The Origin Of The Japanese Gardening
Other rocks floating in a sea of sand represent both the turtle and the crane. These auspicious creatures are associated with the Mystic Isles of the Immortals of Chinese mythology, but in this Japanese context they further indicate, respectively, the depths to which the human spirit can sink and the heights to which a human spirit can soar. One flat rock is a bridge, another junk-shaped rock simultaneously represents a celestial treasure ship that descended to Earth in the times of the gods and the human soul voyaging towards Buddhist enlightenment or the Mystic Isles of the Immortals. Shrubs are clipped to represent distant scenery.
The L-shaped gardens to the east and north, which have been slightly altered in layout over the centuries, express the human condition in symbols and stories. They wrap round the main temple building, leaving its southern view as an open rectangle of sand. Raked in horizontal lines, this is the ocean into which the white sand river empties. The ocean is backed by two lines of hedging, clipped at different heights to represent the ocean and purity, and inset with two cones of sand. The single, June-blooming tree in the southwest corner is a shara no ki or stewartia, representing the sal tree under which the Buddha was born.
Ryoan-ji, also in Kyoto, is the most famous and most influential Zen garden. Ryoan-ji means Dragon Peace Temple, and according to one theory the artist Soami had a hand in the restoration of its celebrated rock garden after the temple was destroyed by fire in 1488. (Sesshu worked mainly outside Kyoto, building the Joeji-ji garden near Yamaguchi, in the following years.) The temple was again destroyed in 1780, leaving the garden untouched and relatively unknown until the 1930s.
Lying behind the main hall of the temple, the garden, backed by a wall and a backdrop of trees, is intended to be viewed only from the veranda. It is never set foot in by anyone but the lay brother who keeps it raked and clean. Moss, the only living material in the garden, grows around the base of 15 rocks, cunningly arranged in five groups of five, two, three, two and three. The interest of rocks as a form of abstract art lies not in their shapes but in their relative spatial relationships. Some hold that the stones represent a mother tiger and her cubs swimming; others see the stones as metaphors for the tops of metaphysical mountains or islands in a plain or sea of consciousness. Many modern artists, including David Hockney, and modern garden designers have been influenced by the mystery of Ryoan-ji, which was completed 400 years before Europe's influential Impressionist and Modernist art movements. But the age of Ryoan-ji is not what is important. Indeed, its layout today may differ from its original conception. Ryoan-ji's success lies in its timelessness, and its enduring power as an aid to meditation.
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