The Japanese love for nature precluded any escape into abstraction; that which is formless and colorless has no solace for the heart.

The idea of transience, expressed in the Buddhist literature of India by the sight of putrefying corpses and rotten food, is conveyed by the Japanese through images of the changing seasons. Though there is no metaphysical salvation in the spectacles of nature, these afford at least a kind of aesthetic salvation.

Sights of winter and autumn fill one with melancholy; sights of spring with sorrow for the dying blossoms. And though we may find mention here and there of the eternal peace that lies beyond the world of the senses, the Japanese does not believe, in the depths of her heart, in a world with no spring and no autumn. Grief for the ephemeral gives way to resignation and even to full acceptance of the transient nature of things.

It is therefore understandable that the Japanese should pursue, during the Heian period, the Tendai branch of Buddhism, which holds the entire world to be Buddha, with Buddha's nature dwelling everywhere - in mountains, rivers, grass, and trees.

Scholars avidly studied Chinese Taoist philosophy, which sees the source of man's being in nature with its changing seasons. Furthermore, the Japanese managed to temper Buddhism's fundamental pessimism with elements from Shinto. In the Buddhist literature of Japan even the Pure Land in the West is often described as a land of beautiful natural scenery.

Some Western scholars, perhaps with a trace of Christian condescension, have called Japanese mysticism "natural," distinguishing it from "spiritual" mysticism.

And yet how wise and humane is the culture that does not contrive an otherworldly supreme being to rule this world, the only one we know.

One might ask what there is to be gained from a "spiritual" sovereign who disturbs the peace of man with commands to act one way or another, promising in exchange an eternal world where scent, shape, and color never enter.

Indeed, even today the Japanese share a deep identification with nature. This is not nature as understood by Western religions, the work of a creator who stands apart from his work, but nature bursting with vitality, appearing and disappearing in cycles of life and death, of summer and winter, spring and fall. The Japanese aspire to clarity of awareness: as of a mirror reflecting natural phenomena in its many forms. And anyone who has seen a Japanese stand silently for a good hour to view the blossoming cherries in spring and the reddening maples in fall, or to gaze at the full moon in the autumn sky, knows that this is no mere gesture of aesthetic appreciation, but an act of worship.