Gardens of Stone, Moss, Sand: 4 Moments of Zen in Kyoto

Once, when the Buddha was asked to preach about a flower he was presented, he instead “gazed at it in silence,” according to the British garden designer Sophie Walker in her book “The Japanese Garden.” In this spiritual moment Zen Buddhism was born, inspiring the serene and eternal dry or rock gardens called karesansui.

Unlike a garden designed for strolling, which directs visitors along a defined path to take in scenic views and teahouses, a dry garden is viewed while seated on a veranda above, offering the heightened experience of traveling through it in the imagination, revealing its essence in meditation.

At Tofuku-ji, the first veranda overlooks the southern garden with clusters of mostly jagged vertical rocks with ripples of raked gravel radiating out.Credit...Andrew Faulk for The New York Times

A detail of the Tofuku-ji garden, with its ripples of raked gravel resembling water.Credit...Andrew Faulk for The New York Times

With rocks artfully placed along expanses of fine gravel raked by monks into ripples representing water, they are sources for contemplation, whether they refer to a specific landscape or are serenely abstract. Ryoan-ji, which dates to about 1500, is the supreme example of the latter among Kyoto temples, with its 15 low rocks in five clusters set in pools of moss within an enclosed rectangle of raked gravel. The puzzle is that only 14 are visible at any one time, no matter where you sit to view it.

Unlike a garden designed for strolling, a dry garden is viewed while seated on a veranda above, offering the heightened experience of traveling through it in the imagination.Credit...Andrew Faulk for The New York Times

Change in Kyoto, Japan’s major city of temple gardens, is a quiet evolution. But a tour of several dry gardens designed within the last century — and even within the last few years — demonstrates that the Zen tradition is timeless when it comes to landscape design, and that moments of contemplation are still possible, even as the crowds grow bigger.

Zuiho-in

The dry garden at Zuiho-in may at first appear traditional, but it was designed in the 1960s by Mirei Shigemori.Credit...Andrew Faulk for The New York Times

Upon arrival at the Zen monastery complex Daitoku-ji, in northern Kyoto, I headed to Zuiho-in, one of its 22 subtemples. The temple was founded in 1319, and then in 1546, the powerful feudal lord Sorin Otomo dedicated it to his family. This was during the period of Spanish and Portuguese missionaries in Japan. Like others, Otomo converted to Christianity but remained inspired by Zen Buddhism.

I entered along angled walkways until I arrived at Zuiho-in’s temple veranda to view the main dry garden. Though the style may at first appear traditional, this garden was designed in the 1960s by Mirei Shigemori, a landscape architect whose training was in the Japanese cultural arts: conducting the tea ceremony, flower arranging, and landscape ink and wash painting. As the Western Modernist movement entered Japan, he adopted it in combination with traditional arts and became determined to revolutionize a garden aesthetic that had remained fixed for hundreds of years. He succeeded in designing more than 200 gardens in Japan and even worked with the Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi on a UNESCO garden, collecting stones in Japan that Noguchi set in the garden at the organization’s Paris headquarters.

In the Zuiho-in garden, the gravel swirls are raked into high peaks as if far out at sea, with a chain of jagged pointed rocks like islands leading to a mossy peninsula crested by a massive stone representing Mount Horai, where, according to Taoist mythology, the heroes called the Eight Immortals, who fought for justice, reside. Referring to Otomo’s Christianity, rocks in a second garden define a cross, and three rows of squarish stones embedded in sand elsewhere in the garden could be seen as Shigemori’s Modernist signature.

Honen-in

In spring, cherry trees bloom along the Philosopher’s Walk, and falling petals float along the canal.Credit...Andrew Faulk for The New York Times

Across town, in the Higashiyama district, the Philosopher’s Walk is a pedestrian path along the picturesque Lake Biwa Canal. First opened in 1890, it is believed to be named for a Kyoto University philosophy professor who strolled there while meditating. As you walk along it, depending on the season, the swift current below carries brilliant autumnal leaves or delicate cherry blossoms shed from trees lining the banks.

Honen-in, one of several Buddhist temples along the Philosopher’s Walk, is particularly popular in autumn, with its grand staircase and entry gate framed by vast canopies of fiery red Japanese maple trees. Two large, rectangular white-sand mounds along the central path are periodically raked by monks into new designs; last fall, a maple leaf was outlined on one and a ginkgo leaf on the other against backgrounds of ridges.

The entrance to Honen-in. Monks rake changing patterns into the mounds of sand flanking the walkway.Credit...Andrew Faulk for The New York Times

The high priest, Kajita Shinsho, who lives there with his family, had a private courtyard with a veranda that needed a garden, and last March he engaged Marc Peter Keane, an American landscape architect now living in Kyoto, to design it. A graduate of Cornell University, Mr. Keane has lived in Japan for almost 20 years and specializes in Japanese garden design. Like Shigemori, he has immersed himself in Japanese culture. His home and studio are now permanently in Kyoto.

Only three old, gnarled camellia trees remained on the rectangular site, with blossoms in season ranging from dark rose to pale pink and white. Mr. Keane’s idea was to represent the constant flux of nature, exemplified for him by the carbon cycle — the process by which carbon travels from the air into organisms and back into air. His garden, titled “Empty River,” creates what he described as “a physical expression of this invisible cycle through a river of pure carbon charcoal.”

In a recently designed garden at Honen-in, a river of black charcoal represents Earth’s carbon cycle. Credit...Andrew Faulk for The New York Times

He traced by foot a narrow serpentine “river” that winds around the roots and trunks of the camellias, and with the short charcoal sticks he placed in the long groove, it cuts a strong black line through a blend of fine brown and white gravel. There are no rocks, only small stones framing the courtyard and plantings, with Andromeda ferns in the corners. Its starkness is its beauty, softened only when camellia petals are strewed across the gravel in April.

Mr. Keane compares this distillation of design and materials to a haiku, the Japanese three-lined poem. But like the gardens of old, it also expresses the Buddhist concept of emptiness.

Tofuku-ji

A view of the southern garden at Tofuku-ji, which terminates at the far end with five mossy mounds like sacred mountains in the sea.Credit...Andrew Faulk for The New York Times

At Tofuku-ji , a temple, in the city’s southeastern district, Shigemori designed the garden of the Hojo, the Abbot’s Hall, as early as 1939, using materials found on site. His avant-garde vocabulary of straight lines and grids may have seemed sensational then, but it is beloved now for its harmonious vitality.

From the first veranda, you overlook the southern garden, with clusters of mostly jagged vertical rocks and ripples of raked gravel radiating out, terminating at the far end with five mossy mounds like sacred mountains in the sea. In the western garden, squarely trimmed azaleas alternate with square fields of white gravel, reflecting ancient land-division customs. Azaleas in Japan are closely clipped, so these bloom in gorgeous flat surfaces of deep pink.

Monks rake ripple patterns in the gravel at Tofuku-ji as part of their Zen practice. Credit...Andrew Faulk for The New York Times