IKEBANA: Flower Arrangement
Date 2007/4/9 13:45:05 | Topic: Japanese Culture
|  The peony blooms and is silent.
The sureness of the position occupied by the flower.
This is a poem composed by Kinoshita Rigen in his sick bed in 1922. He died several years later at age 40. A kind of immovable resolutions appears in the poem. One feels quiet happiness connected to the eternal life in the peony hovering between this world and the next.
This is the fundamental nature of a flower. Rigen may have been describing a potted flower rather than a cut flower, but in any case, the life of a flower is short. The moment of blossoming is the essence of the flower. If a person thinks it would be just as well to appreciate a flower in its natural state than to arrange it, they do not understand the nature of beauty. A natural flower is beautiful, but when it is touched by a human being, ot becomes a thought.
Ikebana (flower arrengement) is essential to the tea ceremony, but the two arts were not linked at first. Flowers were originally part of the offerings made to the gods and Buddhas during religious ceremonies. The tokonoma (the alcove) was also orriginally a place where gos resided. The tea ceremony was perfected in the moromachi and Momoyama periods and the practice of offering flowers to the gods dated long before that.
At first flower arrangement were performed in the Chinese style using Chinese bronze or porcelain containers. Eventually a Japanese style developed and it became part of the tea ceremony. That is when flowers arranging became the independet art form known as ikebana in Japan. Its development is like the evolution of calligraohy from the rigid Chinese style to the freely flowing Japanese style.
In a famous story, the tea master rikyu was asked by his lord Hideyoshi to hold a tea ceremony next to a garden full of morning glories. Rikyu cut down and placed just one in the dark alcove of the tea room. This act represented the true spirit of the way of tea and was an example of “making a flower live”.
It is difficult to arrange one flower, as in the case of Kinoshita Rigen’s peony or Rikyu’s famous morning glory. But the placement of a single flower is of fundamental importance, even if one is using tens or hundreds of flowers. Each flower must be right or the whole will collapse.
The flower container has an important role in ikebana. Many ikebana artist today concentrate on presenting the flowers and plants directly, but for me the container is a great teacher. Once I have seen a container, the arrangement is already determined. The contaier need not be fancy or expensive. I have used bamboos or rocks from my garden and even ash trays. The most iteresting container I have ever used was an ozaru, a bamboobasket used for boiling down tsukudani, given to me by a tsukudani maker from Katada in thought it would look wonderful with a bunch of winter chrysanthemums in it. He gave it to me on the spot, and I still trasure it.
The photograph shows a magnoliaceae placed on a lotus stand for a Buddhist image dating from the Nara period. This is an example of experimenting with objects other than flower vases, one of the possible pleasures of ikebana.
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