Although the term zen-tei (Zen garden) exists in Japanese, its usage is a largely Western one, first coined by the American garden scholar Lorraine Kuck in the 1930s. In the work of designer Shunmyo Masuno, a fully ordained Buddhist priest, we encounter landscapes that endorse Daisetz T. Suzuki's view that the stone garden embodies "the spirit of Zen."
Masuno, who practices meditation as a first step toward design, may conceivably, be the last of Japan's ishitate-so, or "stone-setting priests," a body of semiprofessionals once tasked with assembling gardens, although his responsibilities for creating design and overseeing the construction of his ideas far exceed the brief of those humble ecclesiastical gardeners.
Things are never quite what they seem in the Zen garden. Emptiness might best be described as empowered space, an energized vacuum; what the writer Donald Richie referred to as the "nourishing void." Masuno emphasizes the need to familiarize himself with the project site, to "listen" to the request of stones and to sensitize himself to the forces flowing through the landscape.