Japan -- Social life and customs; Japanese tea ceremony; Tea
In this connection there is a story of Rikiu which well illustrates the
ideas of cleanliness entertained by the tea-masters. Rikiu was watching
his son Shoan as he swept and watered the garden path. "Not clean
enough," said Rikiu, when Shoan had finished his task, and bade him try
again. After a weary hour the son turned to Rikiu: "Father, there is
nothing more to be done. The steps have been washed for the third time,
the stone lanterns and the trees are well sprinkled with water, moss and
lichens are shining with a fresh verdure; not a twig, not a leaf have I
left on the ground." "Young fool," chided the tea-master, "that is not
the way a garden path should be swept." Saying this, Rikiu stepped into
the garden, shook a tree and scattered over the garden gold and crimson
leaves, scraps of the brocade of autumn! What Rikiu demanded was not
cleanliness alone, but the beautiful and the natural also.
The name, Abode of Fancy, implies a structure created to meet some
individual artistic requirement. The tea-room is made for the tea
master, not the tea-master for the tea-room. It is not intended for
posterity and is therefore ephemeral. The idea that everyone should have
a house of his own is based on an ancient custom of the Japanese race,
Shinto superstition ordaining that every dwelling should be evacuated
on the death of its chief occupant. Perhaps there may have been some
unrealized sanitary reason for this practice. Another early custom
was that a newly built house should be provided for each couple that
married. It is on account of such customs that we find the Imperial
capitals so frequently removed from one site to another in ancient days.
The rebuilding, every twenty years, of Ise Temple, the supreme shrine of
the Sun-Goddess, is an example of one of these ancient rites which still
obtain at the present day. The observance of these customs was only
possible with some form of construction as that furnished by our system
of wooden architecture, easily pulled down, easily built up. A more
lasting style, employing brick and stone, would have rendered migrations
impracticable, as indeed they became when the more stable and massive
wooden construction of China was adopted by us after the Nara period.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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