The Way of Zen - Alan Watts [90]
The Western eye is immediately struck by the absence of symmetry in these paintings, by the consistent avoidance of regular and geometrical shapes, whether straight or curved. For the characteristic brush line is jagged, gnarled, irregularly twisting, dashing, or sweeping–always spontaneous rather than predictable. Even when the Zen monk or artist draws a solitary circle-one of the most common themes of zenga–it is not only slightly eccentric and out of shape, but the very texture of the line is full of life and verve with the incidental splashes and gaps of the “rough brush.” For the abstract or “perfect” circle becomes concrete and natural–a living circle–and, in the same way, rocks and trees, clouds and waters appear to the Chinese eye as most like themselves when most unlike the intelligible forms of the geometer and architect.
Western science has made nature intelligible in terms of its symmetries and regularities, analyzing its most wayward forms into components of a regular and measurable shape. As a result we tend to see nature and to deal with it as an “order” from which the element of spontaneity has been “screened out.” But this order is maya, and the “true suchness” of things has nothing in common with the purely conceptual aridities of perfect squares, circles, or triangles–except by spontaneous accident. Yet this is why the Western mind is dismayed when ordered conceptions of the universe break down, and when the basic behavior of the physical world is found to be a “principle of uncertainty.” We find such a world meaningless and inhuman, but familiarity with Chinese and Japanese art forms might lead us to an altogether new appreciation of this world in its living, and finally unavoidable, reality.
Mu-ch’i and Liang-k’ai did many paintings of the Zen Patriarchs and masters, whom they represented for the most part as abandoned lunatics, scowling, shouting, loafing around, or roaring with laughter at drifting leaves. As favorite themes they adopted, as Zen figures, the two crazy hermits Han-shan and Shih-te, and the enormously rotund folk-god Pu-tai, to complete a marvelous assortment of happy tramps and rogues to exemplify the splendid nonsense and emptiness of the Zen life. Zen and–to some extent–Taoism seem to be the only spiritual traditions which feel secure enough to lampoon themselves, or to feel sufficiently un-self-conscious to laugh not only about their religion but in the midst of it. In these lunatic figures the Zen artists portray something slightly more than a parody of their own wu-shin or “mindless” way of life, for as “genius is to madness close allied” there is a suggestive parallel between the meaningless babble of the happy lunatic and the purposeless life of the Zen sage. In the words of a Zenrin poem:
The wild geese do not intend to cast their reflection;
The water has no mind to receive their image.
Thus the aimless life is the constant theme of Zen art of every kind, expressing the artist’s own inner state of going nowhere in a timeless moment. All men have these moments occasionally, and it is just then that they catch those vivid glimpses of the world which cast such a glow over the intervening wastes of memory–the smell of burning leaves on a morning of autumn haze, a flight of sunlit pigeons against a thundercloud, the sound of an unseen waterfall at dusk, or the single cry of some unidentified bird in the depths of a forest. In the art of Zen every