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Concept
Ikebana
Summary
or is the Japanese art of flower arrangement. It is also known as kadō. The tradition dates back to Heian period (794–1185), when floral offerings were made at altars. Later, flower arrangements were instead used to adorn the tokonoma (alcove) of a traditional Japanese home.
Ikebana reached its first zenith in the 16th century under the influence of Buddhist tea masters and has grown over the centuries, with numerous distinct schools extant today.
Ikebana is counted as one of the three classical Japanese arts of refinement, along with kōdō for incense appreciation and chadō for tea and the tea ceremony.
The term ikebana comes from the combination of the Japanese ikeru and 花. Possible translations include and .
The pastime of viewing plants and appreciating flowers throughout the four seasons was established in Japan early on through the aristocracy. Waka poetry anthologies such as the Man'yōshū and Kokin Wakashū from the Heian period (794–1185) included many poems on the topic of flowers.
With the introduction of Buddhism, offering flowers at Buddhist altars became common. Although the lotus is widely used in India where Buddhism originated, in Japan other native flowers for each season were selected for this purpose. While in China the Buddhist priests were the first instructors of flower arrangement, in Japan they only introduced its crudest elements.
For a long time the art of flower arranging had no meaning, and functioned as merely the placing in vases the flowers to be used as temple offerings and before ancestral shrines, without system or meaningful structure. The first flower arrangements were composed using a system were known as shin-no-hana, meaning . A huge branch of pine or cryptomeria stood in the middle, with three or five seasonable flowers placed around it. These branches and stems were put in vases in upright positions without attempting artificial curves. Generally symmetrical in form, these arrangements appeared in religious pictures in the 14th century, as the first attempt to represent natural scenery.
Official source
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