Zen gardeners' discovery of the use of foreshortening in a garden took place at almost the same time that the Florentine artist Uccello (1397-1475) began experimenting with natural perspective in his landscape oils. Although this example of artistic convergence can hardly be more than coincidence, certain of the devices were similar. As the American garden architect David Engel has observed, the Japanese learned that the apparent depth of a scene could be enhanced by making the objects in the distance smaller, less detailed, and darker than those in the foreground.1 (In the garden of Yoshimitsu's Golden Pavilion, for example, the rocks on the spectator side of the garden lake are large and detailed, whereas those on the far side are smaller and smoother.) As time went by, the Japanese also learned to use trees with large, light-colored leaves at the front of a garden and dark, small-leafed foliage farther back. To simulate further the effects of distance, they made paths meandering toward the rear of a garden grow narrower, with smaller and smaller stones. The pathways in a Japanese garden curve constantly, disrupting the viewer's line of sight, until they are finally lost among trees and foliage set at carefully alternated levels; streams and waterfalls deceptively vanish and reappear around and behind rocks and plantings. Zen artists also found that garden walls would disappear completely if they were made of dark natural materials or camouflaged by a bamboo thicket, a thin grove of saplings, or a grassy hillock.
Many methods of psychological deception in a Zen garden exploit instinctive visual assumptions in much the same way that a judo expert uses his victim's body for its own undoing. A common trick is to have a pathway or stream disappear around a growth of trees at the rear of a garden in such a way that the terminus is hidden, leading the viewer to assume it actually continues on into unseen recesses of the landscape. Another such device is the placement of intermittent obstructive foliage near the viewer, causing the diminution in perception that the mind associates with distance. Japanese gardeners further enhance the sense of size and depth in a garden plot by leaving large vacant areas, whose lack of clutter seems to expand the vista. Dwarfing of trees is also a common practice, since this promotes the illusion of greater distance. And finally, flowers are rigidly excluded, since their appearance would totally destroy all the subtle tricks of perspective. Zen garden masters prefer to display their flowers in special vase arrangements, an art known as Ikebana.
The manipulation of perspective and the psychological deception of the Zen garden are always carefully disguised by giving the garden an appearance of naturalness and age. Garden rocks are buried in such a manner that they seem to be granite icebergs, extruding a mere tip from their ancient depths, while the edges of garden stones are nestled in beds of grass or obscured by applications of moss, adding to the sense of artless placement. Everything in the garden—trees, stones, gravel, grass—is arranged with a careful blending of areas into a seemingly natural relationship and allowed to develop a slightly unkempt, shaggy appearance, which the viewer instinctively associates with an undisturbed natural scene. It all seems as uncontrived as a virgin forest, causing the rational mind to lower its guard and allowing the garden to delude the viewer with its artificial depth, its psychological sense of the infinite.
The transformation in garden art the Zen artists wrought can perhaps best be emphasized by comparing the traditional Chinese garden with the abstract landscape created by Japanese artists of the Ashikaga and later eras. 'The Japanese regarded the garden as an extension of man's dwelling (it might be more accurate to say that they saw the dwelling as an extension of the garden), while the Chinese considered the garden a counterpoise for the formality of indoor life, a place to disown the obligations and conventions of society. It has been suggested that the average Chinese was culturally schizophrenic; indoors he was a sober Confucian, obedient to centuries-old dictates of behavior, but in his garden he returned to Taoism, the joy of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower.
In spite of this, the Chinese garden was more formal than the type that developed in Japan, and it included numerous complicated corridors and divisions. The Chinese gardens of the T'ang aristocracy were intended for strolling rather than viewing, since the T'ang aesthetes participated in nature rather than merely contemplating it. Accordingly, Chinese gardens (and Heian copies of them) included architectural features not included in the later Zen landscapes. The Chinese apparently believed that if one is to duplicate the lakes and mountains, then all the items normally seen in the countryside should be there, including the artifacts of man. The Chinese garden welcomed the physical presence of man, whereas the landscape gardens developed in Japan are at their finest when viewed without people, if only because the presence of man acts as a yardstick to destroy the illusion of perspective and exaggerated distance. (However, a Zen-inspired form of Japanese stroll garden for use in connection with the tea ceremony did develop, as will be noted later.)
The plaster wall of a Chinese garden was often an integral element of the decoration, and its shape and topping were part of the overall aesthetic effect. The Japanese, on the other hand, chose to de-emphasize the presence of the wall. Stated differently, the purpose of the wall around a Chinese garden was to keep outsiders from seeing in, whereas the wall of a Japanese garden was to prevent those inside from having to see out—a fundamental difference in function and philosophy.
The dissimilarity in Chinese and Japanese attitudes toward garden rocks also deserves mention. The Japanese preferred interesting naturalness in their stones; they avoided blandness, but were wary of freakish, distracting shapes. The Chinese, in contrast, were charmed by curiosities, and they sought out garden rocks with fantastic, even grotesque contours. This preference seems to have grown out of a desire to duplicate the craggy mountainsides so often seen in Sung landscape paintings. They searched for unnaturally shaped stones in lake bottoms, where the action of water had honeycombed them. (In fact, this particular passion, which became known as "rockery," led to a bit of forgery during the latter part of the Ming era, when ordinary rocks were carved to the desired shape and then placed under a waterfall until they were smoothed sufficiently to disguise the deception.)
The presence of so many unnatural features in Chinese gardens tended to give them a rococo quality, which Zen artists were careful to avoid, and the hemispherical, symmetrical motif of Chinese gardens was transformed into the angular, asymmetrical style that suited Zen aesthetic theory. The fundamental impression a Chinese garden gives is that of skilled artifice, of being a magical, slightly fabulous landscape of dreams. Zen artists transformed this into a symbolic experience of the world at large, distilled into a controlled space but suggesting the infinite. The result was to change a form that has been essentially decorative into something as near to pure art as can be wrought with the primeval elements of tree, water, and stone. Gardens had been used before to approximate this or that monarch's conception of paradise, but never before had they been employed to express an otherwise ineffable understanding of the moral authority of the natural world.
Zen gardens differ even more greatly from Western garden
design. The geometrical creations of Europe, such as the palace garden at Versailles, were fashioned to provide wide-open vistas reaching toward the horizon, while the naturalistic Zen garden is closed in upon itself like a form of curved space, producing the illusion of an infinite wilderness in a few acres. It is intended primarily for viewing; there are no grassy dells for loitering. It is expected to serve functions ordinarily reserved for art in the West: it both abstracts and intensifies reality, being at once symbolic and explicit in design, and the emotion it evokes in the viewer gives him a deeper understanding of his own consciousness.