The Sound of Cherry Blossoms: Zen Lessons from the Garden on Contemplative Design

by Alxe Noden, Martin Hakubai Mosko

Overview

Contemplative design and Zen teachings—a look at how we can transform our lives and our work through the lens of Japanese garden design.

Garden design is the way of discovering the garden. And the garden is a metaphor for life itself.
 
Part garden design philosophy and part Zen Buddhism, this book eloquently shows us how the principles of garden design are the same guidelines we can follow to design our life. Intentional living is the subject of design. When we approach our work in the garden, or in our life, through the practice of contemplative design, we can elevate the whole; we can unite the spiritual with the ordinary; we can join heaven and earth.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611804539
Publisher:	Shambhala
Publication date:	03/20/2018
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.96(w) x 7.99(h) x 0.42(d)

About the Author

Martin Mosko (Hakubai Daishin) is the abbot of Hakubai Temple in Boulder, Colorado, where he teaches Buddhism and design. He is a graduate of Yale University, where he studied art and Sanskrit. In 1974 he founded Marpa, a landscape architecture and building firm whose gardens have won numerous awards and have been published in magazines and books throughout the world. 
 
Alxe Noden is a writer, editor, and photographer who has written several other books, including Landscape as Spirit: Creating a Contemplative Garden (with Martin Mosko), and has made a documentary about the creation of a contemplative garden. She has studied Tibetan Buddhism both in the United States and abroad for more than twenty-five years.

Table of Contents

The Beginning xi

The View

Start mindfully and with a clear vision 3

Clarify your definitions 3

Work with the active forces available 9

Understand the language you have to work with 11

Use your language to create poetry 17

Study the mandala principle 18

Understand scale and proportion 20

Search for balance and harmony 23

Walk in beauty, seek it and create it 25

Find meaning through insight, take lessons from nature 28

Turn aspirations into practical goals 30

Examine and correct your motivation 32

Learn meditation as the foundation of contemplative design 33

Dedicate your merit 39

The Process

Examine the environment without projections 43

Consider your constraints and learn to create within them 46

Organize your materials in coherent patterns 49

Connect Heaven, Earth, and Man 50

Achieve a natural sense of flow 53

Arrange materials to heighten awareness 58

Engage the imagination of the viewer 64

Use visualization as the structure of contemplative design 66

Evaluate the design and adapt it to the vision 72

Opening the Eyes of the Garden

Move from meditation to action 77

Share the vision 81

Build a strong foundation 85

Face your fear 87

Learn to listen carefully 89

Learn the art of placement 91

Define the relationships within the space 92

Leave your attachments behind 94

Spaciousness and Not Knowing

Explore the don't-know mind 101

Join craft and art 102

Join time and timelessness 105

Join light and dark 109

Join Heaven and Earth 112

Acknowledgments 117

Appendix 1 A Guided Meditation/Visualization to Open the Space of the Mind before Designing 119

Appendix 2 Working with the Five Elements 121

Suggested Reading 144

About the Authors 146

Editorial Reviews

The Sound of Cherry Blossoms is a profound, soulful book. Simple and practical but also expansive, it offers wise instruction about how to create a garden that facilitates contemplation. But it does much more than this. It invites readers into serious reflection about how to enter more deeply into life, how to cultivate true awareness of the living world and of oneself as part of the larger whole. This is the transformative vision at the heart of this beautiful, precious book.”
—Douglas E. Christie, author of The Blue Sapphire of the Mind
 
“In this meditation on contemplative design, Mosko and Noden delicately balance practical advice and spiritual insight. An antidote to the mindlessness of computer-driven design, this book understands design as part of a holistic process of finding harmony. Written with concision and clarity, the authors show how the worlds of spiritual practice and landscape design come together in the contemplative Japanese garden. The Sound of Cherry Blossoms is an important manifesto.”
—Kendall H. Brown, author of Quiet Beauty and Visionary Landscapes
 
“It was in our monastery’s sacred garden on Kauai island—a garden that Martin Mosko helped create—where this book took wing. Through him and his work, he taught me that if a garden is created with awareness from the beginning, it will become divine. Mosko and Noden can teach us how to make that happen, inside and out.”— Sadasivanathaswami

From the Publisher