Muromachi Period

1336 to 1573 A.D.

The courtly Heian culture gave way to a new military society that, for the first time, included urban folk and even the lower classes. The riverside people, the senzui kawaramono, worked as professional gardeners and earned real social standing, while Zen monks became master garden designers. Garden making became a professional art, practiced between Zen scholarship and skilled craft.

Taste shifted from Chinese style gardens to a new expression of the traditional Japanese garden, seen at the garden of the Golden Pavilion. Under the Zen monasteries, garden makers refined the dry landscape garden to its highest form, strongly influenced by Chinese landscape painting. Gardens like Ryōan-ji in Kyoto, fifteen stones on a field of raked white gravel, reached a purity of composition no one has bettered. The garden does not copy nature; it abstracts its essence.

The tea ceremony also began to play an important role in Japanese society.

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