Japanese rock garden

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"Zen Garden" redirects here. For the website about CSS, see CSS Zen Garden.

Shitennoji Honbo garden

A Japanese rock garden (枯山水, karesansui^?), sometimes called a Zen garden, is an enclosed shallow sandpit containing sand, gravel, rocks, and occasionally grass and/or other natural elements. The main elements of karesansui are rocks and sand, with the sea symbolized not by water but by sand raked in patterns that suggest rippling water. Plants are much less important (and sometimes nonexistent) in many karesansui gardens. Karesansui gardens are often, but not always, meant to be viewed from a single, seated position. Some Westerners believe that karesansui gardens can be used to calm human minds, but they were not intended for such in their native Japanese settings.

1 The Karesansui garden in Ryōan-ji Temple
2 Layout
3 Gallery
4 See also
5 Notes
6 External links

[edit] The Karesansui garden in Ryōan-ji Temple

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The dry garden at the Ryoan-ji

A famous Japanese rock garden is at Ryōan-ji in northwest Kyoto, Japan.

The garden is 30 meters long from east to west and 10 meters from north to south. There are no trees, just 15 irregularly shaped rocks of varying sizes, some surrounded by moss, arranged in a bed of white gravel/sand that is raked every day.

The rocks of various sizes are arranged on small white pebbles in five groups, each comprising five, two, three, two, and three rocks. The garden contains 15 rocks arranged on the surface of white pebbles in such a manner that visitors can see only 14 of them at once, from whichever angle the garden is viewed.

The garden is not attributed to any single designer, although it is commonly believed that a leading monochrome artist named Sōami (1480?-1525), in association with Daisen-in, designed and laid out the garden. However Ryoan-ji's records are contradictory and indicate some other makers, and the back of one of the 15 stones is inscribed with the names of Kotaro and Hikojiro, who might have been two of the workers that did the actual construction.

[edit] Layout

A miniature dry landscape garden

There have been many attempts to explain the karesansui garden's layout. Some of these are:

The gravel represents ocean and the rocks represent the islands of Japan
The rocks represent a mother tiger with her cubs, swimming to a dragon
The rocks form part of the kanji for heart or mind

See Ryōan-ji for a mathematical analysis of a rock garden.

A recent suggestion by Gert van Tonder of Kyoto University and Michael Lyons, of Ritsumeikan University, is that the rocks form the subliminal image of a tree. This image cannot be consciously perceived when looking at them; the researchers claim the subconscious mind is able to see a subtle association between the rocks. They believe this is responsible for the calming effect of the garden and is also made to have a quiet place for meditation, however their comments are speculation and not supported by Japanese traditions.^[1]