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.
[10] See Kümmel, _Die Kunst Ostasiens_ Pl. 118.
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.