‘Gardeners of the Cosmos’:

The Way of the Garden in East Asian Tradition *

DAVID E. COOPER

Friedrich Nietzsche complained that in European philosophies of art attention

focused too much on the ‘spectators’ of art works and too little on the artists who
created them. Art, he objected, has been envisaged primarily in terms of its products
and not, as it should be, as an ‘activity’ or ‘task’ – the ‘highest task … of this life’, no
less.1 This is not a complaint and objection he could have raised against East Asian
traditions of thought. Here, the arts are ‘Ways’ (Chinese dao, Japanese dō) –
practices that, while they may produce works for people to appreciate, are
essentially ‘tasks’ that belong to the endeavour to live well.
The value of an art or Way is not a simple function of the merit of its products.
This is as true of gardening as it is of other activities classed as Ways in China,
Japan and Korea. One could, as in gardening magazines, understand the expression
‘a good gardener’ in purely technical terms, as referring to someone who makes
gardens that are – by horticultural, aesthetic, ecological or whatever criteria –
successful. But this is a thin understanding that does not correspond to the rich East
Asian conception of gardening’s engagement with the good life.
An important component in this conception is a perception of good gardening -
and of Ways more generally – as nurturing a right relationship between human
culture and the natural realm. In a volume devoted to exploring connections between
gardening, nature and humanity, it is a promising strategy to turn to those traditions
in which these connections have been salient and accorded deep significance.

WAYS

The significance of gardening in these traditions is nicely hinted at in the words of my

title. The phrase ‘gardeners of the cosmos’ is one I have borrowed from a recent
book on Daoism whose author explains that a ‘key metaphor’ in Daoist texts is that
of cultivation. The model for Daoist sages or adepts is the responsible gardener who
plants, nourishes, weeds and then lets things grow according to nature. They may be
called ‘gardeners of the cosmos’, people who ‘slowly shape their life and
environment’ with a right appreciation of the relation between human activity and the
order of nature.2
The metaphor of gardeners of the cosmos is not without earlier and close
relatives. The eighteenth-century Chinese poet and painter, Cheng Hsieh,
encouraged his readers to ‘regard the universe as a garden’. 3 Nor is the image
confined to China and to Daoism. The distinguished Japanese garden designer and
Zen Buddhist priest, Shunmyo Masuno, invites us to draw on the ancient idea of
tokikata, which he characterises as ‘the reading of the cosmos through the garden’.4
As the chosen profession of Shunmyo Masuno suggests, however, gardening
does not provide simply a metaphor for human beings’ place in the cosmos.
Gardening, in the literal sense, is itself a way in which people shape their lives and
their environments. Gardening itself is a Way, a dao or dō. It is difficult to exaggerate
the importance of the idea of a Way in East Asian cultures, and difficult as well to
articulate the idea succinctly. The term applies to a wide range of human practices –
to those, like painting, that we call ‘fine arts’; to ‘martial arts’, such as judō and aikidō;
to crafts like flower arranging (kadō – ‘the Way of flowers’); and to ones that belong
in no such convenient categories of Western discourse, such as chadō, ‘the Way of
tea’, and indeed gardening. Each Way requires training, apprenticeship, and the
mastery of techniques. A Way, however, is much more than the exercise of a skill.
For a true practitioner of a Way, it is ‘a way of life’ and ‘self-development’ or, to
invoke the metaphor of gardening, ‘self-cultivation’.5 Ways have even been
described as ‘forms of moving meditation’ or ‘secular means of enlightenment’.6
Expressions like ‘self-cultivation’ indicate that practitioners of Ways are engaged
in care of the self – in the training and disciplining of emotions and desires that all
too easily fracture or destabilise a person. The mindful or ‘one-pointed’ concentration
required for successful practice counteracts the tendency to act capriciously and
impulsively. Hence the many anecdotes of calligraphers or gardeners who spend
long periods in poised attention before committing to a brush stroke or the placing of
a stone. It would be wrong, however, to think of self-cultivation as directed solely at
‘inner’ processes – or, better, wrong to think that, in East Asian traditions, a sharp
distinction can be maintained between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’. Necessarily, a Confucian
classic reminds us, ‘a man’s heart will be shown in his outward appearance’. 7
Daoists seek, in one commentator’s words, ‘bio-spiritual cultivation’ and, in another’s,
a ‘tuning of the body’.8 Bodily care and cleanliness, meanwhile, are imperatives for
followers of Shinto.
Self-cultivation, then, is care of the person as a whole. A Way is an education in
bodily discipline, demeanour, style and comportment as much as in management of
the soul. It is cultivation, as well, of the virtues. In fact, caring for the self – through
attention to cleanliness, say - is already to be exercising virtues, for this contributes
to a flourishing life. An example of a virtue both required for and reinforced by
practising Ways is a humility that ensures respect for the traditions, materials and
other sources that make achievements possible.
That there is cultivation of the body and of the virtues is sufficient to show that the
‘meditation’ and ‘enlightenment’ associated by some writers with Ways are not a
form of inner navel-gazing. It should be emphasised, too, that the mindfulness and
virtues to be cultivated necessarily entail engagement with the world. As the
Confucian classic cited earlier puts it, virtue cannot help but show up – ‘shine’ – in
one’s ways of dealing with family, friends, and the wider world. 9 Conscientious
followers of Shinto, writes one author, aim to bring ‘purity, order … cleanliness …
brightness – in a word, immaculate impeccability’ into the world around them.10
Confucius, his follower Xunzi, and the Daoist sage Zhuangzi respectively spoke of
the consummate performer of music as helping to ‘bring things to completion’, ‘serve
heaven and earth’, and allowing things ‘to accomplish their own mandates’.11
Remarks like these reflect an ancient conviction that there are symmetries or
correspondences between human affairs and the processes of nature that make it
possible for the moral and cultural activities of people to influence the latter. This
‘correlative thinking’, as it is sometimes called, in turn reflects and reinforces the
ambition that pervades East Asian teachings – to achieve harmony between one’s
own life and the wider reality to which it belongs. Through cultivating our own
natures, says Zhuangzi, we become ‘blended with heaven and earth’ and thereby
are ‘in accord with the ultimate course’ of things.12 The self-cultivating Ways of
human beings are, in effect, ‘forms of integration into some larger whole’. 13 Human
Ways, properly practised, bring us into harmony with the Way (the dao).
The general thought here is not confined to traditions, like Daoism and
Confucianism, that employ the explicit rhetoric of harmony with the dao. For
Shintoists, respectful religious practice achieves ‘fellowship with the kami’, the divine
forces that hold sway over the world.14 For Zen Buddhists, the Way of tea fosters a
selflessness or ‘emptiness’ that emulates, at the human level, the emptiness of a
reality where there is only ‘not-self’ (Pali anatta). A Way, thereby, is not just a means
for bringing one’s life into harmony with the truth of things, but an epitome of the
proper relationship between human beings and the larger order. The practice of a
Way exemplifies or manifests a relationship that may be impossible to articulate in
literal language.
This helps to explain why Ways are invested, in East Asian traditions, with
profound significance. In Daoism, Zen Buddhism, Shinto, even Confucianism, there
is a primacy of practice over theory or doctrine. Shinto, for example, has been
described as ‘spirituality without an agenda’, an ‘existential religiosity’ whose vehicle
is the various rituals, arts and practices of adepts, and not a body of doctrine to
which they must subscribe.15 In none of these dispensations is the route to self-
realization and virtue that of assenting to a set of propositions. Living well is not
some extra bonus that right beliefs may bring. Rather it is in and through living well –
through practising a Way - that Daoist craftsmen, Confucian musicians and Zen
calligraphers know the way of things that cannot be said.

GARDENING AND SELF-CULTIVATION

‘The garden’, declared the twentieth-century Japanese philosopher Nishitani Keiji, ‘is
my Zen master’.16 The remark dramatises a conviction that many East Asian thinkers
– and not just Buddhists - would endorse. Gardening enjoys a certain pre-eminence
among the Ways through which human beings may come to lead fully realized lives.
Each Way seeks to reflect or promote a balanced relationship between humanity and
nature, and a practice so obviously engaged with natural processes as gardening
would seem to be in a privileged position to achieve this. In good gardening, it has
been said, one discerns a ‘dialectic’ of ‘cooperation between human beings and the
natural world’.17
The garden is certainly regarded in the traditions that concern us as an arena for
self-cultivation or care of the self. It is a place, for a start, where discipline and close
attention to ‘materials’ – to the properties of a plant, say, or the quality of the soil –
must replace whim and impulse. The famous advice of the eleventh-century
Japanese treatise on gardening, the Sakuteiki, to ‘follow the request of the stone’
can go proxy for countless injunctions in the literature to be mindful of and
responsive to the natures of things and creatures in the garden, the character of its
site, and the wider environment in which it is set.18
Such injunctions are found, for example, in the many ‘Records’ kept by Chinese
literati that describe their experience of the gardens that they have made and in
which they relax, meditate and converse with friends. A prominent theme in works
like Sima Guang’s eleventh-century Garden of Solitary Enjoyment and Chen Fuyao’s
Flower Mirror some six hundred years later is the power of garden to afford
protection from ‘the dust and grime of the city’.19 This is less a reference to urban
pollution than a metaphor for a frenzied and convention-bound immersion in political
affairs and business that allows no scope for self-reflection. In the garden, by
contrast, a person is not governed by artificial regulations and has the time and the
inspiration – from observing the lives of plants and birds - to reflect on ‘the principles
of things’ and on the direction that his or her own life should take.
One should not, perhaps, picture literati like Sima Guang as involved in muscular
activities like digging soil or sawing branches. But elsewhere in the literature the role
of gardening in disciplines of the body is certainly indicated. Zen Buddhist writers, for
instance, emphasise the importance, in order to reduce self-centredness, of
absorption in routines of physical work – to the point, it has been joked, of holding
that the very purpose of having a garden is to work in it. In Shinto, equally, an
emphasis is placed on making the garden in which the shrine is set immaculate and
clean – a fit precinct for people who are dressed in immaculate clothes and have
purified themselves with water. For Shinto, as for Zen, the attention to bodily
discipline that the garden invites is not disjoined from attention to mental and
emotional discipline. They belong together in a wider economy of care for one’s
person. The same is true of the attention paid by Daoists to care of the body. Here
there is an emphasis on a ‘tuning of the body’ so that it chimes with the various
rhythms that mark the processes of nature. One reason for the importance attached
by Daoists to gardening is that it attunes people to the rhythms of the day and the
seasons, and thereby promotes ‘integration’ into the cosmos itself.20
Following a Way, we saw, is an education in virtue. Different Ways are no doubt
especially suited to developing different virtues – courage in the case of aikidō, say,
or courtesy and solicitude in that of chadō. The garden is regarded, certainly, as an
arena in which to exercise and refine a number of virtues. We have, in fact, already
mentioned some personal qualities manifested in good gardening – cleanliness and
self-discipline, for example – that figure among the virtues (Chinese de) in East
Asian traditions.
 Among the important and related virtues that the good gardeners must exercise if
their enterprise is to flourish are humility, trust and respect. Humility is primarily a
sense of dependence, a modest appreciation that one’s success is contingent on
factors beyond one’s control. Gardening is a Way that is especially apt to encourage
this sense. A garden will not ‘work’, despite the gardener’s best efforts, unless the
soil is suitable, the rains come, and the rabbits stay away. Nor can the gardener
even make these efforts except in a context where knowledge and skills have been
developed and handed down by others. Even the most creative and original
gardeners are in debt to traditions that stretch back centuries.
A humble appreciation of the need for the natural world to cooperate if the
enterprise is to flourish merges with the virtue of trust. This is a precondition for
engaging in any enterprise with a degree of confidence. For the gardener to make or
tend the garden with the prospect that it will flourish, there must be trust in the
benevolence of the kami, or in the continuance of the rhythms that regulate climates,
seasons, growth and decay, or in the responsiveness of the world to well-conceived
projects.
If the gardener’s humility shades into the virtue of trust, so it does into those of
care and respect. In a work compiled in its present form in the fifteenth century by
Japanese Buddhist priests and landscape designers, the gardener is instructed ‘not
to trample on the roots of [a] tree. When you make a landscape garden, maintain an
attitude of reverence and respect, giving each aspect your full attention’.21 The
virtuous gardener displays respect for plants not simply by desisting from wanton
destruction of them and by treating them with protective care, but by attending to
their nature and identifying what is good for them, what they need in order to flourish.
Respect implies a refusal to regard things simply in terms of their use and a resolve,
instead, to see and treat them for what they are.
Respect for natural things is an important component in the celebrated Daoist
notion of wu wei. Literally, the words mean ‘non-action’, but refer, as an early
commentator on the Daodejing put it, to ‘following what is spontaneous or natural’, or
to ‘taking no action contrary to nature’, as a later commentator prefers.22 The ideal of
wu wei, crucially, is not simply cultivation of spontaneity in one’s own person, but
regard for and a resolve to foster the ‘own nature’ (ziran) of all other beings. The
Daoist gardener will ‘support the own course of … things’, and ‘nourish’ them
through ‘following along with the way each thing is of itself’.23 This means that not
only will a plant be allowed to grow as it should but that, for example, it will be placed
in the garden so as to bring out, rather than disguise, its distinctive nature.
Finally, one should not overlook the role attributed to the garden in several East
Asian traditions as a place for educating and exercising various social virtues. For
Confucian literati, the garden was not generally a place, despite the title of Sima
Guang’s work, just for ‘solitary enjoyment’. Writings from the celebrated fourth-
century ‘Preface to the poems composed at the Orchid Pavilion’ to Chen Fuyau’s
Flower Mirror emphasise the aptness of the garden as a setting for considerate
behaviour, cultured conversation, and the promotion of friendship and social
harmony.24 A similar theme is found in Daoist writings. In a fable composed early in
the fifth century, the poet Tao Qian (aka. Tao Yuanming) describes a Utopia, ‘Peach
Blossom Land’, almost inaccessible to outsiders, where people live in peace and
harmony in an idyllic grove, ignorant of the violent, frenzied world beyond. 25
The idea that pervades these texts is that it is only when insulated against
‘worldly filth’ or ‘the dust and grime of the city’ that human beings can authentically
relate to one another. Lives immersed in ‘worldly affairs’ are governed by
regulations, external powers and the imperatives of political and economic
advancement. When so immersed, people are incapable of true friendship and
mutual regard, of being natural and spontaneous in their treatment of one another.
The garden is both a metaphor for, and an exemplar of, a place where human beings
freely participate in a gathering of equals.

GARDENING, ENVIRONMENT AND HARMONY

It is just possible that, from this account of the garden’s role in self-cultivation,
someone might form an image of the good gardener as a cultured scholar or serene
monk enclosed in a garden, occasionally in the company of like-minded friends or
fellow monks, but otherwise cut off from the wider world. The image is encouraged,
perhaps, by a poem like that of the Zen priest, Ryōkan (d.1831), in which he writes of
his love of the seclusion and escape from worldliness that he finds in a friend’s
garden – one where he also finds ‘the spirit of Zen’.26
But the point made earlier about Ways in general applies to gardening as well:
the good practitioner of a Way cannot help but have an engagement with the world.
Indeed, the point applies with special force to a Way that requires such a direct
contact with, and so decisive an impact on, the natural world. Charles Jencks wrote
of the ‘resonance with outer nature’ that, in Chinese tradition, the ‘life-breath’ or inner
power of a painter is deemed to have.27 He could have said the same of the
gardener with equal or greater validity.
Let’s begin by considering some connections between good gardening and
natural environments that are indicated in East Asian literatures. Some of these, in
fact, are indicated in the Ryōkan poem cited above. Secluded the garden may be,
but the poet is acutely aware of its relationship to a larger environment – to the ‘cool,
clear autumnal sky’ and ‘the evening rain’ that falls on the trees. The ‘spirit of Zen’
that the garden evokes is, in part at least, the Buddhist sense of the world as an
intimately interconnected whole. To be mindful of anything is to appreciate that it
owes its identity to its place within an intricate web or net of relationships.
This holistic appreciation that the garden encourages has significant implications
for the gardener’s aesthetic engagement with the environment. Long before William
Kent, inventor of the ha-ha that invited ‘all Nature’ into the garden,28 Chinese and
Japanese landscapers had become masters in the use of ‘borrowed scenery’
(Chinese jeijing, Japanese shakkei). That a gardener should borrow scenery from
the surrounding environment is an important precept both in the Sakuteiki and in the
most celebrated of Chinese works on gardening, Ji Cheng’s 1631 Yuanye (The Craft
of Gardens). As this text explains, however, the gardener must be alert not only to
how the scenery may enhance the experience of the garden, but to the ‘suitability’ of
the garden design to the surrounding environment.29 A designer would be
disrespectful towards nature by creating a garden that occluded, or jarred with, a
beautiful natural prospect. There are other ways, too, in which a design by a
gardener properly attuned to nature will be aesthetically influenced by knowledge of
natural environments. The design may, as in many Japanese gardens, represent
some famously beautiful scene, and materials – rocks, say, or sand – taken from the
location depicted may be incorporated into the garden. Rather like a tailor’s swatch,
parts of the garden actually exemplify what they represent.
If the art of gardening has aesthetic implications for the relationship between
gardens and natural environments, so too do the virtues required for good
gardening. The exercise of cleanliness, care, humility and other virtues extends
beyond the confines of the garden. Care and respect for what grows in a garden, for
example, carries over into the wider environment. Among the second- or third-
century CE One Hundred and Eighty Precepts of the Daoist ‘Celestial Masters’ are
around twenty that enjoin respectful treatment of environments. Rivers should not be
contaminated, trees not wantonly felled, and so on. It is important to appreciate that
these precepts do not reflect an ideal of untouched wilderness. Typically, the places
where rivers and trees are to be respected are sacred spaces, frequented by people,
and often in the vicinity of temples.30 Care for such environments is comparable to
the concern, in Shinto, to ensure that sites are protected and kept pure as fit places
for the kami to dwell.
Respect for animals is especially urged in some classic Daoist texts – a respect
that carefully negotiates between protecting animals (not least, from human
predation) and ‘letting them be’, allowing them to follow their ‘own nature’, their ‘own
course’. Several of the remarks and anecdotes associated with the sage Liezi (fl.
fourth century BCE) attest to this respect. It is said that he treated his own animals,
including pigs, ‘as equally his own kin’, and he was dismissive of the view that
animals were placed on earth to satisfy our needs and appetites. Animals have a
nature and purpose of their own and it is important that we try to understand these
and interpret the creatures’ behaviour rightly. Again, it is not a wildlife ideal that Liezi
is promulgating. Indeed, he hopes that the many animals that he welcomes into his
garden to be fed will lose their desire to live ‘deep in the mountains and hidden away
in the valleys’. The aim, instead, should be to return to the days, before human
beings terrorised and exploited them, when beasts and birds lived together with us in
peaceful proximity.31
An important topic of discussion in ancient China – unsurprisingly, given the
immense scale of its agriculture – was farming. In a manner somewhat prescient of
contemporary debates about organic farming and intensive production, the focus
was not simply on matters of cost-effectiveness and nutrition, but also on ethical
aspects of farming. Especially in Confucian writings, attention was paid to the social
virtues that a good agricultural system should encourage. Indeed, the main ‘value of
agriculture’, according to one text, resides in the virtuous qualities of the life led by
simple and unselfish farmers –one very different from the contrived and self-seeking
life of merchants in the cities.32 Several of these virtues are natural extensions,
beyond the garden wall, of those cultivated in the garden. The ‘well-field system’
described by Mencius sounds, in fact, like one of a community of small-scale kitchen
gardens. What makes it the best system, for Mencius, is not primarily its efficiency,
but its capacity to promote friendship, mutual help, solicitude, love and harmony
among the farmers and their families.33
Qualities needed for good gardening, then, manifest themselves in engagement
with the larger natural world. But we know that gardening, as a Way, must have the
further ambition of achieving and exemplifying harmony with the order of things –
with the Way. Indeed, the aspects of self-cultivation and the various virtues identified
over the last few pages have only a provisional status. For them to be genuine
excellences of a human life, they must be shown to contribute to and reflect this
harmony. This is precisely what many texts in several East Asian traditions attempt
to show.
Very large claims, we saw, were made about the capacity of human beings to
influence the cosmos, to ‘bring things to completion’. According to the Eastern Han
dynasty Daoist text, The Scripture of the Great Peace, it is, in one commentator’s
words, ‘the great responsibility of humankind to maintain harmonious communication
with Heaven and Earth in order to bring about cosmic harmony’.34 With its special
relationship to the earth, gardening was unsurprisingly credited with helping
humankind in this monumental task. But it was also assigned important, if less
cosmically decisive, roles in both enabling and epitomising harmony between human
beings and reality.
Ways owe their centrality in East Asian traditions in part, I suggested, because
they are vehicles of an implicit knowledge of truths that cannot be fully articulated. It
is in and through such practices that people understand the way of things and
conduct their lives in harmony with it. Gardening is an especially apt vehicle of this
understanding. Despite differences in their metaphysical conceptions of reality, there
is broad agreement among the East Asian traditions on the holistic character of the
world, the transience or impermanence of all phenomena, the spontaneity of the
source of the world we experience, and the mystery of this source. Working in
gardens is peculiarly suited to evoking a sense of each of these dimensions of the
way of things.
To begin with, it is work that, sensitive to the seasons, the life-cycles of plants and
insects, and other rhythms in nature, encourages a sense of ‘integration into the
cosmic rhythm’ of the universe at large.35 At the same time, the gardener becomes
acutely aware of the interconnectedness of things within a whole process. In the
garden, an eighteenth-century poet and painter wrote, it is as if flowers are inviting
butterflies, rocks inviting clouds, pine trees inviting the wind, banana trees inviting
the rain, and so on.36 Butterflies, the wind rustling through the branches, and much
else that the gardener experiences are likely, of course, to induce in addition an
impression of the ephemeral character of phenomena. ‘Impermanency’, one of
Lafcadio Hearn’s Buddhist interlocutors reminded him, ‘is the nature of our life’ –
recalling perhaps the days when the refined inhabitants of Heian-kyō (Kyoto) would
stroll in gardens in search of the pathos of the transience of things that falling
blossoms or dissolving mists evoked.37 The idea that we should be sensitive to
impermanence is not peculiar to Buddhism. It is there in Daoist texts and is reflected
in the Shinto practice of dismantling and rebuilding shrines at relatively short
intervals.
The ephemeral nature of events in the garden is one reason why it is essential
for gardeners to be spontaneous – to remain alert, flexible and responsive to
changing circumstances. The garden is an education in spontaneity, not only
because it teaches the need for this flexibility but because gardeners must also be
responsive to ‘the request of the stone’ and of plants, trees and other components of
the garden. There must be no attachment, in other words, to rigid plans that impose
on things what is alien to their nature. In exercising spontaneity and naturalness, the
gardener is in effect emulating the workings of reality. People follow ‘the way of the
earth’, explains the Daodejing, and thereby follow the way of the dao. This is
because the dao in its turn ‘follows the way of spontaneity’.38 The dao does not
‘contend’ or enforce, for there is nothing outside of it to contend against and force
itself upon. While it is responsible for there being things at all, these are not created
or manufactured by the dao according to some purpose or plan. Comparable
conceptions are found in other traditions. In simple activities like hoeing, writes a
Japanese philosopher, people are brought into a ‘face-to-face relation with the
absolute’ that Zen Buddhists call ‘emptiness’ 39 – an ineffable source of the world of
experience that, like the dao, has no plan and imposes nothing on that world.
This last remark leads to a final respect in which gardening is a form of implicit
knowledge of the way of things. In her elegant and acute book on ikebana, Gustie
Herrigel wrote that, while much can be said about flower-setting, there stands
‘behind everything that can be represented … waiting to be experienced … the
mystery and deep ground of existence’.40 Herrigel, one feels, would be happy to
apply her words as well to flower-growing, to gardening more generally. In doing so,
she would be echoing claims about the power of gardening to evoke a sense of
mystery that have been made over the centuries in several East Asian traditions. In
Zen Buddhism, for example, gardens have long been held, in the words of one
authority, to afford ‘a glimpse of this world as it appears to a Zen-enlightened
sensibility’.41 This is a mysteriously emerging world, ‘something ineffable coming [to
us] like this’, as the great Zen master Dōgen put it.42 Those words gesture towards
an experience that is hard to articulate, but to which many gardeners attest. This is
the sense that, in their work, there is a deep connection with the world of plants,
creatures, stones, and seasons that is a ‘gift’, emergent from a source that is at once
beyond the world yet totally intimate with it.43
Over the last few paragraphs, we have in effect answered the question of whether
gardening really is a Way – a practice that is a form of authentic self-cultivation and
in which the qualities it inspires are genuine virtues. In the East Asian traditions that
concern us, a life is one of self-cultivation and virtue only if it is consonant with the
way of things. We have seen that, within those traditions, good gardening is held to
be a vehicle of implicit understanding of reality. The garden fosters a sense of
interconnectedness, transience, spontaneity and mystery. These are fundamental
aspects either of the world of experience or of the source and ground of this world.
To know these aspects is not a matter of assenting to a number of philosophical
propositions, of signing up to a set of doctrines. It is, rather, to work and live with the
kind of sensibility epitomised in the Way of the good gardener.

NATURE, HUMANITY AND THE WAY OF THE GARDEN

The American composer and author John Cage recalled how, having explained to
people the attractions of Zen Buddhism, some of them would say, ‘That’s all very
well, but it won’t work for us, for it’s Oriental’.44 Might it be similarly claimed that East
Asian reflections on the Way of the garden are too remote from Western discourse to
be fruitfully drawn upon? There are significant differences, certainly, in the contexts
and assumptions of the two discourses, some of which stand in the way of dialogue.
For example, Daoist and Buddhist doctrines concerning the connection between the
moral and cosmic orders – ‘correlative thinking’, say, or the theory of karmic effects –
will have little resonance for people educated in contemporary physics and biology.
One should, moreover, resist the temptation to ‘explain away’ such doctrines, to treat
them as merely figurative or only symbolic in intent. That said, it is important to view
them within a framework of thought, concerning the establishment of harmony
between human existence and the natural world, aspects of which should not offend
contemporary science.
Other distinctive components of East Asian reflections on gardens and nature, far
from inviting the sort of negative response John Cage recollects, might surely
encourage reconsideration of tendencies in Western thinking. A striking difference,
briefly noted earlier, is the absence in the East Asian discourse of the ‘wilderness’
ideal that has been so prominent in European and American environmental
philosophy. In China and Japan, the garden has never been a ‘problem’ – a place
that, since it bears the obvious mark of human intervention in nature, needs to be
justified. One American lecturer recalls how his students were disappointed and
angered to hear that Daoist hermits would employ effort and artistry in order to
transform their natural surroundings. For these students, he remarks, ‘a true nature
lover would simply leave nature alone’. And this sentiment, as he rightly points out,
betrays a ‘strictly disjunctive view of the relation between “nature” and “culture”’ that
has never had traction in East Asian thought.45
It is true that, in recent times, many Western writers have themselves criticised a
long-entrenched tendency of ‘opposing’ human beings to the natural world. But their
point, very generally, has been a ‘reductionist’ one to the effect that men and women
are ‘really’ nothing but a species of animal, subject to the same natural laws as
animals are, and sharing with them the great bulk of their DNA composition. This has
never been the point of Buddhists, Daoists and Confucians who reject a
culture/nature dichotomy. In fact, they have tended to emphasise the respects in
which human beings are distinguished from all other beings – not least, in their
capacity to question and care about their relationship to these other beings. These
respects are undeniably there irrespective of data about DNA and a common
subjection of all things to the fundamental laws of nature.
In East Asian traditions, the basis for challenging the dichotomy of nature and
culture is entirely different. It is hinted at in Zhuangzi’s remark that it is impossible, in
any sphere of activity, to separate out what is ‘done by the human’ and what is done
by the non-human, by ‘heaven’ or nature.46 It is made more explicit in a remark I
quoted earlier that refers to a ‘dialectic’ of ‘cooperation between humans and the
natural world’. Elsewhere I have labelled this relationship between culture and nature
‘co-dependence’.47 The term refers to a relationship between human creative effort
and the way the natural world is experienced. Each, I have argued, is dependent on
the other. There can be no creative effort except in the light of a way of experiencing
natural things. Equally, any way in which nature is experienced is a function, in part,
of our creative practices in relation to nature.
Co-dependence is paradigmatically exemplified and expressed by gardening.
What the gardener does cannot help but shape an experience of nature, just as the
latter is bound to impact on what he or she does. What the stone is experienced as
requesting will decide where it is placed in the garden, and where it is placed will in
turn invite an experience of the garden as a whole and of the natural environment
beyond its boundaries. There is an apt visual metaphor for the fusion between
human artifice and nature in the moon-bridge that is a feature of many Asian
gardens. Above the stream there is the man-made creation, in stone or wood;
beneath the bridge is its reflection in the water of the stream. Together, and looked
at from an appropriate angle, the bridge and its natural reflection form a perfect circle
If we are to appreciate the force of rejecting the familiar dualism of artifice and
nature, it is important to recognise that it belongs to a network of dichotomies that
have structured ideas about humanity and nature in Western traditions of philosophy,
religion and science. Others in this network include sharp contrasts between the
aesthetic and both the moral and the religious; between knowledge and both virtue
and emotion; between theory and practice; and between social responsibility and
private pleasure. In this chapter, we have seen how each of these contrasts is
softened or recalibrated within East Asian traditions. It is not that there is a blunt
denial of a distinction between, say, questions about duty and ones about beauty, or
between theoretical understanding and practical skills. Rather, the terms of such
distinctions are treated as abstractions, convenient for certain purposes, from a more
integrated vision of human life.
It is in the notion of a Way – the Way of the garden, especially - that one finds the
terms of these contrasts elided and an integrated vision of life expressed. On my
desk is a book on the arts of Japan in which a photo of a bridge leading into a Shinto
sacred garden is used to illustrate a ‘“religio-aesthetic” tradition’ – one that is as
marked in Buddhism as it is in Shinto – where religious and aesthetic sensibilities
can only be artificially prised apart.48 Earlier we noted how the private pleasures of
Chinese literati in their secluded gardens are inseparable from virtues of friendship
and respect that extend beyond the garden to the wider world of social relationships.
Understanding of aspects of reality that include the transience of phenomena and
the mystery of their source is manifested less in the utterances of scholars and poets
than in mindful engagement with the plants, creatures and elements that come
together in a garden.
I could go on, but the point is made that in the Way of the garden the dualisms
central to Western conceptions of humanity and its relationship to the world are
abandoned in favour of more nuanced connections. It is here that the main value of
the East Asian Way of the garden is to be found. The ‘gardener of the cosmos’, to
recall our opening metaphor, is not a messianic figure at the head of the charge ‘to
save the planet’. He or she is someone whose own life and whose relationship to the
natural environment are modelled on those of good gardener. This is a man or
woman whose engagement with the living world cultivates sensibility to beauty,
bodily grace and discipline, spontaneity and other virtues that enable lives to flourish,
and understanding of the way, and of the mystery, of things.
The final word on the bequest of the good gardener as a model for humanity I
leave to a poet we heard from earlier, Cheng Hsieh. He invited his readers, recall, to
‘regard the universe as a garden’. This, he explains, will lead to ‘the enjoyment of
life’: indeed, it is a vision that, fully embraced, will ‘enable all beings to live according
to their nature’. ‘Great indeed’ the poet concludes, ‘is such happiness’.49

* This paper is an amended version of one published in Annette Giesecke and

Naomi Jacobs (eds.), The Good Gardener: Nature, Humanity and the Garden,
London: Artifice, 2015.

Notes

1. Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Genealogy of Morals III.6, and Preface to The Birth of
Tragedy, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Walter Kaufmann trans., New York: Modern
Library, 1968, pp.31, 539.

2. Miller, James, Daoism: A Short Introduction, Oxford: Oneworld, 2003, pp.45-6.

3. Cited in Jean C. Cooper, An Illustrated Introduction to Daoism, Bloomington, IN:

World Wisdom, 2010, p.129.

4. Shunmyo Masuno, Introduction Michael Freeman and Michiko Rico Nosé, The
Modern Japanese Garden, London: Mitchell Beazley, 2002, p.14.

5. Carter, Robert E., The Japanese Arts and Self-Cultivation, Albany, NY: SUNY
Press, 2007, p.3.

6. Davey, H.E., The Japanese Way of the Artist, Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge, Kindle
Ed., 2012, loc.72 ; Yuriko Saito, “Japanese Aesthetics”, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics
Vol 2, Michael Kelly ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, p.551.
7. The Great Learning (Da Xue), A Sourcebook in Chinese Philosophy, Wing-Tsit
Chan trans., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963, p.90.

8. Kirkland, Russell, Taoism: The Enduring Tradition, New York: Routledge, 2004,
p.33; Schipper, Kristofer, The Taoist Body, Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 1993, p.xiv.

9. The Great Learning, pp.92-4.

10. Pilgrim, Richard B., Buddhism and the Arts of Japan, Chambersburg, PA.:
Anima, 1993, p.10.

11. The Analects of Confucius, Roger Ames and Henry Rosemont trans, New York:
Ballantine, 1999, p.88; Hsün Tzu: Basic Writings, Burton Watson trans., New York:
Columbia University Press, 1963, p.91; Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings, Brook
Ziporyn trans., Indianapolis, IN.: Hackett, 2009, p.68.

12. Chuang-Tzu: The Inner Chapters, A.C. Graham trans., Indianapolis, IN: Hackett,
2001, p.157.

13. The Analects of Confucius, Introduction, p.56.

14. Sokyo Ono, Shinto: The Kami Way, Tokyo: Tuttle, 1962, Kindle Ed., loc.433.
15. Kasulis, Thomas P., Shinto: The Way Home, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i
Press, 2004, pp.32, 36.

16. Cited in François Berthier, Reading Zen in the Rocks, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2000, p.136.

17. Meyer, Jeffrey, “Salvation in the garden: Daoism and Ecology”, Daoism and
Ecology, N. Girardot, J. Miller and Xiaogan Liu eds., Boston, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2001, p.223.

18. Sakuteiki: Visions of the Japanese Garden, Jiro Takei and Marc P. Keane trans.,
Boston, MA: Tuttle, 2001, p.4.

19. On Sima Guang, see Maggie Keswick, The Chinese Garden, London: Academy,
1980, pp.84ff; on Chen Fuyao, see Joseph Cho Wang, The Chinese Garden, Hong
Kong: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp.23ff.

20. Schipper, The Taoist Body, p.139.

21. Illustrations for Designing Mountain, Water, and Hillside Field Landscapes, David
E. Slawson, Secret Teachings in the Art of Japanese Gardens, Tokyo: Kodansha,
1991, §63.

22. Wang Bi and Wing-Tsit Chan, quoted in Wang Keping trans., The Classic of the
Dao: A New Investigation, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1998, p.87.

23. Daodejing: A Complete Translation and Commentary, H-G. Moeller trans,

Chicago: Open Court, 2007, p.149; Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings, p.38.

24. See Zhuang Yue and Wang Qiheng, “The Poetics of Dwelling a Garden: A
Confucian Mode of Being”, Teaching Landscape with Architecture, A. Laffage and Y.
Nussaume eds., Paris: de la Villette, 2009.

25. See Wang, The Chinese Garden, pp.58-9.

26. One Robe, One Bowl: The Zen Poetry of Ryōkan, John Stevens trans., New
York: Weatherhill, 1977, p.48.

27. In Keswick, The Chinese Garden, p.194.

28. In Horace Walpole’s actual words, Kent ‘leaped the fence, and saw that all
Nature was a garden’, cited in John Dixon Hunt and Peter Willis, The Genius of the
Place: The English Landscape Garden 1620-1820, Boston, MA: MIT Press, 1988,
p.313.

29. Ji Cheng, The Craft of Gardens, A. Hardie trans., New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1988, p.39.

30. See Kristofer Schipper, “Daoist Ecology: The Inner Transformation. A Study of
the Early Daoist Ecclesia”, Daoism and Ecology, N. Girardot et al eds..

31. The Book of Lieh-tzu, A.C. Graham trans., New York: Columbia University Press,
1990, pp.43, 55, 179.

32. Quoted from the Spring and Autumn Annals in Fung Yu-Lan A Short History of
Chinese Philosophy, New York: Free Press, 1966, p.18.

33. Mencius, D.C. Lau trans., London: Penguin, 1970, pp.99-100.

34. Chi-Tim Lai, “The Daoist Concept of Central Harmony in the Scripture of Great
Peace: Human Responsibility for the Maladies of Nature”, Daoist Ecology, N. Giradot
et al eds., p.96.
35. Schipper, The Daoist Body, p.139.

36. Zhang Zhou, quoted in Jean C. Cooper, An Illustrated Introduction to Taoism,

p.122.

37. Hearn, Lafcadio, Kokoro: Japanese Inner Life Hints, Public Domain e-book,
2005, Loc.268.

38. The Classic of the Dao, Wang Keping trans., Chapter 25, p.231.

39. Nishida Kitarō, Last Writings: Nothingness and the Religious Worldview, D.
Dilworth trans., Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1987, p.111.

40. Herrigel, Gustie L., Zen in the Art of Flower Arrangement, London: Souvenir,
1999, p.119.

41. Yuriko Saito, “Japanese Gardens: The Art of Improving Nature”, Chanoyou
Quarterly, 1996, no.83, p.59.

42. Dōgen Zenji, Shobogenzo, Vol 2, G. Nishijama and C. Cross trans., London:
Windbell, 1996, p.3.

43. For fuller accounts of gardens and mystery, see David E. Cooper, A Philosophy
of Gardens, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, and Convergence with Nature: A
Daoist Perspective, Dartington: Green Books, 2012.

44. Cage, John, Silence: Lectures and Writings, London: Boyars, 2009, p.143.

45. LaFargue, Michael, ““Nature” as Part of Human Culture in Daoism”, Daoism and
Ecology, N. Girardot et al eds., p.47.

46. Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings, Chapter 6.

47. See David E. Cooper, A Philosophy of Gardens and “Gardens and the Way of
Things”, Earth Perfect? Nature, Utopia and the Garden, Annette Giesecke and
Naomi Jacobs eds., London: Black Dog, 2012.

48. Pilgrim, Buddhism and the Arts of Japan, p.2.

49. Quoted in Jean C. Cooper, An Illustrated Introduction to Taoism, p.128.