The Way of Zen - Alan Watts [89]
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.
Sumi-e, as the Japanese call this style of painting, may have been perfected as early as the Tang dynasty by the almost legendary masters Wu Tao-tzu (c. 700–760) and Wang-wei (c. 698–759). However, the authenticity of works ascribed to them is doubtful, though they may be as early as the ninth century and include a painting so fully characteristic of Zen as the impressionistic waterfall attributed to Wang-wei–a thundering stream of sheer power, suggested by a few slightly curved sweeps of the brush between two masses of rock. The great formative age of this style was undoubtedly the Sung dynasty (959–1279), and is represented by such painters as Hsia-kuei, Ma-yüan, Mu-ch’i, and Liang-k’ai.
The Sung masters were pre-eminently landscape painters, creators of a tradition of “nature painting” which has hardly been surpassed anywhere in the world. For it shows us the life of nature–of mountains, waters, mists, rocks, trees, and birds–as felt by Taoism and Zen. It is a world to which man belongs but which he does not dominate; it is sufficient to itself, for it was not “made for” anyone and has no purpose of its own. As Hsüan-chüeh said:
Over the river, the shining moon; in the pine trees, sighing wind; All night long so tranquil–why? And for whom?1 b
Sung landscapes are by no means as fantastic and stylized as Western critics often suggest, for to travel in similar territory, in mountainous, misty country, is to see them at every turn of the road, and it is a simple matter for the photographer to take pictures which look exactly like Chinese paintings. One of the most striking features of the Sung landscape, as of sumi-e as a whole, 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-yüan, in particular, was a master of this technique, which amounts almost to “painting by not painting,” or what Zen sometimes calls “playing the string-less lute.” The secret lies in knowing how to balance form with emptiness and, above all, in knowing when one has “said” enough. For Zen spoils neither the aesthetic shock nor the satori shock by filling in, by explanation, second thoughts, and intellectual commentary. Furthermore, the figure so integrally related to its empty space gives the feeling of the “marvelous Void” from which the event suddenly appears.
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. Zen artists have preserved