Tenryu-ji. Norris Brock Johnson
sitting before the pond so as to let the garden reveal itself to me.11 I was given access to temple documents for study and I began researching, collecting and translating, and interpreting the few extant articles on the pond garden principally gathered at the libraries at Waseda and the University of Tōkyō. Subsequently permitted to move about the grounds, often alone, after visitors had left, I began to draw maps and photographically document the temple and specific features of the pond garden.
Thus I began ongoing experiences with, and intensive study of, the temple and pond garden, research and writing that continued over the next several decades. I began to devote successive years to learning that which the temple buildings and pond garden continued to demand of me. In attempting to “capture” the temple buildings and pond garden with photographic images and written words, friends in Japan often said I did not notice that the pond garden had “captured my heart.”
When in Japan I returned regularly to the pond garden, as if to a touchstone. Away from Japan, I remained mindful of and continued to feel the presence, the quietude and serenity, of the pond garden. When in Kyōto I was permitted to stay within the temple periodically where, on a futon on a floor of the Guest Quarters, in the early haze of morning, “in dreams I drift on, waking at the feet of the great stones” in the pond garden.12 Arising, I would meet with the priest as he sat and shared with me his vision of and experiences with the pond garden.
FIGURE 24. Stones in the pond, peaking above-water, were set carefully, braced by myriad below water-level stabilizing stones.
FIGURE 25. Koi, sunning in the warm upper waters of the pond.
While staying within the temple, I often recalled that the garden scholar Kinsaku Nakane also embraced a firsthand lived-experience method of researching temple gardens. Professor Nakane, for instance, “found a house nearby and visited that garden [Kokedera, the “moss garden,” within Saihō-ji, the Temple of the Western Fragrance] every day for over a year. Thus even now I know it down to the smallest rocks. If one really throws oneself into it, with much effort the garden’s essence suddenly becomes clear. It is essential to devote oneself in this way.”13 Like Nakane-san, over the years I found that the temple pond garden indeed did begin to reveal its life and spirit to me … through a relationship of intimate, devoted, and prolonged direct experience.
Chapters in Part II interpret in detail seven especially significant aspects of the garden highlighted by the priest—stones, compositions of stone, as well as the pond itself. The temple landscape and aspects of the present-day pond garden are envisioned by the priest principally as manifestations of the Buddha-Nature (仏所, Bussho) of the still-venerated priest Musō Soseki (1275–1351). Soseki was the first abbot of the temple, and, despite scholarly controversy, the priest with whom I studied argued firmly that Soseki “made” the pond garden. Part II looks at associations made by the priest between selected aspects of the pond garden and Rinzai Zen Buddhist states of awareness (見性, kenshō, and 悟り, satori, in particular).
Part III elaborates upon the pond garden aspect of the Temple of the Heavenly Dragon as a considerable contribution to our understanding of the very idea of “garden.” The gardens of Japan continue to capture the attention, stimulate the feelings, and touch the hearts of people not only in Japan but throughout the world. In 1994 the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) designated the pond garden aspect of Tenryū-ji a World Heritage Site, “internationally recognized as a place of exceptional and universal value; a cultural-heritage site worthy of preservation for the benefit of mankind.”
It is as if the pond garden asks … “Why is the making of gardens, as well as our emotional experiences within gardens, a perennial human activity? Why are gardens so prominent in the human imagination, especially our religious imagination? In particular, why is experience of the temple gardens of Japan, for innumerable people from a variety of cultures, so charged with … sacredness (神聖, shinsei)?” In Mirei Shigemori’s translation of and commentary on The Book of Garden (Sakuteiki), he declares, “we do not yet understand the true meaning of garden making … I raise a question for everyone to help in addressing it.”14 Part III of this book is my anthropological response to Shigemori’s call for investigations into the idea of garden.
Part III concludes that the landscape aspect of the Temple of the Heavenly Dragon embodies and preserves materially a primordial conception of garden, a conception of a garden centered around stones rather than foliage. Mirroring our walk to the pond garden aspect of the temple, we conclude our contemplative experience of Tenryū-ji by continuing through the pond garden, conceptually, to venture deep into prehistory to experience primordial conceptions of garden in the Sumerian accounts of the Garden of Inanna and the Garden of the Sun experienced by Gilgamesh. In the Sumerian literature, we find that a primordial conception of “garden” as a garden of stones antedates our conventional conception of “garden” as foliage.
The landscape aspect of the Temple of the Heavenly Dragon, a garden privileging stones, materially preserves an archetypal conception of garden as the animistic embodiment of spirit, deities, and venerated ancestors within which people participate. The primordial idea of garden is what we now would term a sacred space or place.
Acknowledgments
Research for this book was conducted in the New Territories of Hong Kong, in southeastern China, as well as in Japan. I remain indebted to the Japan–United States Educational Commission and the Fulbright Office in Tōkyō.
When in Kyōto I was invited to live in the home of Mr. and Mrs. Kenya Takeichi, in Uji, south of the city. I am indebted to the Takeichi family, who cared for me as family. Dr. Nobou Eguchi, Professor of Anthropology at Ritsumeikan University, also invited me to stay with him and his family in Kyōto. I am grateful for my friend, priest Takanobu Kogawa, then at Daikaku-ji, who, among other research assistance, secured for me permission to access and study firsthand several influential gardens in Buddhist temples whose gates at the time were closed to the public over an ongoing taxation dispute with the city of Kyōto. I always will treasure the collegial friendship shown to me by Professor Teiji Itoh, Department of Architecture at Kōgakuin University in Tōkyō, who devoted considerable energy and time helping me with my then-budding project on Tenryū-ji. For their collegiality and friendship, I also thank Professor Akio Hayashi of Waseda University and Professors Nagayo Homma and Iwao Matsuzaki at the University of Tōkyō. David A. Slawson provided valuable critical commentary early on in my research. Ms. Kei Nagami, Mr. Tatsuya Nakagawa, and Ms. Rumi Yasutake aided me in gathering and translating, along with Mrs. Makiko Humphreys, many of the historical materials on which this book is based. Mrs. Mitsuko Endo, Mrs. Akiko Nomiya, and Professor Daishiro Nomiya are friends dear to me who aided in the translation of difficult source materials, older kyūjitai (旧字体, old character form) especially. I alone am responsible for any errors in this book.
FIGURE 26. The Abbot’s Quarters (Dai Hōjō), to the right, is the larger wing of the central building complex. The smaller wing of the interlinked buildings, to the left, presently serves as Guest Quarters (Ko Hōjō).
Grants from the Japan Center, North Carolina State University and from the Northeast Asia Council of the Association of Asian Studies sustained my research. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a Z. Smith Reynolds Award, several Faculty Fellowships, a Chapman Fellowship from the Institute for the Arts and Humanities, and several research grants from the University Research Council supported work on early manuscripts of this book. A fellowship year in residence at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C., enabled sustained work on completion of this book. I thank Dr. John Dixon Hunt, then Director of Studies in Landscape Architecture at Dumbarton Oaks, for our many conversations on gardens, art, and landscape architecture. Dr. Michel Conan, subsequent Director of Studies in Landscape