The original Heian owners retained possession of the site until approximately 1450, when it was purchased by Katsumoto Hokusawa, adviser to the Ashikaga and one of the instigators of the Onin War. During his period of ownership, Katsumoto built a country villa overlooking the lake-and-island garden, and like Yoshimitsu, he requested that his villa be made into a Zen temple when he Thed. As it turned out, the Onin War caused his wishes to be executed sooner than he might have expected; shortly after the villa was built the estate was transferred to the Myoshin-ji branch of the Rinzai sect, which also controlled a nearby temple called Ryoan-ji. Not long after Katsumoto's death, his villa and other estate buildings were set on fire during the Onin War and joined the general ruin of much of the rest of Kyoto.
In the last decade of the fifteenth century the burned-out estate was restored by Katsumoto's son, but in replacing the buildings he chose a new style of Zen architecture known as shoin, which included a special bay window and desk modeled after those in Chinese Ch'an monasteries. The shoin style had been recently popularized in Kyoto by Yoshimasa, who chose the design for several buildings surrounding his Silver Pavilion. The shoin window overlooked the lake-and-island garden, but since the later Zen monks who controlled the estate had no interest in decorative landscape art, they walled off a small courtyard in front of the window and installed a flat kare sansui garden for contemplation, which soon eclipsed in interest the older lake-and-island landscape. Shortly thereafter the shoin building was in turn destroyed by fire, giving the monks an excuse to bring in a pavilion with a long viewing veranda from the neighboring Seigen-in temple. This veranda, which was positioned along the long axis of the kare sansui garden, now permits group meditation, something not possible from the single window of the earlier shoin structure.
Modern visitors to Ryoan-ji still pass through the older landscape garden en route to the main temple pavilion. From this vantage point only the outer wall of the sand-and-stone garden can be seen; there is no hint of what lies inside. On the temple steps the fragrance of incense mingles with the natural perfume of the ancient trees which line the pathways of the lake. As one enters the dimly lighted hallway of the temple, street shoes are replaced by noiseless, cushioned slippers. Shod in silence, visitors walk along the temple hallways onto the long hojo veranda facing the garden, where the brilliance of the shimmering sand washes unexpectedly over the senses. The effect is sudden and striking.
What one sees, in purely prosaic terms, is an area of rippled sand about the size of a tennis court, set about with fifteen not particularly unusual (by Ashikaga standards) stones arrayed in five distinct clusters. The white sand is raked lengthwise (a routine task for a lay brother), and concentric circles are traced around each of the stones, imparting an illusion of ripples. In the garden proper there is not a tree, indeed not a blade of grass, to be seen; the only suggestion of living matter is the bed of ancient moss in which each group of stones lies nestled. On the three sides of the garden opposite the veranda stands the ancient courtyard wall, whose oil-stained earthen brown contrasts splendidly with the pure white sand. Above the wall, which is capped with black clay tile in Chinese fashion, one can see the tall trees of the landscape garden, obscuring what must once have been a grand view of old Kyoto to the south.
Each of the five clusters of stones seems balanced around its own center of gravity, and the clusters, in turn, appear to be balanced with one another—with the two groups of stones on the left being approximately equal in mass to the three groups on the right. As is the case in most Ashikaga gardens, each grouping is dominated by one obviously assertive member, against which the smaller, less authoritative stones strain for prominence, producing a sense of tension. Simultaneously, there is a feeling of strength about each of the groups, since each cluster is set on an island of mossy soil, which acts as a base to unite the assemblages. Aesthetic stability is also achieved by the placement of the stones at sufficient depth (or apparent depth) within their nest of moss so that only their tips seem to protrude above the floor of the garden.
The stones are set in two groups of two stones, two groups of three, and one group of five. Each of these groupings displays one or another of the various Ashikaga garden conventions. Both groups of two stones make explicit use of contrasting shapes between their members, a standard Zen device. One of the pairs is composed of a long, vertical rock set like an upturned blade in the sand, with a companion that is hardly more than a negligible lump, a token foil. The other pair has one sharp-sided vertical stone with a flat plateau as a top, accompanied by a larger round rock which spreads at the base. As has been noted, the Ashikaga gardeners prized flat-topped stones highly because of their resemblance to the angular brushstrokes of certain Zen ink painters. Life, in this case, was made to imitate art, or rather sculptural art was made to imitate the pictorial. Both pairs of stones are situated slightly off the lengthwise axis of the garden, maintaining the asymmetry considered so essential.
In the two groups of three stones, the intent is to establish the visual pre-eminence of the largest member and to flank it with two comparatively insignificant smaller stones—usually differentiated in shape and attitude—thereby forming a vertical triangle with the peak of the largest stone representing the apex. This particular arrangement was so common in Ashikaga gardens that it became known as the "three-deity" stone setting, supposedly a pious reference to a Buddhist legend but probably merely a convenient tag for a standardized artistic device. The last grouping is five stones, since arrangements of four were considered too symmetrical by Zen gardeners. In this case, the group is dominated by one large central boulder with four ancillary rocks spread about its base like the feet of a granite beast.
Such, in physical terms, is the arrangement of the garden, and when so described it seems undeserving of all the acclaim. Its subjective qualities tell a bit more of the story. It seems clear that the inclination of the stones is intended to evoke a sense of motion, for they have all been placed with their longer axis corresponding to that of the garden. This quality is further enhanced by the practice of raking the sand lengthwise, which makes the observer's eye sweep from left to right or right to left. And although the overall purpose of the garden is to induce mental repose, it has a dynamic tension, such as a high-speed photograph of surging rapids in a mountain stream might catch. But the sand, like the blank spaces in a Chinese ink drawing, is as important as the placement of the stones. The empty areas both emphasize the stones and invite the mind to expand in the cosmological infinity they suggest.
This interaction between form and space is one of the keys to Ryoan-ji's compelling suggestiveness. Evoking a sense of infinity in a strictly confined space, it is a living lesson in the Zen concept of nothingness and nonattachment. It expresses a timelessness unknown in earlier landscape gardens, particularly those of the Heian era, which, with their fading blossoms and falling leaves, were attuned to the poignant transience of life. In the Ryoan-ji garden, the Heian aesthetic concept of aware, the thought that beauty must die, has been replaced by the Zen idea of yugen, which means, among other things, profound suggestiveness, a reduction to only those elements in a creative work that move the spirit, without the slightest concession to prettiness or ornament. The number and placement of stones seem arbitrary, but they are intuitively perfect—like a phrase from Beethoven that, with the alteration of a single note, could be transformed into a comic tune. Like all masterpieces, Ryoan-ji has simplicity, strength, inevitability.
Between them, the gardens at Daisen-in and at Ryoan-ji encompass the range of kare sansui gardening in Ashikaga Japan. The first is a symbolic landscape of parched waterfalls and simulated streams drawn in monochromatic granite; the second, a totally non-representative abstraction of stone arrangements in the sand-covered "flat-garden" style. The kare sansui flat-garden style, in particular, has no real counterpart in world art. Imagine the Egyptians, Greeks, or Florentines collecting rocks, strewing them about a bed of sand in a courtyard, and calling it religious art. Ryoan-ji seems strikingly modern today and in fact it was only after a critical following for abstract art developed in the West that the Zen kare sansui was "discovered." As recently as the 1930s Ryoan-ji was ignored, an unkempt sandpile the monks rarely bothered to rake; and only in 1961 was the garden at Daisen-in restored to what is believed to be its original condition. Ryoan-ji is now the most celebrated site in Japan and so internationally appreciated that a full-sized replica has been constructed in the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, New York.