Zen training also renders the warrior free from troubling frailties of the mind, such as fear and rash ambition—qualities lethal in mortal combat. He is focused entirely on his opponent's openings, and when an opportunity to strike presents itself, he requires no deliberation: his sword and body act automatically. The discipline of meditation and the mind-dissolving paradoxes of thekoanbecome instruments to forge a fearless, automatic, mindless instrument of steel-tipped death.The methods developed by Zen masters for teaching archery differ significantly from those used for the sword. Whereas swordsmanship demands that man and weapon merge with no acknowledgment of one's opponent until the critical moment, archery requires the man to become detached from his weapon and to concentrate entirely upon the target. Proper technique is learned, of course, but the ultimate aim is to forget technique, forget the bow, forget the draw, and give one's concentration entirely to the target. Yet here too there is a difference between Zen archery and Western techniques: the Zen archer gives no direct thought to hitting the target. He does not strain for accuracy, but rather lets accuracy come as a result of intuitively applying perfect form.Before attempting to unravel this seeming paradox, the equipment of the Japanese archer should be examined. The Japanese bow differs from the Western bow in having the hand grip approximately one-third of the distance from the bottom, rather than in the middle. This permits a standing archer (or a kneeling one, for that matter) to make use of a bow longer than he is tall (almost eight feet, in fact), since the upper part may extend well above his head. The bottom half of the bow is scaled to human proportions, while the upper tip extends far over the head in a sweeping arch. It is thus a combination of the conventional bow and the English longbow, requiring a draw well behind the ear. This bow is unique to Japan, and in its engineering principles it surpasses anything seen in the West until comparatively recent times. It is a laminated composite of supple bamboo and the brittle wood of the wax tree. The heart of the bow is made up of three squares of bamboo sandwiched between two half-moon sections of bamboo which comprise the belly (that side facing the inside of the curve) and the back (the side away from the archer). Filling out the edges of the sandwich are two strips of wax-tree wood. The elimination of the deadwood center of the bow, which is replaced by the three strips of bamboo and two of waxwood, produces a composite at once powerful and light. The arrows too are of bamboo, an almost perfect material for the purpose, and they differ from Western arrows only in being lighter and longer. Finally, the Japanese bowstring is loosed with the thumb rather than the fingers, again a departure from Western practice.If the equipment differs from that of the West, the technique, which verges on ritual, differs far more. The first Zen archery lesson is proper breath control, which requires techniques learned from meditation. Proper breathing conditions the mind in archery as it does inzazenand is essential in developing a quiet mind, a restful spirit, and full concentration. Controlled breathing also constantly reminds the archer that his is a religious activity, a ritual related to his spiritual character as much as to the more prosaic concern of hitting the target. Breathing is equally essential in drawing the bow, for the arrow is held out away from the body, calling on muscles much less developed than those required by the Western draw. A breath is taken with every separate movement of the draw, and gradually a rhythm settles in which gives the archer's movements a fluid grace and the ritual cadence of a dance.Only after the ritual mastery of the powerful bow has been realized does the archer turn his attention to loosing the arrows (not, it should be noted, to hitting the target). The same use of breathing applies, the goal being for the release of the arrow to come out of spontaneous intuition, like the swordsman's attack. The release of the arrow should dissolve a kind of spiritual tension, like the resolution of akoan, and it must seem to occur of itself, without deliberation, almost as though it were independent of the hand. This is possible because the archer's mind is totally unaware of his actions; it is focused, indeed riveted in concentration, on the target. This is not done through aiming, although the archer does aim—intuitively. Rather, the archer's spirit must be burned into the target, be at one with it, so that the arrow is guided by the mind and the shot of the bow becomes merely an intervening, inconsequential necessity. All physical actions—the stance, the breathing, the draw, the release—are as natural and require as little conscious thought as a heartbeat; the arrow is guided by the intense concentration of the mind on its goal.Thus it was that the martial arts of Japan were the first to benefit from Zen precepts, a fact as ironic as it is astounding. Yet meditation and combat are akin in that both require rigorous self-discipline and the denial of the mind's overt functions. From its beginning as an aid in the arts of death, Zen soon became the guiding principle for quite another form of art. In years to come, Zen would be the official state religion, shoguns would become Zen patrons extraordinaire, and a totally Zen culture would rule Japan.Part IITHE AGE OF HIGH CULTURE:ASHIKAGA (1333-1573)CHAPTER SIXThe Great Age of ZenFor we are lovers of the beautiful, yet simple in our tastes, and we cultivate the mind without loss of manliness.Pericles, ca.430 b.c.Silver Pavilion, Kyoto 1482Golden Pavilion, KyotoThe floweringof Zen culture might be described as the Periclean age of Japan. As with fifth-century Greece, this was the era that produced Japan's finest classical art at the same time that rampant plagues and internecine warfare bled the land as never before. Government, such as it was, rested in the hands of the Ashikaga clan, men ever ready to sacrifice the general good in furtherance of personal interests. That these interests happened to include Zen and the Zen arts probably brought scant solace to their subjects, but today we can weigh their selfishness against the culture they sponsored. In any case, all who admire the classic Zen cultural forms should be aware that their price included the heartless taxation of and disregard for the entire peasant population of Japan.The historical backdrop for the Ashikaga era reads like a Jacobean tragedy peopled by cutthroat courtiers ever alert to advantage in chambers or in battle. The political shape of the Ashikaga era began to emerge in the early years of the fourteenth century as the once invincible Kamakura rule of the Hojo family dissolved, plunging Japan into a half-century of war and feuding over the identity of the rightful emperor. Throughout much of the century the provincialdaimyowarlords and theirsamuraiwarred up and down the length of the land, supporting first one emperor, then another. It was during this time and the two centuries following that Zen became the official state religion and Zen monks served as foreign diplomats, domestic advisers, and arbiters of taste.The political troubles that ended the Kamakura warrior government and unseated the Hojo seem to be traceable to the war against the Mongols. It was a long and costly operation which left most of thesamuraiimpoverished and angered at a government that could give them only cheerful thanks rather than the lands of the vanquished as was traditional practice. The general discontent found a focus in the third decade of the fourteenth century when a Kyoto emperor named Godaigo attempted to unseat the Hojo and re-establish genuine imperial rule. After some minor skirmishes, the Hojo commissioned an able general nanied Ashikaga Takauji (1305-1358) from an old Minamoto family to march on Godaigo and settle the difficulty. Along the way Takauji must have thought things over, for when he reached Kyoto instead of attacking the emperor's forces he put the Hojo garrison to the sword. Shortly thereafter, another general supporting the imperial cause marched out to Kamakura and laid waste the Hojo capital. The last few hundred Hojo supporters committed suicide en masse, and the Kamakura age was ended.Godaigo gleefully set up the new Japanese government in Kyoto, and soon it was like old times, with aristocrats running everything. In a serious miscalculation, he assumed that theprovincial warlords had joined his cause out of personal loyalty rather than the more traditional motive of greed, for he gave the Hojo estates to his favorite mistresses while regarding warriors like Takauji as hardly more than rustic figures of fun. As might have been expected, another war soon broke out. This time the conflict lasted for decades, with almost unbelievable convolutions, including a number of decades in which Japan had two emperors. At one point Takauji found it necessary to poison his own brother, and it has been estimated that his military exploits cost some sixty thousand lives, not to mention the general ruin of the country at large. The end result was that the forces of Godaigo were defeated, leaving Japan in the hands of the Ashikaga family.For all his bloodletting, Takuji was also a patron of the Zen sect, giving it a formal place in the national life and encouraging its growth and dissemination. One of his closest advisers was the great Zen prelate Muso Soseki (1275-1351), whose influence made Rinzai Zen the official religion of the Ashikaga era. An astutely practical man, Muso established the precedent for doctrinal flexibility which allowed Zen to survive while emperors and shoguns came and went:Clear-sighted masters of the Zen sect do not have a fixed doctrine which is to be held to at any and all times. They offer whatever teaching the occasion demands and preach as the spirit moves them, with no fixed course to guide them. If asked what Zen is, they may answer in the words of Confucius, Mencius, Lao Tzu or Chuang Tzu, or else in terms of the doctrines of the various sects and denominations, and also by using popular proverbs.1Like many Zen teachers, Muso enjoyed the company of the powerful. He began his career in statecraft as a supporter and confidant of the ill-fated Emperor Godaigo. When Godaigo was deposed, he adjusted his allegiance and became the high priest of the Ashikaga house. He was soon the constant companion of Takauji, advising him on policy, flattering his taste in Zen art, and secretly trying to give him a bit of polish. Although Takauji could scarcely have had time for extensive meditation amid his continual bloodletting, Muso preached to him in odd moments and soothed his occasionally guilty conscience.Since Takauji was clearly haunted by his treatment of Godaigo, Muso suggested that the former emperor's ghost might find repose if a special Zen temple was built in his memory. The project was well underway when funds ran low, whereupon the resourceful Muso suggested sending a trading vessel to China to raise foreign-exchange cash. The venture was so successful that before long regular trade was established— naturally enough under the guidance of Zen monks. In later years a special branch of government was established devoted exclusively to foreign trade and directed by well-traveled prelates of Zen. (The Chinese regarded this trade as the exchange of Chinese gifts for Japanese tribute, but the Japanese were willing to overlook the insult in the interest of profit.) Muso's other lasting contribution to the growth of Zen influence was persuading Takauji to build a Zen temple in each of the sixty-six provinces, thereby extending state support of the religion outside of Kyoto ruling circles.Takauji was the founder of a line of Ashikaga shoguns who gave their name to the next two centuries of Japanese history. His entire life was spent on the battlefield, where he concentrated his energies on strengthening the shogunate through the liberal application of armed might. In a sense he prefigured the attitude of John Adams, who once lamented that he must study war so that his grandsons might fashion art and architecture. Indeed, Takauji's grandson was the famous aesthete Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (1358-1408), who ascended to shogun in 1368 and soon thereafter brought to flower a renaissance of the Zen artistic tradition of Sung China.Yoshimitsu was only nine years of age when he became shogun, so the early years of his reign were guided by regents of the Hosokawa clan, who put to rest any remaining dissidence. Consequently, when Yoshimitsu came of age, he felt secureenough in his office to tour the country, visiting religious shrines and establishing his place in the pageant of Japanese history. More significantly for the rise of Zen culture, he also turned his eyes abroad, encouraging the trade with China by stabilizing political relations and becoming the best customer for the silks, brocades, porcelains, and—most important—Sung paintings brought back by the Zen monks.In a very short time, Yoshimitsu had become addicted to the Chinese finery and antique Ch'an art of the Sung which his monks were importing. He was fortunate that the country was stable and peaceful enough to allow him his whims, especially since he almost entirely lost interest in all functions of government save taxation, which he found necessary to apply to the peasants in ever greater measure in order to support his patronage of the arts. Absorbed with aesthetics and Zen art, he became a cloistered sovereign whose luckless subjects were left on their own to weather fortunes that alternated between starvation and the plague, leavened by intermittent wars among provincial chieftains. The peasantry, however, was not blind to his callous priorities, and it is said that his reputation survived into the nineteenth century, maintained by country folk who would trek to a certain temple to revile an old statue of the Ashikaga shogun.His personal failings notwithstanding, Yoshimitsu was the key figure in bringing about the rise of Zen art. His contributions were manifold: he founded a Zen monastery which became the school for the great landscape painters of the era; his personal patronage was largely responsible for the development of the No drama; his example and encouragement did much to bring into being the identification of Zen with landscape garden art; his own practice ofzazenunder the guidance of a famous Zen monk set an example for the warrior court; his interest in tea and poetry served both to set the stage for the development of the tea ceremony as an aesthetic phenomenon and to temper the literary tastes of his warrior followers; and, finally, his interest in Zen-inspired architecture was responsible for the creation of one of the most famous Zen chapels in Japan.When Yoshimitsu retired in 1394 to enter Zen orders, leaving the government to his nine-year-old son, he ensconced himself in a palace in the Kyoto suburbs and proceeded to build a chapel for Zen meditation. The Golden Pavilion, orKinkaku-ji, as it came to be known, was a wooden teahouse three stories high whose architectural beauty is now legendary.There were few if any previous examples of this type of multistory structure, although it has been suggested that the idea may have been copied from a comparable temple in southern China. (The turn-of-the-century American critic Ernest Fenollosa suggested that it was modeled after the structure Kublai Khan constructed for a garden in Shang-tu, which Coleridge called Xanadu, after the translation of the name by Marco Polo: "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/A stately pleasure-dome decree.") Whatever its origins, the building superficially resembled a low-rising pagoda—each successive story was a more or less smaller version of the one below. The two lower floors were used for evening entertainments of music, poetry, and incense, while the top floor was a tiny meditation chapel (whose ceiling was covered with gold leaf, thereby giving the building its name). Set in the midst of a beautiful landscape garden, the sweeping roofs, painstaking wooden joinery, and exquisite unpainted woods of the Golden Pavilion were a landmark of Zen taste destined to influence the course of Japanese architecture for centuries.The Golden Pavilion was the crowning act of Yoshimitsu's career, a fitting monument to the man who, more than any other, was responsible for the rise of Zen culture. Under his rule, Japanese monks first brought back from China the finest examples of Ch'an-inspired art, from which they derived and mastered the artistic principles of the vanished Sung era and went on to re-create if not surpass the great Sung age of artistic production. The momentum for Zen culture produced by Yoshimitsu lasted through the reign of his grandson Yoshimasa (1435-1490), the last great Ashikaga patron of Zen art.As a shogun, Yoshimasa was even more distracted by Zen than his famous grandfather. He concentrated on encouragingthe school of Sung-style ink painting, the Zen ritual of ceremonial tea, the art of flower arranging, and new styles of Zen-influenced architecture. Unfortunately, his apparently hereditary absence of interest in affairs of state ultimately brought about the disintegration of the Japanese political fabric. As the office of shogun weakened to the point of symbolism, Yoshimasa's power to tax became so frail that he was finally forced to borrow from the Zen monasteries. The real power in the land passed to the local feudal lords, ordaimyo, men who governed entire domains, raised their own armies, and exercised far greater power than thesamuraiof earlier times.What remained of Yoshimasa's power came to be exercised by his mistresses and his scheming wife, Tomi-ko. By his late twenties he was ready to retire entirely, the better to pursue Zen and its arts, but none of the women in the palace had yet presented him with a son who could become titular shogun. By 1464 Yoshimasa's patience was exhausted and he turned to one of his brothers who was in monastic orders and persuaded him to begin an apprenticeship for the shogunate. The brother wisely hesitated, pointing out that Tomi-ko, who was still in her twenties, might yet produce a son; but Yoshimasa won him over with solemn assurances that all sons who arrived would be made priests.Less than a year later Tomi-ko did indeed bear a son, setting the stage for the struggle that would eventually destroy Kyoto and signal the decline of the Ashikaga age of Zen culture. As it happened, there was already an animosity between Yoshimasa's principal adviser, Hosokawa Katsumoto, and Hosokawa's father-in-law, Yamana Sozen. When the child was born, Hosokawa, a member of the historic family of Ashikaga regents, favored retaining Yoshimasa's brother as shogun, so the ambitious Tomi-ko turned to Yamana to enlist his aid in reverting the office of shogun back to Yoshimasa and thence to her son. With a natural excuse for conflict finally at hand, the two old enemies Yamana and Hosokawa gathered their armies—both numbering near eighty thousand—outside Kyoto. The impending tragedy was obvious to all, and Yoshimasa tried vainly to discourage the combatants. By that time, however, his voice counted for nothing, and in 1467 the inevitable conflict, now known as the Onin War, began.The war raged for a decade, until virtually all the majestic temples of Kyoto were burned and pillaged. Ironically, one of the few temples to escape destruction was Yoshimitsu's Golden Pavilion, which fortunately had been situated well outside theprecincts of the main city. Although both Hosokawa and Yamana Thed in 1473, the fighting continued, as participants on both sides defected, changed leaders, and fought among themselves until no one could recall what the original war had been about. Finally, after ten full years of almost constant fighting, it became apparent that the carnage had accomplished nothing. One dark night the two armies folded their tents and stole away—and the war was no more. A remarkably senseless conflict, even by modern-day standards, the Onin War effectively obliterated all evidence in Kyoto of the marvelous Heian civilization, as well as the early Ashikaga, leaving nothing but a scorched palette for the final century of Zen art.Yoshimasa, in the meantime, had long since removed himself from affairs of state. Since his shogun brother had switched sides during the war and become a general for Yamana, the succession question was simplified. Tomi-ko took time out from her vigorous war-profiteering to prevail upon Yoshimasa to appoint her son, then four years old, shogun. She thereby became de facto shogun herself, encouraging Yoshimasa in his desire to retire while enriching herself handsomely with imaginative new taxes. The war proved a windfall for Tomi-ko, who lent funds to both sides to keep it going, and her cupidity played no small role in the final destruction of ancient Kyoto.Immersed as he was in the world of Zen and Zen culture, Yoshimasa seemed oblivious to the sea of official corruption around him, and indeed there was probably little he could have done to prevent it. He loved the refined company of women and avoided warriors, whose rough manner offended him but in whose hands lay the only real power in the country. As the government disintegrated, he made his own contribution as a connoisseur and patron of the fine arts, bringing to culmination the movement in Zen art that left Japan a legacy far more lasting than any that mere diplomacy could have left. Like his European counterparts, the Medici, Yoshimasa balanced his failings in politics with faultless aesthetic judgment, endowing the Zen arts with new standards in architecture, painting, gardening, the No theater, the tea ceremony, and ceremonial flower arranging. Perhaps he should not be faulted for doing what he understood best.Yoshimasa also left a physical monument intended to rival the Golden Pavilion. In 1466, as he contemplated retirement, he began plans to construct a villa for meditation. With the outbreak of war he was forced for a number of years to devote his attentions to the repair of the imperial residence, but after the war he renewed his intentions to retire into Zen aesthetics. His decision was strengthened by family troubles, including Tomi-ko's displeasure with the number of his mistresses, a problem that finally exploded when her young son, the shogun, demanded to marry one of them rather than a girl of Tomi-ko's choosing. In 1482, amid the general ruin and confusion, Yoshimasa resolved to begin the construction of his retirement villa. Financial circumstances had changed since his original plan eighteen years earlier, and his interest in Zen was even deeper, so instead of the sumptuous palace once planned, he built a small pavilion of exquisite taste and restraint. It stands today, a forerunner of the traditional house, and is known as the Silver Pavilion, orGinkaku-ji, because of the popular belief that he originally planned to cover portions with silver leaf.Ginkaku-jihas two stories, the first in Zen temple style and the second inshoinstyle. The deliberately unpainted wood exterior of the two-story chapel has weathered to the color of bark, and it has all the dignity its five hundred years demand.There were almost a dozen Ashikaga shoguns after Yoshimasa, but none had any influence on the course of history. The century after his retirement is known as the Age of the Country at War, and it is remembered for almost continuous civil strife amongdaiymo, the provincial chieftains who had swallowed up thesamurai. In this period Japan was less a nation than several hundred small fiefdoms, each controlled by a powerful family and constantly in arms against its neighbors. Little wonder that many of the greatest Zen artists left Kyoto never to return; the capital was a desolate ruin, without power and without patrons. This condition prevailed until late in the sixteenth century, when individuals of sufficient military genius to reunite the country again appeared.The influence of Zen was probably as pervasive in medieval Ashikaga Japan as Christianity was in medieval Europe. A Zen monk was the first Ashikaga shogun's closest adviser, and in later years Zen monasteries virtually took over foreign policy. (Indeed, Zen monks were the only Japanese educated enough to deal with the Chinese.) Yoshimitsu formalized the relationship between Zen and the state, setting up an official Therarchy among the Zen temples in Kyoto (the so-called "Five Mountains" or Gozan, of Tenryu-ji, Shokoku-ji, Kennin-ji, Tofuku-ji, and Manju-ji). These state temples became the resident schools for Zen painters and artists and also provided diplomats and government officials for the China trade. (They made Yoshimitsu so ardent a Sinophile that he once had some Japanese pirates who were troubling Chinese trading vessels captured and boiled alive.) Under the reign of Yoshimasa the China trade dwindled, but Zen monks continued to influence the government in directions that best suited their own interests. Wealthy from their commercial undertakings, they were in a position to finance some of Yoshimasa's more lavish projects, and in later years they helped him design the garden of the Silver Pavilion, including a detached building for tea drinking and meditation—the forerunner of the modern teahouse. This was the finest hour of Zen influence in official circles, for Yoshimasa was the last Ashikaga shogun whose preferences had any influence on the course of Japanese life. After his death, the artists who had surrounded him scattered to the provinces to find patrons. Within a decade the Silver Pavilion and its garden were virtually abandoned. Zen as a religion also went to the provinces, and gradually its following grew as sympathetic teachers who no longer cared for the company of the mighty were content to explain the rewards of nonattachment to the people at large.The many faces of Japanese Zen were paradoxical indeed. The Kamakura warriors turned to Zen for strength on the battlefield, whereas the Ashikaga court found in it aesthetic escapism and spiritual solace in a crumbling world. That an age such as the Ashikaga could have nourished high arts has puzzled historians for centuries, and no entirely satisfactory explanation has yet been advanced. Perhaps art flourishes best when social unrest uproots easy conventions. Fifth-century Athens produced its most enduring art at a time when the land was rent by the fratricidal Peloponnesian War and the city itself was haunted by the plague. Renaissance Florence is another example. Today Kyoto, like modern Athens and modern Florence, is a living museum, concerned more with traffic and tourist hotels than with the long-forgotten blood baths which once raged in its streets. Seemingly forgotten, too, are the warring Ashikaga, at whose behest the noble Zen arts of Japan were shaped.CHAPTER SEVENZen and the Landscape GardenTo see a World in a grain of sand,And a Heaven in a wild flower,Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,And Eternity in an hour.William BlakeRenge-ji Temple, KyotoTenryu-ji Temple, Kyoto, ca.1343For at leasta millennium before the coming of Zen to Japan, gardens had been constructed in China which were founded on underlying religious motives, but only with the rise of Zen in Japan did gardens become deliberately symbolic of the human quest for inner understanding. During the Heian era Japanese aristocrats copied Chinese pleasure parks, and during the Kamakura many of them were translated by practitioners of the Jodo sect into fanciful reproductions of Amida's Western Paradise. After the rise of Zen influence among artists and intellectuals of the Ashikaga age, the gay polychrome of these earlier gardens was supplanted by a sober blend of rocks, trees, sand, and water—Japanese 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 shores 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 God 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 (206b.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 Japanese 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 ofBuddhism. 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 passed, 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 Shinto nature worshipers of Japan 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 Japanese 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 Japanese 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 passion of the Japanese aristocracy; Heian nobles built Chinese-style houses and lake-and-island gardens, complete with Chinese-style fishing 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 nobles linked it to shore with stone footbridges. In these grand parks the Heian nobles 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 Japanese 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 attitude 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 Japan) 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 attitudes 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 Japanese 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 attitude that a garden should be a three- dimensional painting sparked the long march of Japanese 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 architectDavidEngel has observed, the Japanese 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 Yoshimitsu'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 Japanese 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 Japanese 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 grassy hillock.Many methods of psychological deception in a Zen garden exploit instinctive visual assumptions 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 assume 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 associates with distance. Japanese 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 grass or obscured by applications of moss, adding to the sense of artless placement. Everything in the garden—trees, stones, gravel, grass—is arranged with a careful blending of areas into a seemingly natural relationship and allowed to develop a slightly unkempt, shaggy appearance, which the viewer instinctively associates 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 Japanese artists of the Ashikaga and later eras. 'The Japanese 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 grass, of glory in the flower.In spite of this, the Chinese garden was more formal than the type that developed in Japan, 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 participated in nature rather than merely contemplating it. Accordingly, Chinese gardens (and Heian copies of them) included architectural features not included in the later Zen landscapes. The Chinese apparently believed that if one is to duplicate the lakes and mountains, then all the items normally seen in the countryside should be there, including the artifacts of man. The Chinese garden welcomed the physical presence of man, whereas the landscape gardens developed in Japan are at their finest when viewed without people, if only because the presence of man acts as a yardstick to destroy the illusion of perspective and exaggerated distance. (However, a Zen-inspired form of Japanese stroll garden for use in connection with the tea ceremony did develop, as will be noted later.)The plaster wall of a Chinese garden was often an integral element of the decoration, and its shape and topping were part of the overall aesthetic effect. The Japanese, on the other hand, chose to de-emphasize the presence of the wall. Stated differently, the purpose of the wall around a Chinese garden was to keep outsiders from seeing in, whereas the wall of a Japanese garden was to prevent those inside from having to see out—a fundamental difference in function and philosophy.The dissimilarity in Chinese and Japanese attitudes toward garden rocks also deserves mention. The Japanese preferred interesting naturalness in their stones; they avoided blandness, but were wary of freakish, distracting shapes. The Chinese, in contrast, were charmed by curiosities, and they sought out garden rocks with fantastic, even grotesque contours. This preference seems to have grown out of a desire to duplicate the craggy mountainsides so often seen in Sung landscape paintings. They searched for unnaturally shaped stones in lake bottoms, where the action of water had honeycombed them. (In fact, this particular passion, which became known as "rockery," led to a bit of forgery during the latter part of the Ming era, when ordinary rocks were carved to the desired shape and then placed under a waterfall until they were smoothed sufficiently to disguise the deception.)The presence of so many unnatural features in Chinese gardens tended to give them a rococo quality, which Zen artists were careful to avoid, and the hemispherical, symmetrical motif of Chinese gardens was transformed into the angular, asymmetrical style that suited Zen aesthetic theory. The fundamental impression a Chinese garden gives is that of skilled artifice, of being a magical, slightly fabulous landscape of dreams. Zen artists transformed this into a symbolic experience of the world at large, distilled into a controlled space but suggesting the infinite. The result was to change a form that has been essentially decorative into something as near to pure art as can be wrought with the primeval elements of tree, water, and stone. Gardens had been used before to approximate this or that monarch's conception of paradise, but never before had they been employed to express an otherwise ineffable understanding of the moral authority of the natural world.Zen gardens differ even more greatly from Western gardendesign. The geometrical creations of Europe, such as the palace garden at Versailles, were fashioned to provide wide-open vistas reaching toward the horizon, while the naturalistic Zen garden is closed in upon itself like a form of curved space, producing the illusion of an infinite wilderness in a few acres. It is intended primarily for viewing; there are no grassy dells for loitering. It is expected to serve functions ordinarily reserved for art in the West: it both abstracts and intensifies reality, being at once symbolic and explicit in design, and the emotion it evokes in the viewer gives him a deeper understanding of his own consciousness.The four gardens in Kyoto that perhaps best demonstrate the principles of early Zen landscape were all constructed under the patronage of the Ashikaga: the first two, Saiho-ji (ca. 1339) and Tenryu-ji (ca. 1343), were designed by the Zen monk Muso under the reign of Takauji; the garden of the Golden Pavilion (1397) was executed under the influence of Yoshimitsu; and the garden of the Silver Pavilion (1484) was guided by Yoshimasa. All four were created on the sites of earlier gardens dating from the Heian or Kamakura eras which Zen artists both purified and modified, making changes roughly analogous to the reworking of a rococo marble statue of a rotund courtier into a free-standing muscular nude. It is also illustrative of the age that these one-time private estates were transformed into what were to become essentially public parks, albeit under the management of Zen temples.The first of the gardens to be designed was the one at Saiho-ji, a temple on the western edge of Kyoto, popularly known as the "Moss Temple," or Kokedera. During the Heian and Kamakura eras this site belonged to a prominent family who constructed two temple gardens toward the close of the twelfth century in honor of Amida and his Western Paradise. Fashioned long after contacts with China had been broken, these Amida gardens already disowned many of the decorative motifs in the earlier, Tang-style parks. They were self-contained and natural and had no pretense of being symbolic. This was to change, however, around the time that Ashikaga Takauji assumed power, when the owner hit upon the notion of converting these gardens of the Jodo sect into something appropriate to the new school of Zen. The project was begun with the understanding that the famous Zen priest Muso Soseki would come to preside over the new temple as abbot, and work was begun under his guidance.The resulting garden is on two levels, like the original dual garden of Amida, but the Zen designer used the levels to suggest many of the features of a larger universe. It was not yet a fully developed landscape, but rather a contemplative retreat for strolling which strove to emphasize minor aspects of the natural features of rocks, ponds, trees, grasses, and moss. Even so, many of the features of later landscape gardens are traceable to Muso's design here, particularly the rugged rockwork of the islands in the large lake on the lower level, which later inspired the rockwork of Yoshimitsu's Golden Pavilion garden. Located up the hill is a "dry cascade," suggested by the skillful arrangement of round, flat-topped stones carefully set in a place where water never ran. Already, the obligatory waterfall of the Chinese garden had been abstracted into a quiet symbolism. The garden bespeaks a sober, ancient grace and dignity—and reveals aesthetic concepts peculiar to Zen.The garden of Tenryu-ji is at the temple founded by Takauji, at the suggestion of Muso, as a site for the repose of the soul of the Emperor Godaigo, whom Takauji had driven out of Kyoto. It will be recalled that the expense associated with building this temple was the occasion of Takauji's again opening trade with China, an act that led to the real explosion of Zen art. Muso also became the official abbot of the temple and is thought to have contributed to the redesign of its garden—it had previously been part of an imperial country villa. Muso's contribution is questionable, however, since the garden shows evidence of influence from the "landscape-painting" design of Sung China and the peculiarly Sung usage of "rockery." It may have been laid out earlier by some emigrant Chinese Ch'an monk who was aware of the latest Sung garden theory. The rock shapes are not grotesque, however, but rather show the crisp angularity later to become a Japanese trademark. A small islet of three stones suggests the three levels of a landscape painting, and at the back there is a simulated waterfall of rugged dry stones. The lake and its islands are monochromatic and severe, and the footbridge traditional to Sung landscape gardens is represented by three long flat stones crossing a narrow portion of the rear part of the lake. This garden is probably the only Sung-style creation in Japan, but its impact on Zen gardeners was considerable, since it showed the effects Ch'an Buddhism had had on Chinese garden art. Muso undoubtedly recognized the garden as a worthy model for Zen artists, and he probably did no more than put a few final Japanese touches on the work.By the time of Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, builder of the third Zen landscape garden, Ch'an garden concepts were undoubtedlybetter understood in Japan than in China. Yoshimitsu had often gone to Saiho-ji to meditate in the garden, and he knew exactly what was required for the landscape garden to surround his Golden Pavilion. He selected a site known as the North Hill Villa, an estate originally built by an aristocratic family using funds they had got serving as spies to report the activities of the Kyoto aristocracy to the Kamakura warlords. Constructed in 1224, the original garden represented the last flowering of the Heian- (or T'ang Chinese) style garden; that is, it was a purely decorative boating pond. When Yoshimitsu acquired the site, he immediately demolished the Chinese-style residence with its fishing pavilion projecting out onto the lake. Then he turned his attention to the garden, paring down the central island and adding smaller islands by bringing in massive stones from the surrounding hills. To obtain the necessary trees, he simply selected those that caught his eye in the gardens of the powerless aristocracy.Today the garden at the Golden Pavilion covers approximately four and a half acres (although it seems much larger), with a lake occupying about one-third of the total area. The pavilion sits at the lake's edge, but in past times before the waters shifted, it was in its midst. When viewed from the pavilion, as was the original intention, the garden seems a landscape vista. Several of the small islets scattered about the lake have their own dwarf pines, while others are no more than massive protruding stones, chosen for an abstract resemblance to a tortoise or cane. In the portion of the lake closest to the pavilion everything is wrought in great detail, whereas stones on the far side are vague and diffuse, so that the distant shoreline seems lost in misty recesses. The hillsides surrounding the garden are covered with foliage, and there is no clear demarcation between the garden and the hills. Executed at a time when resources were almost limitless, the garden of the Golden Pavilion is one of the finest Zen landscape gardens ever created. It stands as a watershed between the modification of Chinese styles and the maturity of Japanese Zen art.Yoshimasa, architect of the fourth great Zen landscape garden, was also fond of Saiho-ji and had studied its garden, as well as that of the Golden Pavilion, with great care. But the Silver Pavilion and its garden were built after the disastrous Onin War, when the available resources were nothing like those of the earlier Ashikaga shoguns. Although he was surrounded by a coterie of Zen aestheticians, it appears Yoshimasa designed the garden himself, assisted by a new class of professional garden workers drawn from the outcastetaclass (outcast because they were associated with the meat and hides industry and thus pariahs to all good Buddhists), who had been engaged by the Zen priests to take care of the heavy work involved in stone movement and placement. Many of theseetabecame famous for their artistic discernment, and one, the famous Zen-ami, is regarded as one of the foremost garden architects of the Ashikaga era.The garden at the Silver Pavilion was modeled after the one at Saiho-ji and made the same use of bold, angular stones— a mixture of flat-topped, straight-sided "platform" rocks and tall slim stones reminiscent of Sung landscape paintings of distant mountains. Like Saiho-ji, the garden is on two levels, with the rear reminiscent of a mountain waterfall. At one side of the garden the pond is spanned by a stone footbridge connecting either side of the shore with the central island. Shaped dwarf pines abound, and the surface of the water, interrupted here and there with massive stones, is peaceful and serene. Little wonder Yoshimasa preferred his tasteful pavilion and its distilled microcosm of landscape to the ravaged ruins of Kyoto. Here he could rest in meditation, letting his eye travel over the placid waters, past the flowering trees which framed the symbolic waterfall, upward to the silhouette of the towering pines on the far hillside to watch the moon rise in the evening, bathing his world in silver. In this peaceful setting he could relish the last, closing years of the great Ashikaga age of Zen art.The art of the landscape garden did not end with Yoshimasa, of course; rather, it shifted in its direction and purpose. Already beginning was the next phase of Zen garden art, the abstract sand-and-stone gardens.CHAPTER EIGHTThe Stone Gardens of ZenAnd this our life, exempt from public haunt, Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones . . .As You Like ItDaisen-in Temple, Kyoto, ca. 1513Ryoan-ji, Kyoyo, 1490In the closingdecade of the fifteenth century, the long evening parties of Zen aesthetics were over; Kyoto lay in ruins after the Onin War, and a new, sober mood gripped the land. Virtually all the temples and estates in Kyoto, together with their gardens, were abandoned relics; and the once indulgent patronage of aristocrats and shoguns was gone forever. A reflective, contemplative mood settled over the houses of Zen. Out of this era of penurious disarray developed a style of temple garden which many hold to be the most profound expression of Zen art: the dry landscape, orkare sansui. Fashioned from the most austere materials, sand and stone, these waterless vistas were the final step in the creation of three-dimensional reproductions of Sung ink paintings. They condensed the universe into a single span, and they were primarily, if not wholly, monochromatic. More importantly, they were intended exclusively for meditation. Whereas earlier landscape gardens had always striven for a quality of scenic beauty, these small temple gardens were meant to be a training ground for the spirit, a device wherein the contemplative mind might reach out and touch the essence of Zen. These later Zen gardens were also reduced in size and scope, since a temple yard in such diminished times could not accommodate the spacious parks once available to the aristocracy. Stylized, often abstract representations of nature, they dispensed with all decorative possibilities the better to promote the serious business of meditation.Perhaps the best example of this type of monochrome "painting" garden is the famous creation at Daisen-in, a part of the Daitoku-ji temple compound in Kvoto. The sand-and-stone garden here is on all sides of the temple building, placing the viewer literally in the middle of a Sung landscape. The focus of the painting, however, is in one small corner of the grounds, where a pair of head-high vertical stones have been used to represent Sung mountain peaks while striated white sand placed around and among the larger background mountains, together with smaller flat-topped rocks in the foreground, suggest the inrush of water from a symbolic waterfall. The simulated stream of white sand winds among river rocks as it passes across the front of the viewing platform. Included in the design are a stone bridge crossing one portion of the sandy stream and a large boat-shaped stone enhancing the symbolism of water. The water seems to disappear under the temple veranda and emerge on the other side as a shimmering white sea. Adjacent to the tall mountain stones are several ancillary rocks approximately waist-high, over which flow rivulets of white sand, suggesting a cataract captured in monochrome. Just as an expert Zen painter extracts the details of a scene in a few strokes of the brush, so the master of Daisen-in succeeded in distilling from the natural world precisely those elements that excite the spirit.
Zen training also renders the warrior free from troubling frailties of the mind, such as fear and rash ambition—qualities lethal in mortal combat. He is focused entirely on his opponent's openings, and when an opportunity to strike presents itself, he requires no deliberation: his sword and body act automatically. The discipline of meditation and the mind-dissolving paradoxes of thekoanbecome instruments to forge a fearless, automatic, mindless instrument of steel-tipped death.
The methods developed by Zen masters for teaching archery differ significantly from those used for the sword. Whereas swordsmanship demands that man and weapon merge with no acknowledgment of one's opponent until the critical moment, archery requires the man to become detached from his weapon and to concentrate entirely upon the target. Proper technique is learned, of course, but the ultimate aim is to forget technique, forget the bow, forget the draw, and give one's concentration entirely to the target. Yet here too there is a difference between Zen archery and Western techniques: the Zen archer gives no direct thought to hitting the target. He does not strain for accuracy, but rather lets accuracy come as a result of intuitively applying perfect form.
Before attempting to unravel this seeming paradox, the equipment of the Japanese archer should be examined. The Japanese bow differs from the Western bow in having the hand grip approximately one-third of the distance from the bottom, rather than in the middle. This permits a standing archer (or a kneeling one, for that matter) to make use of a bow longer than he is tall (almost eight feet, in fact), since the upper part may extend well above his head. The bottom half of the bow is scaled to human proportions, while the upper tip extends far over the head in a sweeping arch. It is thus a combination of the conventional bow and the English longbow, requiring a draw well behind the ear. This bow is unique to Japan, and in its engineering principles it surpasses anything seen in the West until comparatively recent times. It is a laminated composite of supple bamboo and the brittle wood of the wax tree. The heart of the bow is made up of three squares of bamboo sandwiched between two half-moon sections of bamboo which comprise the belly (that side facing the inside of the curve) and the back (the side away from the archer). Filling out the edges of the sandwich are two strips of wax-tree wood. The elimination of the deadwood center of the bow, which is replaced by the three strips of bamboo and two of waxwood, produces a composite at once powerful and light. The arrows too are of bamboo, an almost perfect material for the purpose, and they differ from Western arrows only in being lighter and longer. Finally, the Japanese bowstring is loosed with the thumb rather than the fingers, again a departure from Western practice.
If the equipment differs from that of the West, the technique, which verges on ritual, differs far more. The first Zen archery lesson is proper breath control, which requires techniques learned from meditation. Proper breathing conditions the mind in archery as it does inzazenand is essential in developing a quiet mind, a restful spirit, and full concentration. Controlled breathing also constantly reminds the archer that his is a religious activity, a ritual related to his spiritual character as much as to the more prosaic concern of hitting the target. Breathing is equally essential in drawing the bow, for the arrow is held out away from the body, calling on muscles much less developed than those required by the Western draw. A breath is taken with every separate movement of the draw, and gradually a rhythm settles in which gives the archer's movements a fluid grace and the ritual cadence of a dance.
Only after the ritual mastery of the powerful bow has been realized does the archer turn his attention to loosing the arrows (not, it should be noted, to hitting the target). The same use of breathing applies, the goal being for the release of the arrow to come out of spontaneous intuition, like the swordsman's attack. The release of the arrow should dissolve a kind of spiritual tension, like the resolution of akoan, and it must seem to occur of itself, without deliberation, almost as though it were independent of the hand. This is possible because the archer's mind is totally unaware of his actions; it is focused, indeed riveted in concentration, on the target. This is not done through aiming, although the archer does aim—intuitively. Rather, the archer's spirit must be burned into the target, be at one with it, so that the arrow is guided by the mind and the shot of the bow becomes merely an intervening, inconsequential necessity. All physical actions—the stance, the breathing, the draw, the release—are as natural and require as little conscious thought as a heartbeat; the arrow is guided by the intense concentration of the mind on its goal.
Thus it was that the martial arts of Japan were the first to benefit from Zen precepts, a fact as ironic as it is astounding. Yet meditation and combat are akin in that both require rigorous self-discipline and the denial of the mind's overt functions. From its beginning as an aid in the arts of death, Zen soon became the guiding principle for quite another form of art. In years to come, Zen would be the official state religion, shoguns would become Zen patrons extraordinaire, and a totally Zen culture would rule Japan.
Part II
THE AGE OF HIGH CULTURE:
ASHIKAGA (1333-1573)
For we are lovers of the beautiful, yet simple in our tastes, and we cultivate the mind without loss of manliness.Pericles, ca.430 b.c.
Silver Pavilion, Kyoto 1482
Golden Pavilion, Kyoto
The floweringof Zen culture might be described as the Periclean age of Japan. As with fifth-century Greece, this was the era that produced Japan's finest classical art at the same time that rampant plagues and internecine warfare bled the land as never before. Government, such as it was, rested in the hands of the Ashikaga clan, men ever ready to sacrifice the general good in furtherance of personal interests. That these interests happened to include Zen and the Zen arts probably brought scant solace to their subjects, but today we can weigh their selfishness against the culture they sponsored. In any case, all who admire the classic Zen cultural forms should be aware that their price included the heartless taxation of and disregard for the entire peasant population of Japan.
The historical backdrop for the Ashikaga era reads like a Jacobean tragedy peopled by cutthroat courtiers ever alert to advantage in chambers or in battle. The political shape of the Ashikaga era began to emerge in the early years of the fourteenth century as the once invincible Kamakura rule of the Hojo family dissolved, plunging Japan into a half-century of war and feuding over the identity of the rightful emperor. Throughout much of the century the provincialdaimyowarlords and theirsamuraiwarred up and down the length of the land, supporting first one emperor, then another. It was during this time and the two centuries following that Zen became the official state religion and Zen monks served as foreign diplomats, domestic advisers, and arbiters of taste.
The political troubles that ended the Kamakura warrior government and unseated the Hojo seem to be traceable to the war against the Mongols. It was a long and costly operation which left most of thesamuraiimpoverished and angered at a government that could give them only cheerful thanks rather than the lands of the vanquished as was traditional practice. The general discontent found a focus in the third decade of the fourteenth century when a Kyoto emperor named Godaigo attempted to unseat the Hojo and re-establish genuine imperial rule. After some minor skirmishes, the Hojo commissioned an able general nanied Ashikaga Takauji (1305-1358) from an old Minamoto family to march on Godaigo and settle the difficulty. Along the way Takauji must have thought things over, for when he reached Kyoto instead of attacking the emperor's forces he put the Hojo garrison to the sword. Shortly thereafter, another general supporting the imperial cause marched out to Kamakura and laid waste the Hojo capital. The last few hundred Hojo supporters committed suicide en masse, and the Kamakura age was ended.
Godaigo gleefully set up the new Japanese government in Kyoto, and soon it was like old times, with aristocrats running everything. In a serious miscalculation, he assumed that the
provincial warlords had joined his cause out of personal loyalty rather than the more traditional motive of greed, for he gave the Hojo estates to his favorite mistresses while regarding warriors like Takauji as hardly more than rustic figures of fun. As might have been expected, another war soon broke out. This time the conflict lasted for decades, with almost unbelievable convolutions, including a number of decades in which Japan had two emperors. At one point Takauji found it necessary to poison his own brother, and it has been estimated that his military exploits cost some sixty thousand lives, not to mention the general ruin of the country at large. The end result was that the forces of Godaigo were defeated, leaving Japan in the hands of the Ashikaga family.
For all his bloodletting, Takuji was also a patron of the Zen sect, giving it a formal place in the national life and encouraging its growth and dissemination. One of his closest advisers was the great Zen prelate Muso Soseki (1275-1351), whose influence made Rinzai Zen the official religion of the Ashikaga era. An astutely practical man, Muso established the precedent for doctrinal flexibility which allowed Zen to survive while emperors and shoguns came and went:
Clear-sighted masters of the Zen sect do not have a fixed doctrine which is to be held to at any and all times. They offer whatever teaching the occasion demands and preach as the spirit moves them, with no fixed course to guide them. If asked what Zen is, they may answer in the words of Confucius, Mencius, Lao Tzu or Chuang Tzu, or else in terms of the doctrines of the various sects and denominations, and also by using popular proverbs.1
Like many Zen teachers, Muso enjoyed the company of the powerful. He began his career in statecraft as a supporter and confidant of the ill-fated Emperor Godaigo. When Godaigo was deposed, he adjusted his allegiance and became the high priest of the Ashikaga house. He was soon the constant companion of Takauji, advising him on policy, flattering his taste in Zen art, and secretly trying to give him a bit of polish. Although Takauji could scarcely have had time for extensive meditation amid his continual bloodletting, Muso preached to him in odd moments and soothed his occasionally guilty conscience.
Since Takauji was clearly haunted by his treatment of Godaigo, Muso suggested that the former emperor's ghost might find repose if a special Zen temple was built in his memory. The project was well underway when funds ran low, whereupon the resourceful Muso suggested sending a trading vessel to China to raise foreign-exchange cash. The venture was so successful that before long regular trade was established— naturally enough under the guidance of Zen monks. In later years a special branch of government was established devoted exclusively to foreign trade and directed by well-traveled prelates of Zen. (The Chinese regarded this trade as the exchange of Chinese gifts for Japanese tribute, but the Japanese were willing to overlook the insult in the interest of profit.) Muso's other lasting contribution to the growth of Zen influence was persuading Takauji to build a Zen temple in each of the sixty-six provinces, thereby extending state support of the religion outside of Kyoto ruling circles.
Takauji was the founder of a line of Ashikaga shoguns who gave their name to the next two centuries of Japanese history. His entire life was spent on the battlefield, where he concentrated his energies on strengthening the shogunate through the liberal application of armed might. In a sense he prefigured the attitude of John Adams, who once lamented that he must study war so that his grandsons might fashion art and architecture. Indeed, Takauji's grandson was the famous aesthete Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (1358-1408), who ascended to shogun in 1368 and soon thereafter brought to flower a renaissance of the Zen artistic tradition of Sung China.
Yoshimitsu was only nine years of age when he became shogun, so the early years of his reign were guided by regents of the Hosokawa clan, who put to rest any remaining dissidence. Consequently, when Yoshimitsu came of age, he felt secure
enough in his office to tour the country, visiting religious shrines and establishing his place in the pageant of Japanese history. More significantly for the rise of Zen culture, he also turned his eyes abroad, encouraging the trade with China by stabilizing political relations and becoming the best customer for the silks, brocades, porcelains, and—most important—Sung paintings brought back by the Zen monks.
In a very short time, Yoshimitsu had become addicted to the Chinese finery and antique Ch'an art of the Sung which his monks were importing. He was fortunate that the country was stable and peaceful enough to allow him his whims, especially since he almost entirely lost interest in all functions of government save taxation, which he found necessary to apply to the peasants in ever greater measure in order to support his patronage of the arts. Absorbed with aesthetics and Zen art, he became a cloistered sovereign whose luckless subjects were left on their own to weather fortunes that alternated between starvation and the plague, leavened by intermittent wars among provincial chieftains. The peasantry, however, was not blind to his callous priorities, and it is said that his reputation survived into the nineteenth century, maintained by country folk who would trek to a certain temple to revile an old statue of the Ashikaga shogun.
His personal failings notwithstanding, Yoshimitsu was the key figure in bringing about the rise of Zen art. His contributions were manifold: he founded a Zen monastery which became the school for the great landscape painters of the era; his personal patronage was largely responsible for the development of the No drama; his example and encouragement did much to bring into being the identification of Zen with landscape garden art; his own practice ofzazenunder the guidance of a famous Zen monk set an example for the warrior court; his interest in tea and poetry served both to set the stage for the development of the tea ceremony as an aesthetic phenomenon and to temper the literary tastes of his warrior followers; and, finally, his interest in Zen-inspired architecture was responsible for the creation of one of the most famous Zen chapels in Japan.
When Yoshimitsu retired in 1394 to enter Zen orders, leaving the government to his nine-year-old son, he ensconced himself in a palace in the Kyoto suburbs and proceeded to build a chapel for Zen meditation. The Golden Pavilion, orKinkaku-ji, as it came to be known, was a wooden teahouse three stories high whose architectural beauty is now legendary.
There were few if any previous examples of this type of multistory structure, although it has been suggested that the idea may have been copied from a comparable temple in southern China. (The turn-of-the-century American critic Ernest Fenollosa suggested that it was modeled after the structure Kublai Khan constructed for a garden in Shang-tu, which Coleridge called Xanadu, after the translation of the name by Marco Polo: "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/A stately pleasure-dome decree.") Whatever its origins, the building superficially resembled a low-rising pagoda—each successive story was a more or less smaller version of the one below. The two lower floors were used for evening entertainments of music, poetry, and incense, while the top floor was a tiny meditation chapel (whose ceiling was covered with gold leaf, thereby giving the building its name). Set in the midst of a beautiful landscape garden, the sweeping roofs, painstaking wooden joinery, and exquisite unpainted woods of the Golden Pavilion were a landmark of Zen taste destined to influence the course of Japanese architecture for centuries.
The Golden Pavilion was the crowning act of Yoshimitsu's career, a fitting monument to the man who, more than any other, was responsible for the rise of Zen culture. Under his rule, Japanese monks first brought back from China the finest examples of Ch'an-inspired art, from which they derived and mastered the artistic principles of the vanished Sung era and went on to re-create if not surpass the great Sung age of artistic production. The momentum for Zen culture produced by Yoshimitsu lasted through the reign of his grandson Yoshimasa (1435-1490), the last great Ashikaga patron of Zen art.
As a shogun, Yoshimasa was even more distracted by Zen than his famous grandfather. He concentrated on encouraging
the school of Sung-style ink painting, the Zen ritual of ceremonial tea, the art of flower arranging, and new styles of Zen-influenced architecture. Unfortunately, his apparently hereditary absence of interest in affairs of state ultimately brought about the disintegration of the Japanese political fabric. As the office of shogun weakened to the point of symbolism, Yoshimasa's power to tax became so frail that he was finally forced to borrow from the Zen monasteries. The real power in the land passed to the local feudal lords, ordaimyo, men who governed entire domains, raised their own armies, and exercised far greater power than thesamuraiof earlier times.
What remained of Yoshimasa's power came to be exercised by his mistresses and his scheming wife, Tomi-ko. By his late twenties he was ready to retire entirely, the better to pursue Zen and its arts, but none of the women in the palace had yet presented him with a son who could become titular shogun. By 1464 Yoshimasa's patience was exhausted and he turned to one of his brothers who was in monastic orders and persuaded him to begin an apprenticeship for the shogunate. The brother wisely hesitated, pointing out that Tomi-ko, who was still in her twenties, might yet produce a son; but Yoshimasa won him over with solemn assurances that all sons who arrived would be made priests.
Less than a year later Tomi-ko did indeed bear a son, setting the stage for the struggle that would eventually destroy Kyoto and signal the decline of the Ashikaga age of Zen culture. As it happened, there was already an animosity between Yoshimasa's principal adviser, Hosokawa Katsumoto, and Hosokawa's father-in-law, Yamana Sozen. When the child was born, Hosokawa, a member of the historic family of Ashikaga regents, favored retaining Yoshimasa's brother as shogun, so the ambitious Tomi-ko turned to Yamana to enlist his aid in reverting the office of shogun back to Yoshimasa and thence to her son. With a natural excuse for conflict finally at hand, the two old enemies Yamana and Hosokawa gathered their armies—both numbering near eighty thousand—outside Kyoto. The impending tragedy was obvious to all, and Yoshimasa tried vainly to discourage the combatants. By that time, however, his voice counted for nothing, and in 1467 the inevitable conflict, now known as the Onin War, began.
The war raged for a decade, until virtually all the majestic temples of Kyoto were burned and pillaged. Ironically, one of the few temples to escape destruction was Yoshimitsu's Golden Pavilion, which fortunately had been situated well outside the
precincts of the main city. Although both Hosokawa and Yamana Thed in 1473, the fighting continued, as participants on both sides defected, changed leaders, and fought among themselves until no one could recall what the original war had been about. Finally, after ten full years of almost constant fighting, it became apparent that the carnage had accomplished nothing. One dark night the two armies folded their tents and stole away—and the war was no more. A remarkably senseless conflict, even by modern-day standards, the Onin War effectively obliterated all evidence in Kyoto of the marvelous Heian civilization, as well as the early Ashikaga, leaving nothing but a scorched palette for the final century of Zen art.
Yoshimasa, in the meantime, had long since removed himself from affairs of state. Since his shogun brother had switched sides during the war and become a general for Yamana, the succession question was simplified. Tomi-ko took time out from her vigorous war-profiteering to prevail upon Yoshimasa to appoint her son, then four years old, shogun. She thereby became de facto shogun herself, encouraging Yoshimasa in his desire to retire while enriching herself handsomely with imaginative new taxes. The war proved a windfall for Tomi-ko, who lent funds to both sides to keep it going, and her cupidity played no small role in the final destruction of ancient Kyoto.
Immersed as he was in the world of Zen and Zen culture, Yoshimasa seemed oblivious to the sea of official corruption around him, and indeed there was probably little he could have done to prevent it. He loved the refined company of women and avoided warriors, whose rough manner offended him but in whose hands lay the only real power in the country. As the government disintegrated, he made his own contribution as a connoisseur and patron of the fine arts, bringing to culmination the movement in Zen art that left Japan a legacy far more lasting than any that mere diplomacy could have left. Like his European counterparts, the Medici, Yoshimasa balanced his failings in politics with faultless aesthetic judgment, endowing the Zen arts with new standards in architecture, painting, gardening, the No theater, the tea ceremony, and ceremonial flower arranging. Perhaps he should not be faulted for doing what he understood best.
Yoshimasa also left a physical monument intended to rival the Golden Pavilion. In 1466, as he contemplated retirement, he began plans to construct a villa for meditation. With the outbreak of war he was forced for a number of years to devote his attentions to the repair of the imperial residence, but after the war he renewed his intentions to retire into Zen aesthetics. His decision was strengthened by family troubles, including Tomi-ko's displeasure with the number of his mistresses, a problem that finally exploded when her young son, the shogun, demanded to marry one of them rather than a girl of Tomi-ko's choosing. In 1482, amid the general ruin and confusion, Yoshimasa resolved to begin the construction of his retirement villa. Financial circumstances had changed since his original plan eighteen years earlier, and his interest in Zen was even deeper, so instead of the sumptuous palace once planned, he built a small pavilion of exquisite taste and restraint. It stands today, a forerunner of the traditional house, and is known as the Silver Pavilion, orGinkaku-ji, because of the popular belief that he originally planned to cover portions with silver leaf.Ginkaku-jihas two stories, the first in Zen temple style and the second inshoinstyle. The deliberately unpainted wood exterior of the two-story chapel has weathered to the color of bark, and it has all the dignity its five hundred years demand.
There were almost a dozen Ashikaga shoguns after Yoshimasa, but none had any influence on the course of history. The century after his retirement is known as the Age of the Country at War, and it is remembered for almost continuous civil strife amongdaiymo, the provincial chieftains who had swallowed up thesamurai. In this period Japan was less a nation than several hundred small fiefdoms, each controlled by a powerful family and constantly in arms against its neighbors. Little wonder that many of the greatest Zen artists left Kyoto never to return; the capital was a desolate ruin, without power and without patrons. This condition prevailed until late in the sixteenth century, when individuals of sufficient military genius to reunite the country again appeared.
The influence of Zen was probably as pervasive in medieval Ashikaga Japan as Christianity was in medieval Europe. A Zen monk was the first Ashikaga shogun's closest adviser, and in later years Zen monasteries virtually took over foreign policy. (Indeed, Zen monks were the only Japanese educated enough to deal with the Chinese.) Yoshimitsu formalized the relationship between Zen and the state, setting up an official Therarchy among the Zen temples in Kyoto (the so-called "Five Mountains" or Gozan, of Tenryu-ji, Shokoku-ji, Kennin-ji, Tofuku-ji, and Manju-ji). These state temples became the resident schools for Zen painters and artists and also provided diplomats and government officials for the China trade. (They made Yoshimitsu so ardent a Sinophile that he once had some Japanese pirates who were troubling Chinese trading vessels captured and boiled alive.) Under the reign of Yoshimasa the China trade dwindled, but Zen monks continued to influence the government in directions that best suited their own interests. Wealthy from their commercial undertakings, they were in a position to finance some of Yoshimasa's more lavish projects, and in later years they helped him design the garden of the Silver Pavilion, including a detached building for tea drinking and meditation—the forerunner of the modern teahouse. This was the finest hour of Zen influence in official circles, for Yoshimasa was the last Ashikaga shogun whose preferences had any influence on the course of Japanese life. After his death, the artists who had surrounded him scattered to the provinces to find patrons. Within a decade the Silver Pavilion and its garden were virtually abandoned. Zen as a religion also went to the provinces, and gradually its following grew as sympathetic teachers who no longer cared for the company of the mighty were content to explain the rewards of nonattachment to the people at large.
The many faces of Japanese Zen were paradoxical indeed. The Kamakura warriors turned to Zen for strength on the battlefield, whereas the Ashikaga court found in it aesthetic escapism and spiritual solace in a crumbling world. That an age such as the Ashikaga could have nourished high arts has puzzled historians for centuries, and no entirely satisfactory explanation has yet been advanced. Perhaps art flourishes best when social unrest uproots easy conventions. Fifth-century Athens produced its most enduring art at a time when the land was rent by the fratricidal Peloponnesian War and the city itself was haunted by the plague. Renaissance Florence is another example. Today Kyoto, like modern Athens and modern Florence, is a living museum, concerned more with traffic and tourist hotels than with the long-forgotten blood baths which once raged in its streets. Seemingly forgotten, too, are the warring Ashikaga, at whose behest the noble Zen arts of Japan were shaped.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Zen and the Landscape Garden
To see a World in a grain of sand,
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.
William Blake
Renge-ji Temple, Kyoto
Tenryu-ji Temple, Kyoto, ca.1343
For at leasta millennium before the coming of Zen to Japan, gardens had been constructed in China which were founded on underlying religious motives, but only with the rise of Zen in Japan did gardens become deliberately symbolic of the human quest for inner understanding. During the Heian era Japanese aristocrats copied Chinese pleasure parks, and during the Kamakura many of them were translated by practitioners of the Jodo sect into fanciful reproductions of Amida's Western Paradise. After the rise of Zen influence among artists and intellectuals of the Ashikaga age, the gay polychrome of these earlier gardens was supplanted by a sober blend of rocks, trees, sand, and water—Japanese 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 shores 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 God 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 (206b.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 Japanese 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 passed, 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 Shinto nature worshipers of Japan 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 Japanese 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 Japanese 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 passion of the Japanese aristocracy; Heian nobles built Chinese-style houses and lake-and-island gardens, complete with Chinese-style fishing 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 nobles linked it to shore with stone footbridges. In these grand parks the Heian nobles 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 Japanese 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 attitude 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 Japan) 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 attitudes 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 Japanese 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 attitude that a garden should be a three- dimensional painting sparked the long march of Japanese 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 architectDavidEngel has observed, the Japanese 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 Yoshimitsu'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 Japanese 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 Japanese 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 grassy hillock.
Many methods of psychological deception in a Zen garden exploit instinctive visual assumptions 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 assume 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 associates with distance. Japanese 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 grass or obscured by applications of moss, adding to the sense of artless placement. Everything in the garden—trees, stones, gravel, grass—is arranged with a careful blending of areas into a seemingly natural relationship and allowed to develop a slightly unkempt, shaggy appearance, which the viewer instinctively associates 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 Japanese artists of the Ashikaga and later eras. 'The Japanese 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 grass, of glory in the flower.
In spite of this, the Chinese garden was more formal than the type that developed in Japan, 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 participated in nature rather than merely contemplating it. Accordingly, Chinese gardens (and Heian copies of them) included architectural features not included in the later Zen landscapes. The Chinese apparently believed that if one is to duplicate the lakes and mountains, then all the items normally seen in the countryside should be there, including the artifacts of man. The Chinese garden welcomed the physical presence of man, whereas the landscape gardens developed in Japan are at their finest when viewed without people, if only because the presence of man acts as a yardstick to destroy the illusion of perspective and exaggerated distance. (However, a Zen-inspired form of Japanese stroll garden for use in connection with the tea ceremony did develop, as will be noted later.)
The plaster wall of a Chinese garden was often an integral element of the decoration, and its shape and topping were part of the overall aesthetic effect. The Japanese, on the other hand, chose to de-emphasize the presence of the wall. Stated differently, the purpose of the wall around a Chinese garden was to keep outsiders from seeing in, whereas the wall of a Japanese garden was to prevent those inside from having to see out—a fundamental difference in function and philosophy.
The dissimilarity in Chinese and Japanese attitudes toward garden rocks also deserves mention. The Japanese preferred interesting naturalness in their stones; they avoided blandness, but were wary of freakish, distracting shapes. The Chinese, in contrast, were charmed by curiosities, and they sought out garden rocks with fantastic, even grotesque contours. This preference seems to have grown out of a desire to duplicate the craggy mountainsides so often seen in Sung landscape paintings. They searched for unnaturally shaped stones in lake bottoms, where the action of water had honeycombed them. (In fact, this particular passion, which became known as "rockery," led to a bit of forgery during the latter part of the Ming era, when ordinary rocks were carved to the desired shape and then placed under a waterfall until they were smoothed sufficiently to disguise the deception.)
The presence of so many unnatural features in Chinese gardens tended to give them a rococo quality, which Zen artists were careful to avoid, and the hemispherical, symmetrical motif of Chinese gardens was transformed into the angular, asymmetrical style that suited Zen aesthetic theory. The fundamental impression a Chinese garden gives is that of skilled artifice, of being a magical, slightly fabulous landscape of dreams. Zen artists transformed this into a symbolic experience of the world at large, distilled into a controlled space but suggesting the infinite. The result was to change a form that has been essentially decorative into something as near to pure art as can be wrought with the primeval elements of tree, water, and stone. Gardens had been used before to approximate this or that monarch's conception of paradise, but never before had they been employed to express an otherwise ineffable understanding of the moral authority of the natural world.
Zen gardens differ even more greatly from Western garden
design. The geometrical creations of Europe, such as the palace garden at Versailles, were fashioned to provide wide-open vistas reaching toward the horizon, while the naturalistic Zen garden is closed in upon itself like a form of curved space, producing the illusion of an infinite wilderness in a few acres. It is intended primarily for viewing; there are no grassy dells for loitering. It is expected to serve functions ordinarily reserved for art in the West: it both abstracts and intensifies reality, being at once symbolic and explicit in design, and the emotion it evokes in the viewer gives him a deeper understanding of his own consciousness.
The four gardens in Kyoto that perhaps best demonstrate the principles of early Zen landscape were all constructed under the patronage of the Ashikaga: the first two, Saiho-ji (ca. 1339) and Tenryu-ji (ca. 1343), were designed by the Zen monk Muso under the reign of Takauji; the garden of the Golden Pavilion (1397) was executed under the influence of Yoshimitsu; and the garden of the Silver Pavilion (1484) was guided by Yoshimasa. All four were created on the sites of earlier gardens dating from the Heian or Kamakura eras which Zen artists both purified and modified, making changes roughly analogous to the reworking of a rococo marble statue of a rotund courtier into a free-standing muscular nude. It is also illustrative of the age that these one-time private estates were transformed into what were to become essentially public parks, albeit under the management of Zen temples.
The first of the gardens to be designed was the one at Saiho-ji, a temple on the western edge of Kyoto, popularly known as the "Moss Temple," or Kokedera. During the Heian and Kamakura eras this site belonged to a prominent family who constructed two temple gardens toward the close of the twelfth century in honor of Amida and his Western Paradise. Fashioned long after contacts with China had been broken, these Amida gardens already disowned many of the decorative motifs in the earlier, Tang-style parks. They were self-contained and natural and had no pretense of being symbolic. This was to change, however, around the time that Ashikaga Takauji assumed power, when the owner hit upon the notion of converting these gardens of the Jodo sect into something appropriate to the new school of Zen. The project was begun with the understanding that the famous Zen priest Muso Soseki would come to preside over the new temple as abbot, and work was begun under his guidance.
The resulting garden is on two levels, like the original dual garden of Amida, but the Zen designer used the levels to suggest many of the features of a larger universe. It was not yet a fully developed landscape, but rather a contemplative retreat for strolling which strove to emphasize minor aspects of the natural features of rocks, ponds, trees, grasses, and moss. Even so, many of the features of later landscape gardens are traceable to Muso's design here, particularly the rugged rockwork of the islands in the large lake on the lower level, which later inspired the rockwork of Yoshimitsu's Golden Pavilion garden. Located up the hill is a "dry cascade," suggested by the skillful arrangement of round, flat-topped stones carefully set in a place where water never ran. Already, the obligatory waterfall of the Chinese garden had been abstracted into a quiet symbolism. The garden bespeaks a sober, ancient grace and dignity—and reveals aesthetic concepts peculiar to Zen.
The garden of Tenryu-ji is at the temple founded by Takauji, at the suggestion of Muso, as a site for the repose of the soul of the Emperor Godaigo, whom Takauji had driven out of Kyoto. It will be recalled that the expense associated with building this temple was the occasion of Takauji's again opening trade with China, an act that led to the real explosion of Zen art. Muso also became the official abbot of the temple and is thought to have contributed to the redesign of its garden—it had previously been part of an imperial country villa. Muso's contribution is questionable, however, since the garden shows evidence of influence from the "landscape-painting" design of Sung China and the peculiarly Sung usage of "rockery." It may have been laid out earlier by some emigrant Chinese Ch'an monk who was aware of the latest Sung garden theory. The rock shapes are not grotesque, however, but rather show the crisp angularity later to become a Japanese trademark. A small islet of three stones suggests the three levels of a landscape painting, and at the back there is a simulated waterfall of rugged dry stones. The lake and its islands are monochromatic and severe, and the footbridge traditional to Sung landscape gardens is represented by three long flat stones crossing a narrow portion of the rear part of the lake. This garden is probably the only Sung-style creation in Japan, but its impact on Zen gardeners was considerable, since it showed the effects Ch'an Buddhism had had on Chinese garden art. Muso undoubtedly recognized the garden as a worthy model for Zen artists, and he probably did no more than put a few final Japanese touches on the work.
By the time of Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, builder of the third Zen landscape garden, Ch'an garden concepts were undoubtedly
better understood in Japan than in China. Yoshimitsu had often gone to Saiho-ji to meditate in the garden, and he knew exactly what was required for the landscape garden to surround his Golden Pavilion. He selected a site known as the North Hill Villa, an estate originally built by an aristocratic family using funds they had got serving as spies to report the activities of the Kyoto aristocracy to the Kamakura warlords. Constructed in 1224, the original garden represented the last flowering of the Heian- (or T'ang Chinese) style garden; that is, it was a purely decorative boating pond. When Yoshimitsu acquired the site, he immediately demolished the Chinese-style residence with its fishing pavilion projecting out onto the lake. Then he turned his attention to the garden, paring down the central island and adding smaller islands by bringing in massive stones from the surrounding hills. To obtain the necessary trees, he simply selected those that caught his eye in the gardens of the powerless aristocracy.
Today the garden at the Golden Pavilion covers approximately four and a half acres (although it seems much larger), with a lake occupying about one-third of the total area. The pavilion sits at the lake's edge, but in past times before the waters shifted, it was in its midst. When viewed from the pavilion, as was the original intention, the garden seems a landscape vista. Several of the small islets scattered about the lake have their own dwarf pines, while others are no more than massive protruding stones, chosen for an abstract resemblance to a tortoise or cane. In the portion of the lake closest to the pavilion everything is wrought in great detail, whereas stones on the far side are vague and diffuse, so that the distant shoreline seems lost in misty recesses. The hillsides surrounding the garden are covered with foliage, and there is no clear demarcation between the garden and the hills. Executed at a time when resources were almost limitless, the garden of the Golden Pavilion is one of the finest Zen landscape gardens ever created. It stands as a watershed between the modification of Chinese styles and the maturity of Japanese Zen art.
Yoshimasa, architect of the fourth great Zen landscape garden, was also fond of Saiho-ji and had studied its garden, as well as that of the Golden Pavilion, with great care. But the Silver Pavilion and its garden were built after the disastrous Onin War, when the available resources were nothing like those of the earlier Ashikaga shoguns. Although he was surrounded by a coterie of Zen aestheticians, it appears Yoshimasa designed the garden himself, assisted by a new class of professional garden workers drawn from the outcastetaclass (outcast because they were associated with the meat and hides industry and thus pariahs to all good Buddhists), who had been engaged by the Zen priests to take care of the heavy work involved in stone movement and placement. Many of theseetabecame famous for their artistic discernment, and one, the famous Zen-ami, is regarded as one of the foremost garden architects of the Ashikaga era.
The garden at the Silver Pavilion was modeled after the one at Saiho-ji and made the same use of bold, angular stones— a mixture of flat-topped, straight-sided "platform" rocks and tall slim stones reminiscent of Sung landscape paintings of distant mountains. Like Saiho-ji, the garden is on two levels, with the rear reminiscent of a mountain waterfall. At one side of the garden the pond is spanned by a stone footbridge connecting either side of the shore with the central island. Shaped dwarf pines abound, and the surface of the water, interrupted here and there with massive stones, is peaceful and serene. Little wonder Yoshimasa preferred his tasteful pavilion and its distilled microcosm of landscape to the ravaged ruins of Kyoto. Here he could rest in meditation, letting his eye travel over the placid waters, past the flowering trees which framed the symbolic waterfall, upward to the silhouette of the towering pines on the far hillside to watch the moon rise in the evening, bathing his world in silver. In this peaceful setting he could relish the last, closing years of the great Ashikaga age of Zen art.
The art of the landscape garden did not end with Yoshimasa, of course; rather, it shifted in its direction and purpose. Already beginning was the next phase of Zen garden art, the abstract sand-and-stone gardens.
The Stone Gardens of Zen
And this our life, exempt from public haunt, Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones . . .
As You Like It
Daisen-in Temple, Kyoto, ca. 1513
Ryoan-ji, Kyoyo, 1490
In the closingdecade of the fifteenth century, the long evening parties of Zen aesthetics were over; Kyoto lay in ruins after the Onin War, and a new, sober mood gripped the land. Virtually all the temples and estates in Kyoto, together with their gardens, were abandoned relics; and the once indulgent patronage of aristocrats and shoguns was gone forever. A reflective, contemplative mood settled over the houses of Zen. Out of this era of penurious disarray developed a style of temple garden which many hold to be the most profound expression of Zen art: the dry landscape, orkare sansui. Fashioned from the most austere materials, sand and stone, these waterless vistas were the final step in the creation of three-dimensional reproductions of Sung ink paintings. They condensed the universe into a single span, and they were primarily, if not wholly, monochromatic. More importantly, they were intended exclusively for meditation. Whereas earlier landscape gardens had always striven for a quality of scenic beauty, these small temple gardens were meant to be a training ground for the spirit, a device wherein the contemplative mind might reach out and touch the essence of Zen. These later Zen gardens were also reduced in size and scope, since a temple yard in such diminished times could not accommodate the spacious parks once available to the aristocracy. Stylized, often abstract representations of nature, they dispensed with all decorative possibilities the better to promote the serious business of meditation.
Perhaps the best example of this type of monochrome "painting" garden is the famous creation at Daisen-in, a part of the Daitoku-ji temple compound in Kvoto. The sand-and-stone garden here is on all sides of the temple building, placing the viewer literally in the middle of a Sung landscape. The focus of the painting, however, is in one small corner of the grounds, where a pair of head-high vertical stones have been used to represent Sung mountain peaks while striated white sand placed around and among the larger background mountains, together with smaller flat-topped rocks in the foreground, suggest the inrush of water from a symbolic waterfall. The simulated stream of white sand winds among river rocks as it passes across the front of the viewing platform. Included in the design are a stone bridge crossing one portion of the sandy stream and a large boat-shaped stone enhancing the symbolism of water. The water seems to disappear under the temple veranda and emerge on the other side as a shimmering white sea. Adjacent to the tall mountain stones are several ancillary rocks approximately waist-high, over which flow rivulets of white sand, suggesting a cataract captured in monochrome. Just as an expert Zen painter extracts the details of a scene in a few strokes of the brush, so the master of Daisen-in succeeded in distilling from the natural world precisely those elements that excite the spirit.