The silver dew is never partial.
From her heart
The flower-maiden's beauty.4
The quality of such impromptu verse is necessarily strained, but the spirit of impulsive art revealed in this episode survived to become an important quality of Zen creations.
The Heian era bequeathed many artistic forms and techniques to later Zen artists, but even more important was the attitude toward beauty developed by the Heian courtiers. Their explicit contributions were a sense of the value of beauty in life and a language of aesthetics by which this value could be transmitted. One of the more lasting attitudes developed was the belief that transience enhanced loveliness. (The idea of transience seems to be one of the few Buddhist concepts that entered Heian aesthetics.) Beauty was all the more arresting for the certainty that it must perish. The perfect symbol for this, naturally enough, was the blossom of the cherry tree, as may be seen from a poem taken at random from a Heian-period compilation.
O cherry tree, how you resemble
this transitory world of ours,
for yesterday you were abloom
and gone today your flowers.5