Japanese Garden

This guide to the Japanese Garden at Shitennoji in Osaka opens at the Ryumon waterfall, where a stone carp is frozen mid-leap, an old Buddhist image for the struggle toward enlightenment. It traces how the garden's ponds and rock groupings were built in the early Edo period to model Amida Buddha's Western Pure Land, then turns to the temple around it, founded in 593 by a young Prince Shotoku backing a new foreign religion. Three rocks rise from the largest pond, one for Amida and two for the attendant bodhisattvas beside him.