Once, when the Buddha was asked to preach about a flower that was presented to him, he “looked at it in silence,” according to British garden designer Sophie Walker in her book The Japanese Garden. In this spiritual moment Zen Buddhism was born, inspiring the peaceful and eternal dry or rock gardens called karesansui.
Unlike a garden designed for strolling, which directs visitors along a set path to take in scenic views and teahouses, a dry garden is viewed while sitting on a terrace above, offering the heightened experience of traveling through it to the imagination, revealing the essence of Meditation.
With rocks artfully placed along stretches of fine gravel rolled by monks into ripples representing water, they are sources for contemplation, whether they refer to a specific landscape or are serenely abstract. Ryoan-ji, which dates to about 1500, is the supreme example of the latter among Kyoto temples, with its 15 low rocks in five clusters set in mossy ponds within an enclosed rectangle of combed gravel. The puzzle is that only 14 are visible at any given time, no matter where you sit to see it.
Change in Kyoto, Japan’s largest temple garden city, is a quiet development. But a tour of several dry gardens designed over the past century—and even recent years—shows that the Zen tradition is timeless in landscape design, and that moments of contemplation are still possible, even as the crowds grow.
Zuiho-in
Once I arrived at the Daitoku-ji Zen monastery complex in northern Kyoto, I headed to Zuiho-in, one of its 22 sub-temples. The temple was founded in 1319 and then in 1546, the powerful feudal lord Sorin Otomo dedicated it to his family. This happened during the period of the Spanish and Portuguese missionaries in Japan. Like others, Otomo converted to Christianity but remained inspired by Zen Buddhism.
I entered along corner corridors until I reached the porch of the Zuiho-in temple to view the main dry garden. Although the style may initially appear traditional, this garden was designed in the 1960s by Mirei Shigemori, a landscape architect whose training was in the Japanese cultural arts: conducting the tea ceremony, flower arranging, and ink and wash landscape painting . As the Western Modernist movement entered Japan, he adopted it in conjunction with traditional arts and became determined to revolutionize the garden aesthetic that had remained static for hundreds of years. He succeeded in designing more than 200 gardens in Japan and even collaborated with the Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi on a UNESCO garden, collecting stones in Japan that Noguchi set up in the garden at the organization’s Paris headquarters.
In the Zuiho-in garden, the gravels swirl into high peaks as if far out at sea, with a chain of jagged pointed rocks like islands leading to a mossy peninsula topped by a huge stone representing Mount Horai, where, according to the Taoist mythology, inhabited by heroes called the Eight Immortals, who fought for justice. Referring to Otomo Christianity, rocks in a second garden define a cross, and three rows of square stones embedded in the sand elsewhere in the garden could be seen as Shigemori’s modernist signature.
Honen-in
Across town, in the Higashiyama district, the Philosopher’s Walk is a pedestrian walkway along the scenic Lake Biwa canal. It first opened in 1890 and is believed to have been named after a philosophy professor at Kyoto University who strolled there while meditating. As you walk along it, depending on the season, the swift current below carries bright autumn leaves or delicate cherry blossoms spilling from trees on the banks.
Honen-in, one of several Buddhist temples along the Philosopher’s Walk, is especially popular in autumn, with its grand staircase and entrance gate flanked by vast canopies of fiery red Japanese trees. Two large, rectangular mounds of white sand along the central path are periodically carved by the monks into new designs. last fall, a maple leaf was outlined in one and a ginkgo leaf in the other against a backdrop of ridges.
The head priest, Kajita Shinsho, who lives there with his family, had a private terraced courtyard that needed a garden, and last March he hired Marc Peter Keane, an American landscape architect now living in Kyoto, to design it. A graduate of Cornell University, Mr. Keane has lived in Japan for nearly 20 years and specializes in Japanese garden design. Like Shigemori, he has immersed himself in Japanese culture. His home and studio are now permanently located in Kyoto.
Only three old camellia trees remained on the rectangular site, with blossoms in season ranging from dark rose to pale pink and white. Mr Keane’s idea was to represent the continuous flow of nature, as exemplified for him by the carbon cycle – the process by which carbon travels from the air to organisms and back to the air. His garden, titled ‘Empty River’, creates what he described as ‘a physical expression of this invisible cycle through a river of pure carbon’.
He traced on foot a narrow snaking “river” winding around the roots and trunks of the camellias, and with the short sticks he placed in the long furrow, cut a strong black line through a mixture of fine brown and white gravel. There are no rocks, only small stones bordering the yard and plantings, with Andromeda ferns in the corners. Its acidity is its beauty, softened only when camellia petals scatter on the gravel in April.
Mr. Keane compares this distillation of design and materials to a haiku, the Japanese three-line poem. But like the gardens of old, it also expresses the Buddhist concept of emptiness.
At Tofuku-ji, a temple in the southeast quarter of the city, Shigemori designed the Hojo Garden, the Abbot’s Hall, as early as 1939, using materials found on site. His pioneering vocabulary of straight lines and grids may have seemed shocking at the time, but is beloved now for its harmonious vibrancy.
From the first terrace, you look out over the south garden, with clusters of jagged mostly vertical rocks and undulations of coarse gravel that radiate, culminating in five mosses like holy mountains in the sea. In the west garden, square azaleas alternate with square fields of white gravel, reflecting the ancient customs of dividing the land. Azaleas in Japan are closely pruned so they bloom in lovely flat deep pinks.
Then, a vast checkerboard field of remnant paving blocks embedded in a carpet of moss seems to dwindle to infinity in the north garden. And finally, to the east, a pattern of stone pillar foundations recreates the Ursa Major constellation, with gravel wrapped in concentric circles around each pillar to emphasize its individuality.
The Ukifune Garden of Mr. Keane 2022 (Drifting Boat Garden) is an allegorical interpretation of the eponymous chapter from “The Tale of Genji”, Murasaki Shikibu’s 11th century novel about Prince Hikaru or “Shining” Genji, and the stormy romances and political life at court .
Mr Keane designed it as the Zen courtyard garden of the Genji Kyoto Hotel, which opened in April 2022, on the banks of the Kamo River, near where Genji is building his own large estate and gardens in the book. Designed by American architect Geoffrey P. Moussas, who also lives in Kyoto, the hotel’s design incorporates the interior-exterior features of Kyoto’s old commercial houses.
Mr. Keane was inspired by the “Genji” scene in which one of two powerful officials vying for Ukifune’s favor, a 22-year-old woman, travels through a blizzard and escapes with her by boat on the Uji River. As they pass the Isle of Orange Trees, she recites a poem in which she likens herself to the drifting boat: “The lasting hue of the Isle of Orange Trees may never change,/ Yet we know not now where the drifting boat’s limit lies.”
Mr. Keane consulted John Carpenter, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s curator of Japanese art, who told him about the late 16th-century “Genji” painting by Tosha Mitsuyoshi in the museum’s collection depicting this famous scene. A copy of the painting is now in Kyoto next to the garden.
Mr Keane installed a ‘river’ that slanted with gray river stones cleverly placed on edge rather than flat, giving the flow a greater sense of direction. The garden is located between two wings of the hotel and the “water” appears to cascade from one building to the other with a wide, flat steel bridge above, a viewing platform that brings the design to life. The banks on either side are densely planted with maples, palms, ferns and ground cover moss. And a boat-shaped stone bears a large patch of moss, which Mr Keane interprets as Earth drifting through the galaxy.
If you go
The gardens at Zuiho-in and Tofuku-ji Abbot’s Hall Garden require tickets. Admission to both is ¥400 for adults (about $2.65) and ¥300 for children (about $2).
General admission to Honen-in is free, except for the spring and autumn opening weeks, which usually fall on the first week of April and the third week of November, and cost 500 yen in spring and 800 yen in autumn. You can visit the Empty River Garden during these weeks.
The garden at Hotel Genji Kyoto is free.
If you get hungry while browsing the gardens, Izusen, a restaurant in the Daiji-in sub-temple of the Daitoku-ji monastic complex, offers many local specialties on set menus beautifully presented in mostly red lacquered bowls, which nestle when empty. Open from 11am until 4 p.m. with reservation. 4,370 to 8,050 yen. It is located near Zuiho-in.
Also by reservation, Yudofu Kisaki, a restaurant between Honen-in’s entrance and Philosopher’s Walk, has vegetarian and tofu specialties. Open 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., last order at 6 p.m. 4,370 to 8,050 yen.
To read a companion book to your tour, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Yasunari Kawabata’s post-World War II novel “The Rainbow” is newly available in English. Many chapters take place in Kyoto, and it can feel like you’re traveling together, often to the same gardens. Kawabata’s knowledge of plants was formidable, and the simplicity of his descriptions was natural and direct: “On the grass in front of the gate, in the shadows of the pines, dandelions and lotuses were in bloom. A double-flowered camellia had blossomed in front of the bamboo fence.’
Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and subscribe to the Travel Dispatch weekly newsletter to get expert tips to travel smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming of a future getaway or just an armchair trip? Take a look at ours 52 places to go in 2024.
