English. I spent several months very happily at the work, putting love and patience into it; but so great are its difficulties that I am still but a crude beginner.
The art—it is almost unnecessary to say—came from China, along with all the other garden and floral lore. The great Sen-no-Rikiu, landscape artist, high priest of the tea ceremonial, æsthete, and scholar, introduced it into Japan in the sixteenth century, when he elaborated the allied arts of garden planning and the ceremony of the tea-drinking to take place there. Confucianism was also concerned in the cult, and the rules laid down were according to the active and passive principles of Nature,[1] which the Japanese convert into the vigorous male, displayed and relieved by the quieter and humbler female qualities; just as, in their gardens, stones and plants are bound by those traditions and ideas. It would take more time and space than I can spare to this subject to explain the subtle and sometimes far-fetched notions that this involves.
The basis of the rules is triangulation. Old art lectures came back to me as I began to understand that this subtlest of Eastern æsthetics
- ↑ “The smug schoolmen … attributed all phenomena to the action of principles without life, which they called Yin and Yang (positive and negative principles of Nature). But how can there be action without life? Certainly the existence of activity presupposes a living God from whom it proceeds.”—From Hirata Atsutane (1776–1845). Translated by W. G. Aston.
