The recent spate of incorporating Zen into contemporary living has become so popular that it has inspired people to apply it in designing their homes, artworks or even in dealing with other people in organizations. Its emphasis in combining simplicity and harmony makes it an ideal design for gardens because it could summon good concentration and deep-seated meditation. In the today’s modern hectic life, visiting a Zen garden is definitely a refreshing break from our ubiquitous and rowdy cityscapes.



Zen claims to preserve the essence of the Buddha’s teachings through direct experience, triggered by mind-to-mind transmission of the dharma. It dismissed scriptures, Buddhas, and Bodhisattvas in favor of training for direct intuition of cosmic unity, known as the Buddha-nature or the Void. However, in the world of gardening, the impact of Zen has been felt only relatively recently. It is one obvious sign of contemporary longing for affirmation that gardens do indeed express spiritual values.

Even with the technological advance of Japanese cities, once you have cleared the sprawling Tokyo suburbs, it is easy to have the impression that the whole Japanese landscape is a garden — where the gods are never far away. Perhaps from the eye’s eagerness to record as much as possible of the scenery rushing past, one will experience a series of sharp images: gentle hills covered with delicate, feathery conifers, groves of slender bamboo, pine trees with round,
prickly cones, tea plantations with the bushes ranged in neatly clipped rows, the gables of red-tiled roofs against the sky — everything apparently painted with a very fine-pointed brush and carefully composed and balanced. The same qualities of fineness and balance are found, distilled to a greater degree, in the gardens of Japan, whether secular or religious (McIntosh, 2005).

To convey the spirit of Japanese gardens, Lafcadio Hearn (1927) had previously noted that there existed a sensitivity and perception of life in Japan, in its society and customs. Hearn explained that:

No effort to create an impossible or purely ideal landscape is made in the Japanese garden. Its artistic purpose is to copy faithfully the attractions of a veritable landscape, and to convey the real impression that a real landscape communicates. It is therefore at once a picture and a poem; perhaps even more a poem than a picture. For, as nature’s scenery, in its varying aspects, affects us with sensations of joy or of solemnity, of grimness or of sweetness, of force or of peace, so must the true reflection of it in the labor of the landscape gardener create not merely an impression of beauty but a mood in the soul. The grand old landscape gardeners, those Buddhist monks who first introduced the art into Japan, and subsequently developed it into an almost occult science, carried their theory yet farther than this. They held it possible to express moral lessons in the design of a garden, and abstract ideas such as Chastity, Faith, Piety, Content, Calm, and Connubial Bliss. Therefore were gardens contrived according to the character of the owner, whether poet, warrior, philosopher or priest.

Over the years, change is also evident in the long evolution of Japanese gardens. Japan has been profoundly influenced by its larger neighbor to the west, and this is seen in significantly different types of impact from China at some key moments in this development (Nitschke, 1999). Shintoism, Japan's native religion, seems in origin to have been a form of animism, perhaps inevitable in a land of such sharp contrasts of mountains, valleys, and lakes. Some have drawn parallels with the standing stones of places such as Callanish in the Western Isles (Cave, 1993), but the idea of rocks as alive with spirits was to be supplemented by Chinese geomancy, and so gardens were created to reflect on a smaller scale (and so influence) the surrounding patterns of the landscape on which the people's livelihood depended (Nitschke, 1999).

Zen is essentially an inner awareness in which great attention is given to every action. Other forms developed in India and the Far East have much greater popular appeal. One of the major trends is known as Pure Land Buddhism. At times of great social upheaval (for instance, when the old Japanese feudal aristocracy was falling apart), it was widely thought that people had become so degenerate that it was nearly impossible for them to attain enlightenment through their own efforts. Instead, many turned to Amida Buddha, the Buddha of Boundless Light, to save them. Amida (first worshipped in India under the Sanskrit name Amitabha) was believed to have been an ancient prince who vowed to attain enlightenment. When he did, he used his virtue to prepare a special place of bliss, the Pure Land, for all those who called on his name (Lopez, 1999). Japan had an ancient tradition of worshipping mountains as the realm to which the dead ascend and from which deities descend to earth. The originally abstract Indian Buddhists’ concept of the “Pure Land” far to the west to which devotees return after death was transformed in Japan into concrete images. They depicted Amida Buddha riding on clouds billowing over the mountains, coming to welcome his dying devotees.

Sources:
Cave, P. Creating Japanese Gardens (London: Aurum Press, 1993), 92–3.
Hearn, Lafcadio. Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, Second Series (London, Jonathan Cape, 1927).
Lopez, Donald S., Jr., ed., Buddhism in Practice, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
McIntosh, Christopher. Gardens of the Gods : Myth, Magic and Meaning in Horticulture. London: I. B. Tauris & Company, Limited, 2005.
Nitschke, G. Japanese Gardens (Cologne: Taschen, 1999).