A Zen monastery under wooded hills, its gates and halls on one axis, the abbot’s quarters between a court of raked gravel and stones and a pond garden to walk round; a plausible temple modelled on those of Kyoto, not a survey of any.
Zen monasteries came to Japan from China in the thirteenth century with their plan: an outer gate, a great two-storeyed gate, the Buddha hall and the lecture hall on one axis from south to north, and round them the meditation hall, the kitchen and offices, the bath and the bell tower. Behind the lecture hall stood the abbot’s quarters, the hōjō, with a court to the south for ceremonies. The Sakuteiki, written in the eleventh century for the gardens of noble houses, had already described such a court of white sand before the main hall, and a pond beyond with islands, stones and streams.
In the Zen temples the court became the garden itself. At Ryōan-ji, around 1500, fifteen stones in five groups stand in a rectangle of raked white gravel some 25 m by 10, behind a low earthen wall, to be looked at from the veranda: the Sakuteiki’s dry landscape, mountains and islands without water. At Tenryū-ji the older pond garden lies behind the hōjō, with stones at its edge and the hills of Arashiyama borrowed into its view. Here the abbot’s quarters stand between the two.
To the west a lane leads past sub-temples, each in its own wall with its own small dry garden, as at Daitoku-ji; a shrine to the guardian god of the place stands inside the precinct, and the houses and shops of the temple town line the street before the outer gate. Pines and maples fill the precinct, and wooded hills close the view to the north.