Dry gardens create space where the imagination can wander
Once, when the Buddha was asked to preach about a flower he was presented, he instead “gazed at it in silence,” according to British garden designer Sophie Walker in her book “The Japanese Garden.” In this spiritual moment, Zen Buddhism was born, inspiring the serene and eternal dry or rock gardens called karesansui.
Unlike a garden designed for strolling, which directs visitors along a defined path to take in scenic views and teahouses, a dry garden is viewed while seated on a veranda above, offering the heightened experience of traveling through it in the imagination, revealing its essence in meditation.
With rocks artfully placed along expanses of fine gravel raked into ripples representing water, they are sources for contemplation, whether they refer to a specific landscape or are serenely abstract. Ryoan-ji, which dates to about 1500, is the supreme example of the latter among Kyoto temples, with its 15 low rocks in five clusters set in pools of moss within an enclosed rectangle of raked gravel.
Change in Kyoto, Japan’s major city of temple gardens, is a quiet evolution. But a tour of several dry gardens designed within the past century demonstrates that the Zen tradition is timeless when it comes to landscape design, and that moments of contemplation are still possible.
Zuiho-in
Upon arrival at the Zen monastery complex Daitokuin northern Kyoto, I headed to Zuiho-in, one of its 22 subtemples. The temple was founded in 1319, and then in 1546, powerful feudal lord Sorin Otomo dedicated it to his family.
I entered along angled walkways until I arrived at Zuiho-in’s temple veranda to view the main dry garden. Although the style may at first appear traditional, this garden was designed in the 1960s by Mirei Shigemori, a landscape architect whose training was in the Japanese cultural arts: conducting the tea ceremony, flower arranging, and landscape ink and wash painting. He succeeded in designing more than 200 gardens in Japan and even worked with the Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi on a UNESCO garden.
In the Zuiho-in garden, the gravel swirls are raked into high peaks as if far out at sea, with a chain of jagged pointed rocks like islands leading to a mossy peninsula crested by a massive stone representing Mount Horai, where, according to Taoist mythology, the heroes called the Eight Immortals, who fought for justice, reside.
Honen-in
Across town, in the Higashiyama district, the Philosopher’s Walk is a pedestrian path along the picturesque Lake Biwa Canal. Opened in 1890, it is believed to be named for a Kyoto University philosophy professor who strolled there while meditating. As you walk along it, depending on the season, the swift current below carries brilliant fall leaves or delicate cherry blossoms shed from trees lining the banks.
Honen-in, one of several Buddhist temples along the Philosopher’s Walk, is particularly popular in fall, with its grand staircase and entry gate framed by vast canopies of fiery-red Japanese maple trees. Two large, rectangular whitesand mounds along the central path are periodically raked by monks into new designs.
The high priest, Kajita Shinsho, who lives there with his family, had a private courtyard with a veranda that needed a garden, and in March 2023, he engaged Marc Peter Keane, an American landscape architect now living in Kyoto, to design it.
Only three old, gnarled camellia trees remained on the rectangular site. Keane’s idea was to represent the constant flux of nature, exemplified for him by the carbon cycle — the process by which carbon travels from the air into organisms and back into air. His garden, titled “Empty River,” creates what he described as “a physical expression of this invisible cycle through a river of pure carboncharcoal.”
Tofuku-ji
At Tofuku-ji, a temple, in the city’s southeastern district, Shigemori designed the garden of the Hojo, the Abbot’s Hall, as early as 1939, using materials found on site. His avant-garde vocabulary of straight lines and grids may have seemed sensational then, but it is beloved now for its harmonious vitality.
From the first veranda, you overlook the southern garden, with clusters of mostly jagged vertical rocks and ripples of raked gravel radiating out, terminating at the far end with five mossy mounds like sacred mountains in the sea. In the western garden, squarely trimmed azaleas alternate with square fields of white gravel, reflecting ancient land-division customs.
Next, a vast checkerboard field of leftover square paving stones embedded in a carpet of moss seems to dwindle off to infinity in the northern garden. And finally, to the east, a pattern of stone pillar foundations re-creates the Big Dipper constellation, with gravel raked in concentric circles around each pillar to emphasize its individuality.