Once upon a time, there was a country parson making his rounds of the village, and he stopped at the cottage of a farmer and looked over the fence to where the farmer was working in his garden, and said, “Well, my man, that’s a wonderful job that you and the Lord have done on that piece of land!” And the farmer said, “Yes, reverend, but you should have seen it when the Lord had it to himself.”

I don’t think that farmer realized that the Lord still had it to himself. We think of ourselves as so separate from the doings of the Lord, or the doings of nature, and as a result of this, when we go to work on the land, we are apt to force patterns on it—as, for example, in this old Italian print of a stately garden, where the plants are practically drawn up on parade ground, and made to look, shall we say, as artificial as city-like, as possible. This is a garden made by someone for whom man was the boss of nature, and not in nature.

I remember once seeing a cartoon of a retired Army sergeant gardener standing by a bed of tulips, all arranged. And there he was, with his arms stiff beside him, calling out, “Attention!” But in the gardens of China and Japan there is an entirely different philosophy where the gardener regards himself, as it were, as a new plant introduced into the area—not one, however, that is rooted to the ground; a mobile plant with an intelligence. And he doesn’t regard his intelligence and his artistry as something different from those processes by which leaves grow and ferns achieve their patterns and water its ripples. He regards his intelligence as something of the same kind.

And therefore, when he looks at a piece of so-called “rough ground” which he is going to turn into a garden, the first thing he asks is not, “What sort of a pattern am I going to impose on this piece of land?” In other words, he doesn’t move in with a bulldozer and shovel the mounds of earth around. He asks, “What would this piece of land, in collaboration with me, like to become?” And this is, of course, the essence of Taoist philosophy upon which Zen Buddhism is founded—a principle which is also illustrated in the art of judo, which I shall be talking about in the next program. The principle that the Taoists call wú wéi, or “non-interference”—which doesn’t actually mean doing nothing in the face of nature, doing nothing in the face of problems that have to be handled, but it means not just taking the line of least resistance, but, as it were, finding out the grain of the situation and going with it. And this whole philosophy of nature—of man as an integral part of nature, not separated from it and dominating it, but in it and moving with it; his own intelligence representing the same force that moves in mountains and stars and plants and trees—is to build works of art that are at the same time works of nature rather than works of artificiality.

Now, one of the most sublime examples of the Japanese garden is that of the Katsura Palace in Kyoto. And this garden was created somewhere around 1620 or 1624. And in these crowded city areas the Japanese have exhibited a perfect genius for achieving, in a very small space, the atmosphere of the vast lakes and forests and mountains. Creating them in the city is a kind of symbolism, too, of the Zen saying,

If the mind is not overlaid with wind and waves,

You will always be living among blue mountains and green trees.

If your true nature has the creative force of nature itself,

Wherever you may go you will see fishes leaping and kites flying.

And so, in the densely crowded cities of Japan, the gardener and the architect have together conspired to use minute spaces to create the atmosphere of peace and solitude and naturalness. Of course, this garden here is a very, very wealthy garden attached to an old imperial palace, with its great lakes and spacious landscapes. But the same thing, of course, is often done on a tiny scale, so that you might think that a space of a few yards is a day’s journey.

Now, the art of the gardener can very well be illustrated by a number of anecdotes about the old masters of gardening. And these were often, incidentally, masters of what is called the tea ceremony. The tea ceremony is a ritual of drinking tea in quiet seclusion with friends, and arises from the practice of Zen monks who, a long time ago, used to drink tea to keep themselves awake during their long hours of meditation.

One of the famous masters of the tea ceremony in Japan was Sen no Rikyū. And a tea master is a kind of coordinator of arts, for the tea ceremony involves not only simply the drinking of tea, but also the ceramic and other utensils connected with it, the building of the house in which the tea ceremony is held, and the construction of the garden in which the house is placed. And so a tea master is a man who has supervision of all these various arts, and casts over them the influence of his exquisite taste.

Now, when Rikyū was studying the art of the garden, his master one day directed him to sweep the path, and religiously and dutifully he swept it. And the master said, “Not quite good enough.” And so he swept it again. And the master looked at it and said, “Still not good enough.” And so he swept it again. But the master said, “Still not good enough.” “Well,” said Rikyū, “look, I’ve swept it three times and it’s perfectly clean.” “No, no, that’s not the point,” said the master. And, grabbing the branch of a tree, he shook it, and some leaves scattered on the path. “That,” said the master, “is a clean path.”

A similar story is told about Rikyū himself, when he attained the full stature of his mastery. He was patronized by one of the great feudal lords of Japan, the prince Hideyoshi. And one day Hideyoshi came to him with a golden lacquer bowl and some plum branches and asked Rikyū to make an arrangement—you know, the Japanese art of ikebana, or flower arrangement. But what Rikyū did was simply to knock the blossoms off to float on the water, and the pattern of random blossoms on the surface of the water with the gold light of the bowl beneath was a perfect creation—but done, as it were, in an accidental way. This, too, is the spirit of wú wéi, or non-interference with nature.

Let me give you another illustration of this, which is rather fascinating. It’s also a story connected with Rikyū. There was a feudal lord of some kind—I forget who he was; a noble—who owned a tea caddy that he was very proud of, and it was a ceramic tea caddy. And he invited Rikyū to have tea with him one day and use the caddy. But Rikyū made no comment about it. And so the nobleman thought, “Well, it really isn’t a very good one after all,” and he was so angry that he smashed it. But a friend of his procured all the pieces and had the tea caddy mended. Now, there’s an art of mending broken ceramics with molten gold, and little lines of molten gold showed all over the caddy wherever the cracks had been, casting this wonderful network. And when Rikyū saw that, he said it was absolutely superb. And consequently, the value of this caddy went up to a phenomenal figure.

Now, this is the art of what the great modern Japanese painter Saburō Hasegawa called the controlled accident. And, you see, there is the combination in the idea of the controlled accident—the accident being the spontaneity of nature, the control being the contribution of man. But actually, in the philosophy of Zen, these two things are not thought of as different, as representing different realms; control from the realm of mind and spirit, and accident from the realm of matter and brute energy. They look upon the two as one energy, and therefore the intelligence of man working in nature simply being a more elaborate form, a more complex form, of the same forces that are, as I said, shaping the trees and the ferns.

Now, the Katsura garden, which I showed you, as I said, was a very elaborate one. And, for my taste, the extremely simple gardens that you often find in Zen monasteries are still more marvelous. And there is a particular garden in Kyoto at a temple called Daisen-in, which is a peculiarly magnificent example of this art. These are just a few initial pictures of stone walks in the neighborhood of this garden. And here is a part of the monastery with a monk strolling through it into the garden.

These gardens are made primarily of rock and sand. And you see in this painting of Sesshū’s, which is shown here, the marvelous feeling for rocks which inspired both the painter and the gardener. And here, in the garden of Daisen-in, there is created, as it were, a stream. But the stream is made of sand. And the rocks selected for it could well be called living rocks.

I think nothing shows the absence of alienation between man and nature more than the Zen artist treatment of rocks. You see, rocks, minerals, are the part of nature that we think most dead, and here they are shown as most alive. You know, the art of bonseki, or the cultivation of rocks, is a very, very highly regarded artistic pursuit in Japan. And the gardener will search for days and days in mountain streams and places where fantastic rocks may be found, and bring them to the garden. But once he gets them to the garden he wants to get them accustomed to their new environment. And so he goes very carefully about placing them, and getting, for instance, moss to grown on them in the way that he wants. He wouldn’t dream, for instance, of simply getting some moss and plunking it on a rock. He will rather put the rock in a moist place where moss will form upon it naturally. It may take three or four years. But then, when the moss has grown, he’ll remove the rock to the place in the garden where he wants it. So you could almost say that bonseki is the art of growing rocks. Do you know the Japanese national anthem says something like this: “May our emperor reign a thousand years, reign ten thousand thousand years, until little stones grow into mighty rocks, thick-velveted with ancient moss.”

Now, this attitude to the inanimate—or to the sub-intelligent, as we deign to call nature—is the key of the whole thing. I remember a Western story which illustrates the same point very well. There was a competition in sculpture at the Chicago Art Institute some years ago, and the competition consisted in seeing what the students could do with a cubic foot of plaster of Paris. Now, can you imagine anything more uninviting than a cubic foot of plaster of Paris? A textureless, white, flat material? And the person who won the competition looked at this object for a long time, utterly unable to decide what it wanted to be. So finally she picked it up and flung it on the floor, and this mashed it up and put all sorts of cracks through it, and odd, jagged edges. Then she looked at it again. And now, because it had some texture to it, she could feel, she could look into it, and see what that plaster block wanted to become.

You know, it’s rather the same way, perhaps, when you’re lying in bed early in the morning, and roving your eyes over cracks and blotches on the ceiling, or patterns in a cretonne curtain, and you begin to see figures in them that were not put there intentionally. And, in this way, the rough surface that has come there by nature begins to suggest ideas, which you take up and develop. And this faculty (which we call eidetic vision) is what the gardener and the artist, the rock artist, inspired by Zen, employs.

Now, what about the dwellings that are put near these gardens? Here, too, man does not put up buildings which make him look a stranger in his environment. The whole art of Zen is to put up buildings that look as if they belonged in their place—as, for example, this temple: a Zen temple in Kyoto which, with its thatched roof and the particular style of roof architecture, perfectly fits in with its surroundings. It doesn’t, as we say proverbially, stick out like a sore thumb. It isn’t that man is so, as it were, humble or masochistic that he doesn’t, as it were, have the spirit to assert himself. His assertion of himself is subtle, along the lines of human nature.

And thus, compare this temple with a stately temple of the West, piercing the sky, with stone walls shutting out the day and the surrounding country: Canterbury Cathedral—where, as a matter of fact, I lived for many years. Noble, austere, grand. But nevertheless contrary to nature.

Here is the interior of a temple tea room. And I want you to particularly to notice the marvelous use of emptiness in this kind of architecture. Perhaps it isn’t easy to see clearly, but in the very center of the picture there is a pillar, and that pillar is a tree trunk with nothing more than the bark removed. It has hardly been finished in any other way, so that the twist of the trunk and the grain are still there to be seen.

And the feeling for emptiness that you find very prominently in this kind of architecture is also a major feature of Chinese and Japanese painting, as in this particular example, where you can see that the summer house and the pine tree (at the bottom right) are balanced against a vast area of space in the top of the picture and over to the left. Now, the point of this use of space is not that it’s simply background. I mean, if you take a sheet of white paper and you draw a figure bang in the middle of it, the rest of the white paper simply serves as background. But space in Far Eastern painting and gardening is intended to be part of the composition, not something (as in this Ryōan-ji garden) which shows off the rocks, but together with the rocks constitutes the area.

And this philosophy of space, again, is connected with Zen. Because very often in Zen it is said this universe of form is fundamentally emptiness, or all things come out of emptiness. And this doesn’t mean a kind of philosophy of nihilism, but the idea that emptiness is creative—in just the same way when a small boy is confronted with a vast white wall, he seems to be drawn irresistibly to take a piece of charcoal or something, or a crayon, and make marks on it. Nothing is more fertile than emptiness.

And so, you see, in these Japanese interiors there is a feeling of total freedom from clutter. These houses very largely dispense with furniture. They don’t have great awkward bedsteads and tables, and cumbersome things to be moved around every time one pulls up one’s stakes. You seep on the floor with quilts thrown down that can be rolled up and put in closets during the day, and so have your bedroom space free for other things.

And I think the point of this is that, you know, really, you can only live in such surroundings with comfort if you’re at peace in yourself. In other words, you know how some people, when they get out in the spaces of the desert, they feel uncomfortable. Or if there’s a long period of silence, many of us feel positively uncomfortable. And so, in the same way, we tend to like our living spaces cluttered, full of all sorts of things to distract our minds and our eyes. And this is simply symptomatic of our lack of interior peace. To be able to live in such surroundings, you must be as serene as these surroundings.

This, incidentally, shows the tokonoma (or alcove) in a tea room. This alcove is rather important because it is a sort of survival in the secular house of the altar space in a Buddhist temple. And it’s of great interest for the feeling of Zen that the altar space is no longer occupied by a specifically religious object. In this particular tokonoma here there is a piece of calligraphy hanging (of writing), but very often the principal decoration of the tokonoma will simply be a flower arrangement. Flowers instead of an image, emphasizing the particular Zen point that, when the master is asked “What is the fundamental principle of Buddhism?” he may well reply, “A branch of plum blossom”—this is it.

And we see now how this feeling for the spacious architecture of Japan which flows into its surroundings is increasingly being taken up by American architects. Houses, particularly on the west coast, have for several years been showing the influence of Japanese and Chinese design, but more particularly Japanese. The increasing merging of the house with its surroundings, the increasing use of empty space. But there is one respect, I think, in which the Western architect is not quite understanding the spirit of Japanese architecture, and this is because the culture in which he works does not quite understand the spirit, too.

You know, many of our new homes showing Japanese influence are just pretty much a roof covering a living area, with perhaps some partitioning for the bathroom. But there is no privacy in so many of our modern homes. We have what we call “togetherness”—that means human beings treated as sardines in a can, all lumped together. And this absence of privacy, this absence of seclusion in these great barns, where the whole family lives on top of everybody else, is not at all in the spirit of Zen.

Notice that the Japanese house, as I showed it to you, is full of screens and partitions. The whole idea of creating houses like this, with gardens like this in small areas, with all sorts of screens dividing areas off, is to create privacy and peace, and an atmosphere of solitude in a densely populated area.

And so, where we use this kind of architectural feeling to throw people together—you know, we’re not really putting them together. You don’t get human people to cooperate with each other by throwing them at each other’s heads. Just in the same way, you don’t get the full development of human personality by trying to cultivate personality. Did you ever hear of anybody who had true personality who got it through taking a course on how to win friends and influence people? Or how to be a real person? You never did. It’s rather: when you forget about your personality, and you become interested in something else, that you become interesting to other people.

And so, in the same way, it’s when you learn to love solitude that—paradoxically, it may seem—you’re able the better to get on with others. This is an example of what’s sometimes called a paradox—I simply call it the backwards law—which runs all the way through Taoist and Zen philosophy: that contrary things come from actions, unexpected things. That is to say, when you would be strong, very often the best course is to be weak. When you would be powerful, the best course often is to withdraw.