Marc Peter Keane is a landscape architect who is known for his contemporary Japanese garden designs for private residences, company offices, and temples. He recently relocated back to Kyoto, where he originally trained and worked, after many years in Ithaca, New York.
Keane’s garden designs are informed by his many other artistic and cultural pursuits, which include ceramics, the study of garden history, and a form of personal narrative that combines deep introspection with close observation of the external world and its processes. When Keane writes about nature, he is writing about himself, about all of us.
Viewing a Japanese garden demands active observation. The garden is filled with cultural and perceptual details. Textures, colors, and placements work together to establish frameworks that suggest vaster or more distant spaces. Sometimes the garden designers call attention to their manipulations but often they do not, leaving it entirely up to the viewer to “see.”
Gardens designed by Marc Peter Keane include those at the Genji Kyoto Hotel (Kyoto), in the lobby of 34 East 51st Street in New York City, at the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University (Ithaca, NY), at Hiden-in Temple (Kyoto), at Momochitaru-kan (Kyoto), and at Awanosato Park in Tokushima. (Access to these gardens may be restricted.)
The following selection is from Keane’s book Of Arcs and Circles: Insights from Japan on Gardens, Nature, and Art, published by Stone Bridge Press in 2022.
karesansui
Thoughts on creating contemporary dry landscape gardens—what are often called Zen gardens
You can watch a summer storm descend upon you from across a valley. Black clouds boil above the distant mountains and you find yourself just standing there, watching them approach, the air pressure dropping in a frightening headlong dive. Lighting strikes somewhere across the valley, then moments later, only a hundred yards away. The sky splits open and releases a deluge of hail upon the world, tearing through leaves and pitting the paintwork of hapless cars.
With earthquakes, there is no warning. No theatrical approach. The assault is instantaneous.
Living in Japan means living with earthquakes. They may come at any time, barging into your living room or place of work without a hint of forewarning. Most often, they appear as only a tremor, a quick rattle or thump. The walls shake, some dust falls from the ceiling. A pendant light in the middle of the room sways. You stand, stock still, heart in your throat, eyes wide, ears cocked to listen for what comes next. Is this the big one? A moment later, realizing you have stopped breathing, you take a slow breath and grin or chuckle as if it were all nothing. But it is not all nothing. And it will come again. On that you can depend. The world is in motion and it cannot always move without breaking things.
Japan has the dubious fortune of being located at the convergence of not two, but four tectonic plates. Two of them, the Pacific and Philippine Sea plates, lie to the east of Japan under the ocean. Moving slowly westward, around two or three inches per year, those plates slide down underneath the Okhotsk and Eurasian plates on which the islands of Japan sit. The resulting friction and uplift is what causes Japan to be. The mountains rising from the sea that form Japan, and its one hundred active volcanoes, are all a natural result of the forces that lie hidden beneath the ground. As the plates grind and tear at each other, they understandably jitter and rattle from time to time, about 100,000 times a year, of which about 1,500 can be felt. On average, in a given year, one of those 1,500 will be devastating. But that is only the average over a century. In reality major quakes don’t come in orderly fashion, once a year. They come unexpectedly, in clusters that even to this day are beyond prediction.
Earthquakes are called natural disasters but in fact they are not so destructive for life forms other than humans. Birds and winged insects lift into the air for a time at the first rattle and hover until it is over. Rabbits and deer run themselves in panicked circles, then go back to grazing a minute after it is all over. Plants are not bothered by the shaking, and if they end up shoved an inch or a yard from where they started, it doesn’t matter. The sun shines just as well in that new spot as where they were before.
No, it is we humans, with all our built structures, who suffer. Buildings topple, automobiles skid off highways, dams and levees burst. In fact, when you step back and take a look at the effects of tectonic plate movement on a planetary scale, the negative effects of earthquakes and ensuing tsunami notwithstanding, the results are almost entirely positive. Creative, not destructive. The very landscape of Japan has been born of it, from volcanoes like Mount Fuji, which is the symbol of Japan, to the ordinary granitic hills that cover seventy percent of its landmass. Tectonic plate movement is the mother of Japan.
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Japan’s karesansui gardens are often referred to as Zen gardens in the Western press, although that expression is not Japanese in origin and these gardens are only tangentially related to Zen Buddhism. The word karesansui is written with three characters. Kare 枯, which means withered or dry, san 山, which means mountain, and sui 水, which means water. Kare refers to the fact that the gardens are made without the use of water, no brooks or ponds, and sansui is the ancient way of saying nature. The mountain is the quintessential yang element of nature: upright, solid, everlasting. Water is the quintessential yin element of nature: horizontal, fluid, everchanging. Mentioning the two archetypical elements of nature together, mountain-water, was a simple way to refer to all of nature.
The karesansui gardens are abstract expressions of nature, but the understanding of what nature is and how it works, which underlies those gardens, is that which existed in Japan before the introduction of systems of scientific thought in the eighteenth century. This traditional understanding of nature was, at that time, informed by the concepts of Buddhist, Taoist, and Shintō religions.
As an example, from Buddhism came the concept of Mount Sumeru, which the Japanese call Shumisen, the central mountain of Buddhist and Hindu cosmology. The image of this mountain as the axis mundi of the universe was one that was expressed abstractly in traditional karesansui gardens. From Taoism came the concept of yin and yang, the harmonically balanced dual aspects of nature. The classical form of a karesansui garden—a number of stones representing mountains, set in a field of raked white sand that represents water—is an expression of this duality. From Shintō, the native religion of Japan, came an understanding of stones as being not simply chunks of mineral but as points of connection to the world of the kami, the god-spirits that inhabit nature. The iwakura prayer stones, which predate gardens by millennia, are an example of this.
When the people of Japan during those medieval and early modern times looked at the landscape, which given the landscape of Japan meant they were looking at mountains, they understood those mountains in a way that was informed by the teachings of Buddhism, Taoism, and Shintō. They did not see them as the result of the movements of four massive tectonic plates that underlay the very land they stood on, as the bedrock being bucked up from below. If they had seen the mountains in that light, not only as the realm of the kami or the earthly expressions of the sacred Shumisen, but also as the visible result of an enormous force that lay hidden in the ground below them, what karesansui garden would they have created then?
That is the question that led me to create just such a contemporary karesansui garden in the outdoor courtyard of a new building in New York City. The garden is called Thrust! (including the exclamation point for the proper effect). The materials and design are drawn from traditional karesansui gardens. Stones and moss are the only materials, and the overall design includes a great deal of what is called ma, or empty space, as do traditional karesansui gardens. The underlying theme of the Thrust! Garden, however, is the vast unseen power of tectonic plates, the movement of which is concealed until one realizes that the very mountains themselves are the revelation of that hidden power. In the Thrust! Garden there is a single upright stone, being seemingly propelled out of a field of smaller stones and moss that look like they, too, are being drawn upward by the force. The hidden being revealed.
In another place, also in Manhattan but this time on a rooftop, I made a karesansui called the Still Point Garden. This time I was interested in the concept of singularity. Singularity is a word that has as many meanings as there are people who use it. To the mathematician it means one thing, and to the cosmologist or the theoretical physicist something else. The Penrose–Hawking singularity refers to how gravitation can produce black holes, while another kind of singularity refers to the infinite density that caused the Big Bang. The Still Point Garden features a single upright stone in an expanse of flat river stones laid in a fishscale pattern. The standing stone creates the image of a still point within a field of chaotic energy.
The Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin proposed a singularity he called the Omega Point, a confluence at which life on earth attains a final point of unification. According to his proposal, living entities on earth create first a biosphere that envelops the planet. Next, Homo sapiens, the wise-man or thinking-man, develop a noosphere, a layer of cognitive existence, which, in its final stage at the Omega Point, becomes separated from the physical world to create an overarching metaphysical entity. I expressed this concept in a temporary karesansui garden built at Daigoji temple as part of the Kyōto Arts Festival. In an open courtyard that surrounds the temple’s thousand-year-old pagoda, I created a field of white sand that rose up into a mound in the shape of the Greek letter omega, Ω. The omega and the pagoda together formed a symbol expressing the similarities between Chardin’s concept of release from the physical based on Christian and technological thought, and the Buddhist concept of nirvana or the liberation from the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.
The first karesansui garden I built that used a contemporary understanding of nature as the basis for its design was the Spiral Garden. The setting was a thatch-roofed house in the mountains outside Kyōto, which happened to be the oldest extant residence in Kyōto City, built almost four hundred years ago. The house is L-shaped, the two wings and a separate storehouse enclosing a courtyard in which grew a maple tree that had a subtle spiral growth to its trunk. I extended that spiral out and across the courtyard in a sweeping pattern of moss and white sand. The spiral shape is certainly not the only basic structure in nature, but it is a fascinating one that appears in forms as small as the microscopic double helix of DNA, up to the incomprehensibly large expanse of a galaxy, the arms of which spiral outward from a center dense with stars.
As I write this, as if on cue, there is a slight tremor, one of those gentle shimmies that lies on the cusp of awareness, one that we feel and disregard in almost the same moment. And, yet, I can’t help but accept it as a subtle reminder from the Great Beneath. One that says, yes, I am still here. You will not forget me.
Learn more about Of Arcs and Circles and the author, Marc Peter Keane, on our website.
And be sure to check out Marc Peter Keane on the Stone Bridge Podcast.