0 years. These rock islands are also said to symbolize a tiger and its cub swimming, or even a deer or rabbit. Yet the mind can also ascribe other symbolism to the scene. There is nothing in a Zen garden except what you bring to it yourself. Sitting in one of these gardens one is bound to enter into meditation and spiritual contemplation.All stones are fundamental to the dry-stone garden; and after the Heian period the making of a garden was referred to as “standing the stones.” It is little wonder, therefore, why they were so important in the Japanese garden. Other symbolic references were made with stones such as the shumisenseki and the kusenhakkaiseki, both stone-groupings identifiable with Buddhist ideology and teachings. The dry-stone garden was, in other words, an expression of nature taken to an extreme, generated by this kind of strong attachment for stones. These gardens created by the Zen priest are called “kansho-niwa” or (contemplation garden) and termed by many today as “Zen gardens “. The two main elements of a Zen or a “dry style” garden are rocks to form mountains and island and raked sand to form flowing water. The sand used in Japanese gardens is not often even sand but instead crushed granite. These dry-stone gardens symbolically expressing elements of nature in stone appeared during the latter part of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th century as stated earlier. Although toward the end of the 16th century, when the splendor of Momoyama culture was at its height, Rikyu, the renowned tea master, perfected the highly understated and yet elegant aesthetics of tea, and a very particular style of garden was developed as an approach to the tea house or room where the ceremonies would take place. It was these two garden styles, the abstracted “dry-style” garden and the restrained “tea garden”, which would greatly influence the Japanese gard...
