The garden does not need to look Buddhist or oriental. Many people, who are not Buddhist, also value such ideals. That the design promotes peacefulness, goodwill and respect for all creatures is more important than things like wind chimes, prayer flags or stone lanterns. If you wish so, you can certainly also include Buddhist and oriental decorations and garden features but, on their own, such decorations are not as important as a design which uses Buddhist ideas<\/em>.
\nThe Buddhist themes used at Samye Ling are World Peace, Wellbeing and Healing. They also grow organic vegetables and favour sustainability. These are themes which Buddhist Environmentalists have embraced – and which can be read into traditional Buddhism. I support all these themes but have a little regret that a garden of as much interest as Samye Ling does not put more emphasis on core Buddhist principles and philosophical concepts. These include the Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path, dependent origination, non-self and impermanence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Most Buddhist gardens are in East Asia – especially Japan – and people therefore have the idea that a Buddhist garden should look Japanese and should probably be a ‘Zen Garden’. This is wrong. I like this comment from the Religious Education and Environment Programme REEP on Designing a Buddhist Garden: The garden does not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9433"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9433"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9433\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}