Zen garden, Ching 494

Example - Ryoanji
Zen monks invented the dry meditation garden as a practical necessity. Earlier Japanese garden
design had been based on Song Chinese examples, which were built on large estates with long
stroll paths that had views created from the natural landscape and constructed ponds, islands,
mountains, and even rivers complete with waterfalls. While the miniaturization of natural
elements was a part of the design strategy, these gardens relied on size for their effect. In the
15th century, however, when the shoguns began to reduce plot sizes to accommodate their
cities' larger populations, such full-fledged gardens became impossible. The newer generation
of gardens, made by Zen masters, were designed around the principle of careful staged views.
In the process, they created the dry garden, so called because they employed abstract means of
representation, using, for example, white pebbles and moss to signify large bodies of water.
The Zen monks particularly enjoyed creating visual koans, or quizzical conundrums, that could
be meditated upon.
Ryoanji , the Temple of the Peaceful Dragon, contains the most famous of Japan's dry gardens,
created around 1480 by an unknown designer in the estate of Hosokawa Masarnoto, located in
the northwestern foothills of Kyoto. The southern half of the estate contains a pond with an
island and a circumambulatory stroll path, to which was added a rectangular dry garden with a
bed of white gravel carefully raked to form east-west running bands. Within it were placed
fifteen natural stones clustered in five groups. The gravel around them is raked in the manner
of ripples in a pond. The precise meaning of this koan IS left open. Perhaps the white field is an
ocean and the rocks islands. The rocks could also stand for a tigress leading her cubs across a
riveranother common interpretation. Ultimately, the garden is not meant to convey a
singular interpretation but to serve as an aid to meditation, with the empty space between the
stones just as important as the stones themselvesor perhaps even more so.