Zen Garden Designs

The Zen Garden, also known as the Japanese rock garden, is a type of garden based around the core tenets of Zen Buddhism. Zen means “dry”, and the Japanese word for this type of garden is karesansui, meaning dry landscape. Japanese gardens became very popular in Japan during the years 1185-1573. Buddhist temples in the country created Zen gardens for the purposes of meditation, and shogun rulers adopted this practice to adorn the landscapes around their palaces.

Water is never used in a true Zen garden. Instead, gravel and sand are used to symbolize water. This is done in order to allow patterns to be raked into the sand or gravel at will. The gardener can create ripples, waves, sea currents, rivers, or even lakes in only a matter of minutes. These patterns are altered every so often, because Buddhism teaches that change is the only constant in the universe. Even the most fixed of forms are slowly being altered, bit by bit, by unseen forces. In fact, many temple monks rake sand as an act of meditation, striving for a perfection in linear progression that represents a still mind, and patterns of curvature that reflect a creative mind in harmony with one’s surroundings.

For the most part, rocks take the place of vegetation in Zen gardens. They create focal points around which to sculpt the sand, providing structure to the endless fluidity that surrounds them. In this way, they reflect the relationship between matter and energy. Buddhist monks have long used simple, practical symbolism like this to express profound cosmic principles. The colors of the rocks are typically symbolic as well, featuring a mixture of white and black stones proportionally balanced in key locations in the sand. It bears noting that black is NOT a symbol of evil in the Eastern World, but rather represents the passive principle of the mind. White, likewise, has nothing to do with good, but rather symbolizes action. The combination of white and black stone elements is never meant to represent a clash of opposites in a Zen garden. This is because opposites cannot truly exist in a cosmos of constant change. The objective instead is to create an arrangement is a harmonious unity of passivity and action, receptivity and projection, much like the meditative state of a monk who meditates prior to taking intentional action.

The philosophical function of rocks, sand and gravel is then further developed with decorative intent by creating forms that reflect Natural formations. Ancient Japanese texts on the art of Zen gardening instruct the landscaper to arrange stones to appear like mountains, islands, and cliffs. One famous text even goes so far as to say that the art of placing stones is the primary purpose of gardening. Rocks should always be placed where their most attractive side faces the primary vantage point, and tradition calls for a greater number of horizontal stones (chasing stones) than vertical ones (running stones.) Vegetation is extremely minimalist in such a setting, with moss being the most common ground cover to represent river banks, lakeshores, and mountainsides covered in forests. Very small shrubs are used at times to frame a Zen garden, but only as a differentiating element that sets the garden apart from the remainder of the landscape.