Page:Japanese Gardens (Taylor).djvu/40

14. Imitation has been the sincerest flattery.

The art of landscape gardening is said to have been introduced into Japan from India, via China; or, perhaps, from India, via China, via Korea, as so many of the Japanese arts are supposed to have come, but it seems more probable that Buddhism influenced religious sentiment—which, in its turn, had its effect on the arrangement of temple gardens, and, through those, on other gardens—than that Indian originals served in any concrete form as models. No one who knows the formality and regularity and artificiality of Indian gardens could seriously suppose those of the Japanese to be copies of them. And, in the same way, whatever they have taken from China—and all their arts came first from there—they have so adapted to their own needs and ideas, developed so much by their own genius, that they have evolved them into products wholly Japanese. It is almost as foolish to imagine that India or China created Japanese art influences as to say that, because Shakespeare took his plots from other writers and from other countries than his own, he is not the actual author of his plays; and that they are really Italian or French, as the case may be, because the post on which he flung the mantle of his world-enveloping genius happened to have come from this or that country.

Buddhism has undoubtedly been responsible