Journal of the Japanese Institute of Landscape Architects

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Karesansui is the term used today to describe Japanese gardens with stone arrangements. A typical example would be the Daisen-in stone garden, which was made in the 16th century. This paper attempts to prove that at the time when those gardens were made, another term was used to describe this type of arrangement: kasan. The term kasan actually refers to an artificial mountain or artificial mountains mainly in gardens, sometimes in small basins. The term (jiashan in Chinese, k. in Korean and Japanese) originated in China, along with the habit of creating such stone arrangements.
This paper introduces the representative records from the 12-16th centuries in Korea and Japan using this term. For example, even the garden of the Daisenin, which is the most famous garden in the Karesansui style, was recorded as Kasan in the classical texts written by a Japanese Zen monk and even a Korean scholar, who visited it in the 16th century. My main point is to show that the intellectuals in Japan and Korea followed the same type of garden making theory during the period when the Karesansui style was established in Japan. This gives us a new possibility of interpreting the Karesansui garden in a larger Asian context.

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