If you get out of your car and walk left, you'll reach the Hartley Gardens. A right-hand turn, though, will take you to Japan House. You follow a winding path under a dense canopy of trees and when you emerge on the other end, you see the Japanese gardens.
The University of Illinois started Japan House to promote Japanese culture in Champaign. They offer classes and host authentic tea ceremonies. The house has three distinct rooms, one for each type of ceremony: formal, semi-formal, and casual. The three rooms were built in Japan, then shipped to Illinois for assembly by Japanese carpenters.
The gardens around the house feature native Japanese plants, a Zen dry garden, and, on either sides of the door, a Japanese stone lantern, called a toro, and a pagoda.
Let's Talk about Pagodas
When you think of a pagoda, think of your front lawn. Both have had a similar trajectory from utility to ornament. In the 1500s in England, lawns were communal areas a village used to graze sheep and cows. The word lawn comes from the Old French lande, which just meant heath or open moor. Owning one of these grazing pastures for your own use was a mark of wealth, so the aristocracy planted ostentatious grass lawns in front of their manor houses just to show everyone how much money they had. The upper classes in a brand new United States, to show the world our rich were just as good as the British rich, also planted large grassy plots in front of their mansions. Eventually, we had this emergent middle class who said, if the rich can do it, so can we, and planted lawns in front of their more modest homes. By the 1950s, the heyday of the American middle class, lawns came as standard equipment on any suburban home. Now, all over the US, though few own sheep or cows, suburbanites spend a lot of time and money maintaining these miniature monuments to our pastoral past.
Prehistoric Indians buried important people, kings and such, under piles of rocks. They called the pile a stupa, which just means heap in Sanskrit. After the life and death of Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha), stupas became associated with important Buddhist relics and started too look like domes of earth. During the mid 200s BCE, Emporer Ashoka conquered most of modern day India and Pakistan. He converted to Buddhism and made it the official religion of his kingdom with similar results to Constantine adopting Chrisianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire a hundred years earlier.
Ashoka went on to build giant stupas all over India as sacred sites to Buddhism. Think of the rash of Gothic churches built in the Middle Ages in Europe. It took another 400 years for Buddhism to slosh over the Himalayan rim into China, but when it did, it went into the Chinese blender with Confucianism and Daoism. The Buddhism that emerged focused on the five elements of Chinese cosmology: fire, earth, water, air, and heaven. They built their stupas with five levels (sometimes more, but always an odd number), gave the levels roofs like a traditional Chinese pavilion, and the pagoda was born. A few hundreds years after that, the Japanese adopted Chinese Buddhism and Pagodas whole cloth from the mainland. Now they serve as temples and Buddhist symbols.
In the pictures above, you'll notice the pagoda has five tiers. You'll also notice the toro has five distinct sections (post, base, fire box, canopy, and finial). The Japanese also borrowed toros from China, where they served as light sources for Buddhist temples. This specific toro is a "buried lantern" or an ikekomi-doro. Use of these eventually spread to Japanese Zen Gardens owned by Tea Masters. Sort of like what you see here.
On the Art of Dry Gardening
A Japanese Dry Garden, or Rock Garden, or Zen Garden, uses gravel, not sand, since wind and rain disrupt sand more easily. Zen Buddhism, you guessed it, came from China as well, but the Japanese invented the Zen Garden. Most of the traditional Japanese arts (tea ceremony, Zen gardening, calligraphy, etc.) stem from Buddhism in that they require concentration and focus to perfect. Zen gardens started popping up at Buddhist temples as a way for monks to be creative and practice concentration. The goal is to rake the gravel to look like ripples in a pond, but to do so in a unique and creative way every time. The finished product can also be a focus of meditation.
Japanese Vegetation
Here's a random picture of some of the landscaping with native Japanese plants. We'll explore some of the specific plants I found in a later post.
Meditation Bench
Japan House also has this little gazebo sort of thing with a bench, set to look over the pond. You can sit here and read, think, pray, meditate. When I was here, the place felt very quiet and tranquil. You almost wanted to whisper anywhere in the vicinity of the Japanese gardens.
Unfortunately, we've had this drought up here. And like the corn and the wetlands, this place has suffered. Despite the deceptive beauty of the Arboretum, you can still see the toll the hot, dry summer has taken on area. The current water level sits well below where it once did.
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