Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 3.djvu/30

Rh His grouping of them is a composition wherein linear effects are as much studied as colour harmonies. It is not necessary, indeed, that colour should enter into the scheme at all, except in so far as it enters into every natural picture. A tree's foliage may be regarded as its flowers, and not the least beautiful productions of the ike-bana deal solely with branches and leaves. This art is essentially Japanese. A Buddhist origin has been attributed to it by some, on the ground that the idea of preserving the living aspect of a flower is derived from the Buddhist veto against taking life. Such an explanation seems fanciful and far-fetched. It is true that vases containing sprays of lotus formed an essential element in the altar furniture of Buddhist temples, and that such decorative objects, having been entirely absent from Shintō paraphernalia may have been introduced to the Japanese for the first time by the propagandists of Buddhism. That hypothesis is confirmed by examination of the floral compositions attributed to Prince Shotoku and the religious teachers of the seventh and eighth centuries. They show all the essentially non-Japanese features of the art, being, in short, sprays and boughs symmetrically disposed on either side of a central standard. The floral compositions of Indian, Persian, and Grecian decorative art obey the same rule, symmetry by equipoise; whereas the fundamental principle of Japanese decorative art,