When asked to give a talk about Zen gardens, or indeed about any garden, the first thing to remember is that a work of art can never be translated into words.

It is, by its very nature, visual and non-verbal.

It is a thing that has to be experienced; it lies beyond the reach of words and no amount of talk can capture it.

Whether in poetry or prose, or logical analysis, language can do no more than point the way.

At best, it can help to dissipate the clouds of ignorance, the clutter of misunderstandings, with which we normally surround ourselves; at worst, it forms just one more barrier to be surmounted.

Zen gardens take innumerable forms. They vary from temple to temple, sect to sect and age to age, designer to designer, and I shall start, not with the early pond and hillside gardens, with their sometimes seemingly close links to Chinese landscape painting, but with the flat, rock and moss and gravel gardens of the karesansui type.

This is in part because they are so obviously works of art and partly because, in my ignorance, they are the ones that I know best.

They were developed after the devastating civil war of 1467-77, not only because they were economical and required no springs or running water, and also fitted in so well with the spare, tatami-based interior architecture of the shoin style, but also because they expressed the inner spirit of burgeoning Japanese Zen Buddhist thought in its purest form.

Among the supreme expressions of this kind of religious thinking, with its emphasis on silent meditation, must surely be the garden of Ryōan-ji, built around the end of the fifteenth century or the beginning of the next, where I have spent so many hours just sitting.

Here, it is all about space, and that is true of every great Zen garden. If one is thinking of making such a garden it is with that that one must start.

It is no use concentrating just upon the rocks. The rocks are in one sense merely a measuring rod, each one no more than a space within a space. In fundamental, Buddhist terms, is and is not are equal.

Yet where, as at Ryōan-ji, there are only fifteen rocks in all, it is also clear that each one was selected for its own particular qualities, as well as for the special role it has to play within the garden as a whole.

Although Ryōan-ji is one of the largest, pure Zen gardens, it still remains a walled-in space, which has been turned into an ocean, a vast sea with islands stretching far away into the distance.

But having said this, one only has to turn, as you can see, to any of the groups of rocks, to realise that in the microcosm, as in the macrocosm, not only the distances between the groups, but the spaces between each member of a group, play a vital role, as do the contrasts and consonances between rock and rock.

Each is, in itself, and in its relationship, not only to its immediate neighbours, but to each one of the other rocks in the garden, of vital importance, no matter where you look.

In the two on the right of the garden, the contrast of horizontal and vertical, the calculated or, if you like, the intuitive precision of the gaps between each of the larger rocks and its immediate neighbour, the dynamic balance of the two groups as a whole, and their relationship to the space which separates them, are remarkable indeed.

Within the over-all calm of the garden, the boldness of the sliced-off top of the rock on the extreme right, in contrast to all the other rocks in the garden, is emphasised still further when it is compared to the complex structure and coloration of the main rock in the foreground group in which there is, in its own way, a no less bold contrast between it and the small, low lying, almost flat rocks by which it is flanked.

Just what such things may involve can be seen in the much less important British Zen garden at Three Wheels, where, in the comparable opening group of two rocks it took well over half an hour to settle on the size of the small intervening gap.

The difficulty was, of course, compounded by the fact that none of the other ten rocks was as yet in place, and it was not just a question of it looking good when the decision actually had to be made, but of its looking just right when the garden as a whole was finished.

What is more, when each stone had been slung beneath a wooden tripod and walked to exactly the chosen spot, it had to be lowered until, as with all the rocks in the garden, precisely what was meant to be seen, no more and no less, would be visible when thirteen centimetres of gravel and, in this case, eight to ten centimetres of soil and moss had been added, and the garden was complete.

In fact, the small stone on the left is merely the tilted tip of a deeply buried, one metre high, columnar rock, while the whole of the larger one to its right sits almost on the surface.

Most Zen gardens are, indeed, a fine embodiment of that basic Buddhist belief that all is illusion!

Finally, while each rock was still suspended, it had to be rotated to achieve orientational accuracy with a tolerance of no more than two or three degrees in order to contribute to a rhythmic flow embracing what would otherwise be no more than a collection of miscellaneous rocks.

However, it would be a great mistake to think that it is only on a relatively large scale that it is possible to create a sense of vast, calm spaces.

The small, Edo period garden of Tokai-an, not outside, but enclosed within a temple, for example, shows that, even within such limited confines, all the essential qualities of Ryōan-ji, of a Zen garden, are still present.

Here, there are only seven rocks, and the vital role of the raking of the gravel in each and every karesansui garden, to which I have not referred before, is very evident.

At Ryōan-ji, the furrows of the raking greatly increase the sense of space, not only in the diagonal view shown, but also when looking across them from anywhere on the long viewing platform.

At Three Wheels, the perspectival effect of the more widely spaced, stronger ridges, reminiscent of the great rollers of the southern oceans with their crests hundreds of metres apart, play a fundamental role in increasing the apparent length of a relatively small garden, since the view from the meditation platform is directly along them instead of across them, which means, of course, that the raking, which takes some five hours, has to be outstandingly precise.

Within the garden of Tokai-an, it is the raking that confirms an essential hierarchy and maintains the integrity of the whole.

Here, to use a possibly inappropriate zoological metaphor, it is not the largest, most imposing rock, but the small, and merely in dimensional terms, the least significant of all, set, as it is, between two flanking groups of three, that is the alpha male.

Not only is it central, but it is from it that the concentric circles of the raking ripple out to energise the entire garden, side to side and end to end.

As ever, in a true Zen garden, the spaces between each and every rock, as well as that between the groups, are as important as the quality of the rocks themselves.

But seven, instead of the fifteen of Ryōan-ji, still remains a lot of rocks.

Yet, on the typically Zen principle that less is more, which finds expression also in the wider context of the seventeen syllables of every haiku, the South Garden of the Temple of Daisen'in, probably dating from the first half of the sixteenth century, amply proves, there is no absolute necessity for even a single rock.

Providing that you get it right, which is extremely difficult to do, as almost always is the case with very simple-seeming things, two subtly distinguished cones that rise up out of a flat, rectangular expanse of raked gravel, can be profound in their effect.

This might, however, lead a thoroughly irreverent Englishman like me to wonder, why so many?

But then again, there may well be an answer, since I happen to possess a door from tribal Gambia in West Africa, made out of two enormous, rough-hewn planks of heavy wood from one of which protrudes a splendidly bold, twin, female symbol of fertility, compared to which the gravel garden is, as is appropriate in such a setting, quite spectacularly chaste.

However that may be, another, seemingly more or less contemporary Zen garden at Daisen'in, could hardly be more different in intention and effect, and the comparison epitomises the catholicity of taste that could find expression within the confines of a single temple complex.

Its relationship to certain types of Chinese and dependent Japanese, brush drawn, mountain landscapes is immediately apparent.

In it, a dry, raked gravel river cascades from a wall of distant mountains past the tall, precipitous faces of a close-linked pair of vertical rocks that close the view immediately upstream before it flows on under a slender bridge made from a single thin, flat stone, and through a small barrier of rocks which lie across the stream, to speed on past a boldly contrasted series of large rocks on either side.

The river, as it curves away downstream, confirms a thing that was already evident, the fact that every bush and fern and pine tree is as carefully chosen, placed and pruned, and contrasted, as the rocks themselves.

How swiftly and how easily such discipline can descend to chaos can be seen in the happy, picturesque jumble that is visible in many aspects of the early seventeenth century garden of Tokakuji, where, as is evident in the detail shown, there is again a dry, stone stream that is crossed at various points by stone bridges, again made out of single slabs of rock.

At Ryōan-ji and Tokai-an, and even at Three Wheels, it is clearly a basic principle that no stone simply seems to lie about upon the surface. Each and every rock appears grow out of the landscape as a whole, of which it is an integral and timeless part.

Here, on the contrary, many, ranging from small stones to quite large rocks appear, in this particular stretch of the cascading stream, to do just that amid a jungle of unruly cycad ferns.

Betraying an extensive, but nonetheless profound, and very different, kind of subtle visual discipline, certain aspects of the late fifteenth century garden of Joeiji which, although more or less contemporary with Ryōan-ji, reflects the earlier tradition of the Japanese pond garden, are unrivalled.

As can be seen in the image on Joeiji, it is a very different world from that of Tokakuji and although there are something like fifty rocks, they are all, with the exception of one or two small, low-lying ones, of a single geological type and are predominantly mid grey in colour.

In this, the contrast with Three Wheels in which, reflecting Shogyoji's principle of harmony within diversity and extending it into the realm of the Zen garden, there are some eight geological types, and therefore a great variety of textures, shapes and colours among the twelve rocks, could hardly be more extreme.

The flow and spatial dynamism created at Joeiji are such that nowhere is there any sense of simple scattering, on the one hand, or of clutter on the other. No matter where one turns one's gaze, it seems that that view is the best view. Where you are, that is where you are meant to be.

The same thing happens in the more or less contemporary karesansui garden of Ryōan-ji, although in that case, there is a single, very special point on the long veranda from which the whole of every one of the restricted range of fifteen rocks is fully visible.

At Joeiji, quite without needing to move out among the rocks, one senses the completeness of each stone in every group. It is, indeed, another principle honoured in the best Zen gardens that the facets hidden from observers kneeling on the meditation platform are as interesting as the parts that can be seen.

In the West, this age old sculptural tradition is seen at its finest in the sculptures in the British Museum which come from the mid fifth century BC pediment of the Parthenon in Athens.

There, the drapery patterns on the backs of the figures, which were intended never to be visible at all, and never were for two millennia or more until they were taken down, are just as carefully and fully carved as those in front, which were always intended to be seen.

At Joeiji, the variety and interest of the rock forms in themselves, and the subtlety of the interrelationships, not only between the many groupings, running up to three to five rocks each, but also between those within each group, are unrivalled.

Just one example of the subtleties involved is the special use that has been made of the five or six large, flat-topped rocks as the one in the left centre of this illustration leads the eye to the flat-topped rock in the middle distance on the right which, in its turn, bridges the wide space of lawn beyond to that in the centre of the closely packed group in the far distance.

The vital importance of the seemingly unimportant is evidenced by such small rocks as the one which controls that same wide open sweep of space that would otherwise run unbroken to the pond beyond which, in the far background, half-hidden in the shadows, can be seen the great dry waterfall of rock plunging between the trees that frame the garden and lead on up the hillside into the world of natural nature.

One only has to look at a gardens such as that at Komyoin, built in 1939, to realise the acuity of eye and visual control that are involved.

The contrast with the spatial slackness, together with the relative repetitiveness of the mostly undistinguished, isolated rock forms, is extreme.

A second detail from Joeiji comes as a delight and a relief, and serves to strengthen the likelihood that it was indeed the priest and painter, Sesshū, who designed it during a seventeen year stay in the temple which began in 1484, following a two-year visit to China in 1467-69.

In writing of Zen gardens there are often references to Chinese influence and most of them seem to be rather vague and non-specific, but, as can be seen from the brush drawing on the left, the attribution of the garden at Joeiji to the painter, Sesshū, may be a rather different matter.

It is a drawing of mountains and water and, as is shown by the tiny boat on the left, far off in the distance, they really are mountains.

On the other hand, they could very easily be rocks, as can be seen if you turn to the garden and look, in particular, at the large rock near the foreground on the right.

Both in the garden and in Sesshu's drawing, rocks and mountains are as one, and give expression to the central Buddhist belief in the unity of all that is; where all distinctions fall away, where rocks and mountain, trees and moss, the vast and the minute, the organic and the inorganic, rounded stones and trimmed azaleas are not separate.

Everywhere on the green lawns of Joeiji, with their subtle undulations turning brown in winter; in every group of rocks, the small, trimmed bushes of azalea and the like all play a vital role and even, as with some of the rocks themselves, are left to stand alone.

Indeed, the interchangeability of rock and plant is epitomised in the conical, Fujiyama of a rock-capped, bush-mountain to the rear, before the pond is reached.

Though both of them are early representatives of the changes taking place in the late Muromachi period round the turn of the fifteenth century, it might seem at first that the gardens of Ryōan-ji and Joeiji have but little in common, whereas in fact they share two revolutionary aspects that are fundamental to the new developments, one of them being the greatly increased emphasis on the importance of each individual rock.

The second, which flows directly from the first, is the new concern with the spaces lying in between; the voids are now just as important as the solids.

The relationship between garden and landscape, artifice and nature, can of course be very much closer than it is at Ryōan-ji or even at Joeiji, although the latter, as a pond garden, is closer to the mainstream of the relatively little that survives unmodified from the preceding periods.

Although the pond in front of the main hall of the temple, which was destroyed in the bombing of 1945, was modified in the Edo period, much of the garden of Tokoji remains one of the finest examples of such a survival, conceivably from as early as about 1270.

The garden is not set in front of a backdrop of rising ground, but actually on a slope that flows down naturally to the pond, and the rocks appear to flow down with it.

Yet this is not by chance. Behind the blend with natural nature, it is very obvious that there is a world of highly skilful artifice.

Both here and in the repeated rock diagonals, seen from the drawing room in the reconstructed main hall, the flow on down the hillside to the water is clearly highly organised.

Particularly at the water's edge in the illustration of the pond, there are many fine, large, individual rocks with carefully calculated harmonies and contrasts in their shapes and their positioning.

Nevertheless, the numbers and the close-packed overlapping of the rocks in general mean that, in contrast to the classic gardens of the turn of the fifteenth century, there is much less stress on the overall shape and individuality of each stone, with only an occasional point of vertical emphasis caused by a major change in scale.

The linkage with the natural world is even greater in such pond gardens as that at Hokokuji, where the rocks both vary greatly in their shape and size, but on this occasion cascade down a wooded slope.

On the left, a casual seeming jumble of quite small stones is set amongst the vegetation, and on the right, a group of larger rocks appear to have collided no less casually, whilst, at the same time, there is a rhythm in the flow of large rocks from the massive forms of those in the distance at the top of the slope to those that are actually standing in the water on the far side of the pond.

The sensitivity and cunning underlying the construction of the now somewhat modified garden at Tokoji stand out in sharp contrast to that of the seventeenth century garden at Jokyoji.

There, the rocks that tumble down to what was once a stream appear, for the most part, to be meant as counterparts to or approximations of the natural screes and rockfalls in the mountains, so that the element of artifice often appears to be quite minimal in the resulting visual effect.

In terms of implied motion, and the results of movement in the motionless rocks, I suppose that the garden of Zuiho-in, built in 1535, lies at the opposite extreme.

In all, only a dozen rocks or so are involved in the main group, and some distance from an initial, tilted, introductory rock, with fine internal, upward sloping grain, a run of three rocks resting on each other accelerates a sweeping movement to the right. This then curls round, climbing more steeply still until it is stopped, in the corner formed by two trimmed hedges, by a final, towering, finely veined rock.

In Buddhist terms, the garden is itself a koan; a contradiction in terms; a statement lying in a world beyond the reach of logic. As in every true Zen garden, all is paradox, emptiness, illusion; complex thoughts which could perhaps, in the case of Zuhoin, be compressed into the seventeen syllables of a haiku.

Here
in the stillness

the river races
uphill

no wave
ever moves.

The echoes of the early karesansui style, which spread throughout Japan in endless variations, had by the twentieth century lost almost all of their original religious relevance and largely moved away from the temples to the grounds of big hotels and even, in the form of a little sand and a few, sometimes ill-chosen rocks, to the forecourts of filling stations and the like.

Even in many of the Zen temples themselves, the gardens and associated buildings have acquired a largely decorative function and taken on the roles of tourist attractions and museums.

Perhaps in every way the most spectacular example of the move away from a religious context are the gardens which form an integral part of the Adachi Museum of Art, devoted to modern Japanese painting and opened in 1970.

To begin with, they involve, not a handful of square yards, but fully 13,000 tsubo, which comes, in British terms, to more than ten and a half acres.

The karesansui influence is clear in the monumental, main garden, which runs, on the right, so seamlessly into the wooded hill beyond, yet at the same time begs the question of what is natural, what is not.

The waterfall, which is a striking feature of the scene, is actually pump-fed, and the trees immediately above it and to its right are as carefully planted and meticulously pruned as those that are sprinkled on the bare side of the hill.

One only has to turn towards the left to see that here the link with natural nature, which is an intimate feature of so many of the classic Zen gardens, is forged on a vast scale, as the mountains into which the garden seems to run almost without a break, and into which the eye is led by the gravel inlet, are in fact kilometres away.

The garden runs into a mountain; mountain becomes garden.

Alongside the karesansui tradition, a second and no less obvious influence at Adachi is that of the tea garden, which grew in importance as the seventeenth century progressed and the changing political and social climate led to the waning of the religious of power of the great Zen temples.

This is reflected in the wealth of enormous, trimmed azaleas, which play just as important a role as do the rocks themselves and recall such gardens as that of Jikoin, created c.1663 by the founder of the Sekishu school of tea ceremony.

There, actual rocks are notable for their rarity and their relatively small, though never unimportant role in comparison with that of the large, rounded stones of trimmed azalea which are such a dominant, if not quite exclusive, feature of the garden.

The scale, of course, is intimate, in contrast to Adachi, where the bases of the green, rounded bushes also lie, stemless and flat, upon the ground.

At Adachi many of the enormous rocks weigh, not kilograms or tonnes, but tens of tonnes, and the traditional methods of construction still used, for example at Three Wheels, involving spades and wooden tripods, have necessarily given way to bulldozers and cranes.

What has lived on within traditions handed down for centuries is the sensitivity of eye and of imagination which makes it seem, even on this vast scale, that every view, as soon as it is seen, appears to be the most important one.

With each shift of focus or direction, whether small or large, what can be seen appears to be the primary view. The setting of each rock, each rounded, green azalia stone, the placement and the slope of every tree-trunk and the trimming of the branches of each pine, seem calculated to the last degree.

It was, indeed, the fundamental premise, underlying each decision that was made, that the garden was to be a living painting, a three dimensional extension of the galleries of actual paintings in the Museum itself, turning the landscape back to picture, picture into landscape.

This is no mere form of words, and every window has itself been placed and designed as if it actually was a painting.

Indeed, the idea of the picture window, takes on a new meaning and the element of control, so evident in the garden itself, now encompasses the viewer to an extent that makes the viewing platforms, the verandas and the pathways in the precincts of Zen temples seem like freedom.

Nevertheless, despite the general move towards a secular world, there are still, in my own lifetime, true Zen gardens, that are being made so skilfully that they are more than mere pastiches.

I am thinking, in particular, of the tiny, internal garden of Ryogen-in, built in 1958. With only five rocks and not seven, it is even smaller than that at Tokai-an, and the element of symmetry, seen in that case, here becomes a sharper, more dynamic balance.

Now, two concentric sets of circles help to hold two, widely spaced groups of rocks together, while the parallel lines of the furrows in the raking, which stream past on either side, greatly increase the vastness of the space that separates them, at the same time as giving expression to the essential form of the enclosing, narrow rectangle in which the garden is set.

To meditate, it is I think to the quiet and the calm of gardens such as these that I would go, rather than to the scenic splendours of Adachi, built with other things in mind. It is only if one is still in the stillness that one can hope, perhaps, one day to enter the zen of a Zen Garden.

As regards the garden at Three Wheels, I will end with a haiku that some of you might
already know, since it was written years ago:-

In this
small garden

Amida Buddha 
awaits

building
his Pure Land.