Buddhist Gardens: The Garden of Suggestion

But Buddhist gardens in China seem to make no special feature of trees and choose rather to represent the Buddhist pantheon in stone. In a representational garden rocks were required to reproduce the crags and precipices of an ideal landscape, but they also have value not as representations of precipices but because, properly used, they could produce similar sensations without the pretence of representation. They came to be seen as things beautiful in themselves with the unmeaning mysterious beauty which finds in the mind an echo of its inevitability and completeness. They are, in fact, specimens of natural sculpture. In its extreme expression these stones were mounted on a plinth and placed in the garden much as statuary is used in the West. Certain forms of stone were greatly sought after. Expeditions were sent to collect them. Shops existed in the principal cities solely for their sale. So greatly did the connoisseurs value them that in the early nineteenth century in Japan there was a strange version of Europe's medieval sumptuary laws, when a law was made setting an upper limit to the price that could be paid for a single specimen. The quality the Chinese chiefly looked for in their gardens was the `picturesque'. The `picturesque' does not mean simply of-a-kind-suitable-to-be-made-into-a-picture, any more than `poetic' means necessarily of-a-kind-suitable-to-be-made-into-a-poem. There are many pictures not picturesque; there are many poems not poetic. `Picturesque' we must take as meaning a certain heightening of those visual effects which create a positive emotional response; there is an element of caricature about it. There seems not to have been any great development in China beyond the point of the picturesque or emotive garden.