Zen in the Arts
 Happily, it is possible for us not only to hear about Zen but also to see it.
 Since one showing is worth a hundred sayings, the expression of Zen in the Arts gives us one of the most direct ways of understanding it.
 This is the more so because the art forms which Zen has created are not symbolic in the same way as other types of Buddhist art,
 or as is religious art as a whole.
 The favorite subjects of Zen artists, whether painters or poets, are what we would call natural, concrete, and secular things.
 Even when they turn to the Buddha, or to the patriarchs and masters of Zen, they depict them in a peculiarly down-to-earth and human way.
 Furthermore, the arts of Zen are not merely or primarily representational.
 Even in painting, the work of art is considered not only as representing nature, but as being itself a work of nature.
 For the very technique involves the art of artlessness, or what Saburo Hasegawa has called "the controlled accident,"
 so that paintings are formed as naturally as the rocks and grasses which they depict.
 The art forms of the Western world arise from spiritual and philosophical traditions in which spirit is divided from nature
 and comes down from heaven to work upon it as an intelligent energy upon an inert and recalcitrant stuff.
 Thus, Malraux speaks always of the artist "conquering" his medium,
 as explorers and scientists speak of "conquering mountains" or "conquering space."
 To Chinese and Japanese ears, these are grotesque expressions,
 for when you climb, it is the mountain as much as your own legs which lifts you upwards,
 and when you paint, it is the brush, ink, and paper which determine the result as much as your own hand.
 The expression of this whole attitude in the arts is perhaps best approached through painting and poetry.
 Since writing and poetry were among the chief preoccupations of Chinese scholars,
 and since the Chinese way of painting is closely akin to writing,
 the roles of scholar, artist, and poet were not widely separated.
 The result was a tremendous cross-fertilization of philosophical, scholarly, poetic, and artistic pursuits,
 in which the Zen and Taoist feeling for naturalness became the dominant note.
 Shiploads of monks amounting almost to floating monasteries plied between China and Japan,
 carrying not only sutras and Chinese classical books,
 but also tea, silk, pottery, incense, paintings, drugs, musical instruments,
 and every refinement of Chinese culture, not to mention Chinese artists and craftsmen.
 Closest to the feeling of Zen was a calligraphic style of painting,
 done with black ink on paper or silk, usually a painting and poem in one.
 Chinese black ink is capable of a great variety of tones, varied by the amount of water,
 and the ink itself is found in an enormous number of qualities and colors of black.
 The ink comes in a solid stick, and is prepared by pouring a little water into a flat stone dish,
 upon which the stick is rubbed, until the liquid is of the required density.
 Writing or painting is done with a sharply pointed brush set in a bamboo stem,
 a brush which is held upright without resting the wrist on the paper,
 and whose soft hairs give its strokes a great versatility.
 Since the touch of the brush is so light and fluid,
 and since it must move continuously over the absorbent paper if the ink is to flow out regularly,
 its control requires a free movement of the hand and arm,
 as if one were dancing rather than writing on paper.
 In short, it is a perfect instrument for the expression of unhesitating spontaneity,
 and a single stroke is enough to give away one's character to an experienced observer.
 One of the most striking features is the relative emptiness of the picture,
 an emptiness which appears, however, to be part of the painting, and not just unpainted background.
 By filling in just one corner, the artist makes the whole area of the picture alive.
 Ma Yuan, in particular, was a master of this technique,
 which amounts almost to "painting by not painting,"
 or what Zen sometimes calls "playing the stringless lute."
 The secret lies in knowing how to balance form with emptiness,
 and above all, in knowing when one has said enough.
 Equally impressive is the mastery of the brush,
 of strokes ranging from delicate elegance to rough vitality,
 from minutely detailed trees to bold outlines and masses given texture
 by the controlled accidents of stray brush hairs and uneven inking of the paper.
 In poetry, the empty space is the surrounding silence which a two-line poem requires,
 a silence of the mind in which one does not think about the poem,
 but actually feels the sensation which it evokes,
 all the more strongly for having said so little.
 By the 17th century, the Japanese had brought this wordless poetry to perfection in the haiku,
 the poem of just 17 syllables, which drops the subject almost as it takes it up.
 To non-Japanese people, haiku are apt to seem no more than beginnings, or even titles for poems,
 and in translation it is impossible to convey the effect of their sound and rhythm.
 However, translation can usually convey the image, and this is the important point.
 Of course, there are many haiku which seem as stilted as the Japanese paintings on cheap lacquer trays for export,
 but the non-Japanese listener must remember that a good haiku is a pebble thrown into the pool of the listener's mind,
 evoking associations out of the richness of his own memory.
 It invites the listener to participate, instead of leaving him dumb with admiration
 while the poet shows off.
 The development of the haiku was largely the work of Basho, 1643-1694,
 whose feeling for Zen wanted to express itself in a type of poetry altogether in the spirit of wu-shi, nothing special.
 Basho wrote his haiku in the simplest type of Japanese speech,
 naturally avoiding literary and highbrow language,
 so creating a style which made it possible for ordinary people to be poets.
 The haiku sees things in their suchness, without comment,
 a view of the world which the Japanese call sono mama, just as it is, or just so.
 Weeds in the rice field, cut and left lying, just so, fertilized.


{END}
Wait Time : 0.00 sec
Model Load: 0.64 sec
Decoding  : 0.49 sec
Transcribe: 509.31 sec
Total Time: 510.43 sec