Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 3.djvu/31

Rh as well as of Japanese floral arrangement, is symmetry by suggestion. What the Buddhists imported from India was a method based on equality of distribution. What the Japanese themselves conceived was a method based on balance of inequalities. There can be little doubt that the conception was derived from close observation of nature's fashions, and that the wide vogue its practice attained was due primarily to the bonsai cult, which, as already described, grew out of the great æsthetic movement of the fifteenth century. It is, indeed, to the celebrated painter Soami, whose name is so closely connected with that movement, that the Japanese attribute the new departure, and it was at the Silver Pavilion, where the cults, of the Cha-no-Yu and the Kô-awase may be said to have been evolved, that the art of ike-bana received its first great development. But though the theory and something of the practice were due to Soami, his pupil, a priest named Ikenobo, is justly credited with having elaborated the principles and canons of the art into something like an exact science. Thereafter many men of taste made contributions to the cult, until finally it came to possess a code of its own, accurate and consistent, but not without disfigurement of excessive detail. Here, too, as in the case of landscape gardening, the philosophy of the yang and the ying, the male and the female principles, obtruded itself; not with any transcendental significance,