sixteen saucers of rice, four saucers of salt, fish, fowl, fruits, sea-
weed, and vegetables. Such was the quality of Shinto.

Buddhism was adopted in the eighth century as an official
religion, accompanied by an unreserved acceptance of the culture
attending it, a culture which involved the importation of new
art forms, a complete system of religious and bureaucratic archi-
tecture, a new written language, even a means for salvation.
Despite the power of Buddhism, the basic Japanese attitudes--a
matter of the original intuitive emotionalism of Shinto--per-
sisted, always expressed privately in the Japanese dwelling.

Japan is an amazing repository of Buddhism, having preserved
major examples of Buddhist architecture of every historic period
since its adoption. Great temple complexes were built after
Chinese models with buildings symmetrically arranged on stone
platforms, their columns painted vermillion, roof tiles brightly
glazed--decisive architectural statements in disregard of nature,
if not opposed to it. In time, this imported expression was con-
siderably softened by the Japanese, whose own direct response
to nature on the domestic level would consist of sliding open a
series of room-height paper-covered partitions, for example,
even in the dead of winter, to admire nature's landscape or its
symbol, the garden, beside his house. Consisting of wood,
thatch, rush, paper--a variety of vegetable products with mineral
and ceramic accents--his house literally proclaimed nature; in
addition, sliding interior partitions would have scenes or motifs
from nature painted on them. The lack of physical warmth in
winter is the necessarily passive quality, the stoic element, in so
comprehensive a response to nature.

Originally from India, Zen Buddhism came to Japan in a later
cultural wave, and brought doctrines close to those of Shinto. It
denied a central motivating deity (Shinto also denied a single
one by assignment of divinity to all things), maintained that the
deepest truths of life were not susceptible to logic (in accord
with unreflective, non-analytical qualities of Shinto beliefs), and
instituted new mental disciplines toward everyday life, disdaining
material desires (welcomed as providing clearly defined codes of
personal behavior as well as condoning the use of simple natural
materials rather than those hard to obtain). As the systematic
in Zen reinforced the intuitive in Shinto, answering questions
that Shinto, in a sense, had never really posed, imparting disci-
pline and sophistication to the basic potential in nature's use,
the domestic architecture of Japan came to yield an aesthetic

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