Chinese Garden's Design: The Garden of Suggestion

Upon this fertile field were sown the teachings of Buddha which elevate the attainment of calm, of contemplation, of freedom from all kinds of desire, to a mystical level. There were thus united in the cultivated Chinese character a love of nature and that wonderful passive receptivity to sensation that makes the connoisseur. The habitable portions of China have been thickly peopled and intensively cultivated from very early days. In escape from their urban and suburban surroundings it was customary for men to visit from time to time those spots, usually mountainous, often remote, where the beauty or the grandeur of the scenery, by stripping off the dust of daily affairs, revealed the deeper harmonies of the spirit the awareness of which gave them so essential a delight. Here, in a lightly constructed summer house, in the company of a few well-chosen friends, a man might pass some days in delightful conversation or the making of verses, offering whatever sacrifices seemed appropriate to the genius of the place. The journeys to such spots were often arduous and particularly difficult for womenfolk, whose artificially restricted feet made them bad pedestrians. What more natural than to try to reproduce the physical conditions which induced this state of intense awareness of being (being not doing) very much nearer home? To make, in fact, a garden in the likeness of the revered landscape? This was the origin of the Chinese garden and though the sacred imitative character did not endure everywhere the love for natural scenery and of the emotional states aroused by it did. Unlike the gardens of Europe, with their dual ancestry of sanctuary and a grove sacred to heroes, the first function of these gardens was to induce a desired spiritual state. Because of its wild rather than urbane origin geometry had no place in the Chinese garden's design. The outline might be rectangular and it might contain many pavilions, but beyond that the architect had no function.