Part 7 (1/2)
And Eternity in an hour.
_William Blake
_Renge-ji Temple, Kyoto
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_Tenryu-ji Temple, Kyoto, ca.1343
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FOR AT LEAST a millennium before the coming of Zen to j.a.pan, gardens had been constructed in China which were founded on underlying religious motives, but only with the rise of Zen in j.a.pan did gardens become deliberately symbolic of the human quest for inner understanding.
During the Heian era j.a.panese aristocrats copied Chinese pleasure parks, and during the Kamakura many of them were translated by pract.i.tioners of the Jodo sect into fanciful reproductions of Amida's Western Paradise. After the rise of Zen influence among artists and intellectuals of the As.h.i.+kaga age, the gay polychrome of these earlier gardens was supplanted by a sober blend of rocks, trees, sand, and water--j.a.panese copies of, first, Sung Chinese gardens and, later, Sung monochrome landscape paintings. In their landscape ”painting” gardens, Zen artists captured the reverence for nature which, for them, was a cornerstone of Zen philosophy.
The origins of Far Eastern landscape gardens have been traced to an obscure Chinese legend which predates the Christian Era. It describes five holy islands, situated off the sh.o.r.es of Shantung province, whose peaks soared thousands of feet into the ocean mist and whose valleys were a paradise of perfumed flowers, snow-white birds, and immortals who plucked the trees for pearls. These islanders, who lived in palaces of precious metals, enjoyed eternal youth and had the capacity to levitate at will, although for extended journeys they might choose to ride on the backs of docile flying cranes. However, like Adam and Eve, these paradise dwellers wanted more. Since their islands were floating rather than attached to bedrock, they complained to the ruling deity, requesting more substantial support. The supreme ruler of ancient China was more understanding than the G.o.d of Mesopotamia; instead of evicting the island immortals, he obligingly sent out a flotilla of giant tortoises to hold the islands on their backs and secure them in place.
During the Han era (206 B.C.-A.D. 220) various Chinese emperors reportedly sent out expeditions to locate these islands, but they were always unsuccessful. Finally, the Han Emperor Wu hit upon the notion that if he were to construct an idealized landscape on his estate, the immortals might abandon their misty ocean isles for his park, bringing with them the secrets of eternal life. A garden park was built on a scale intended to rival that of paradise; and to make the immortals feel even more welcome, various rocks symbolizing cranes and tortoises were installed, items the j.a.panese would one day include in their gardens as symbols of longevity. No immortals materialized, but the Chinese landscape garden was launched in considerable style.
During the ensuing Six Dynasties era (A.D. 220-589), Chinese gardens began to reflect the beliefs of the new religion of
Buddhism. The lake-and-island gardens of the aristocracy ceased to represent the legend of the misty isles and became instead a symbol of the Western Paradise of Amida Buddha. As time pa.s.sed, the growing influence of Taoism deepened the Chinese feeling for nature itself without reference to any particular legend. In later years, as scholars sought out mountain retreats in the rugged south of China, soaring peaks came to be part of the standard landscape garden, a need sometimes realized by situating the garden against a backdrop of distant mountains or by piling up rocks on the island in the garden lake.
The interest in garden art continued to grow during the T'ang dynasty (618-907), as poets and philosophers increasingly turned to nature for religious and artistic inspiration. Interestingly enough, their perception of nature was not idealized in the manner of the Florentine landscapists but rather emphasized the rugged, untamed qualities of the mountains and streams. It was this sense of nature as the embodiment of a free spirit that they tried to capture in their gardens. Theirs was a reverence for nature as it was in the wild; if it must be domesticated into a garden, the sense of freedom should be preserved as far as possible.
When the s.h.i.+nto nature wors.h.i.+pers of j.a.pan encountered the advanced civilization of China, they may have recognized in the Chinese Taoist feeling for nature a similarity to their own beliefs. It had never occurred to the j.a.panese to construct a domestic abstraction of nature for contemplation, but the new idea of a garden seems to have had its appeal. When a copy of the Chinese capital was created in Nara, the j.a.panese architects were careful to include a number of landscape gardens around the imperial palace. After the government moved to Kyoto and launched the regal Heian era, a rage for things Chinese became the consuming pa.s.sion of the j.a.panese aristocracy; Heian n.o.bles built Chinese-style houses and lake-and-island gardens, complete with Chinese-style fis.h.i.+ng pavilions extending out over a lake. Since these pleasure parks were intended for parties of boaters and strollers, they had few religious overtones. Instead the lake became a thoroughfare for pleasure barges, on which idle courtiers cruised about dressed in Chinese costume, and reciting Chinese verses. These gardens were rich with plum and cherry trees, pines, willows, and flowering bushes, and often included a waterfall near at hand, in keeping with Chinese convention. The central island gradually lost its original symbolism as an Elysian holy isle as the n.o.bles linked it to sh.o.r.e with stone footbridges. In these grand parks the Heian n.o.bles gave some of the most sophisticated garden parties ever seen.
After relations with China fizzled to a stop around the beginning of the tenth century, the j.a.panese garden began to evolve on its own. It was always an emblem of power, making it essential that when the warrior government moved to Kamakura a leader no less imposing than Minamoto Yoritomo should oversee the creation of the main garden at the new capital. Significantly, the garden in Kamakura was constructed as part of the Buddhist establishment, rather than as an extension of Yoritomo's private estate. Perhaps this transformation of the garden into Buddhist temple art was a consequence of the Western Paradise beliefs of Amadism (a forerunner had been the late-Heian Western Paradise garden outside Kyoto at Uji); perhaps it was the first implicit acknowledgment of the nature mysticism of Zen; or perhaps the Kamakura warriors simply believed that a private garden would smack too much of the decadence of Kyoto. Whatever the reason, the coming of Zen seems to have been coincidental with a new att.i.tude toward the connection between gardens and religion. The frivolous polychrome of the Heian pleasure park was clearly a thing of the past; gardens became solemn and, as the influence of Zen grew, increasingly symbolic of religious ideas.
The monks who visited China to study Ch'an (as well as Ch'an monks who migrated to j.a.pan) were, of course, familiar with the landscape gardens of the Sung Chinese. These gardens had purged many of the more decorative elements of the T'ang-period pleasure parks and reflected the reverential att.i.tudes of the Taoists and Ch'an Buddhists toward the natural world. At least one of these Sung-style gardens was produced in Kyoto during the early years of renewed contacts with China. Oddly enough, however, it was the Sung ink paintings that would eventually have the greatest influence on Zen landscape gardens. The Sung paintings captured perfectly the feeling j.a.panese Zen monks had for the natural world, leading them to conclude that gardens too should be monochromatic, distilled versions of a large landscape panorama.
Not surprisingly, the att.i.tude that a garden should be a three- dimensional painting sparked the long march of j.a.panese garden art into the realm of perspective and abstraction. In fact, the manipulation of perspective advanced more rapidly in the garden arts than in the pictorial. Without going into the Chinese system of perspective in landscape painting, let it be noted that whereas the Chinese relied in part upon conventions regarding the placement of objects on a canvas to suggest distance (for example, the relative elevation of various tiers of landscape elements on the canvas was often an indication of their distance), the Zen artists learned to suggest distance through direct alteration of the characteristics our eye uses to scale a scene. And since many of these gardens were meant to be viewed from one vantage point, they became a landscape ”painting” executed in natural materials.
The manipulation of perspective may be divided roughly into three main categories: the creation of artificial depth through overt foreshortening, thereby simulating the effects of distance on our visual sense; the use of psychological tricks that play on our instinctive presumptions regarding the existence of things unseen; and the masterly obliteration of all evidence of artifice, thereby rendering the deception invisible.
Zen gardeners' discovery of the use of foreshortening in a garden took place at almost the same time that the Florentine artist Uccello (1397- 1475) began experimenting with natural perspective in his landscape oils. Although this example of artistic convergence can hardly be more than coincidence, certain of the devices were similar. As the American garden architect David Engel has observed, the j.a.panese learned that the apparent depth of a scene could be enhanced by making the objects in the distance smaller, less detailed, and darker than those in the foreground.1 (In the garden of Yos.h.i.+mitsu's Golden Pavilion, for example, the rocks on the spectator side of the garden lake are large and detailed, whereas those on the far side are smaller and smoother.) As time went by, the j.a.panese also learned to use trees with large, light-colored leaves at the front of a garden and dark, small-leafed foliage farther back. To simulate further the effects of distance, they made paths meandering toward the rear of a garden grow narrower, with smaller and smaller stones. The pathways in a j.a.panese garden curve constantly, disrupting the viewer's line of sight, until they are finally lost among trees and foliage set at carefully alternated levels; streams and waterfalls deceptively vanish and reappear around and behind rocks and plantings. Zen artists also found that garden walls would disappear completely if they were made of dark natural materials or camouflaged by a bamboo thicket, a thin grove of saplings, or a gra.s.sy hillock.
Many methods of psychological deception in a Zen garden exploit instinctive visual a.s.sumptions in much the same way that a judo expert uses his victim's body for its own undoing. A common trick is to have a pathway or stream disappear around a growth of trees at the rear of a garden in such a way that the terminus is hidden, leading the viewer to a.s.sume it actually continues on into unseen recesses of the landscape.
Another such device is the placement of intermittent obstructive foliage near the viewer, causing the diminution in perception that the mind a.s.sociates with distance. j.a.panese gardeners further enhance the sense of size and depth in a garden plot by leaving large vacant areas, whose lack of clutter seems to expand the vista. Dwarfing of trees is also a common practice, since this promotes the illusion of greater distance. And finally, flowers are rigidly excluded, since their appearance would totally destroy all the subtle tricks of perspective.
Zen garden masters prefer to display their flowers in special vase arrangements, an art known as Ikebana.
The manipulation of perspective and the psychological deception of the Zen garden are always carefully disguised by giving the garden an appearance of naturalness and age. Garden rocks are buried in such a manner that they seem to be granite icebergs, extruding a mere tip from their ancient depths, while the edges of garden stones are nestled in beds of gra.s.s or obscured by applications of moss, adding to the sense of artless placement. Everything in the garden--trees, stones, gravel, gra.s.s--is arranged with a careful blending of areas into a seemingly natural relations.h.i.+p and allowed to develop a slightly unkempt, s.h.a.ggy appearance, which the viewer instinctively a.s.sociates with an undisturbed natural scene. It all seems as uncontrived as a virgin forest, causing the rational mind to lower its guard and allowing the garden to delude the viewer with its artificial depth, its psychological sense of the infinite.
The transformation in garden art the Zen artists wrought can perhaps best be emphasized by comparing the traditional Chinese garden with the abstract landscape created by j.a.panese artists of the As.h.i.+kaga and later eras. 'The j.a.panese regarded the garden as an extension of man's dwelling (it might be more accurate to say that they saw the dwelling as an extension of the garden), while the Chinese considered the garden a counterpoise for the formality of indoor life, a place to disown the obligations and conventions of society. It has been suggested that the average Chinese was culturally schizophrenic; indoors he was a sober Confucian, obedient to centuries-old dictates of behavior, but in his garden he returned to Taoism, the joy of splendor in the gra.s.s, of glory in the flower.
In spite of this, the Chinese garden was more formal than the type that developed in j.a.pan, and it included numerous complicated corridors and divisions. The Chinese gardens of the T'ang aristocracy were intended for strolling rather than viewing, since the T'ang aesthetes partic.i.p.ated in nature rather than merely contemplating it.