After relations with China fizzled to a stop around the beginning of the tenth century, the Japanese garden began to evolve on its own. It was always an emblem of power, making it essential that when the warrior government moved to Kamakura a leader no less imposing than Minamoto Yoritomo should oversee the creation of the main garden at the new capital. Significantly, the garden in Kamakura was constructed as part of the Buddhist establishment, rather than as an extension of Yoritomo's private estate. Perhaps this transformation of the garden into Buddhist temple art was a consequence of the Western Paradise beliefs of Amadism (a forerunner had been the late-Heian Western Paradise garden outside Kyoto at Uji); perhaps it was the first implicit acknowledgment of the nature mysticism of Zen; or perhaps the Kamakura warriors simply believed that a private garden would smack too much of the decadence of Kyoto. Whatever the reason, the coming of Zen seems to have been coincidental with a new attitude toward the connection between gardens and religion. The frivolous polychrome of the Heian pleasure park was clearly a thing of the past; gardens became solemn and, as the influence of Zen grew, increasingly symbolic of religious ideas. The monks who visited China to study Ch'an (as well as Ch'an monks who migrated to Japan) were, of course, familiar with the landscape gardens of the Sung Chinese. These gardens had purged many of the more decorative elements of the T'ang-period pleasure parks and reflected the reverential attitudes of the Taoists and Ch'an Buddhists toward the natural world. At least one of these Sung-style gardens was produced in Kyoto during the early years of renewed contacts with China. Oddly enough, however, it was the Sung ink paintings that would eventually have the greatest influence on Zen landscape gardens. The Sung paintings captured perfectly the feeling Japanese Zen monks had for the natural world, leading them to conclude that gardens too should be monochromatic, distilled versions of a large landscape panorama. Not surprisingly, the attitude that a garden should be a three- dimensional painting sparked the long march of Japanese garden art into the realm of perspective and abstraction. In fact, the manipulation of perspective advanced more rapidly in the garden arts than in the pictorial. Without going into the Chinese system of perspective in landscape painting, let it be noted that whereas the Chinese relied in part upon conventions regarding the placement of objects on a canvas to suggest distance (for example, the relative elevation of various tiers of landscape elements on the canvas was often an indication of their distance), the Zen artists learned to suggest distance through direct alteration of the characteristics our eye uses to scale a scene. And since many of these gardens were meant to be viewed from one vantage point, they became a landscape "painting" executed in natural materials.