A bit of History

From a book "Japan: The story of a nation" by Edwin O. Reischauer (served as US ambassador to Japan from 1961 to 1966), p.71-72:

"The medieval Zen monks also brought from China three other arts which in time became so characteristic of Japanese culture that they are now considered to be typically Japanese. One was flower arrangement, which started with the placing of floral offerings before representations of Buddhist deities, but eventually became a fine art which is now part of the training of well-bred Japanese girl. The second was landscape gardening, in which, in contrast to the formal, geometric gardens of the West, the Ashikaga masters tried to create in a restricted space a small replica of the mountains, forests, and waters of nature itself, sometimes in close verisimilitude but sometimes only symbolically, as in the rock garden of the Ryoanji in Kyoto, which is composed only  of the rocks and sand. (The works of these Ashikaga masters made Kyoto the word Mecca if landscape gardening.) The third was the tea ceremony, a rite in which a beautiful but simple setting; a few fine pieces of old pottery; a slow, formalized, extremely graceful ritual for preparing and serving the tea; and a spirit of complete tranquility all combined to express the love of beauty, the devotion to simplicity, and the search for spiritual calm which characterized the best of Zen.

All three of these arts, as well as monochrome landscape painting, shared a common esthetic idiom. They were close to nature and rejected artificial, man-made patterns of regularity; they showed a deep love of simplicity; and they displayed a disciplined cultivation of the essence - the handful of blossoms or branches in a flower arrangement, the simple instruments and spare movements of the tea ceremony, the restricted space and sometimes austere design of the gardens, the few but bold lines of paintings that suggested sweeping landscapes and vast cosmic powers. It was an esthetics which cultivation that the feudal Japanese had derived from Zen and the warrior ethos. It was also an esthetics peculiarly suited to the relative simplicity and  poverty of medieval Japan. It is interesting that it has proved in recent years to have worldwide appeal in our own more complex and affluent age."