Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 2.djvu/259

REFINEMENTS AND PASTIMES proportions or any wealth of decoration. In the beginning of the thirteenth century the first treatise on the subject appeared from the pen of Yoshitsune Gokyogoku. On the form of park hitherto associated with the "bed-chamber" style of architecture he grafted certain precepts laid down by the Buddhists for arranging rockery stones, and he also indicated, as applicable to the whole, the Taoist doctrine of the active and passive principles. As to this latter canon, it was nothing but a mysteriously stated formula of balance. Nature has made everything in pairs, the dominant and the dominated, the male and the female, and in following nature's guidance, as was above all things essential, that universal law had to be carefully observed. Gokyogoku's work was a kind of grammar of park planning. By giving to everything a definition, he invested it with a motive, and for expressing the various motives general rules, many of them purely conventional, were laid down. A lake had to take the outline of a tortoise or a crane. An island might be a mountain, a field, a strip of seashore, a cloud in the distance, a morning mist, a sandy beach, a floating pine, or the bank of a stream. A waterfall was either full-face or profile, fragmentary or complete, uniform or stepped, corner or side, single, double, or threaded. A stream, if it ran from east to south and then west, was regular; if it flowed from west to east, it was inverse. If it did not rise in a lake, a country 231