_Wabi _purged the tea ceremony of all its lingering aristocratic qualities, bringing into being _cha-no-yu _as it is practiced today. Today many Japanese, even those who practice neither tea drinking nor Zen, know and appreciate the ideals preserved in the ceremony. In recent years the concept of _wabi _has become the rallying point for those who regret the intrusions of the modern West into traditional Japanese culture, and _cha-no-yu _is valued as never before as a lesson in life's true values. CHAPTER FOURTEEN Zen Ceramic Art _ Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity. _ John Keats, _Ode on a Grecian Urn Shino tea bowl Raku tea bowl _ALTHOUGH JAPAN had been a nation of potters almost from prehistoric times, it was only after the rise of Zen influence and a popular interest in the tea ceremony that ceramics was raised from craft to high art. The great age of Japanese ceramics occurred several hundred years after the heroic periods of Chinese ceramic art in the T'ang and Sung dynasties, but, as in other cases, the Japanese eventually equaled and in some ways surpassed their mainland teachers. The Stone Age Jomon tribes in Japan created some of the richest figurine art of any of the world's prehistoric peoples. These Jomon figurines, fired at low temperatures and rarely over six or eight inches in height, are a classic puzzle to anthropologists and art historians, for they sometimes seem Polynesian, sometimes pre- Columbian, and sometimes pure abstraction in the modern sense of the term. Indeed, certain Jomon figurines could pass as works of Picasso or Miro. At times the features of the body were rendered recognizably, but usually they were totally stylized and integrated into the figure as part of some larger interest in material and pure form. It was a noble beginning for what would be a permanent Japanese interest in the look and feel of natural clay. When the Jomon were displaced around the third century B.C. by the Yayoi, their beautiful figurine art disappeared, and for several centuries Japan produced mainly pedestrian crocks and drinking vessels. The few figurines created retained little of the sophisticated Jomon abstraction. Around the turn of the fourth century A.D., however, Yayoi potters found their metier, and began the famous _haniwa _figurines, hollow-eyed statuettes in soft brown clay which were used to decorate aristocratic tombs, and simple but elegant vases and water pots in low- fired brown clay, which often were dyed with cinnabar and which give evidence of being thrown on some form of primitive wheel.