Zen Buddhism And Its Relation to Art

There were already many sects in China, the chief of which were:

We now come to Zen.

In the year 520 A.D. there arrived at Canton a missionary from Southern India. His name was Bodhidharma and he appears to have been the younger son of an Indian Prince.

The reigning Emperor of China was a munificent patron of Buddhism. He had built monasteries, given alms, distributed scriptures, defended the faith. Hearing that a Buddhist prince had arrived from India he summoned him at once to his Capital. The following conversation took place in the Palace at Nanking:

The Emperor could make nothing of him. Monasticism, a huge vested interest, decried him, and after a short stay in Nanking he started northward, towards the Capital of the Wei Tartars, who then ruled over a large part of China. The Wei Emperor, like his Chinese confrère, was also a great patron of Buddhism, and he, too, desired an interview with the Indian priest. But Bodhidharma had done with Emperors, and settled in a small country temple, where he lived till his death nine years later. Some say that he tried to visit the Capital of the Weis, but was prevented by the intrigues of the monks there.

He left behind him a few short tractates, the substance of which is as follows:

Some one asked him: “Why may we not worship the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas?” He answered:

He was asked: “Can a layman with wife and children, one given over to the lusts of the flesh, achieve Buddhahood?” He answered:

“What,” cried his listeners, “a butcher, who lives by taking life, and he achieve Buddhahood?” The master replied:

Such was the teaching of Bodhidharma. It was Vedantic[3] rather than Buddhist. The terms “thought,” “Buddha,” etc., used by Bodhidharma correspond exactly to the brahman of the Upanishads. Mystic contemplation or yoga had been used by the Brahmins and was not unknown to the early Buddhists. But Bodhidharma was the first to insist upon it as the sole means of salvation.

Yet though his whole teaching turned on this “meditation” or “Zen,” he left behind him no exact directions for the practice of it. Having shown the end, he left it to each individual to find his own means. Rules, dogmas and definitions were precisely what he set out to destroy.

Less than a hundred years after his death another Indian, Buddhapriya, came to China and there defined with exactitude and blunt materiality the various forms of meditation.

The transition from the spirituality of Bodhidharma to the grossness of his follower is, however, typical of religious history. The poetry of Christ turns into the theology of Paul; the hovel of Saint Francis into the mansion of Brother Elias.

He first describes the different attitudes in which Zen may be practised, with an exact account of the correct position for hands, feet, head, etc. The normal attitude of meditation, cross-legged, with upright back and hands locked over the knees is familiar to every one.

Zen could also be practised while walking and, in cases of sickness, while lying down. Buddhapriya’s instructions are in the form of question and answer.

Zen was at first a purely personal discipline, non-monastic, non-ethical, not demanding the acceptance of any Scripture or any tradition. In modern Japan it has to some extent regained this character. In China the habit of quoting written authority was too strong to be easily discarded. The Zen masters soon began to answer difficult questions by quoting from the Buddhist Scriptures. Convenience dictated that practicants of Zen should live in communities and monasticism was soon established in their sect, as in every other sect of Buddhism. Questions of conduct arose, and Zen was squared with the contemporary ethical outlook; though in medieval Japanese literature wicked and cynical persons are generally depicted as adepts of Zen.

Bodhidharma denied the existence of Good and Evil; but it was pointed out by later apologists that the Zen adept, having viewed the Absolute, is convinced of the unreality and futility of those pleasures and possessions which are the incentive to sin. The Zen practicant, though he makes no moral effort, nevertheless is certain not to sin, because he is certain not to be tempted.

Finally, Zen forged itself a tradition. Probably during the eleventh century a Scripture[5] was fabricated which recounts how once when Buddha was preaching, he plucked a flower and smiled. Only the disciple Kāshyapa understood the significance of this act. Between him and the Buddha there passed a wordless communication of Absolute Truths. This communication was silently passed on by Kāshyapa to his disciple, and so ultimately to Bodhidharma, who brought it to China.

The method of teaching by symbolic acts (such as the plucking of a flower) was extensively used by the Zen masters. For example, when a disciple asked Enkwan a question about the nature of Buddha, he answered, “Bring me a clean bowl.” When the priest brought the bowl, the master said, “Now put it back where you found it.” He signified that the priest’s questionings must return to their proper place, the questioner’s heart, from which alone spiritual knowledge can be obtained.

The object of the Zen teachers, as of some eccentric schoolmasters whom I have known, seems at first sight to have been merely to puzzle and surprise their pupils to the highest possible degree. A peculiar “brusquerie” was developed in Zen monasteries. The literature of the sect consists chiefly in an endless series of anecdotes recording the minutest happenings in the lives of famous Zen monks and their (apparently) most trivial sayings. But behind these trifling acts and sayings a deep meaning lay hid. The interpretation of such teaching depends on a complete knowledge of the symbolism used. I am not inclined to agree with those students of Zen who assert that its written teaching are wholly devoid of intellectual content or so completely esoteric as not to admit of explanation in words. Like other Buddhist philosophers the Zen masters were chiefly concerned with the attempt to define the relation between the One and the Many, between the subjective and objective aspects of life.

The idealism of Zen does not mean that the phenomenal world has no importance. To those who have not reached complete self-realisation the urgencies of that world remain paramount and are the only stepping-stones upon which he can climb higher.

On the day of his arrival at the monastery a novice presented himself before the abbot, begging to be allowed to begin his spiritual exercises without further delay. “Have you had supper?” asked the abbot. “Yes.” “Then go and wash your plate.”

Let us begin with Enō, a master of the seventh century. He lost his parents when he was young and earned his living by gathering firewood. One day when he was in the market-place he heard some one reading the Diamond Sūtra.[6] He asked where such books were to be had and was told “From Master Kōnin on the Yellow Plum-blossom Hill.” Accordingly he went to Kōnin’s Monastery in Anhui and presented himself before the Master. “Where do you come from?” “From the South.” “Bah! In the South they have not Buddha in their souls.” “North and South,” replied Enō, “are human distinctions that Buddha knows nothing of.”

Kōnin accepted him as a lay-brother and put him to pound rice in the bakery.

Kōnin was growing old and wished to choose his successor. He therefore instituted a poetical competition in which each monk was to epitomise in a quatrain the essence of Zen. The favourite candidate was the warden Shinshū, who sent in the following verses:

Enō, as a lay-brother, was not qualified to compete. Some one told him of Shinshū’s quatrain. “Mine would be very different,” he exclaimed, and persuaded one of the boys employed in the bakery to go stealthily by night and inscribe the following poem on the monastery-wall:

The authorship of the poem was discovered and the abbot Kōnin visited Enō in the bakery. “Is your rice white or no?” he asked. “White?” answered Enō; “it has not yet been sifted.” Thereupon the abbot struck three times on the rice-mortar with his staff and departed. Enō understood his meaning. That night at the third watch he came to Kōnin’s cell and was invested with the abbot’s mantle, thereby becoming the Sixth Patriarch of the Zen Church. He died in 712 A.D., without having learned how to read or write.

The warden Shinshū had lost the Patriarchate and with it the spiritual headship of Zen. But as a compensation Fate had in store for him worldly triumphs of the most dazzling kind. Leaving the rural monastery of Kōnin, he entered the Temple of the Jade fountain in the great city of Kingchau. His fame soon spread over central China. He was a man of “huge stature, bushy eyebrows and shapely ears.” The Empress Wu Hou, who had usurped the throne of China, notoriously cultivated the society of handsome priests. About 684 A.D. she summoned him to the Capital. Instead of commanding his presence at Court she came in a litter to his lodgings and actually knelt down before him. The friendship of this murderous and fiendishly cruel woman procured for him temporal dignities which in the eyes of the world completely outshone the rustic piety of the Sixth Patriarch. Shinshū at the Capital became as it were the Temporal Father of Zen, while Enō at his country monastery remained its spiritual pope. The successors of Enō became known as the Fathers of the Southern School; while the courtly and social Zen of Shinshū is called Zen of the North.

Was it in sincere goodwill or with the desire to discredit his rival that Shinshū invited Enō to join him at the Capital? In any case Enō had the good sense to refuse. “I am a man of low stature and humble appearance,” he replied; “I fear that the men of the North would despise me and my doctrines”—thus hinting (with just that touch of malice which so often spices the unworldly) that Shinshū’s pre-eminence in the North was due to outward rather than to spiritual graces.

Shinshū died in 706, outliving his august patroness by a year. To perpetuate his name a palace was turned into a memorial monastery; the Emperor’s brother wrote his epitaph; his obsequies were celebrated with stupendous pomp.

His successor, Fujaku, at first remained at the Kingchau monastery where he had been Shinshū’s pupil. But in 724 the irresolute Emperor Ming-huang, who had proscribed Buddhism ten years before, summoned Fujaku to the Imperial City. Here princes and grandees vied with one another in doing him honour. “The secret of his success,” says the historian,[7] “was that he seldom spoke and generally looked cross. Hence his rare words and occasional smiles acquired in the eyes of his admirers an unmerited value.” He died at the age of 89. On the day of his interment the great streets of Ch’ang-an were empty. The whole city had joined in the funeral procession. The Governor of Honan (one of the greatest functionaries in the State), together with his wife and children, all of them clad in monastic vestments, followed the bier, mingling with the promiscuous crowd of his admirers and disciples.

Religion was at that time fashionable in the high society of Ch’ang-an, as it is to-day in the great Catholic capitals of Munich, Vienna or Seville. When I read of Fujaku’s burial another scene at once sprang into my mind, the funeral of a great Bavarian dignitary, where I saw the noblemen of Munich walk hooded and barefoot through the streets.

I shall not refer again to the Northern School of Zen. One wonders whether the founders of religions are forced by fate to watch the posthumous development of their creeds. If so, theirs must be the very blackest pit of Hell.

Let us return to the Southern School, always regarded as the true repository of Zen tradition.

Ōbaku lived at the beginning of the ninth century, and was thus a contemporary of the poet Po Chü-i. He enjoyed the patronage of a distinguished statesman the Chancellor Hai Kyū, of whom the Emperor said, “This is indeed a true Confucian.” It is to the Chancellor that we owe the record of Ōbaku’s conversations, which he wrote down day by day. I will make a few extracts from this diary:

“The master told me that when he was studying with Enkwan, the Emperor Tai Chung came dressed as a monk. The master happened to be in the chapel prostrating himself before an image of Buddha. The Emperor, who thought he had learnt the lesson of Zen idealism, said to him: ‘There is nothing to be got from Buddha, nothing from the Church, nothing from Man; for nothing exists. What do you mean by praying at your age?’

“Ōbaku answered him: ‘I seek nothing of Buddha, the Church, or of Man. I am in the habit of praying.’ The Emperor said: ‘What do you do it for?’ Ōbaku lost patience and struck him with his fist. ‘You rude fellow,’ cried the Emperor. ‘Since nothing exists, what difference does it make to you whether I am rude or polite?’ and Ōbaku struck him again. The Emperor retreated hastily.”

In his old age Ōbaku visited his native village and stayed a year in his mother’s house, without revealing his identity. After he had set out again for his monastery, his mother suddenly realised that he was her son and went in pursuit of him. She reached the shore of a certain river, only to see him disembarking on the other side. Thereupon she lost her reason and flung herself into the water.

Ōbaku threw a lighted torch after her and recited the following verses:

Henceforward the throwing of a lighted torch into the bier became part of the Zen funeral ceremony; it was accompanied by the reciting of the above verses. Probably formula, ritual, and story alike belong to a period much more ancient than Buddhism.

In the seventeenth century a Chinese priest named Ingen[8] carried the teaching of Ōbaku to Japan, where it now possesses nearly 700 temples.

Baso was a master of the ninth century. One day he was sitting with his feet across the garden-path. A monk came along with a wheel-barrow. “Tuck in your feet,” said the monk. “What has been extended cannot be retracted,” answered Baso. “What has been started cannot be stopped,” cried the monk and pushed the barrow over Baso’s feet. The master hobbled to the monastery and seizing an axe called out “Have any of you seen the rascal who hurt my feet?” The monk who had pushed the barrow then came out and stood “with craned head.” The master laid down his axe.

To understand this story we must realise that the wheel-barrow is here a symbol of the Wheel of Life and Death, which, though every spoke of it is illusion, cannot be disregarded till we have destroyed the last seed of phenomenal perception in us.

Ōbaku, as we have seen, taught wisdom with his fists. When the novice Rinzai came to him and asked him what was the fundamental idea of Buddhism, Ōbaku hit him three times with his stick. Rinzai fled and presently met the monk Daigu.

At that moment Rinzai had a Great Enlightenment.

Rinzai substituted howling for Ōbaku’s manual violence. He shouted meaningless syllables at his disciples; roared like a lion or bellowed like a bull. This “howling” became a regular part of Zen practice, and may be compared to the yelling of the American Shakers. Upon his deathbed Rinzai summoned his disciples round him and asked which of them felt capable of carrying on his work. Sanshō volunteered to do so. “How will you tell people what was Rinzai’s teaching?” asked Rinzai. Sanshō threw out his chest and roared in a manner which he thought would gratify the master. But Rinzai groaned and cried out, “To think that such a blind donkey should undertake to hand on my teaching!”

It was in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that Zen most completely permeated Chinese thought. Upon the invasion of the Mongols[9] many Zen monks from Eastern China took refuge in Japan; the same thing happened during the Manchu invasion in the seventeenth century. But by that time Zen had a serious philosophic rival.

In the fifteenth century the philosopher Wang Yang-ming began to propagate a doctrine which, in all but names, strongly resembled the philosophic side of Zen. He taught that in each one of us is a “higher nature,” something which, borrowing a phrase from Mencius, he called “Good Knowledge.” Of this inner nature he speaks in exactly the same terms as the Zen teachers spoke of their “Buddha immanent in man’s heart.” He even uses the same kind of doggerel-verse as a medium of teaching.

Rigid Confucianists, who would not have listened to any doctrine of professedly Buddhist origin, were able through Wang Yang-ming’s tact to accept the philosophy of Zen without feeling that they were betraying the Confucian tradition. The followers of Yang-ming are to-day very numerous both in China and Japan. They cultivate introspection, but not the complete self-hypnosis of Zen.

In China, where Zen is almost forgotten, the followers of this later doctrine are not even aware of its derivation.

I said at the beginning of this paper that Zen is often mentioned by writers on Far Eastern Art. The connection between Zen and art is important, not only because of the inspiration which Zen gave to the artist, but also because through Zen was obtained a better understanding of the psychological conditions under which art is produced than has prevailed in any other civilisation.

Art was regarded as a kind of Zen, as a delving down into the Buddha that each of us unknowingly carries within him, as Benjamin carried Joseph’s cup in his sack. Through Zen we annihilate Time and see the Universe not split up into myriad fragments, but in its primal unity. Unless, says the Zen æsthetician, the artist’s work is imbued with this vision of the subjective, non-phenomenal aspect of life, his productions will be mere toys.

I do not mean to suggest that Chinese artists found in Zen a short cut to the production of beauty. Zen aims at the annihilation of consciousness, whereas art is produced by an interaction of conscious and unconscious faculties. How far such an interaction can be promoted by the psychic discipline of Zen no layman can judge; moreover the whole question of the artist’s psychology is controversial and obscure.

Perhaps it is not even very important that the artist himself should have a sound æsthetic; but it is of the utmost importance to the artist that the public should have some notion of the conditions under which art can be produced—should have some key to the vagaries of a section of humanity which will in any case always be found troublesome and irritating.

Such a key Zen supplied, and it is in the language of Zen that, after the twelfth century, art is usually discussed in China and Japan.

One institution, about which till recently very little was known, seems to have been an important factor in the propagation of Zen art and ideas. About 1215 A.D. a Zen priest came from the far south-west of China to Hangchow, the Capital, and there refounded a ruined monastery, the Rokutsūji, which stood on the shores of the famous Western Lake. His name was Mokkei. He seems to have been the first to practise the swift, ecstatic type of monochrome which is associated with Zen. In hurried swirls of ink he sought to record before they faded visions and exaltations produced whether by the frenzy of wine, the stupor of tea, or the vacancy of absorption.

Sometimes his design is tangled and chaotic; sometimes as in his famous “Persimmons,”[10] passion has congealed into a stupendous calm.

Of his fellow-workers the best known is Rasō, a painter of birds and flowers. Ryōkai, once a fashionable painter, left the Court and with his pupil Rikaku worked in the manner of Mokkei.

Examples of Ryōkai’s work before and after his conversion are still preserved in Japan.

Finally, about the middle of the fourteenth century, a Japanese priest came to China and, under circumstances which I shall describe in an appendix, confusingly became Mokkei II. It may be that it was he who sent back to his own country some of the numerous pictures signed Mokkei which are now in Japan. Which of them are by Mokkei and which by Mokuan is a problem which remains to be solved.

This Zen art did not flourish long in China, nor in all probability do many specimens of it survive there. But in Japan it was a principal source of inspiration to the great painters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Sesshū himself is the direct descendant of Mokkei; as in a decadent way are Kanō masters such as Tsunenobu.

Zen paintings are of two kinds. (1) Representations of animals, birds and flowers, in which the artist attempted to identify himself with the object depicted, to externise its inner Buddha. These were achieved not by study from the life, as the early Sung nature-pieces have been, but by intense and concentrated visualisation of the subject to be painted. This mental picture was rapidly transferred to paper before the spell of concentration (samādhi) was broken. (2) Illustrations of episodes in the lives of the great Zen teachers. This branch of Zen art was essentially dramatic. It sought to express the characters of the persons involved, subtly to reveal the grandeur of soul that lay hidden behind apparent uncouthness or stupidity. Typical of this kind of painting are the pictures of “Tanka burning the Image.”

One night Tanka, a Zen priest, stayed as a guest at an ordinary Buddhist monastery. There was no firewood in his cell. As the night was cold he went into the chapel, seized a wooden statue of Shākyamuni and, chopping it up, made himself a comfortable fire. To him the idol of Buddha was a mere block of wood; his indignant hosts took a different view. The controversy is the same as that which occupies the central place in the Nō play Sotoba Komachi.

There is another aspect of Zen which had an equally important effect on art. The Buddha-nature is immanent not in Man only, but in everything that exists, animate or inanimate. Stone, river and tree are alike parts of the great hidden Unity. Thus Man, through his Buddha-nature or universalised consciousness, possesses an intimate means of contact with Nature. The songs of birds, the noise of waterfalls, the rolling of thunder, the whispering of wind in the pine-trees—all these are utterances of the Absolute.

Hence the connection of Zen with the passionate love of Nature which is so evident in Far Eastern poetry and art.

Personally I believe that this passion for Nature worked more favourably on literature than on painting. The typical Zen picture, dashed off in a moment of exaltation—perhaps a moonlit river expressed in three blurs and a flourish—belongs rather to the art of calligraphy than to that of painting.

In his more elaborate depictions of nature the Zen artist is led by his love of nature into that common pitfall of lovers—sentimentality. The forms of Nature tend with him to function not as forms but as symbols.

Something resembling the mystic belief which Zen embraces is found in many countries and under many names. But Zen differs from other religions of the same kind in that it admits only one means by which the perception of Truth can be attained. Prayer, fasting, asceticism—all are dismissed as useless, giving place to one single resource, the method of self-hypnosis which I have here described.

I have, indeed, omitted any mention of an important adjunct of Zen, namely tea-drinking, which was as constant a feature in the life of Zen monasteries as it is here in the régime of charwomen and girl-clerks. I have not space to describe the various tea-ceremonies. The tendency of monasteries was to create in them as in every part of daily life a more and more elaborate ritual, calculated to give some pattern to days otherwise devoid of any incident. We possess minute descriptions of every ceremony—the initiation of novices, the celebration of birth and death anniversaries of the Patriarchs, the procedure in cases of sickness, madness, disobedience, disappearance or death of monks; the selection and investiture of abbots; the lectures, liturgies and sessions which constituted the curriculum of Zen instruction.

In China decay set in after the fifteenth century. The Zen monasteries became almost indistinguishable from those of popular, idolatrous Buddhism. In Japan, on the other hand, Zen has remained absolutely distinct and is now the favourite creed of the educated classes. It has not hitherto conducted any propaganda in Europe, whereas the Amida Sect has sent out both missionaries and pamphlets. But I believe that Zen would find many converts in England. Something rather near it we already possess. Quakerism, like Zen, is a non-dogmatic religion, laying stress on the doctrine of Immanence. But whereas the Quakers seek communion with the Divine Spark in corporate meditation and deliberately exploit the mysterious potencies of crowd-psychology—the Zen adept probes in solitude (or at least without reference to his neighbour) for the Buddha within him.

In cases where a Quaker meeting passes in silence, the members having meditated quietly for a whole hour, a very near approach to a Zen gathering has been made. But more often than not the Holy Spirit, choosing his mouthpiece with an apparent lack of discrimination, quickly descends upon some member of the meeting. The ineffable, which Zen wisely refused to express, is then drowned in a torrent of pedestrian oration.

Some, then, may turn to Zen as a purer Quakerism. Others will be attracted to it by the resemblance of its doctrines to the hypotheses of recent psychology. The Buddha consciousness of Zen exactly corresponds to the Universal Consciousness which, according to certain modern investigators, lies hid beneath the personal Consciousness. Such converts will probably use a kind of applied Zen, much as the Japanese have done; that is to say, they will not seek to spend their days in complete Samādhi, but will dive occasionally, for rest or encouragement, into the deeper recesses of the soul.

It is not likely that they will rest content with the traditional Eastern methods of self-hypnosis. If certain states of consciousness are indeed more valuable than those with which we are familiar in ordinary life—then we must seek them unflinchingly by whatever means we can devise. I can imagine a kind of dentist’s chair fitted with revolving mirrors, flashing lights, sulphurous haloes expanding and contracting—in short a mechanism that by the pressure of a single knob should whirl a dustman into Nirvāna.

Whether such states of mind are actually more valuable than our ordinary consciousness is difficult to determine. Certainly no one has much right to an opinion who has not experienced them. But something akin to Samādhi—a sudden feeling of contact with a unity more real than the apparent complexity of things—is probably not an uncommon experience. The athlete, the creative artist, the lover, the philosopher—all, I fancy, get a share of it, not when seeking to escape from the visible world; but rather just when that world was seeming to them most sublimely real.

To seek by contemplation of the navel or of the tip of the nose a repetition of spiritual experiences such as these seems to us inane; and indeed the negative trance of Zen is very different from the positive ecstasies to which I have just referred. I say that it is different; but how do I know? “Zen,” said Bodhidharma, “cannot be described in words nor chronicled in books”; and I have no other experience of Zen. If I knew, I might transmit to you my knowledge, but it would have to be by a direct spiritual communication, symbolised only by a smile, a gesture, or the plucking of a flower.

I need not therefore apologise for having given a purely external and historical account of Zen, a creed whose inner mysteries are admittedly beyond the scope of words.

Reproductions of Zen Paintings in Japanese art publications. (The Kokka and the other publications here referred to may be seen at the Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum; and at the Print Room of the British Museum.)

The Nikkōshū[11], a diary by the priest Gidō, has the following entry under the year 1378 (month and day uncertain):

Reproductions of paintings illustrating Zen legend.

The only writer who has made extracts from the works of Bodhidharma is Père Wieger, whose remarks (in his Histoire des Croyances religieuses en Chine, pp. 517-528) show a robust and likeable bigotry.

Of Zen literature he says: “Nombre d’in-folio remplis de réponses incohérentes, insensées.... Ce ne sont pas, comme on l’a supposé, des allusions à des affaires intérieures, qu’il faudrait connaître pour pouvoir comprendre. Ce sont des exclamations échappées à des abrutis, momentanément tirés de leur coma.”

For the tea-ceremony in Japan see Okakura’s Book of Tea (Foulis, 1919). The “military” Zen of Japan is well described by Nukariya Kaiten in his The Religion of the Samurai, 1913.

Most of this paper is derived from the section on Zen (Series II, Vol. 15, seq.) in the “Supplement to the Collection of Buddhist Scriptures,” Dai Nihon Zoku Zō Kyō.

Much of the information with regard to the Rokutsūji School is taken from the article by Mr. Saga to which I have already referred. For the Rokutsūji (“Temple of the Six Penetrations”) see Hsien Shun Lin-an Chih (“Topography of Hangchow, 1265-1275 A.D.”), ch. 78, f. 9 recto.

I have also used Yamada’s Zenshū Jiten (Dictionary of Zen) and the Hekiganroku, edited by Sōyen, 1920.

(Chinese pronunciations given in brackets.)

A duplicate title page has been removed from the text.

"Externise" on p. 23 is a variant form of "externalise", and has been left as printed.

The diacritics in "Saddharma Pundarīka Sūtra" on p. 8 were marked in pen on the printed copy, and may not have been printed.