shook a tree and scattered over the garden gold and crimson leaves,
scraps of the brocade of autumn! What Rikiu demanded was not
cleanliness alone, but the beautiful and the natural also.

The name, Abode of Fancy, implies a structure created to meet
some individual artistic requirement. The tea-room is made for
the tea master, not the tea-master for the tea-room. It is not
intended for posterity and is therefore ephemeral. The idea that
everyone should have a house of his own is based on an ancient
custom of the Japanese race, Shinto superstition ordaining that
every dwelling should be evacuated on the death of its chief
occupant. Perhaps there may have been some unrealized sanitary
reason for this practice. Another early custom was that a newly
built house should be provided for each couple that married.
It is on account of such customs that we find the Imperial capitals
so frequently removed from one site to another in ancient days.
The rebuilding, every twenty years, of Ise Temple, the supreme
shrine of the Sun-Goddess, is an example of one of these ancient
rites which still obtain at the present day. The observance of
these customs was only possible with some form of construction
as that furnished by our system of wooden architecture, easily
pulled down, easily built up. A more lasting style, employing
brick and stone, would have rendered migrations impracticable,
as indeed they became when the more stable and massive wooden
construction of China was adopted by us after the Nara period.

With the predominance of Zen individualism in the fifteenth
century, however, the old idea became imbued with a deeper
significance as conceived in connection with the tea-room.
Zennism, with the Buddhist theory of evanescence and its