_Daisen-in Temple, Kyoto, ca. 1513

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Ryoan-ji, Kyoyo, 1490

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IN THE CLOSING decade 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, or _kare 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 s.p.a.cious 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 pa.s.ses 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.

This cla.s.sical _kare sansui _garden is thought to have been designed around 1513, reconstructed from one of the run-down temples left after the Onin War. Credit for the design is traditionally (but probably erroneously) given to the artist So'ami (1472-1525), a well-known painter. The distinction between painting and garden art was necessarily blurred, since these gardens were in fact intended to copy paintings more than nature. The true mark of a Zen painter was his ability to handle rocks and mountains in the prescribed manner, with sharp, angular brushstrokes devoid of softness or sentimentality.

Naturally enough, stones with this same quality were essential for the _kare sansui _gardens, but such stones were extremely rare and prized almost beyond price. Trees could be grown; stones had to be found in the mountains and moved somehow to Kyoto.

During the heyday of the Kamakura and Ashikaga glory, there were resources at hand to find, move, and position stones--and at times armies of over a thousand men were impressed into service for this task. After the Onin War no such battalions were available, but there was a ready source of superb stones: the burned-out temple and estate gardens of old Kyoto. Furthermore, monks from many of the earlier temples had systematically pillaged the estates of Heian n.o.bles for stones, using the cream of the stone collections from earlier centuries to create their small gardens. So when the builders of Daisen-in began to collect stones, they had the finest examples of centuries of collecting at their disposal. Hence the magnificent stones at Daisen-in actually represent the _creme de la creme_ of garden stonework, rising phoenix-like out of the destruction of older estates.

What were the qualities of these stones that they should have been hauled for hundreds of miles and prized by shoguns and Zen aesthetes alike? What did Zen artists look for when they scavenged the surrounding mountains for special rocks? They wanted rocks that looked like the mountains and crags in ink paintings. This meant light-colored stones with striated sides and sharp edges, with no hint of the hand of man about them. They looked not so much for odd formations as for natural shapes that possessed an authoritative, monumental quality. One particularly prized shape was flat-topped and vertical-sided, looking like a ma.s.sive tree stump cut off about a foot above the ground.

Another valuable stone was shaped like a steep-sided volcanic island which, nestled in a bed of sand, gave the impression of rising from the depths of the ocean. Oblong stones with lengthwise striations or incisions were valued for their similarity to towering vertical mountains; and rounded, flat-bottomed stones, for their resemblance to natural river rocks. The subjective "feel" of a stone was important; perfectly smooth stones or those with no memorable characteristics had no place in _kare sansui_. Those used must have the vigorous face of centuries, the weathered texture of antiquity.

Daisen-in was unquestionably the best of the Zen "painting" gardens: possibly designed by an experienced Zen painter, it contained the finest stones from an entire era of intensive collecting; and it was heir to centuries of garden mastery, from which was distilled the essence of landscape art. Its understated authority is the product of a long development of such Zen ideals as simplicity, starkness, austerity, and spareness. One would be tempted to declare it the finest example of the Zen _kare sansui _art were it not for an even more striking garden of the same era: Ryoan-ji.

Unlike Daisen-in, the garden at Ryoan-ji is not a symbolic mountain scene. It is instead a work of abstract art on a canvas of sand which goes beyond a symbolic representation of a landscape scene to provide a distillation of the very universe. It is internationally regarded as the very essence of Zen, and it is almost impossible to describe, in either words or pictures. It has a spirit that seems to rise up for those who come into its presence, evoking an immediate response even in someone who has no understanding of Zen.

Ryoan-ji was apparently built around 1490, which makes it roughly contemporaneous with Yoshimasa's Silver Pavilion. As early as 985 the site of Ryoan-ji had been used as the location of a private chapel for retired Heian emperors, and in the twelfth century a government minister of the Heian took it over and constructed a country villa, to which his grandson added a lavish Chinese-style lake and island garden in 1189. Thus the site had abundant water, something missing from other _kare sansui _gardens--although the style dictated that no water be used in the final Zen garden. After the fall of Heian and throughout the Kamakura deluge, the lake became a sort of lingering _ancien regime _touch, recalling the elegance of former days. (The remains of the lake, undoubtedly much modified through the centuries, still survive as part of the Ryoan-ji temple complex.)

The original Heian owners retained possession of the site until approximately 1450, when it was purchased by Katsumoto Hokusawa, adviser to the Ashikaga and one of the instigators of the Onin War.

During his period of ownership, Katsumoto built a country villa overlooking the lake-and-island garden, and like Yoshimitsu, he requested that his villa be made into a Zen temple when he Thed. As it turned out, the Onin War caused his wishes to be executed sooner than he might have expected; shortly after the villa was built the estate was transferred to the Myoshin-ji branch of the Rinzai sect, which also controlled a nearby temple called Ryoan-ji. Not long after Katsumoto's death, his villa and other estate buildings were set on fire during the Onin War and joined the general ruin of much of the rest of Kyoto.

In the last decade of the fifteenth century the burned-out estate was restored by Katsumoto's son, but in replacing the buildings he chose a new style of Zen architecture known as _shoin_, which included a special bay window and desk modeled after those in Chinese Ch'an monasteries. The _shoin _style had been recently popularized in Kyoto by Yoshimasa, who chose the design for several buildings surrounding his Silver Pavilion. The _shoin _window overlooked the lake-and-island garden, but since the later Zen monks who controlled the estate had no interest in decorative landscape art, they walled off a small courtyard in front of the window and installed a flat _kare sansui _garden for contemplation, which soon eclipsed in interest the older lake-and- island landscape. Shortly thereafter the _shoin_ building was in turn destroyed by fire, giving the monks an excuse to bring in a pavilion with a long viewing veranda from the neighboring Seigen-in temple. This veranda, which was positioned along the long axis of the _kare sansui _garden, now permits group meditation, something not possible from the single window of the earlier _shoin _structure.

Modern visitors to Ryoan-ji still pa.s.s through the older landscape garden en route to the main temple pavilion. From this vantage point only the outer wall of the sand-and-stone garden can be seen; there is no hint of what lies inside. On the temple steps the fragrance of incense mingles with the natural perfume of the ancient trees which line the pathways of the lake. As one enters the dimly lighted hallway of the temple, street shoes are replaced by noiseless, cushioned slippers. Shod in silence, visitors walk along the temple hallways onto the long hojo veranda facing the garden, where the brilliance of the shimmering sand washes unexpectedly over the senses. The effect is sudden and striking.

What one sees, in purely prosaic terms, is an area of rippled sand about the size of a tennis court, set about with fifteen not particularly unusual (by Ashikaga standards) stones arrayed in five distinct cl.u.s.ters. The white sand is raked lengthwise (a routine task for a lay brother), and concentric circles are traced around each of the stones, imparting an illusion of ripples. In the garden proper there is not a tree, indeed not a blade of gra.s.s, to be seen; the only suggestion of living matter is the bed of ancient moss in which each group of stones lies nestled. On the three sides of the garden opposite the veranda stands the ancient courtyard wall, whose oil-stained earthen brown contrasts splendidly with the pure white sand. Above the wall, which is capped with black clay tile in Chinese fashion, one can see the tall trees of the landscape garden, obscuring what must once have been a grand view of old Kyoto to the south.

Each of the five cl.u.s.ters of stones seems balanced around its own center of gravity, and the cl.u.s.ters, in turn, appear to be balanced with one another--with the two groups of stones on the left being approximately equal in ma.s.s to the three groups on the right. As is the case in most Ashikaga gardens, each grouping is dominated by one obviously a.s.sertive member, against which the smaller, less authoritative stones strain for prominence, producing a sense of tension. Simultaneously, there is a feeling of strength about each of the groups, since each cl.u.s.ter is set on an island of mossy soil, which acts as a base to unite the a.s.semblages. Aesthetic stability is also achieved by the placement of the stones at sufficient depth (or apparent depth) within their nest of moss so that only their tips seem to protrude above the floor of the garden.

The stones are set in two groups of two stones, two groups of three, and one group of five. Each of these groupings displays one or another of the various Ashikaga garden conventions. Both groups of two stones make explicit use of contrasting shapes between their members, a standard Zen device. One of the pairs is composed of a long, vertical rock set like an upturned blade in the sand, with a companion that is hardly more than a negligible lump, a token foil. The other pair has one sharp-sided vertical stone with a flat plateau as a top, accompanied by a larger round rock which spreads at the base. As has been noted, the Ashikaga gardeners prized flat-topped stones highly because of their resemblance to the angular brushstrokes of certain Zen ink painters. Life, in this case, was made to imitate art, or rather sculptural art was made to imitate the pictorial. Both pairs of stones are situated slightly off the lengthwise axis of the garden, maintaining the asymmetry considered so essential.

In the two groups of three stones, the intent is to establish the visual pre-eminence of the largest member and to flank it with two comparatively insignificant smaller stones--usually differentiated in shape and att.i.tude--thereby forming a vertical triangle with the peak of the largest stone representing the apex. This particular arrangement was so common in Ashikaga gardens that it became known as the "three- deity" stone setting, supposedly a pious reference to a Buddhist legend but probably merely a convenient tag for a standardized artistic device. The last grouping is five stones, since arrangements of four were considered too symmetrical by Zen gardeners. In this case, the group is dominated by one large central boulder with four ancillary rocks spread about its base like the feet of a granite beast.

Such, in physical terms, is the arrangement of the garden, and when so described it seems undeserving of all the acclaim. Its subjective qualities tell a bit more of the story. It seems clear that the inclination of the stones is intended to evoke a sense of motion, for they have all been placed with their longer axis corresponding to that of the garden. This quality is further enhanced by the practice of raking the sand lengthwise, which makes the observer's eye sweep from left to right or right to left. And although the overall purpose of the garden is to induce mental repose, it has a dynamic tension, such as a high-speed photograph of surging rapids in a mountain stream might catch. But the sand, like the blank s.p.a.ces in a Chinese ink drawing, is as important as the placement of the stones. The empty areas both emphasize the stones and invite the mind to expand in the cosmological infinity they suggest.

This interaction between form and s.p.a.ce is one of the keys to Ryoan- ji's compelling suggestiveness. Evoking a sense of infinity in a strictly confined s.p.a.ce, it is a living lesson in the Zen concept of nothingness and nonattachment. It expresses a timelessness unknown in earlier landscape gardens, particularly those of the Heian era, which, with their fading blossoms and falling leaves, were attuned to the poignant transience of life. In the Ryoan-ji garden, the Heian aesthetic concept of _aware_, the thought that beauty must die, has been replaced by the Zen idea of _yugen_, which means, among other things, profound suggestiveness, a reduction to only those elements in a creative work that move the spirit, without the slightest concession to prettiness or ornament. The number and placement of stones seem arbitrary, but they are intuitively perfect--like a phrase from Beethoven that, with the alteration of a single note, could be transformed into a comic tune. Like all masterpieces, Ryoan-ji has simplicity, strength, inevitability.

Between them, the gardens at Daisen-in and at Ryoan-ji encompa.s.s the range of _kare sansui _gardening in Ashikaga j.a.pan. The first is a symbolic landscape of parched waterfalls and simulated streams drawn in monochromatic granite; the second, a totally non-representative abstraction of stone arrangements in the sand-covered "flat-garden"

style. The _kare sansui _flat-garden style, in particular, has no real counterpart in world art. Imagine the Egyptians, Greeks, or Florentines collecting rocks, strewing them about a bed of sand in a courtyard, and calling it religious art. Ryoan-ji seems strikingly modern today and in fact it was only after a critical following for abstract art developed in the West that the Zen _kare sansui_ was "discovered." As recently as the 1930s Ryoan-ji was ignored, an unkempt sandpile the monks rarely bothered to rake; and only in 1961 was the garden at Daisen-in restored to what is believed to be its original condition. Ryoan-ji is now the most celebrated site in j.a.pan and so internationally appreciated that a full-sized replica has been constructed in the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, New York.

Zen gardeners were sophisticated aestheticians, and one can

recognize in their work at least two artistic techniques that the West did not discover until this century. The first is the Surrealist principle, derived from the earlier Dadaist idea, of _objets trouves_, that is, the use of aesthetically interesting natural or accidental materials as part of an artistic composition. The stones of Ryoan-ji and other Ashikaga gardens were left in the condition in which they were discovered and used in the gardens as stones, yet they were also symbols for something larger than themselves. The second "modern"

artistic principle found in Zen gardens is the reliance on abstract expressionism. Flat gardens like Ryoan-ji are not meant to depict a natural scene; they are exercises in the symbolic arrangement of ma.s.s and s.p.a.ce. The Zen gardeners actually created a new mode of artistic expression, antic.i.p.ating the West by several centuries.

Perhaps Ryoan-ji went unnoticed for so long because it was not explicitly intended as a work of art, but rather as a statement in physical terms of the essence of mystical truth. One's reaction upon first coming into the presence of Ryoan-ji is like the famous Western mystic Meister Eckhart's description of the realization of Oneness, called _satori_ in Zen: "Then at once, G.o.d comes into your being and faculties, for you are like a desert, despoiled of all that was particularly your own. . . ." Ryoan-ji presents this desert in physical terms, a place of no attachments and no antagonistic polarities. This is Zen art at its most n.o.ble; beauty and aesthetics are present, but they are secondary to a realm of the spiritual.

CHAPTER NINE

Zen and the Ink Landscape

_Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;

Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,

Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.

_ John Keats

_Sesshu (1420-1506) _ Shin _style

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ASHIKAGA MONOCHROME ink painting is one of the finest moments of j.a.panese art. Monochrome painting, which began in China as a logical extension of brush calligraphy, came to be the ultimate medium for the transmission of j.a.panese Zen. A Zen painter has been described as a man who studies technique for twenty years and then throws himself on the mercy of inspiration. The works of Zen artists often seem to have been tossed off without effort, but this is the deliberate deception of the consummate master. Like the slash of the Zen swordsman, the absolute accuracy of the Zen artist's brushstroke can come only from one whose mind and body are one. The purpose of Zen painting is to penetrate beyond the perceptions of the rational mind and its supporting senses, to show not nature's surface but its very essence. The artist paints the enlightenment of a moment, and there is therefore no time to labor over each stroke; the technique must flow thoughtlessly, from deep within, capturing the fleeting images of the inner sense, beyond mind and beyond thought.

To watch a Zen painter is to receive a lesson in the discipline of Zen.

As he sets out to create a work, he first brings to hand the essential artistic materials: brush, inkstone, ink, paper. Kneeling on the floor, he spreads the paper out before him, and as he grinds and mixes the ink, begins to envision the outline and scope of his work. Like a _samurai_ warrior before a battle, he banishes thoughts of the world and in a state of contemplation organizes his energies for a burst of action. When the ink is ready, the paper smoothed, an appropriate brush tested for point and feel, and his spirits composed, he strikes.

The ink is absorbed almost immediately by the fibrous rice paper preferred by Zen artists, allowing no alteration of a line once it has been set down. If the artist is dissatisfied with a stroke, he attempts no corrections but tears up the work and begins another. In contrast to conventional Western oil painting, which allows for retouching, an ink brushstroke on paper (or silk, which is sometimes used) becomes dull and lifeless if it is painted over, and corrections are always obvious when the painting dries. The work must flow out of the Zen discipline of no-mind. The artist never pauses to evaluate his work; the ink flows in an unending flurry of strokes--heavy or sparing, light or dark, as required--producing a sense of rhythm, movement, form, and the artist's vision of life's inner music.