Kare-sansui Combining Old And New

Sculpted Space at Zuiho-in

by William Will

I had never heard of the dry-landscape garden at Zuiho-in, a subtemple within the Daitoku-ji temple precinct, best known for the Daisen-in garden. Created by Mirei Shigemori (1896-1975) in 1961, it is one of over 100 gardens designed by one of the Japanese gardens most revered historians. Our guide had taken us to this small gem of a garden as an alternative to the better known and quite overrun examples of the genre, the Ryoan-ji and the Daisen-in.

We approach the Zuiho-in from the main street that enters Daitoku-ji along a quiet path, rather formal with carefully pruned specimen plants lining the walled rectangular layout. The path is narrow, almost intimate, and I notice the unique quality of the stones used in paving. They have been handpicked to achieve just the right balance in the pattern. I could spend all afternoon just dwelling on the aesthetic of this one element, but time is short and I proceed into the small garden.

The garden is a sculpture of stones, white gravel and moss, framed by a backdrop of simple hedges and a white wall. Small and intimate, the composition has a definite direction: a vast open sea of white gravel, raked in strong expressionistic waves, in which stones and patches of moss form islands with a soft undulating texture. This is a miniature stylized world, reminiscent in its clear and simple shapes of the modernist art of the late 20th century. A view of the world shaped by the practice of Zen meditation, long before mankind took to the skies to observe the essential forms of the landscape from on high.

I spend time just sitting and appreciating the texture of the gravel, the way it reflects the light. What fascinates me most in this garden is the unique quality and character of the individual rocks themselves. Some Japanese hang on to old superstitious beliefs to this very day: that these stones house kami, spirits, which inhabit each individual stone and give them some of the special character we perceive.

The stones were definitely chosen with a level of appreciation that is foreign to our western understanding of garden materials, and the difference in textural quality is highly visible. It is this difference that plays the most significant role in making the garden achieve its full impact as a modernist sculpture, based on concepts conceived centuries before our time.