Dom Hilary Martin in his Zen Garden

We initiate this week a series on “Places of the Monastery.” Our hope is to highlight spots in and around the monastery or on our monastic grounds that may hold particular significance to the monks or to many of our oblates and friends in the extended monastic community.

One place of enduring mystique on our grounds, yet one which has over the years fallen into some disuse, is known as the Zen Garden. It has seen sporadic use and few visitors. “The birds may come and circle for a while... but they soon go elsewhere,” to inappropriately quote Thomas Merton’s Zen and the Birds of Appetite. Yet, of late, we have seen a revival of interest, and some renewed raking.

The Standing Bell, in the main

corridor of the monastery

The second half of the twentieth century saw an extended wave of interest in Zen Buddhism and in Christian-Buddhist dialogue within Christian monasticism. Merton popularized these resonances and many others followed him in writing about Zen. This interest found a famous spokesperson within our own monastery, particularly when our prior, Dom Aelred Graham, published his Zen Catholicism: A Suggestion in 1963. One remaining tangible remnant of this interest is the “Standing Bell” that graces the main entry corridor of the monastery and is still sounded daily for meals and for Compline. The bell was a gift of Elsie and John Mitchell, friends of Dom Aelred who had shared with him engagement in the developing awareness and appreciation of Zen. Elsie Mitchell, creator of the Ahisma Foundation in Cambridge, referred to Graham as “The Zen Catholic Prior.”

Dom Aelred Graham

​A second reminder of this Buddhist influence is found in the monastery’s Zen Garden. A place of some intrigue to students and others, this space was created by Dom Hilary Martin at the time of the construction of the Belluschi monastery, which coincided with Prior Graham’s tenure and with the peak of Zen interest here at Portsmouth, as around the country. Recently, some visiting alumni have taken a renewed interest in the spot, which they recall as a place they would smoke cigarettes (not entirely against the rules in their day). The garden has been recapturing the imagination, seen with a new eye after the installation of the monastery elevator, which required significant reworking of the northeast end of the monastery. These modifications are in part due to the access needed to reach the exterior entry to the elevator. But this work has also prompted a rediscovered curiosity about the Zen Garden and its unique place on our grounds and in our history, leading to a sprucing up of the entire area occupied by the Zen Garden.

In connection with this anecdotal spot in our history and our grounds, we have retrieved an introduction to the Zen Garden that was published anonymously in the monastery newsletter in the Fall of 1962, shortly before the publication of Graham’s book on Zen. The brief article may well have been penned by Dom Hilary himself and offers us some insight into the vision for the place held by its creators. The article concludes with reference to Aelred Graham’s book “this coming spring” (1963), now just over 60 years ago.

(published without attribution in Fall 1962 monastery newsletter)

Zen comes from the Japanese word zazen, which means “to sit and meditate.” as neither sitting nor meditating is distinctively Japanese, there is obviously nothing particularly exotic - a point that is here emphasized - about a Zen garden. Nevertheless, interested people elsewhere in the world do seem to have learnt from Japan the secret of designing a garden of such natural simplicity, so as to induce in the beholder a contemplative mood. Characteristic of a Zen garden is the dry landscape, with water symbolized by sand and waterfall by stone, as providing the most satisfactory means of revealing “the mysteries of nature and creation”. Describing one of the most famous Japanese sand and rock gardens, Dr. Alan W. Watts, a Western expositor of Zen, writes: “it suggests a wild beach, or perhaps a Seascape of Rocky Islands, but it’s unbelievable simplicity evokes a serenity and clarity of feeling so powerful that it can be caught even from a photograph”.

Early rendering of Belluschi plan
(The Zen Garden is tucked behind the left side of the church, in front of the monastery)

A Zen garden, one might say, is classical rather than romantic. What it intends to elicit is neither awe nor nostalgia but a sharpened perception of the scene looked at, not misty-eyed, but clearheaded. “The media are the simplest imaginable,” says Mr. Watts; “the effect is as if man had hardly touched it, as if it had been transported unchanged from the seashore; but in practice only the most sensitive and experienced artist can achieve it. This sounds, of course, as though ‘Zen flavor’ were a studied and affected primitivism. Sometimes it is. But the genuine Zen flavor is when a man is almost miraculously natural without intending to be so.”

New elevator shaft

adjacent to Zen Garden

Be that as it may, the fact that a Zen garden has come into being at Portsmouth is not in execution of any solemn purpose but because such a garden, set between monastery and church, was thought an appropriate way to landscape our new buildings. Zen, a touch of nature, which makes the whole world, kin, is no more peculiar to Japan then the content of philosophia is specifically Greek, or clairvoyance French. The Zen insight, a natural perfection, and therefore capable of being sanctified by grace, has its place in Catholic tradition. To be aware that this is so might have two beneficent results: it could help Catholics to “realize” more fully their religion as an all-embracing way of life; it could save one of the most precious intuitions of human spirit from dissipating itself as a mere intellectual and aesthetic fad, à la mode among bohemians and beatniks.

Such, at any rate, is the suggestion contained in Father Prior’s latest book, to be published by Harcourt, Brace & World this coming spring.