HISTORY OF IKE-BANA
While in China the Buddhist priests were the first instructors of flower arrangement, in Japan they only introduced its crudest elements. For a long time the art had no meaning and was merely the placing in vases, without system, of the flowers to be used as temple offerings and before ancestral shrines. Again quoting Captain Brinkley, "What the Buddhist imported from India was based on equality of distribution—what the Japanese conceived was a method based on balance of inequalities."
The first flower arrangements worked out with a system were known as Shin-no-hana, meaning central flower arrangement. A huge branch of pine or cryptomeria stood in the middle, and around the tree were placed three or five seasonable flowers. These branches and stems were put in vases in upright positions without attempt at artificial curves. The general form was symmetrical, and this is what we find in Japanese religious pictures of the fourteenth century. It was the first attempt to represent natural
