Part 9 (1/2)
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”