When, in a weak moment, I agreed to give a talk to the Buddhist Society in London about Zen and the Making of a Garden, I seem to have committed myself to dealing in terms of paradox, to speaking about the ultimate purpose of a garden that has no purpose.

Paradox lies, of course, at the very heart of Zen Buddhism and is, in the form of the koan, a central feature of the training of monks in the Rinzai school. Everyone nowadays is familiar with the famous koan about the sound of one hand clapping, and since, as you know all too well by now, apart from giving talks, one of my main vices is writing poetry, I recently happened to write a poem on the theme. It goes like this:

There is a pool
in the forest
which has no water

the fish leap
and the mayfly dance.

There is a desert
of burning sands

where the scorpions
and the lizards
scuttle
in the waves.

There is a bridge
that flows across
a motionless river

a stadium
that reverberates
to the sound
of one hand
clapping.

Nothing
is strange
in the world of paradox,

in the world

in which we live

our lives.

It is indeed an everyday sort of paradox that the very British, mock Tudor, suburban house in Acton which you have turned into Three Wheels, should possess a fully fledged Zen Garden.

Even a small garden, consisting of a few rocks, a little moss and some grey gravel, is a constant reminder of the Buddhist concepts of ceaseless, all-pervading flux, of emptiness and the interdependence of all that is.

The garden in the even light of a typical English grey day is very different from the garden in summer sunlight when the photograph of the viewing shelter was taken. It is not simply that summer sun or winter snow reveal a different aspect of it.

Each photograph is, of course, a special kind of illusion in a world of illusion that includes the garden itself. What we see is not the garden that a dog, or an animal or insect sensitive to infra-red or ultraviolet sees. It too is an illusion, yet, at the same time real.

Just as one observer sees this and ignores that, a photographer on the viewing platform can, by use of appropriate shutter speeds and filters, emphasise and dramatise the shadows which other viewers, concentrating on the rocks or the raked gravel, hardly notice (7 L, 8 R).

However that may be, the original, somewhat untidy English garden did, as I think you will agree, look rather different, as you can see here.

What happened was that when Professor Sato and I were looking at it, he asked me what I thought should be done about it, and I said, as usual without thinking, that perhaps to turn it into a Zen garden would be a good idea (11 L, 12 R).

One of the great experiences during my early visits to Japan, before I had known of Shogyoji, had been the opportunity finally to spend long hours in Ryōan-ji and the great Zen gardens of Kyoto, and anyway, it seemed to me that Buddhism and meditation went together.

It came as something of a shock when some time later, when I was visiting Shogyoii, Chimyo Takehara sama said on your behalf,' fine, and please will you design one for us', or words to that effect.

It is typical of the tolerance and openness of Pure Land Buddhism at its best, and of all of you in the Temple, in particular, that you should not only have set up an outpost in London, but then have willingly embraced the idea of creating a garden stemming from a wholly different stream of Buddhist practice and belief.

That tolerance, not to mention courage, must have been stretched to the utmost in asking an Englishman, who was neither a Buddhist nor a Japanese speaker, and who had never before designed a garden of any kind, to do it for you.

The subtleties inherent in the making of a Zen garden are such that it was clear, at the very moment of saying yes, that the odds were overwhelmingly on failure, and that, in the terms of the Bhagavad Gita or the Buddhist Sutras. the only course of action lay in non-attachment to the outcome —- in doing for the doing; nothing more and nothing less.

Yet even in doing for the doing there is always paradox; always some sort of fundamental framework within which one works; a starting point or an overriding aim outside the orbit of the individual, unpremeditated action.

The abstract minimalism of a Zen garden has, indeed, a function that lies both outside and beyond the pleasing of the eye. That function is to provide a starting point, but only a starting point, a springboard if you like, for meditation, for the cleansing of the mind of all extraneous hubbub; for the calming down of all the welter of sense inputs from the outside world and the uncontrolled, internal battering of thought.

One opening effect, if all is rightly done, may be to sense within a confined space the peacefulness attendant on vast distances; on mountains, forests, islands, rising from grey seas; of peaks above the clouds. For a Shin Buddhist, it may be to see in it a symbol of the Pure Land itself.

A constant aim of Buddhist thought is to break down the duality of subject and object, I and not I, and to reach out intuitively to an all-embracing and inseparable oneness. In the words of the Sutras, form is emptiness and emptiness is form.

In any attempt to create a Zen garden, one essential is the realisation that what is not is as important as what is. The control of empty space is paramount. One could even say that the rocks are simply the spaces between the spaces.

To quote a poem which some of you may already know from Taira's translation in The Breath in the Flute, it can be said of every true Zen garden

This
is the garden

of being
and not being,

of rocks
and no rocks.

Here
when you enter
and are,

is and is not
are equal.

In setting out the ground plan, there was, of course an initial scheme in which root two and golden section proportional systems were involved, and a preliminary model of the garden was made to see how it might look from various rooms in the house (13 L, 14 R).

Even more striking is the model, also made by John Read, who was asked to design the oak timbered, L-shaped viewing shelter in such a way that there were no supports between the viewer and the garden.

Seeing him at work on the shelter itself gives some idea of the complexity of the full scale timbering, built in the traditional manner with wooden dowelling and not a single nail, with which he solved the problem.

Given the small size of the garden, I had originally thought of nine or ten rocks at the most. But when Chimyo sama said that he would like there to be twelve, possibly with twelve tone music in mind, as well as other, purely Buddhist resonances, it gave an opportunity to incorporate yet another level of symbolic meaning in the layout.

The grouping of the twelve rocks; five, three, two, one, one, or one, one, two, three, five, each digit being the sum of the preceding two, is part of a mathematical series that creates a link with the proportional patterns in the growth of many natural forms, from the placement of leaves on the stems of plants to the internal chambering of shells.

In the end, however, as is only right in anything to do with Zen, it is the intuitive eye which has the last word. Rocks chosen, when first found, to fit in one position, ended up in quite another or had to be discarded altogether.

Within the overall scheme, which more or less survived, things grew and changed in unexpected ways as each rock was moved by tripod and lowered centimetre by centimetre into the ground in order to leave visible exactly what was intended when the gravel, soil and moss were added.

With each successive placement the garden gradually took control, demanding endless adjustments of orientation of as little as a single degree in order to ensure exactly the right flow from rock to rock and group to group within the design as a whole.

Because Dr. Eric Robinson, a geologist at University College London, had close connections with Cumbria, it was in the fells above Coniston in the Lake District that we began our search for suitable rocks. Without the hospitality and organising powers of his friend Philip Johnston, several of those that we found would have been quite impossible to get down.

In all we made eight or nine visits to find the handful that we needed among the hundreds of thousands of rocks that we saw as we climbed and scrambled over the fells and screes and the tailings of long abandoned copper mines (18 L, 19 R).

However, it was actually beside the gravel road up which I drove alone for a preliminary meeting with Philip Johnston, that the first of the eight rocks that, with due permission we collected, caught my eye, eventually to take its place in the garden on the left of the major group of three geologically quite different stones.

The two and a half ton central rock, a third of which is underground, together with the one to its right, we subsequently found in a West London rock supplier's yard. This too was the source of the tall, half-buried, almost vertical rock that stands beside the low lying rock from Cumbria on its right.

You notice I said' almost vertical. As you can see from this unusual view, all is indeed illusion (24 R). It was set like that to make it look exactly right when seen from the viewing platform which was yet to be built.

The fourth and final rock from the rock yard is the jagged grey and pink rock, of yet another geological type, which has not been sunk into the ground at all (25 R).

On the other hand, less than a quarter of the other single rock, immediately in front of it, is visible (26 L). When we found it we had an almighty struggle to carry it, slung beneath a cradle of steel scaffolding poles, up the steep river bank (27 R).

When the eight of us first tried to lift it, oriental fashion, with a single pole, it bent like wet spaghetti.

In searching for rocks one has to know what one is looking for, yet paradoxically keep an absolutely open mind. A whole rock or a fraction of a rock that works are equally important. Both must catch the eye. The seen and the unseen are one, and each and every rock must be chosen with a clear idea of how much may or may not be visible in the end.

Each rock must be respected and selected as a single indivisible, three-dimensional whole. Each must be as fine on the unseen sides as on the sides presented to the viewer. This can readily be seen from this same rock (28 L, 29 R) when photographed from angles which no visitor would ever see. Time and again a rock with a particularly beautiful front face or two fine sides, turned out to be a mere façade, an empty shell to be rejected.

Each and every rock was chosen for itself, and not for itself, to fit into the overall pattern of the garden and to live harmoniously with its neighbours. The creation of harmony within diversity is, indeed, a guiding principle in Shogyoji itself and is the fundamental purpose of Three Wheels.

How hard it sometimes was to see a rock, hiding, well camouflaged amongst its neighbours, instead of lying in the open by itself, can be seen from this rock from the eventual group of five, which was first spotted nestling in the middle of a spoil heap thirty feet or more below us as we scrambled over it (30 L, 31 R), (32 L).

As can be seen from the marker string, the first rock in this group is largely buried, while the main rock sits upon the surface (33 L, 34 R). Nevertheless, it is another essential aspect of any good Zen garden that each rock, however it is set, should appear not to be sitting on the ground, but to grow naturally out of it; to be as much a part of the landscape as any mountain is. The main rock also (35 L) nestled in amongst its fellows, this time far above the lake across which it was ferried in the evening in a rubber boat after being lowered inch by inch upon a makeshift cradle with the aid of a belaying rope.

In hindsight I am sure that the first two rocks in the opening group were subliminally chosen and eventually set with the very different group at Ryōan-ji (36 L) hidden somewhere at the back of my mind, and there may well be other, more distant echoes of that wondrous, very different garden.

The two rakes held by Taira in his working clothes (37 R) and made by John Read, are, however, the only things directly and consciously copied from Ryōan-ji.

The levelling and raking, which takes Taira over five hours every fortnight, is not only intended to evoke the patterns that occur when the great rollers of the open ocean interact with islands in their path. Together with the careful placement of the rocks, the long parallel lines assist in making a small space seem vast in the mind's eye. The leaving of the long views into the far corners unimpeded further enhances the effect.

The harmony which a Zen garden is meant to create is not a passive thing It is an active unison built up of separate notes, and the garden at Three Wheels is designed not simply to incorporate, but if possible to extend what seem to be the underlying principles of the great Zen gardens of Japan by maximising the diversity from which the final harmony is built.

In most of the strict Zen Temple gardens in Japan, the geological range of the rocks is relatively restricted. Some, indeed, contain only a single type. The same is true of colour and texture. Some even have no rocks at all. Where, as at Ryōan-ji, the changes in texture are sometimes marked, the contrasts are held in check by muted colour and by the considerable intervening distances.

At Three Wheels all such contrasts are closely juxtaposed. Some rocks are set close to the viewer. Some are far away and can never be approached, and the twelve rocks comprise some ten, very different, geological types. Jagged vertical forms stand next to soft, reclining horizontals and there is a maximum variation between rough and smooth, sharp and rounded.

Man and nature are, moreover, directly brought together by the combination of naturally weathered and of quarried rocks, one of which still bears the groove made by a drill, although few people ever notice it.

Finally, innumerable shades of black and brown and grey; of white and pink, are in constant interplay between one rock and another, and even at times within a single rock, and interact with the grey, speckled granite gravel and the light, honey brown of the cob walls with their grey and brown Cumbrian slates and lead capping (38 L).

It is interesting that the slaters who came down from Cumbria wanted to throw away all the brown slates as being discoloured, whereas to us they made a special contribution to the overall harmony.

The colour interplay continues in the granite sets and marble pebbles of the guttering and the grey oak planks and beams of the viewing shelter (39 R) with its grey, thatched roof and wattle and daub panels.

The twelve rocks of the garden may, indeed, be thought of as being in a constant process of harmonious encounter with each other and with their surroundings. Here, perhaps, although I did not think of it in those terms at the time, is another aspect of their possible symbolic meanings, since encounter, like harmony within diversity, is a central theme in the Shin Buddhist way of life and was, as it turned out, a fundamental aspect of the making of the garden.

The original garden with its trees and bushes could have been cleared and levelled by a bulldozer and digger, and the garage with its concrete foundations demolished, and the myriad tree roots grubbed up, in four or five days at the most, and virtually no one but the drivers would have been involved.

Instead, it was all done by hand (40 L, 41 R), in fair weather and foul, through a long harsh winter of hard physical labour.

From Japan, to toil beside the members of Three Wheels and their British and, indeed, their Indian helpers, came a constant stream of young priests and senior monks, of boys and girls and men and women, from seventeen to seventy, and from all levels of society, in an endless process of encounter.

Not least exciting was my own encounter with Masayuki Ogawa who, with quite extraordinary generosity of spirit, was content, in spite of being one of the top garden experts in Kyoto, to come and supervise such technical processes as the making and moving of the tripods with which the sometimes massive rocks were shifted into place (43 R).

No less remarkable was the fact that Taira's elder brother, Horenji san, who had built his own Temple Garden in Usuki, and whose flower arrangements are amongst the most beautiful I have ever seen, came, together with three expert helpers, to assist.

It was indeed a case in which ignorance and determination on the one hand were more than matched by expertise, humility and forbearance on the other (44 L, 45 R).

In the end, in spite of what may well have seemed, initially, to be insuperable barriers of language and cultural background, all those who worked at Three Wheels, and all of you at Shogyoji who subscribed so generously to make the building of the garden possible, and who, unable to come to England yourselves, followed every aspect of the saga through a stream of photographs and video recordings — not to mention telephone and Email reports at all hours of the day and night — had become as one.

During its making, the garden with its rocks, designed to create a harmony out of diversity, worked at a deeper, human level, to do exactly that.

If you were to ask me now if I am pleased with the garden or proud of it, it would be a question that has no answer.

From the beginning, non-attachment to the outcome; doing for the doing, as far as such a thing is ever possible, appeared to be the only way to work, and non-attachment is not a garment that is easily put on and taken off.

All history, all our memories of the past, are constructs, are illusions. To become attached to things done in the past — worse still to one's own actions and their seeming consequences — is no way to live in a world in which it seems that even self is an illusion.

Yet, in some sense, the garden is, I am, and you are. That is all.

As for the purpose of the garden, it is what is brought to it and taken from it that gives it meaning. If you, or anyone, see in it some particular purpose, that then is its purpose. If, on the other hand, you see no purpose in it, then there is none.

Certainly in Zen, and in Buddhism as a whole and in the Sutras in particular, words, like all the words that have flowed over you this evening, have very little meaning. So it is with a Zen garden.

However, if there must be words, an attempt at a verbal introduction in Japanese and English, which some of you may know, hangs on the walls of the viewing shelter.

Its opening lines go like this:

Here in the garden
do not ask who made it,
or why, or when.

The garden is and you are.

Be.