Japanese dry garden

They were intended to imitate the essence of nature, not its actual appearance, and to serve as an aid for meditation.

This kind of garden featured either rocks placed upright like mountains, or laid out in a miniature landscape of hills and ravines, with few plants.

The ocean style featured rocks that appeared to have been eroded by waves, surrounded by a bank of white sand, like a beach.

In Zen gardens, it represents water, or, like the white space in Japanese paintings, emptiness and distance.

[citation needed] The Muromachi period in Japan, which took place at roughly the same time as the Renaissance in Europe, was characterized by political rivalries which frequently led to wars, but also by an extraordinary flourishing of Japanese culture.

[5] Zen Buddhism was introduced into Japan at the end of the 12th century, and quickly achieved a wide following, particularly among the Samurai class and war lords, who admired its doctrine of self-discipline.

"Nature, if you made it expressive by reducing it to its abstract forms, could transmit the most profound thoughts by its simple presence", Michel Baridon wrote.

"The compositions of stone, already common in China, became in Japan, veritable petrified landscapes, which seemed suspended in time, as in certain moments of Noh theater, which dates to the same period.

The lower garden of Saihō-ji is in the traditional Heian period style; a pond with several rock compositions representing islands.

This garden appears to have been strongly influenced by Chinese landscape painting of the Song dynasty, which feature mountains rising in the mist, and a suggestion of great depth and height.

The garden at Tenryū-ji has a real pond with water and a dry waterfall of rocks looking like a Chinese landscape.

Saihō-ji and Tenryū-ji show the transition from the Heian style garden toward a more abstract and stylized view of nature.

The garden is meant to be viewed from a seated position on the veranda of the hōjō, the residence of the abbot of the monastery.

[citation needed] The invention of the Zen garden was closely connected with developments in Japanese ink landscape paintings.

In 1940, the temple commissioned the landscape historian and architect Shigemori Mirei to recreate the gardens.

In Japanese gardens, individual rocks rarely play the starring role; the emphasis is upon the harmony of the composition.

[citation needed] Rocks are rarely if ever placed in straight lines or in symmetrical patterns.

The act of raking the gravel into a pattern recalling waves or rippling water, known as samon (砂紋)[15] or hōkime (箒目), has an aesthetic function.

Rakes are according to the patterns of ridges as desired and limited to some of the stone objects situated within the gravel area.

[17] Gardens in Kyoto have historically used "Shirakawa-suna", (白川砂利, "Shirakawa-sand") which is known for its rather muted colour palette.

[17] This type of muted black-speckled granite is a mix of three main minerals, white feldspar, grey quartz, and black mica which matches the aesthetic for most Zen gardens.

Shirakawa-suna also has an eroded texture that alternates between jagged and smooth and is prized for its ability to hold raked grooves, with patterns that last weeks unless weather, animals or humans intervene.

[18] Since the banning of extraction from the Shirakawa River the gravel used for both maintenance of existing gardens and the creation of new ones is sourced from quarried mountain granite of similar composition that is crushed and sieved.

[18] For instance the Portland Japanese Garden experimented with granite chips sourced from Canadian quarries to compensate for the loss of access to Shirakawa-suna.

[20] Some classical Zen gardens, like Daisen-in, have symbolism that can be easily read; it is a metaphorical journey on the river of life.

A review of the quotes of Buddhist priests that are taken to "prove" Zen for the garden are actually phrases copied from Chinese treatises on landscape painting.

In Japan the critique was taken over by Yamada Shouji who took a critical stance to the understanding of all Japanese culture, including gardens, under the nominator of Zen.

[25] Christian Tagsold summarized the discussion by placing perceptions of the Japanese garden in the context of an interdisciplinary comparison of cultures of Japan and the West.

Though each garden is different in its composition, they mostly use rock groupings and shrubs to represent a classic scene of mountains, valleys and waterfalls taken from Chinese landscape painting.