With the supremacy of the Ashikaga clan, the reigning power returned to Kyoto, the cultural centre, and helped to foster all sorts of peaceful accomplishments. With the development of painting, flower arranging, cha-no-yu, pastime of incense, sand pictures, noh drama and others, came the popularisation of the gardens. Not only were they made popular, but many improvements were effected. Hitherto the gardens were so constructed as to be admired primarily from without, but now they came to be so laid out as to be enjoyed from within as well, thus opening a new era in their development. The subjective tendency in Chinese thought in the Sung and Yuan dynasties became more firmly established in the Ming period and influenced our priests who studied the Zen sect of Buddhism then in China, and who upon their return moulded our thoughts, not only in religion, but in all branches of art. The objective attitude in creating the garden was denounced and the subjective mood became the motive power. Gardens thus became alive with individuality. The influence of Zen was irresistible in all branches of art. It found an artistic expression in cha-no-yu, "a cult or institution founded upon the admiration of the beautiful in the sordid facts of everyday life. " It infused into everything a shibumi, which is generally rendered "austere," but without the harshness which the term implies, being an unassuming quality, the refined taste of which is kept hidden underneath a commonplace appearance only to be appreciated by the cultured. The cha-seki, the place for cha-no-yu, required the garden to be different from the formal one which satisfied the people until then. The ï¾µsthetic priests, "tea-men," and connoisseurs devised new forms of gardens for the cha-seki which developed a style of its own and revolutionalised gardens of Nippon. The famous Zen priest named Muso Kokushi, who died in 1351 at the age of 76, was a great genius. Several gardens, preserved to the present day, are attributed to him. It was he who designed the garden of Ginkakuji in Kyoto for Shogun Yoshimitsu (1368-1394). The gardens of Tenryuji, with its pond and waterfall, and of Saihoji, with its pond shaped like the Chinese character for "heart," still show, though not in the complete original form, the greatness of Muso Kokushi as a garden designer.
