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Dry landscape rock garden
To many, the temple's name is synonymous with the temple's famous karesansui (dry landscape) rock garden, thought to have been built in the late 1400s. The garden consists of raked gravel and fifteen moss-covered boulders, which are placed so that, when looking at the garden from any angle (other than from above) only fourteen of the boulders are visible at one time. It is traditionally said that only through attaining enlightenment would one be able to view the fifteenth boulder. (Also, if facing the garden from the far right and about 8 feet back a person of about 1.82m(6ft) in height can see all 15 boulders, though the small boulder farthest to the left appears to be part of the much larger boulder immediately next to it).
Analysis
In an article published by the science journal Nature, Gert J. Van Tonder and Michael Lyons analyze the rock garden by generating a model of shape analysis (medial axis transformation) in early visual processing.
Using this model, they show that the empty space of the garden is implicitly structured, and is aligned with the temple's architecture. According to the researchers, one critical axis of symmetry passes close to the centre of the main hall, which is the traditionally preferred viewing point. In essence, viewing the placement of the stones from a sightline along this point brings a shape from nature (a dichotomously branched tree with a mean branch length decreasing monotonically from the trunk to the tertiary level) in relief.
The researchers propose that the implicit structure of the garden is designed to appeal to the viewers unconscious visual sensitivity to axial-symmetry skeletons of stimulus shapes. In support of their findings, they found that imposing a random perturbation of the locations of individual rock features destroyed the special characteristics.
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