Tea Gardens: The Garden of Suggestion

Their height above the ground was also at one period governed by a rigid convention... the lower you were in the social scale the nearer your stepping-stones were to the surface of the mud. Waterways, whether wet or dry, were crossed whenever practicable by bridges. In Japanese gardens bridges were not conceived as ways of crossing water dry-shod, but rather as viewing terraces, and the more protracted they succeeded in making one's journey across water the better. Where man-made articles were present they had a strangely Puritan quality; there was a calculated rusticity, a primitive coarseness about them. In place of the exquisite half-circle of jade which was the Chinese ideal of a bridge the Japanese preferred a rough timber construction or a monolith. Otherwise the most conspicuous feature in the average garden was the lantern, or rather the lanterns, for they have a tendency to proliferate much as urns did in eighteenth-century England. These lanterns, again of very well pigeon-holed types, are the direct result of the influence of Buddhist monastic gardens, for there they fulfilled the same function as candles in a Roman Catholic Church or tripods at Delphi: they were offerings, gifts, sacrifices, and their function of shedding light was of very little importance. Artistically they were points of reference, highlights in the design, they provided the orderly, symmetric element which served as a foil to the natural shapes of rock and tree and water of which the garden was composed, though even with this age itself, or those appearances of age, moss and lichen, were desired attributes. The tea garden was a very specialized form of gardening indeed. It seems to have appeared in Japan in the fourteenth century and is supposed to have originated in China. Inasmuch as tea drinking and the courteous formality of a tea party were originally Chinese, this is no doubt true, but the esoteric ceremonial, the religious ritualistic quality of the tea ceremony, is only another instance of the Japanese formalizing to the most extreme degree a Chinese hint. The purpose of the tea ceremony, for it is strongly purposive, is to serve as a moral exercise. It is designed to inculcate the simple virtues of restraint, modesty, politeness, sensibility, and so on. The participant enters the tea garden through a narrow aperture about three feet in circumference necessitating a position of humility and reverence. He passes through a garden which seeks by its design to evoke a certain spiritual aura.