands in a sea. Any Japanese garden may also incorporate existing scenery outside its confinement, e. g. the hills behind, as "borrowed scenery" (using a technique called Shakkei).

*The Sakuteiki is a garden book with notes on garden making that dates back to the late seventeenth century. Its oldest title is Senzai Hishõ, "Secret Extracts on Gardens", and was written nearly 1000 years ago, making it the oldest work on Japanese gardening. It is assumed that this was written in the 11th century by a noble man named Tachibana no Tichitsuna. In this text lies the first mention of the karesansui in literature. Only recently we saw an English modern translation of this gardening classic.