To return to the main point, we owe to the Cha-no-e much of the present standard of our taste, which is, in its turn, nothing more than the Zen ways of looking at things as applied to everyday life. This is no wonder, when we remember that it was in the tasteful hands of the Zen priests that the whole ceremony reached its perfection. Indeed, the word _cha_ is a term which conveys to this day the main features of the Contemplative sect to our mind. In connection with the tea-ceremony, there are some sister arts which have been equally effective in the proper cultivation of our taste. Landscape gardening, in which our object is to make an idealised copy of some natural scene, is an art that has been loved and practised among us for more than a thousand years, although it was not indigenous like most things Japanese. This practice of painting with tree and stone soon gave rise to another art, the miniature reproduction of a favourite natural scene on a piece of board, and this is the forerunner of the later _bonkei_, or the tray-landscape, and its sister _bonsai_, or the art of symbolising an abstract idea, such as courage, majesty, etc., by means of the growth of a dwarf tree. The same love that we feel for a symbolic representation is also to be traced in the arrangement of flowers. The practice of preserving cut branches, generally of flowering trees, in a vase filled with water is often mentioned in our classical literature. But it was first in the sixteenth century that it assumed its present aspect, when, in conjunction with the Cha-no-e, it found a great patron in that most influential dilettante Shogun Yoshimasa. Already in his time there were a great many principles to be learned concerning the way to give the longest life and the most graceful form to the branches put in a vase, besides investing the whole composition with a symbolic meaning. Up to this day we look upon this art as very helpful for the cultivation of taste among the fair sex, who receive long courses of instruction by the generally aged masters of floral arrangement, who, along with their teaching in the treatment of plants, know how to instil ethics in their young pupils, taking the finished vase of flowers as the subject of conversation. The masters of the tea-ceremony are also well versed in arranging flowers in that simple manner which is yet full of meaning called _cha-bana_, or the 'Zen type of floral art.' You see how much all these arts have contributed to the production of our taste, whose ideals are the dislike of loudness and love of symbolic representation, with a delicate feeling for the beauty of line as seen in things moving or at rest. This last quality must have been immensely augmented by the linear character of our drawing, and also by the great importance we are accustomed to attach to the shape and the strokes of the characters when we are learning to write.