Shunmyo Masuno - Zen and the Art of the Garden

ISHIDATE-SO . . . the title given to Zen priests of days gone by, who as part of their ascetic practice,expressed themselves through the art of landscape gardening with great importance given to rock placement. Shunmyo Masuno of Kenkoh-ji temple is a modern day Zen priest who through this art form, strives to express his spiritual self.

 

The gardens of Japan remain among the country's spellbinding emblems. Created to be looked at, not to be walked through, they are living pictures.

In their most evolved form there is always a place, often a turn in a path or a small teahouse, for a visitor to stand at exactly the right angle.

Earth, trees, stones, water, moss, ferns, flowering shrubs, paths, light and shade all play their parts, none loudly.

"Each component is important, not only the stones or the trees, but sometimes the way a twig is blown with the wind. Each component gives tranquillity and space to visitors and that is where I find peace and success," he says.

If there is a star in the Japanese garden it is the rock. Whole chapters in landscaping manuals are devoted to matters of selection, alignment and character. The world's oldest book on gardening, a treatise called Sakuteiki: Visions of the Japanese Garden, was published about 1000 years ago and began with "the art of setting stones" as its first words. Placed properly, designers say, rocks in a Japanese garden should look like a calf playing near a seated cow or a pack of dogs crouching near the ground.

Scattered like that, they defy symmetry, another clue to success in a Zen garden. "The crooked tree leans at the top of the cliff," he says, in an eerily Carradine-esque moment. "You might think it will fall but it will not and in the garden we can create visual and physical balance."

Mr Masuno, who has created gardens in Norway, Germany and Canada, was this month commissioned to build one in Latvia. In his 350-page manual on creating gardens outside Japan, he despairs at how "extremely difficult" it is to find elegant stones for the garden in foreign countries. He recounts futile field trips to quarries where there are only the cracked, broken or pulverised variety. Even for a Buddhist, life is too short to live with bad rock.

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