Tenryu-ji. Norris Brock Johnson
over time in fashioning a still vibrant landscape that continues to touch the feelings, and hearts, of people.
FIGURE 14. The front eastern-side of the Abbot’s Quarters. The temple Dharma Drum (Hokku), the white circle to the right-side end of the veranda, is sounded as a call for monks to assemble.
FIGURE 15. With shōji pulled back along their tracks in the floor, glimpses of the pond can be experienced through the Abbot’s Quarters as one walks to the western garden.
Consider the manner in which contemplative experiences of the pond garden touched Tsutomu Minakami, an award-winning writer who was a priest within the temple during the 1930s. Since 1345, Tenryū-ji has served as a residential arena for the training of priests. Priest Minakami wrote, “When I was young, the shadows of many people did not fall within the temple. There were only mendicant wicker-hatted priests coming into and going out of the temple. As a young priest, I had opportunity to see many gardens in Zen temples but in the Tenryū-ji garden stones, trees, and water are placed in a perfect harmony [和, wa], still alive after hundreds of years.”5
Priest Minakami personified the garden, and he related animistically to the garden as he would relate to a person. The concept of animism will be of ongoing importance to our study of the temple pond garden. Here, “animists are people who recognize that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others.”6 Conceptualizing animism as a sympathetic relationship rescues a vital existential theory of being from prior dismissals as “primitive mentality.” Anima, the Breath of Life, is synonymous with spirit as a vital aspect of life; as such, animism challenges conceptions of phenomena labeled “nonanimate.” Life lived in relationship with others includes others that perhaps are stones or ancestors or spirit.
As we attend to the pond garden aspect of the Temple of the Heavenly Dragon, animism will be manifest in the manners in which the garden over time is perceived and experienced by people as vital and affecting as well as, importantly, in the interdependent personto-person manner in which people behave toward the garden and aspects of nature held to be sacred. Priest Minakami, for instance, experienced the garden “in a knowing manner, as hundreds of thoughts appear and disappear; only the garden, the quiet garden, is left before me. The garden remains there, silently.”7 Priest Minakami experienced what we might term the soul (魂, tamashii) of the complex, in that “the temple was so quiet, and refreshing. The tranquillity of the Dai Hōjō in the pine trees, and the path paved with stones … turning into something more than just a view of the garden [my italics].”8Something more. Throughout its tumultuous existence, as we will see, the pond garden aspect of the temple was and continues to be experienced animistically by people as vital spirit (精霊, seirei)—the “something more,” I feel, of which Priest Minakami wrote.9
Part I reconstructs the early settlement activity on the land on which the present-day temple buildings and pond garden rest. Tenryū-ji proper was constructed from 1340 to 1345, though the area west of Kyōto within which the temple emerged was the site of what we would term religious (Shintō, principally) activity as early as the tenth century.
Chapters composing Part I recount the manner in which salient events and people of influence defined the character of the region within which the temple and pond garden came into being. In turn, the mountainous region west of Kyōto exercised considerable influence on the character of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Japan. Part I is the compelling account of the birth and early life of a landscape continuing as “a powerful domain which includes felt values, dreams … and events, to which affect has accrued.”10 In addition to matters of design and construction, emotion also is a vital aspect of the origin and life of landscapes. Compassion and love, as well as fear and guilt, specifically, generated influential activity and historically important events that participated in the genesis of the landscape aspect of the temple.
FIGURE 16. The front eastern-side of the Abbot’s Quarters.
FIGURE 17. People customarily move rather quietly toward the pond in the garden.
Part II presents core features of the pond garden aspect of the Temple of the Heavenly Dragon from present-day points of view. Chapters composing Part II are framed by my ongoing experiences with, and interpretations of, the pond garden as well as by a priest with whom I studied while staying periodically within the temple. While teaching at Waseda University and the University of Tōkyō, Komaba, I first came upon Tenryū-ji quite unexpectedly late one spring afternoon in 1985 while exploring the forested regions west of Kyōto. I only had sought to find refreshment within the temple, tea and rice cakes perhaps, and to rest from the day’s sojourn.
Initial experiences of the pond garden were deeply affecting for me and I continued to revisit the temple, initially among throngs of visitors (figs. 7, 17). Young couples often entered the temple to stroll hand-in-hand through the park-like wooded upper areas of the complex. School buses, shiny in reflecting midmorning sunlight, would line up in rows in the larger parking area. Quiet and orderly in crisp uniforms, young schoolchildren would file from the buses. Teachers carried poles flying the banner and logo of each school. Students would line up behind the banners then begin their study-excursion through the temple. The pond garden and temple buildings are important historically, as we will see, and are a planned educational experience for many schoolchildren. Many afternoons women, mostly, and a few men would enter the temple to consult with priests, to pray, to copy then recite sūtra attributed to Buddha, or to sip green tea (matcha) while sitting quietly on the veranda of the Abbot’s Quarters overlooking the pond in the garden.
FIGURE 18. A glimpse of the pond and a view toward the south/southwest, from in front of the rear of the Abbot’s Quarters.
FIGURE 19. The pond in the garden. The view is toward the south/southwest.
FIGURE 20. The pond in the garden. The view is toward the west with the piedmont of Turtle Mountain, blanketed with trees, as background.
FIGURE 21. The pond in the garden. The view is toward the northwest.
FIGURE 22. Moss and foliage contribute an organic quality to aged stones, stones appearing to rest on the water of the pond. The faint line of a spider’s web reveals a subtle, unintended though engaging manner in which several stones in the pond are interlinked.
FIGURE 23. Variegated light and shadow delineate the faceted intricacies of stones in the pond.
My explorations of the temple complex grew more prolonged and intense and, at dusk, as the front gates were closing, monks often had to usher me up and out from sitting before the garden. One morning, I asked the (exclusively Japanese-speaking, at the time) staff if there was anyone who could tell me about the pond garden in particular, with whom I would be permitted to speak. I was introduced to a senior priest known for his knowledge of the pond garden. After a time, “the priest”