passed down from sensei to apprentice. The opening words of Illustrations for designing mountain, water and hillside field landscapes (1466) are "If you have not received the oral transmissions, you must not make gardens" and its closing admonition is "You must never show this writing to outsiders. You must keep it secret". These garden manuals are still studied today. Gardens in literature and poetry The Tale of Genji, the classic Japanese novel of the Heian period, describes the role of the Japanese garden in court life. The characters attend festivals in the old Kyoto imperial palace garden, take boat trips on the lake, listen to music and watch formal dances under the trees. Gardens were often the subject of poems during the Heian period. A poem in one anthology from the period, the Kokin-Shu, described the Kiku-shima, or island of chrystanthemums, found in the Osawa pond in the great garden of the period called Saga-in. I had thought that here only one chrysanthemum can grow. Who therefore has planted the other in the depths of the pond of Osawa? Another poem of the Heian period, in the Hyakunin isshu, described a cascade of rocks, which simulated a waterfall, in the same garden: The cascade long ago ceased to roar, But we continue to hear The murmur of its name. Philosophy, painting, and the Japanese garden In Japanese culture, garden-making is a high art, equal to the arts of calligraphy and ink painting. Gardens are considered three-dimensional textbooks of Daoism and Zen Buddhism. Sometimes the lesson is very literal; the garden of Saihō-ji featured a pond shaped like the Japanese character shin (心) or xīn in Chinese, the heart-spirit of Chinese philosophy, the newspaper character is 心 but it's the full cursive, the sousho style (草書) for shin that would be used; sousho, this well-named "grass writing", would be appropriate for gardening purpose indeed, for in cursive writing the character shapes change depending on the context and of course, since it is cursive, depending on the person -that is to say that the character would be done in a single pencil stroke, it would match the state of mind and the context rather than the newspaper print. However, usually the lessons are contained in the arrangements of the rocks, the water and the plants. For example, the lotus flower has a particular message; Its roots are in the mud at the