The spirit of Zen can be found in many forms of Japanese art, including haiku poetry, Noh drama, the music of the bamboo flute shakuhachi garden design, and the tea ceremony. Compared with these other art-forms, however, Zen paintings and calligraphy are the most concentrated expressions of Zen principles, because of their direct link to enlightened masters. The most important monks of the past four centuries took up the brush, usually in their final years, to express their inner vision. The paintings and calligraphy that they created are considered in Japan to be visible records of their individually enlightened minds. The first full-scale international exhibition of this remarkable art is now touring museums in the United States, having opened at the Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, Kansas, this January.
Zen art is unique. For other Buddhist sects, paintings have been prepared with care and precision by accomplished craftsmen to be radiant, idealized, and awe-inspiring. In contrast, the brushwork of Zen masters is rough, spontaneous, and often irreverent. Utilizing the simple means of ink (and more rarely color) on paper, monks have been able to express their inner Zen experience in direct visual terms. By considering Zen art to be an aid to mediation, a form of teaching beyond words, and a visible expression of the inherent Buddha nature, monks of the Edo, Meiji, and Taisho periods in Japan (1600-1925) brought new life to the ink-painting tradition.
In part this was a revival; Zen brushwork had begun in China a millennium ago, reaching Japan in the thirteenth century. In Japan's Middle Ages, however, the simple and intense ink painting tradition that had come from China evolved into a professional form of art in which fundamental spiritual values of the past were superseded by elaborations of technique. Zen figures gave way to landscapes as the primary subject, and masters such as Sesshu and Sesson became celebrated for their painting skills, receiving many commissions from government leaders. Eventually, professional artists with no training in Zen began to dominate the ink-painting tradition.
Beginning in 1600, however, fundamental changes occurred in Japan. These included government support for Confucianism rather than Zen, the closure of the country to the outside world, the rise of a mercantile economy, increasingly restrictive regulations by the Tokugawa shogunate, a general weakening of religious beliefs, and later, the dramatic opening of Japan to the West. Through all these changes, Zen art not only survived but flourished; lacking strong support from the government, monks were free to create art for both personal and public purposes. Some Zen masters attempted to establish connections with the leaders of society through such means as tea ceremony meetings, which conveyed cultural prestige through a sense of personal and artistic refinement. Other monks rejected the world of the elite and painted merely to express their own Zen vision, giving their works to followers and pupils. Most Edo period (1600-1867) masters however used art as a means of reaching out to the public, popularizing Zen in ways not attempted before. Realizing that painting and calligraphy could have a more immediate impact than sermons or rituals, teaching monks took up the brush to express the nature of meditation and enlightenment.
Enlightened Masters
Zen masters in the seventeenth century returned to figure painting rather
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