Is round.
Traditional Japanese poem
The spread of Zen culture from the mansions of the samurai to the houses of the bourgeoisie meant ultimately that Zen aesthetics would touch even the most routine features of daily life. Nowhere, perhaps, is this more noticeable than in Japanese cuisine and flower arranging. As we have seen, the tea ceremony was the great preserver of higher Zen ideals of art, but this ceremony, for all its pretensions to refined poverty, is essentially the province of the prosperous. It requires space for a garden, a special—and frequently expensive—house, and utensils whose properly weathered look can be obtained only at a price. Even a simple Zen garden is hardly available to a modern Japanese living in a cinderblock apartment building.
Everyone, however, can practice the classical art of arranging flowers in a manner reflecting the precepts of Zen. A flower arrangement is to a large garden what a Haiku is to an epic poem—a symbolic, abbreviated form whose condensed suggestiveness can encapsulate the larger world. Similarly, the Zen ideals of wabi, or deliberate understatement, and sabi, the patina of time, can be captured almost as well in the display of food—in both its artistic arrangement on a plate and the tasteful ceramics employed—as in the arts and ceramics of the tea ceremony. Thus a properly conceived serving of seasonal and subtly flavored foods accompanied by a Zen-inspired flower arrangement can be an evervday version of the tea ceremony and its garden, embodying the same aesthetic principles in a surrogate form just as demanding of Zen taste and sensibility.
It will be recalled that Zen itself is said to have originated when the Buddha silently turned a blossom in his hand before a gathering on Vulture Peak. The lotus blossom was one of the foremost symbols of classical Buddhism for many centuries; indeed the earliest Japanese flower arrangements may have been merely a lotus floating in a water-filled vessel set before a Buddhist altar. To the ancient Buddhists, the flower was a symbol of nature, a momentary explosion of beauty and fragrance embodying all the mysteries of life's cycle of birth and death. The early Japanese, who saw in nature the expression of life's spirit, naturally found the flower a congenial symbol for an abstract philosophy like Buddhism. In the years preceding Zen's arrival in Japan, a parallel but essentially secular taste for flowers permeated the aristocratic court civilization of the Heian, where lovers attached sprays of blossoms to letters and eulogized the plum and cherry as symbols of life's transient happiness. Indeed, it is hardly an exaggeration to describe blossoms as the foremost symbol of Japan's great age of love poetry.
Exactly when the Japanese began the practice of arranging
flowers in pots for decorative purposes has never been satisfactorily determined. Perhaps not surprisingly, the first well- known exponent of floral art seems to have been the famous Zen aesthete Ashikaga Yoshimasa (1435-1490), builder of the Silver Pavilion. However, Yoshimasa merely popularized an art that was considerably more ancient. Ikebana, or flower arranging, had for some time been transmitted as a kind of secret cult by a line of priests who had called themselves Ikenobo. Just what role Zen and Zen art theory played in this priestly art is questionable, for early styles were florid and decorative. At first glance, it may seem strange that the flower arrangements of the Ikenobo priests should have captured the interest of Yoshimasa and his circle of Zen aesthetes during the high age of Zen culture, since the Ikebana of this period, far from showing the spareness characteristic of Zen garden arts, was an exuberant symbol of the world at large, rather like a complex mandala diagram of some esoteric sect wherein all components of the universe are represented in a structured spatial relationship.
This early style of formal flower arranging, now known as Rikka, was later codified into seven specific elements, each symbolizing some aspect of nature—the sun, the shade, and so forth. There were three main branches in an arrangement and four supporting branches, each with a special name and a special aesthetic-symbolic function. As with most art forms preceding the modern age, the distinction between religious symbolism and purely aesthetic principles was not well defined, and artists often preferred to use philosophical explanations as a means of transmitting those rules of form they instinctively recognized to be most satisfying. Not surprisingly, given the Zen ideals of the age, Rikka-style flower arrangements were asymmetrical and intended to suggest naturalness as far as possible. Although complex, they were by no means artificial, seeming instead a happy accident of nature. As with Zen gardens, great artifice was used to give the impression of naturalness.
Since the elaborate Rikka style was supported by an equally
elaborate theory and required total discipline, flower arranging acquired many of the qualities of a high art. Certainly the arrangement of flowers in the West never approached anything like the formality and rules of technique surrounding Japanese floral displays, and for this reason we sometimes have difficulty in accepting the idea that it can be considered a genuine art form. But then we have never seriously considered the flower a primary religious symbol—a role that, to the Eastern mind, automatically makes it a candidate for artistic expression. The religion of Zen, with no particular god to deify, turned to flowers and gardens as symbols of the spirit of life.