"So prompt!" said he, smiling, and ordered a writing box to be brought [for himself]. His answer- 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 _Many of the later verities of Zen art can be traced to this first philosophical melancholy over life's transience which developed in the Heian era. The vehicle for this heritage was a special vocabulary of aesthetic terms (providing distinctions few Westerners can fully perceive) which could describe subtle outer qualities of things--and the corresponding inner response by a cultivated observer--by the use of fine-grained aesthetic distinctions.6 The word that described the delicate discernment of the Heian courtiers was _miyabi_, which was used to indicate aspects of beauty that only a highly refined taste could appreciate: the pale shades of dye in a garment, the fragile geometry of a dew-laden spider web, the delicate petal of a purple lotus, the texture of the paper of a lover's letter, pale yellow clouds trailing over a crimson sunset. If the beauty were more direct and less muted, it was described as _en_, or charming, a term marking the type of beauty as sprightly or more obvious. The most popular aesthetic term was _aware_, which refers to a pleasant emotion evoked unexpectedly. _Aware _is what one _feels _when one sees a cherry blossom or an autumn maple. (This internalization of aesthetic qualities was later to have great import for the Zen arts, whose reliance on suggestiveness shifted a heavy responsibility to the perceiver.) As the notion of beauty's transience became stronger, the term also came to include the feeling of poignancy as well as pleasure and the awareness that delight must perish.