Zen Garden of Hashin( Light Rays from Buddha )

location : Tofuku-ji Komyo-in temple ,Kyoto city,Kyoto prefecture,Japan

 

Hashin-tei garden 波心庭　

created by Mirei SHIGEMORI重森三玲

 

 

The stone placement represents the emitted lights ,and it comes from the name of this temple 光明院　光(Kou)means "lights" 明(myou)means "bright",so 光明means bright lights,in other words, the beams of light coming from the Buddha's body.

 

For more information...

 

This temple was founded by Kinzan Myosho in 1391 and the garden was designed by modern landscape architect Mirei Shigemori in 1939 and called "the garden of Hashin"

The significant feature of the garden is its strong stone foundation and modern style allotment of land by moss ,especially the placement of stones attracts attention and has some meanings

 

We can see the triad stone arrangement at the rear of the garden ,in which the central stone symbolizes Buddhist Mount Meru,

It is so- called "Sanzon-seki "三尊石 in Japanese and in this case selectively placed on artificial moss hill and regarded as a kind of the light source from which the lights are radiating.

And the other stones represent the radiated lights itself from the Sanzon-seki stones.

So in other words ,the garden depicts the lights source and lights beams by using 75 stones, that is based on the Buddhist thought and connected with the name of the temple "Komyo" 光明[Kou or Ko 光 means the lights ,Myo 明 means bright.

 

Thank you for your interest and seeing my photo.

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Mirei Shigemori (重森三玲 Shigemori Mirei, 1896–1975) was a notable modern Japanese landscape architect and historian of Japanese gardens.

Mirei Shigemori was a garden designer who actively participated in many areas of Japanese art and design. Shigemori was born in Kayō, Jōbō District, Okayama Prefecture, and in his youth was exposed to lessons in traditional tea ceremony and flower arrangement, as well as landscape ink and wash painting. In 1917, he entered the Tokyo Fine Arts School to study nihonga, or Japanese painting, and later completed a graduate degree from the Department of Research. In the early 1920s, he tried extensively to found a school of Japanese Culture, Bunka Daigakuin to synthesize the teaching of culture, but was foiled by the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, which forced him to move back to his hometown near Kyoto.

 

He also intended to create a new style of ikebana,or flower arrangement, and produced art criticism and history writings, including the Complete Works of Japanese Flower Arrangement Art published in 1930, and the New Ikebana Declaration written with Sofu Teshigahara and Bunpo Nakayama in 1933. Throughout his later gardening career, he maintained a voice in avant garde criticism of ikebana through publishing Ikebana Geijutsu magazine beginning in 1950, and through the founding of an ikebana study group called Byakutosha in 1949.

 

At the same time, he cultivated an interest and knowledge in traditional Japanese gardens. He co-founded the Kyoto Rinsen Kyokai with others in 1932. After the destruction caused by the Muroto typhoon in 1934, he began a survey of significant gardens in Japan. In 1938, he finished publishing the 26-volume Illustrated Book on the History of the Japanese Garden, an unprecedented and meticulous documentation of major gardens in the country which he revised in 1971, shortly before his death.

 

He began practicing as a garden designer in 1914 with a garden and tea room on his family’s property. His first major work was a design for the garden at Tofuku-ji Temple in 1939. He designed 240 gardens, and worked mostly in karesansui, or dry landscape gardens. Many of his gardens are on existing religious sites, but a few of his works are in cultural or commercial settings. He also collaborated with Isamu Noguchi in choosing stones for the UNESCO Garden in Paris.

- wikipedia

 

Canon EOS M5/ EF-M18-150mm f/3.5-6.3 IS STM/

ƒ/7.1 18.0 mm 1/100 sec ISO250 /all manual / no crop

 

 

 

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