Landscape garden of Daigoji Sampoin Temple its composition and Construction

Abstract

It is already a well-known fact that the garden attached to the Sampoin Sub-Temple which belongs to the Daitokuji Temple was built in the 3 rd Year of Keicho (1598) when a cherry-flower viewing party was held at the temple by the Shogun, Hideyoshi Toyotomi, who himself conducted an actual survey of Daigo and gave his instructions on the division of the land and so forth.
The construction of the garden was commenced on April 7 of the same year under his instructions and completed a month later on May 13, which fact deserves to be wondered at in terms of speed.
Whatever a great power Hideyoshi might have as the man who ruled the entire country then, it is still too short a time for which period he should have dug a pond and arranged rocks anew to make the garden.
The repair works carried out on the garden over a period between the early part of January and that of March, this year, revealed that before the garden was built by Hideyoshi, there had already been a garden made previously and that the present one was built by removing the formerly-arranged rocks, reconstructing and expanding the old pond and arranging the rocks anew in the original garden.
It furnishes us with an interesting material, furthermore, that this garden of Sampoin's, which represents those in the Momoyama Period, has a very weak foundational constitution in sharp contrast to the splendor of its outward form.