Zen Garden / Japanese dry garden

枯山水 kare-san-sui | Japanese rock garden

Zen garden, or kare-san-sui (dry landscape), is a traditional Japanese garden designed for meditation and spiritual reflection. They translate the vastness of nature into a minimalist, abstract form. The characters for kare-san-sui translate as ‘mountain without water’, i.e. a mountain landscape that, when depicted in a ‘dry garden’ or ‘dry landscape garden’, has to make do with sand, gravel, stones or rocks instead of water and moss instead of plants. The arrangement of the stones or rocks should convey a random order in keeping with nature. Famous gardens in Kyôto temples: Ryōan-ji,  Daitoku-ji + Tofuku-ji