Gardens of Paradise - Part One
The paradise described in the Amida Sutra seems more likely to inspire jewelers than gardeners, especially Japanese gardeners. Buddhism was first introduced to Japan in the sixth century, a period when the Japanese were being strongly influenced by many aspects of Chinese culture, including Chinese gardens. The earliest Japanese gardens borrowed many ideas from Chinese gardens, but the Japanese grafted these ideas onto their native Shinto culture. Unlike Chinese gardens, Japanese gardens are rooted in the concept of "niwa". According to Shinto beliefs, the world is full of spirits, any of which could be harmful. The word "niwa" means open space; it was a purified space in front of their dwellings, a space protected from harmful spirits. In this purified space, the Japanese planted trees and brought in stones, to serve as dwellings for beneficial spirits. As the Japanese adopted Buddhism, it was very easy for them to accept Buddhist beliefs about trees having souls; Buddhism just made nature even more sacred. The idea of a paradise filled with jeweled trees is basically alien to Japanese thought; it is just too unnatural, so I have been trying to understand why these gardens were created.
The Heian period (795 - 1195) is regarded by most historians as Japan's golden age. During this period, the Japanese nobility gathered around the Emperor in the city of Heian-kyo (now known as Kyoto). This was a court society not unlike that established at Versailles under Louis XIV, in that the courtiers rarely visited their country estates and they devoted themselves to living as elegantly as possible. By the middle of the tenth century this society was at its most refined, but the neglect of the countryside had caused huge social and political problems. The courtiers could sense their way of life wasn't going to last much longer and many of them withdrew to their summer homes in the hills surrounding Heian-kyo, where they created paradise gardens.
One of the reasons why I find these paradise gardens so interesting is that they didn't look very different from earlier Heian gardens. For centuries the Heian aristocrats had summered in pavilions which were erected on the north shore of ponds that were large enough for boating. Unlike Chinese gardens of the period, which featured covered galleries along the edge of a pond, the gardens of Heian Japan were mainly intended to be viewed from a boat, rather than
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