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ZEN BUDDHISM and a single vase of flowers, is derived from the Buddhist altar before which the Samurai of old drank ritual tea to Bodhidharma, that spiritual warrior who showed the way to Zen. And the Zen garden of Ryoanji, admittedly a technique carried to extremes, what can the West derive from a waste of white sand, the size of a tennis lawn, and in it but five groups of rock? Yet the rocks are placed so perfectly, so "right", that the heart is satisfied as though with a burden of flowers, and the whole effect, as I murmured to myself when I first saw it, is best compared to unaccompanied Bach. In the words of Laurence Binyon,
that singular garden of Soami's, with its nakedness, its abstraction, shows the Zen spirit in an extreme form. In the art inspired by Zen all the emphasis is on the interior life, and the communication of ideas is reduced to the simplest, barest forms. It is an art of suggestion rather than expression.". The same applies to Japanese flowerarrangement, no bud nor leaf too many and each perfect of its kind, and to the beauty and neatness of their national dress. It applies to their poetry, of which more later, to sumiye painting, and above all to Cha-no-yu, the Tea Ceremony. I have attempted, in my Via Tokyo to describe this exquisite lay sacrament of friends, and have no more to say. Okakura Kakuzo, in his famous Book of Tea, calls it the adoration of the beautiful amongst everyday facts. It is more than that. The ceremony" is simple enough; the water is boiled, the tea is made, those present drink it and the bowls are then washed up and dried. But every movement in the entire performance is pre-ordained, rehearsed and perfectly performed. The making and drinking of tea has no objective value; all
1 The Spirit of Man in Asian Art, p. 144.
