Tenryu-ji. Norris Brock Johnson
invaluable insights on the final manuscript of this book. I remain thankful to Keir Davidson, for his fine-grained critical reading of and gracious comments on the final manuscript.
I remain deeply appreciative of my always-welcoming home in the woods, which has provided over thirty years of shelter, respite, and nourishment of body, soul, and spirit as well as a constant stimulus for work. Apart from the aforementioned places, all of the work on this book took place at home amid windows filled with soothing vistas of myriad tree leaves of oak and cedar and pine and, at night, luminous sheets of moonlight filtering through the windows, often literally touching my writing. The house and land always require manual labor, fortunately—the physical work, for instance, of designing and planning home repair and renovation projects; working the land; pruning trees … and moving rocks and stones. The house and land participated greatly in the writing of this book by demanding, then reinforcing attention to the exquisite microcosm of myriad details of the part-to-part and part-to-whole interdependent relationships comprising the construction processes. Whether working with board or word, the house and land provided a setting and ongoing opportunities for the direct physical experiences of coupling ideas and feelings with materiality.15 Physical work/effort also is an important aspect of Zen Buddhism, as we will see.
Completion of this book would not have been possible without the encouragement and support of Dr. T. Elaine Prewitt, Ms. Stephanie Parrish Taylor, and Reverend William J. Vance. I am grateful to Peter Goodman and the staff at Stone Bridge Press for their sustained attention to and enormous energy involved in the myriad details of preparing the mauscript and images for publication.
This book exists because of the support of many people at Tenryū temple, notably the priest with whom I studied.
Tenryū-ji: Life and Spirit of a Kyōto Garden has been composed to engender in the reader a vicarious, felt-experience of a venerated Buddhist temple and pond garden. The temple and pond garden we will experience are not inscrutable, as “the world of affect is common to all people … anyone from any culture is bound to experience a basic substratum of rapport with the affecting presence of any culture.”16Marcel Proust once declared, “I believe each of us has charge of the souls that he particularly loves, has charge of making them known, and loved.”17 The pond garden in the temple continues to affect my life and spirit. I am privileged to have participated in the life and spirit of the temple and in making the pond garden better known and loved through the words and images of this book.18 Throughout its genesis and tumultuous life history, the pond garden within the Temple of the Heavenly Dragon always has touched a variety of people from a variety of cultures directly, as Rinzai Zen Buddhists would put it, through one’s heart (心, kokoro).
NORRIS BROCK JOHNSON
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Season of the Redbuds Blooming (March), 2012
| I | Land, Landscape, and the Spirit of Place |
Even after decades,
if someone digs in the ruins …
human bones’ll
still come out,
won’t they?
YŌKO ŌTA
“Residues of Squalor” 1
The Temple of the Heavenly Dragon was sited to the west of Kyōto, and is embraced by the three influential prominences:
the Mountain of Storms (Arashiyama)
the Mountain of Dusk and Shadow (Ogurayama)
Turtle Mountain (Kameyama)
The mountainous region west of Kyōto was altered by people numerous times, neglected, abandoned for centuries, only to be subsequently reinhabited and renewed. The land itself remained compelling and continued to capture the transgenerational attention and imaginations of people. The temple came into being within this particular region in large measure because the land on which the buildings and the pond garden presently rest had long been experienced as deeply affecting, emotionally, aethetically, and spiritually (figs. 2, 5, 30).
During our walk through the present-day complex to the pond garden, we experienced salient aspects of nature from which the landscape aspect of the temple was formed: water, stones and rocks, trees and foliage, and the land itself, especially mountains (figs. 27–29). These aspects of nature were not selected as vital features of the landscape aspect of the temple by any one person exclusively, nor all at one time, but selected at various times by people influential enough to define a landscape.2
The human-created landscape aspects of the present-day temple were assembled over time. Successive occupants of the region west of Kyōto, for instance, added large-scale waterways and ponds to the landscape within which the temple emerged (the evocative stones placed in and around the present-day pond in the garden, the subject of Part II, are a comparatively recent addition to the landscape of the temple).
Three people of influence in early Japan began to alter aspects of the mountainous area west of Kyōto for their individual purposes. In time, buildings began to appear as aspects of the landscape. In the historical overview to follow we will consider the cumulative landscape-defining influences of Tachibana no Kachiko (786–850, Empress Danrin, consort of Emperor Saga, 785–842), Prince Kaneakira (914–87, the eleventh son of Emperor Daigo, 885–930), and Emperor Go-Saga (1220–72).3
FIGURE 27. An expansive view of mountains to the south/southwest.
FIGURE 28. The roofs of buildings within the Temple of the Heavenly Dragon nestle within a sea of trees.
FIGURE 29. The pond garden customarily is experienced by people from the veranda of the rear western-side of the Abbot’s Quarters … and “the temple building, with its beautiful roof and delicate railing, seems to grow from its own reflection.”f29.
The landscape aspect of the Temple of the Heavenly Dragon was fashioned over time from the interdependent relationship of people and nature as well as from belief in the intervention of deities and venerated ancestors in the landscape-making affairs of people.
I
MOUNTAINS, WATER, AND FRAGRANT TREES
Prior to the seventh century, it had been the custom to abandon the court of an emperor or empress after their death, as each site was then considered polluted. New sites, purified places, were prepared for each successive emperor or empress. Imperial courts grew in size, and relocations increasingly became cumbersome; in time, imperial coursts became semipermanent, then permanent.
In 710, during the reign of Empress Genmyō (Genmei, 660–721), Nara (Heijō-kyō, Capital of the Peaceful Citadel) became an influential capital city for imperial courts. Rather than defer to concerns over death and pollution, selection of the site for the Capital of the Peaceful Citadel in large part was based on then-favorable aspects of the surrounding area, in particular, the sensory delights afforded to people of privilege through aesthetic experiences of the Yamato Plain.
Nara (Level Land), though, increasingly became subject to periodic flooding as the imperial city had been sited near the Saho and Tomio rivers. Aesthetic enjoyment of the area around Nara did not offset the growing belief that the land itself was failing to influence the well-being of emperors, the city, and its people.