A Preliminary Study On Ancient Zen Garden

Zen, is a Buddhism which has Chinese characteristic wisdom and also a philosophy exploring the nature of cosmos. During its development and dissemination, Zen played an important role in many respects of ancient China, such as philosophy, literature, art, science, etc. The Zen temples and Zen gardens, grew and developed in an tough and unique trajectory in history, experienced the periods of "Zen Grotto" (Wei Jin Nan Bei dynasty), Zen temple (Tang dynasty), "Five Mountains and Ten Temples' System" (Southern Song dynasty) and Zen temple gardens in middle ages of Japan. Such valuable heritage is not only a treasure to China and Japan, but also a treasure to the oriental culture and the world civilization. However, we find little reservation and vestige in the land of China for historical reason.On a basis of scientific methods from studying the ancient literatures, ancient drawings and hypothetic restoration, together with some incomplete cases of Zen temple gardens, this paper explores both theory and practice in Zen gardens. Two valuable results achieved are as follows:1. Based on the thoughts of Zen and aesthetics of Zen, a new developing context of ancient Zen gardens was first proposed. Besides, the unique features of ancient Zen temples' layout, architecture and gardens are generalized, and the philosophy of Zen gardening is emphasized by the author.2. Through varied case studies to contemporary Zen-style landscape works in Japan and China, this paper focuses on the relationships between Zen gardens and the modern society, ecology, art and modern landscape architecture, further more, the author explores the modern sense of Zen gardening, so as to give suggestion and reference to colleagues in landscape architecture during their designs.