Zen Garden

A Western term for an Eastern practice

For millions of people worldwide, the term Zen garden has come to represent an ancient tradition of Buddhist meditation that is inextricably connected to naturalistic landscaping. What they would be surprised to know is that it was the modern West that imposed this interpretation - and even the term Zen garden - onto the history of Japanese gardening.

Karesansui

The historical Japanese term for what we have come to know as a Zen garden is karesansui. The literal meaning of this word in English is "dry landscape." Such gardens are also known as waterless stream gardens. Karesansui is one of the three broad categories of Japanese landscape gardening. The other two are tsukiyama, meaning artificial hill or constructed mountain gardening, and chaniwa, a tea garden used in the Japanese tea ceremony.

So where did the phrase Zen garden originate? Japanese gardening literature prior to the 20th century bears no mention of the term Zen garden. Even Westerners famous for their association with Japan, such as author Lafcadio Hearn, who lived in Japan from 1889 till his death in 1904, never used the phrase Zen garden. Of karesansui Hearn wrote, "Until you can feel, and keenly feel, that stones have character, that stones have tones and values, the whole artistic meaning of a Japanese garden cannot be revealed to you" (italics added).

A book that sheds light on this linguistic mystery is Themes, Scenes, and Taste in the History of Japanese Garden Art by Wybe Kuitert. In his book, Kuitert states that the first textual use of the term Zen garden in any language was in a 1935 English book, One Hundred Kyoto Gardens, by Loraine Kuck. It was nearly 25 years later before the Japanese began using their own version of the term Zen garden: zen-teki teien.

Is a Zen garden really a Zen garden?

Though "Zen gardens" are commonly found next to Zen temples or outside the homes of Zen abbots, there is no truth to the idea that karesansui is an intrinsic part of Buddhist practice. In fact, one of the earliest and most renowned designers of Japanese gardens, Muso Soseki, aka Muso Kokushi (1275 A.C.E. to 1351 A.C.E.), was heavily criticized for his devotion to gardening. Said one Buddhist monk and contemporary of Soseki, "People practicing Zen should not construct gardens."

The ubiquity of dry gardens in "secular" locations within Japan is another reason to interpret the Zen garden as an exercise in formal aesthetics rather than a means to spiritual enlightenment. The six-page pamphlet on Japanese gardens given to tourists by the Japan National Tourist Organization does not once use the term Zen garden, despite the presence of numerous temples and shrines in its garden listings. The terms the pamphlet uses instead of Zen garden are dry garden, landscape garden, and dry landscape garden.

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