Buddhism and the Japanese garden

When talking about the influence of Buddhism on the Japanese garden we often get lost on the details like “Do monks sit facing a dry garden when they meditate?” and by doing so miss the broader question. The major religion in the west is Christianity and its influence on Westerners is not measured by architecture and how many people go to church on Sunday alone but by a subconscious attitude. It is an attitude that in its two thousand year existence has impregnated the cultures of the west in the same way that Buddhism has got beneath the skin of the countries of East Asia perhaps more so in Japan perhaps because of the influence of Zen.
Whether monks meditate while facing a wall or facing a dry garden is a somewhat disingenuous diversion to disprove the influence of Buddhism. We recognize the passing of the seasons as those that Easter and Christmas brings and not by a reference to the solstices they occur on, whether we worship the events that gave these festivals a name or not. Our attitude to work and family are connected with the dominant faith or religion, who has not heard of the “Protestant work ethic” or perhaps the way you heard it was “Catholic work ethic”? It may be difficult to pin point exactly how we came to have a certain attitude towards work or money but these attitudes are ingrained into society. It may well be that a passage from a sutra can point to an object in a garden it may even be possible to explain a lot of the physical elements in a Japanese garden as symbolic of something mentioned in a text but it is also likely that the general lay out has come about because of an attitude towards the materials being worked with that is different from the way someone in the west would approach it.
In “The theory of garden art” CCL Hirschfield says that “effect” is the major objective in garden art. The desired ‘effect’ is most likely to be pleasure, or happiness if you prefer, this objective may be the same the world over, Buddhists however do not accept the duality of the observer and the observed. When you add the zen ideal to to the mix, that is to attain “the most of the essence with the least possible means”, as Fredric Leiberman puts it, then there is a clear distinction. This distinction has to do with the emphasis on form in a western garden compared to an emphasis on meaning in a Japanese garden. In other words a Japanese garden comes about not as a representation or icon of a religious belief to be worshiped but as a result of holding certain views about the nature of things leading to an expression using the least material to capture the “effect”.

“To fully appreciate the nature of theology, it is useful to explore why there are no theologians in the East. Consider Taoism. The Tao is conceived of as a supernatural essence, an underlying mystical force or principle governing life, but one that is impersonal, remote, lacking consciousness, and definitely not a being. It is the “eternal way,” the cosmic force that produces harmony and balance. According to Lao-tzu, the Tao is “always nonexistent” yet “always existent,” “unnamable” and the “name that cannot be named.” Both “soundless and formless,” it is “always without desires.” One might meditate forever on such an essence, but it offers little to reason about. The same applies to Buddhism and Confucianism. Although it is true that the popular versions of these faiths are polytheistic and involve an immense array of small gods (as is true of popular Taoism as well), the “pure” forms of these faiths, as pursued by the intellectual elite, are godless and postulate only a vague divine essence—Buddha specifically denied the existence of a conscious God.3 The East lacks theologians because those who might otherwise take up such an intellectual pursuit reject its first premise: the existence of a conscious, all-powerful God.”
from “The Victory of Reason” by Rodney Stark.
If we agree with Rodney Stark that there is not the belief in the existence of an omnipotent god but instead a ‘way’ that produces harmony and balance and this ‘way’ is in all things then we can accept that this symbiotic view would produce different art from the Cartesian, self centred, view. This self centred view is responsible for the cult of individualism with its neurosis of exceptional art.