Zen Culture Part 9

The discipline of ink painting was only one of the qualities that endeared it to Zen painters. Equally important was the understated, suggestive art it made possible. Learning from the Chinese, As.h.i.+kaga j.a.panese discovered that black ink, carefully applied to suggest all the tones of light and shade, could be more expressive and profound than a rainbow of colors. (A similar lesson has been learned by modern photographers, who

often find black and white a medium more penerating than color.) The Chinese painters of the T'ang and Sung dynasties were the first to discover that black ink could be made to abstract all pigments and thereby suggest, more believably than actual color paintings, the real tones found in nature. Whereas the medium of ink has been used in the West primarily for line drawings and lithographs, the Eastern artists use ink to produce the illusion of color--an illusion so perfect that viewers must at times remind themselves that a scene is not in full polychrome. And just as the seemingly unfinished artistic statement nudges the viewer into partic.i.p.ating in a work, the suggestive medium of monochrome with its implied rather than explicit hues tricks the viewer into unwittingly supplying his own colors.

The Zen insight that the palette of the mind is richer than that of the brush has been best described by a j.a.panese artist and critic, who explained the rich suggestiveness of black ink, called _sumi_ by the j.a.panese:

_At first glance, this bit of ink on a sheet of white paper seems dull and plain, but as one gazes at it, it transforms itself into an image of nature--a small part of nature, to be sure, seen dimly, as though through a mist, but a part that may guide one's spirit to the magnificent whole. Armed with pigments by the dozen, artists have tried for centuries to reproduce the true colors of nature, but at best theirs has been a limited success. The _sumi-e _[ink painting], by reducing all colors to shades of black, is able, paradoxically, to make one feel their genuine nuances. . . . By recognizing that the real colors of nature cannot be reproduced exactly, the _sumi-e _artist has grasped one of the most fundamental truths of nature. He is, therefore, more in tune with her than the painter who tries to engage her in oils and water colors.1

_

Zen painting seems to have been created, like the religion itself, by antischolastic thinkers of the latter T'ang dynasty. The eccentric monks who invented _koan_ paradoxes also seem to have been fond of calligraphy and monochrome painting. These monks, together with non- Buddhist painters at odds with academic styles, loved to outrage their conservative colleagues by flinging ink at the paper and smearing it about with their hands, their hair, or sometimes the body of an a.s.sistant. Even those who restricted themselves to the brush delighted in caricature and unconventional styles. The school of painting represented by disaffected Tang literati and Ch'an monks came to be well respected (much like the abstract expressionist school of today) and was given the name of "untrammeled cla.s.s." During the Sung dynasty, Ch'an monks became respectable members of Chinese society, and gradually three distinct types of Ch'an-influenced painting were established. One, known in j.a.panese as _zenkiga_, featured didactic figure paintings (_zenki-zu_) ill.u.s.trating Ch'an parables, depicting Bodhidharma in some legendary situation, recording the critical moment of a _koan_, or simply ill.u.s.trating a Zen adept practicing self- discipline through some humble task.

The second type was portraiture, known as _chinzo_. These solemn, reverential studies of well-known teachers, sometimes executed in muted pastels as well as in ink, clearly were intended to represent the physical likeness of the sitter as closely as possible. They must be ranked among the world's finest portraits. The insight into character in the _chinzo_ is not so harsh as that of Rembrandt nor so formal as that of the Renaissance Florentines, but as sympathetic psychological studies they have rarely been surpa.s.sed.

The third type of painting a.s.sociated with Ch'an is the monochrome landscape. Landscape was not originally a major Ch'an subject, but Ch'an monks experimented with the traditional Chinese treatment of such scenes and so influenced Chinese landscape painting that even academic paintings during the Sung dynasty reflected the spontaneous insights of Ch'an philosophy. Landscapes represent Chinese painting at its finest, and the j.a.panese Zen painters who embraced the form made it the great art of Zen.

The technical mastery of landscape painting had been achieved late in the T'ang dynasty when the problems of

perspective, placement, and vantage point were solved. The cla.s.sic rules for the genre, which were formalized during the early Sung dynasty, were respected for several hundred years thereafter in both China and j.a.pan. One must appreciate these rules if one is to understand the Far Eastern landscape. To begin with, the objective is not photographic accuracy, but a representation of an emotional response to nature, capturing the essentials of a landscape rather than the particular elements that happen to be present in a single locale.

(In fact, j.a.panese Zen landscapists frequently painted Chinese scenes they had never seen.) Nature is glorified as a source of meditative insight, and the artist's spontaneity is expressed within a rigid framework.

Certain specific items are expected to appear in every painting: mountains, trees, rocks, flowing water, roads, bridges, wildlife, houses (or at least thatched huts). The mountainsides vary with the seasons, being lush and sensuous in spring, verdant and moist in summer, crisp and ripe in autumn, and austerely bare in winter. The tiny human figures show the dignity of retired Sung officials at a hermitage; there are no genuine farmers or fishermen. The paintings have no vanis.h.i.+ng point; receding lines remain parallel and do not converge. The position of the viewer is that of someone suspended in s.p.a.ce, looking down on a panorama that curves up and around his range of sight.

To depict distances extending from the immediate foreground to distant mountain ranges, a painting is divided into three distinct tiers, each representing a scene at a particular distance from the viewer. These include a near tableau close enough to show the individual leaves on the trees and ripples on the water, a middle section where only the branches of three trees are delineated and water is usually depicted as a waterfall, and a far section containing mountain peaks. Since these three levels represent quantum jumps in distance, fog or mist is often introduced to a.s.sist in slicing the painting into three planes.

These landscape conventions were the subject of volumes of

a.n.a.lysis and interpretation during the Sung dynasty. According to the painter Han Cho in a work dated 1121:

_In paintings of panoramic landscapes, mountains are placed in ranges one above the other; even in one foot's s.p.a.ce they are deeply layered; . . . and proper order is adhered to by first arranging the venerable mountains followed by the subservient ones. It is essential that . . .

forests cover the mountain. For the forests of a mountain are its clothes, the vegetation its hair, the vapor and mists its facial expressions, the scenic elements its ornaments, the waters its blood vessels, the fog and mists its expressions of mood.2

_

Two characteristics of Sung landscape paintings that were later to become important elements in the canon of Zen aesthetic theory were the use of empty s.p.a.ce as a form of symbolism, later to be found in all of Zen art from rock gardens to the No theater, and the specific treatment of rocks and trees, elements that the Zen school would one day take as metaphors for life itself. These characteristics have been eloquently described by the Western critics Osvald Siren and Ernest Fenollosa, respectively:

_We hardly need dwell on the well-known fact that the Chinese painters, and particularly those who worked in Indian ink, utilized s.p.a.ce as a most important means of artistic expression, but it may be pointed out that their ideas of s.p.a.ce and their methods of rendering it were far from the same as in European art. s.p.a.ce was not to them a cubic volume that could be geometrically constructed, it was something illimitable and incalculable which might be, to some extent, suggested by the relation of forms and tonal values but which always extended beyond every material indication and carried a suggestion of the infinite.3

The wonderful twisted trees, mighty mountain pines and cedars, loved by these early Chinese and later j.a.panese, which our Western superficial view first ascribed to some barbarian taste for monstrosities, really exhibit the deep Zen thinker in their great knots and scaly limbs that have wrestled with storms and frosts and earthquakes--an almost identical process through which a man's life-struggles with enemies, misfortunes, and pains have stamped themselves into the wrinkles and strong muscular planes of his fine old face. Thus nature becomes a vast and picturesque world for the profound study of character; and this fails to lead to didactic overweighting and literary conceit, as it would do with us, because character, in its two senses of human individuality and nature individuality, are seen to become one.4_

During the early years of the Sung dynasty, two distinct styles of landscape painting developed, which today are known as "Northern" and "Southern," reflecting their geographical locations. Although it is extremely dangerous to venture generalizations about painting schools, it might be said that the Northern school produced comparatively formal, symmetrical works done in sharp, angular, ax-like brushstrokes which distinguished clearly between ink line and ink wash and in which the distant mountains were generally portrayed as crisply as the foreground. In contrast, the Southern school as a rule preferred a more romantic treatment of landscape elements, with rounded hills and misty valleys. Distant mountains were portrayed in graded washes of ink, suggesting mysterious recesses bathed in fog, while the middle ground was filled with rolling hills mellowed by a sense of diffuse lighting.

A Chinese critic of the period described a Northern artist's work as all brush and no ink, and a Southern artist's as all ink and no brush--a simplified but basically accurate characterization of the two schools.

The Northern style was originally centered around the northern capital of Kaifeng and the Southern around Nanking in the Yangtze valley, but when the Sung court fled to the South after the fall of the northern capital in 1127, the styles of the two schools were merged to some degree in a new academy that was established in the lovely southern city of Hangchow. Painters of the Southern Sung dynasty, as this later era came to be known, often were masters of both styles, sometimes producing jagged Northern landscapes, sometimes misty Southern vistas, or sometimes combining the two in a single painting. In time, however, as the mood of the age grew increasingly romantic and Ch'an Buddhism became more influential in academic circles, the jagged brushstrokes of the Northern painters retreated farther and farther into the mist, leaving the landscapes increasingly metaphorical, with contorted trees and rugged, textured rocks.

This new lyrical style, which predominated in the last century of the Sung painting academy, was primarily the creation of two artists, Ma Yuan (active ca. 1190-1224) and Hsia Kuei (active ca. 1180-1230), whose works were to become the models for As.h.i.+kaga Zen landscapes. They both experimented with asymmetry and the deliberate juxtaposition of traditional landscape elements. s.p.a.ce became an element in its own right, particularly in the works of Ma Yuan, whose "one-corner"

compositions were often virtually blank save for a bottom corner. An eclectic stylist, he frequently depicted the foreground in the ax-cut brushstrokes and sharp diagonals of the North, while distant mountains in the same painting were treated by the soft, graded washes of the South. Hsia Kuei did much the same, except that he took a marked interest in line and often painted foreground trees and rocks in sharp silhouette. In later years, after the Ming dynasty came to power, Chinese tastes reverted to a preference for the Northern style, but in j.a.pan the so-called Ma-Hsia lyric school was revered and copied by Zen artists who found the subjective treatment of nature a perfect expression of Zen doctrines concerning intuitive insight.

The Southern Sung academy did not deliberately produce

Ch'an art; it was the j.a.panese who identified the Ma-Hsia style explicitly with Zen. However, during the early years of the thirteenth century, an expressionist, Ch'an school of art-- the heir of the earlier T'ang eccentrics--arose and produced a spontaneous style of painting as unpredictable as Zen itself. The center for this protest school of landscape art was not the Sung academy but rather a Ch'an monastery near Hangchow, and its leader was a monk named Mu-ch'i (ca. 1210-ca.

1280), who painted all subjects--landscapes, Ch'an _koan_, and expressionistic still-lifes--with brushstrokes at once skillfully controlled and deceptively casual. His was a disciplined spontaneity. A master of technique, he deliberately disregarded all the conventions.

As time pa.s.sed, various staid painters of the Sung academy heard his siren call of ecstasy and abandoned their formal styles, ending their days drinking with the Ch'an monks in monasteries around Hangchow, lost in the sheer exhilaration of ink and brush.

When j.a.panese monks began traveling to China, their first encounter with landscape painting was in these monasteries. Consequently, the styles and the paintings of the Ch'an Mu-ch'i school were the first to be sent to j.a.pan. In later years, after the Northern school of painting was again in vogue in China, Ming Chinese were only too happy to unload outdated Southern Sung monochromes on the eager j.a.panese. The emissaries of Yos.h.i.+mitsu (as well as earlier traveling monks) had their pick of these works, with the result that the very best examples of the spontaneous Mu-ch'i and the lyric Ma-Hsia styles of Sung painting are today in j.a.pan.

The paintings of Mu-ch'i, the first Chinese monochrome art to be seen in j.a.pan, were an instant success, and Zen monks rapidly took up the style. The most successful imitator was a j.a.panese priest-painter named Mincho (1351-1431), who before long was producing landscapes virtually indistinguishable from Mu-ch'i's. It was almost as though Mu-ch'i had risen from the dead and begun a new career in j.a.pan a century later.

Subsequently, the landscapes of the Ma-Hsia school found their way to j.a.pan, and before long a second "Sung dynasty" was in full swing under the As.h.i.+kaga. j.a.panese Zen had found its art, and soon Yos.h.i.+mitsu had established a painting academy at the temple of Shokoku-ji, where painter-monks gathered to study each new boatload of Sung works and to vie with one another in imitating Chinese brush styles.

The head of the Zen academy was the priest Josetsu (active ca. 1400- 1413), who took full control after Yos.h.i.+mitsu's death in 1408.

Josetsu's famous "Man Catching a Catfish with a Gourd," a parable of the elusiveness of true knowledge, is a perfect example of j.a.panese mastery of Sung styles, with its sharp foreground brushwork and misty distant mountains. The Zen academy dominated j.a.panese art until well after the Onin War, exploring and copying the great Sung works, both those in the lyric academic style and those in the spontaneous Ch'an style. Josetsu was succeeded by his pupil Shubun (flouris.h.i.+ng 1423-d.

ca. 1460), whose vast (attributed) output of hanging scrolls and sixfold screens was a precise re-creation of the Sung lyric style. He was not a mere imitator, but rather a legitimate member of a school long vanished, with a genuine understanding of the ideals that had motivated the Southern Sung artists. Shubun was a perfect master, a Zen Raphael, who so disciplined his style that it seemed effortless. His paintings are things of beauty in which the personality of the artist has disappeared, as was the intention of the Sung masters, resulting in works so perfectly of a type that they stand as a foundation on which others might legitimately begin to innovate.

However, under Shubun's successor Sotan (1414-1481), the academy continued to copy the techniques of dead Sung artists (as so often happens when art is inst.i.tutionalized), producing works that showed no glimmer of originality. Zen art had reached maturity and was ready to become its own master; but it needed an artist who would place more trust in his own genius than in the dictates of the academy.

The individual who responded to this need is today looked upon as the finest j.a.panese artist of all time. Sesshu Toyo (1420-1506) was a pupil of Shubun and very nearly the contemporary of Sotan. Painting out of a profound sense of the spirit of Zen, Sesshu was able to dismantle the components of Sung landscapes and rea.s.semble them into an individual statement of Zen philosophy. It is thought that he became a Zen priest early in life and spent his formative years in an obscure rural village on the Inland Sea. However, records show that at the age of thirty- seven he was a priest in a reasonably high position at Shokoku-ji, under the patronage of Yos.h.i.+masa, and a member of the academy presided over by Shubun. He apparently studied under Shubun until shortly before the Onin War, when he left Kyoto for a city on the southwestern coast and soon was on his way to China aboard a trading vessel.

Traveling as a Zen priest and a painter of some reputation, Sesshu was immediately welcomed by the Ch'an centers of painting on the mainland and by the Ming court in Peking. Although he was able to see and study many Sung paintings not available in the Kyoto As.h.i.+kaga collection, he was disappointed in the Ming artists he encountered and returned to j.a.pan declaring he had found no worthy teacher in China except her streams and mountains. He also p.r.o.nounced Josetsu and Shubun the equals of any Chinese painters he had met--probably the first time in history such a statement could have gone unchallenged. He never again returned to Kyoto, but established a studio in a western seaside village, where he received the mighty and pa.s.sed his years in painting, Zen meditation, and pilgrimages to temples and monasteries. According to the traditional account, he declined an opportunity to become Sotan's successor as head of the Kyoto academy, recommending that the post be given to Kano Masan.o.bu (1434-1530), who did in fact a.s.sume a position as official painter to the shogun in the 1480s. It later pa.s.sed to Masan.o.bu's son Kano Moton.o.bu (1476-1559). This launched the decorative Kano school of painting which dominated j.a.panese art for centuries thereafter.

Sesshu was a renegade stylist who mastered the Sung formulas of Shubun early in his career and then developed striking new dimensions in ink painting. Despite his scornful a.s.sessments of Ming art, he learned a great deal in China which he later used, including an earthy realism that freed him from Shubun's sublime perfection, a sense of design that allowed him to produce large decorative sixfold screens which still retained the Zen spirit, and, perhaps most importantly, the Ch'an- inspired ''flung ink" technique which took him into the realm of semi-

abstraction. In his later years he became famous for two distinct styles which, though not without Chinese precedents, were strongly individualistic.

In the first of these, known as _s.h.i.+n_, the polished formulas of Shubun were supplanted by a controlled boldness, with rocks and mountains outlined in dark, angular brushstrokes seemingly hewn with a chisel.

The landscapes were not so much sublimely unattainable as caught and worked to his will. The reverence for nature remained, but under his hand the depiction was almost cubist; the essence of a vista was extracted in an intricate, dense design of angular planes framed in powerful lines. Delicacy was replaced by dominance. Precursors of this style can be found in the works of Ma Yuan and Hsia Kuei, both of whom experimented in the hard, Northern-influenced techniques of brushstroke, but it was Sesshu who was the true master of the technique. Writing in 1912, the American critic Ernest Fenollosa declared him to be the greatest master of the straight line and angle in the history of the world's art.

Sesshu's second major style was _so_, an abstraction in wash combining the tonal mastery of the Southern Sung school with the "flung ink," or _haboku_, of the Ch'an school--a style in which line is almost entirely ignored, with the elements of the landscape being suggested by carefully varied tones of wash. A viewer familiar with the traditional elements of the Sung landscape can identify all the required components, although most are acknowledged only by blurred streaks and seeming dabs of ink which appear to have been applied with a sponge rather than a brush. In contrast to the cubist treatment of the _s.h.i.+n _style, the _so _defines no planes but allows elements of the landscape to blend into one another through carefully controlled variations in tonality. As effortless as the style appears to be, it is in fact a supreme example of mastery of the brush, an instrument intended for carving lines rather than subtle shading and blending of wash.

Because Sesshu chose to live in the secluded provinces, he did not perpetuate a school, but artists in Kyoto and elsewhere drew on his genius to invigorate Zen painting. One artist inspired by him was So'ami, a member of the Ami family which flourished during the academy's heyday. The earlier members of the family had produced acceptable works in the standard Sung style, but So'ami distinguished himself in a number of styles, including the _so_. The other artist directly influenced by Sesshu was the provincial Sesson (ca.1502- ca.1589), who took part of the earlier master's name as his own and became adept in both _s.h.i.+n _and _so _techniques. Although he, too, avoided strife-ridden Kyoto, he became famous throughout j.a.pan, and his works suggest what the academy might have produced had Sesshu chosen to remain part of the Zen establishment. Yet even in Sesson's work one can detect a polished, effortless elegance that seems to transform Sesshu's hard-earned power into an easy grace, a certain sign that the creative phase of Zen art had ended.

The As.h.i.+kaga era of j.a.panese monochrome landscape is really the story of a few inspired individuals, artists whose works spanned a period of something more than one hundred and fifty years. As men of Zen, they found the landscape an ideal expression of reverence for the divine essence they perceived in nature. To contemplate nature was to contemplate the universal G.o.d, and to contemplate a painting of nature, or better still to paint nature itself, was to perform a sacrament. The landscape painting was their version of the Buddhist icon, and its monochrome abstraction was a profound expression of Zen aesthetics.

Like the artists of the Renaissance, the As.h.i.+kaga artists wors.h.i.+ped through painting. The result is an art form showing no G.o.ds but resonant with spirituality.

CHAPTER TEN