The first arrivals on the Japanese archipelago were a Stone Age people, known today as "Jomon," who left artifacts across a time span beginning in the fourth millennium b.c. and lasting until the early Christian Era. Arriving in Japan from northeast Asia via a land bridge now submerged, they remained primarily in the north, where they lived in covered pits, buried their dead in simple mounds, and, most importantly for the later Japanese, developed a ceramic art of low-fired vessels and figurines whose loving awareness of material and form re-emerged centuries later as a characteristic of Zen art.
The free, semi-nomadic life of the Jomon was disrupted around the time of Aristotle by the arrival of various groups of invaders known collectively as the "Yayoi." These Bronze Age warriors eventually replaced the Jomon, first driving them farther into the north and finally eradicating them entirely. The gods and culture of the Yayoi indicate a tropical origin, perhaps the vicinity of South China. They settled in the southern islands, where they erected tropical dwellings and began the cultivation of rice. Soon they were making implements of iron, weaving cloth, and molding pottery using the wheel and high-temperature kilns. The descendants of the Yayoi became the Japanese people.
For the first several hundred years of Yayoi hegemony, their ceramics, although technically more sophisticated, showed less artistic imagination than those of the Jomon. In the fourth century a.d., however, after the consolidation of their lands into a unified state, a new era of artistic production began. From this time until the introduction of Buddhism in the sixth century, an interlude known as the Mound Tomb era, the arts of Japan blossomed, producing some of the finest sculpture in the ancient world. The Yayoi mound tombs, often many acres in size, were filled with the implements of their aristocratic owners (much as were the pyramid tombs of Egyptian pharaohs), and around their perimeters were positioned hollow clay statues, presumably as symbolic guardians. These realistic figures, ordinarily two or three feet in height, are today known as haniwa. Fashioned in soft brown clay, they portrayed virtually all the participants in early Japanese life: warriors in armor, horses standing at the ready, courtiers, rowdy farmers, fashionable laThes-in-waiting, and even wild boar.
The making of haniwa died out after the sixth century, as Chinese Buddhist culture gradually took hold among the Japanese aristocracy, but the underlying aesthetic values were too fundamental to perish. When Zen culture came to flower in medieval times, all the early artistic values awoke from what seems to have been only a slumber; monk-artisans returned to an emphasis on natural materials—whether in soft clay tea bowls, in unworked garden rocks, in the architecture of unfinished woods, or in a general taste for unadorned simplicity. These men created their art and architecture from seemingly rough and imperfect materials out of deliberate choice rather than necessity—a preference rare if not unique in human experience.
During the years following the introduction of pre-Zen Buddhism, the Japanese disowned their native values and artistic instincts as they slavishly copied Chinese culture and reproduced the ornate and elaborate arts of mainland Buddhism. The nature-worshiping tribes of Japan were awed by the seemingly powerful religion of China. They were no less impressed by the manner in which the Chinese emperor ruled his land, and shortly after becoming acquainted with China they set about copying the Chinese form of government. Equally important, the previously illiterate Japanese adopted a Chinese system of writing—a confusing arrangement whereby Chinese symbols were used for their phonetic value rather than for their meaning. This lasted for several centuries, until the Japanese finally gave up and created a simplified system which included their own syllabary or alphabet.
Having borrowed Chinese administration and Chinese writing, the Japanese next decided to re-create a Chinese city, and in the year 710 they consecrated Nara, a miniature replica of the T'ang capital of Ch'ang-an. The city was soon overflowing with Chinese temples and pagodas. Newly ordained Japanese priests chanted Buddhist scriptures they scarcely understood, while the native aristocracy strode about in Chinese costume reciting verses of the T'ang poets.
Japan had never really had a city before Nara, and its population quickly rose to some 200,000. Yet less than a century after its founding it was abandoned by the court—possibly because the new Buddhist priesthood was getting out of hand— and a new capital was laid out on the site of present-day Kyoto. This new city, founded at the beginning of the ninth century and known as Heian, was deliberately kept free of Buddhist domination, and within its precincts the first truly native high culture arose as Chinese models were gradually transcended. No longer copiers, the aristocrats of Heian turned inward to bring forth a highly refined secular civilization.
To understand the foundations of Zen beauty, it is necessary to examine this Heian culture in some detail, for many of the Zen arts and the aesthetic rules later associated with Zen arose in these early aristocratic years. If civilization may be gauged by the extent to which relations are mediated by artificiality, this would surely be the finest example in all history. Etiquette and sentimentality were the touchstones. The courtiers occupied their days with elaborate ceremonies, extravagant costumes, and lightweight versifying, and their nights with highly ritualized amorous intrigues, conducted in a fashion so formal that the courtly love of Provence seems brusque in comparison. Initially the court had modeled its behavior on the T'ang dynasty, but in the year 894, a hundred years after the founding of Heian, relations with the T'ang court were suspended. There were few formal contacts with China until the coming of Zen several centuries later. Since the country was unified and at peace, interest in affairs of state gradually disappeared altogether, freeing the aristocracy to create a misty, artificial world all its own.
This period, whose aesthetic values were the precursor of Zen art, was also Japan's great age of literature. The idleness of the court provided an abundance of free time and equally abundant boredom—circumstances that brought into being rich, textured psychological novels, some of the earliest and most revealing diaries of the world's literature, and a concern with poetry never equaled elsewhere, before or since. These works of literature depict a society preoccupied with beauty, where life and art merged, and founded on a conviction, later to become ingrained in Japanese life and Zen art, that the ability to appreciate beauty was the most important characteristic an individual could possess.
Perhaps the most unusual aspect of this great age of literature is the fact that the work was produced almost entirely by women. Theirs was the aesthetic legacy that later became the foundation for Zen taste, including the overwhelming importance of brushstroke calligraphy, the subtle sense of what constitutes beauty and what excess, the vocabulary of aesthetics, the elaborate concern with the use of color, and the refinement of the poetic form that eventually led to Zen Haiku.