Although Japanese painting had its beginnings in China, Chinese painting began gold bns and continued in strict realism. Japanese paintings have a much greater imaginative freedom -a result, I believe, of the sensual character of the Japanese people. The Japanese artist paints what his senses and his mind receive from the subject. It is a part of an inherited attitude of seeing and having an emotional affinity with small, apparently insignificant things that others usually would pass over as being a commonplace. But in Zen, nothing is commonplace. Not even blade and soul gold buying nothing! Everything - on any scale - is of equal importance.The difference between Chinese and Japanese brush painting is best illustrated by these two poems. The first is the Chinese poet Li Tai Po describing a waterfall:"The sun shines upon the peak of Koro, making the mist purple. The Cascade seen in the distance looks like a long river rushing straight down three thousand feet. Is it not the Milky Way falling from the Ninth Heaven?"
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