Asian Art and Architecture: Art & Design 382/582

Design List

553 Portrait of Enni Ben’en Mincho Muromachi early 15th c

557 Winter and Spring Landscape Tensho Shubun Muromachi early 15th c

560 Eka Showing His Severed Sesshu Toyo Muromachi 1496

561 Long Landscape Scroll Sesshu Toyo Muromachi late 15th c

563 Ama no Hashidate Sesshu Toyo Muromachi 1392 - 1573

565 Hatsuboku Landscape for Soen Sesshu Toyo Muromachi 1495

573 Shari-den Engaku-ji Late Kamakura c 1282

575 Ginkaku Jisho-ji Muromachi 1483

576 Garden of Daisen-in Soami Muromachi c 1500

575 Dry Landscape Ryoan-ji Muromachi 1392 - 1573

578 Tai-an teahouse Sen no Rikyu Momoyama 1582

579 Tai-an teahouse Sen no Rikyu Momoyama 1582

The Muromachi period is named for the quarter of Kyoto from which the Bakufu governed. The period is also referred to as the Ashikaga, after the name of the ruling shoguns. It was a time of feudal decentralizing and continual warfare among the powerful regional clans (uji). The emperor was out of the picture as far a state power was concerned, but still the center of a rich art supporting court life. Back in Kyoto and now losing power themselves the Shoguns now became another major source of patronage for the arts. This was also a period when trade with China flourished as did a new commercial class.

In the arts strong interest in Chinese styles re-emerged after 500 years of slight or rare contact.

Zen Buddhism had come from China (where it was called Chan, as a transcription of the Indian Dhyana or meditation). The new warrior culture embraced it enthusiastically. It dropped image worship in favor of meditation under a master, and master-student tutelage was a well accepted pattern among them. By the early 14th century it was already strongly embedded and functioning. And with the interest in the and prestige of Chinese Chan and the Chinese masters who spread it came an integral interest and training in other Chinese esthetic styles. China provided the ideal esthetics for the contemporary Japanese world. [Or at least what passed for Chinese did.]

"But Muromachi art expresses the Zen apprehension of the spiritual identity of all created things and the Zen appreciation of direct, intuitive perception, and it shares the Zen aesthetic standards of subtlety, allusiveness and restraint."( 418)

color on silk, 8’4 1/2" at Tofoku-ji

cf. Priest Bu-Kong (483), No. Song, 45", on silk, at Kozan-ji

In the Portrait of Enni Ben’en by Mincho we see the current conservative style of Chinese Portraiture in a Japanese rendition. The closeness to its model can be seen by looking back to the portrait of Priest Bu-Kong (483) from the Song. The only difference of note is the doubling of size in this Japanese work. In this case the work was not done from life, but later. Shoichi Kokushi, the founding abbot of Tofuku-ji, lived from 1202-1280; Mincho’s work was about a century later. If there is a difference between these two it is the hardening in the later version of the subtleties of the model. The portrait, no matter how invented, is a very explicit and personal one. suggesting that it was modeled on a particular individual if not surviving portraits of its subject. So the Japanese penchant for realism shows as does the decorative interest in the insistent patterns of the fabric. There is no reason to suppose that this individual piece had to be the model, though it is one that came to Japan at this time and could have been. Others came about the same time.

The artist Kichizan Mincho (1352-1431) is also known by the name Cho Densu. He is a Zen monk. As we saw last time, in the White Robed Kannon (from Kozan-ji, Lee, 550) the Chinese monochrome ink style was part of this set of cultural forms adapted at this time. Lee notes its Chinese style straight nose, narrowed eyes and inward expression, that contrast with the usual Japanese version. He also notes the early Japanese version of the "nail head" strokes in the calligraphy. The new Japanese style took off in this direction.

Besides the sort of conservative portrait style just seen Mincho also pursued the new and so adventurous monochrome as well. This Hermitage by a Mountain Brook is the only example to survive. A thatched cottage amid a grove of trees by a river is settled below and close by, while separated by a good deal of mist rising peaks mark the distance. Broad, "ax-cut" strokes of the side of the brush are used to create the mountains. It is an subtle caricature of Southern Song’s Ma-Xia, lyric style. What ever it may lack from not being an exact version of the Chinese point of view it makes up in creating a new Japanese one. The brush strokes reveal some variety, but as far as the one-cornered or loosely evocative elements one expects from the lyric style are concerned, this is a fairly earth bound and plodding job.

Above the painting are comments relating to it by a number of different connoisseurs, as the differences in writing reveal.

Josetsu was active around the year 1400. Though a good number are referred to in records of the time, only one that has survived is accepted as definitely his. This one. It shows a man illustrating the Zen aphorism "the heart cannot be grasped." We see a peasant fisherman beside a stream, beside a clump of bamboo. A catfish swims by in the stream. Lee says, the fish observes the futility of his pursuer’s efforts. However much he may want his prey, there is no way this camel of a fish is going through the narrow eye of that gourd’s mouth. The point is the futility of so much human effort.

If the picture didn’t make the issue plain enough, it is driven home by the 31 separate commentaries by Zen monks that stand above the painting. One mentions that it was made for the shogun around 1413. That would be Ashikaga Yoshimochi, the 4th 1394-1423. He was known as a fervent Zen deciple. He commissioned Josetsu to do a "small single-leaf screen in the new style." And it was placed near his throne of public audience to remind him of the difficulty of being a judge.

Josetsu is credited with being the founder, or maybe we should say fountainhead of the monochrome painting in Japan. Tensho Shubun, his student, was a more important figure spreading the style. It was his student, Sesshu who was its finest example. Shubun was not only a member of a Buddhist order, but an active painter and sculptor who worked for the Shogun as well as the order. The combination is revelatory. The Buddhist orders in Japan were now highly connected the political powers of the time. They were not only patronized by them and attacked by their rivals, but they worked actively with and for them.

ink and slight color on paper 12’ l.

Shubun visited Korea c 1423 and was familiar with the Ma-Xia style from examples he saw there as well as in Japan itself. He was best known for his hanging scrolls and screens. This is one of a pair of six fold screens. Except in rare cases, like the Josetsu piece we have just seen, screens were created in pairs and usually of multiple sections, since it was their folds that allowed them to stand up. The architectural mode of the time, and a remaining pattern of Japanese interior design, is the maintenance of wide open spaces that are broken up by portable screen. Thus a part of a room may be given up to different functions at different times, and these reshaped with the space by moving the screens around as convenient.

If this is a screen with scenes of winter and spring, its pair would have been a summer autumn blend. The style here is a mix of the powerful and rational Northern Song monumental style and the Ma-Xia Southern Song asymmetrical and elliptical. Winter is seen in the first four panels (reading light to left) while the richer, lusher snowless spring is found on the last two. A bridge separates the two seasons. The monochrome landscape’s dependence here as in China depends upon the strengths of the "drawing" or painting hand. Here on the exaggerated scale of the five and a half foot tall screen every aspect of this hand stands nakedly open for inspection.

[The format here is of great interest in itself. The folding screen can never be laid out as we see it in the photograph. To keep from falling over a screen must be zig-zagged on the floor, thus creating the fact of six distinctly separated and yet coordinated compositions. And as you see them here in the final five panels these cab be further distinguished by borders, though paper screens can be borderless and so run more effectively together from one to the next. The point remains, we see six separate compositions that can also be viewed in various combinations of two to six. Each has to stand on its own, and yet each also has to compile with the others! The varieties are great and often brilliantly varied.

ink & color on paper, hanging scroll 78 3/4"

The third generation in this monastic lineage of Japan’s monochrome painters is the most important. Sesshu Toyo is recognized as the greatest of all Japanese painters. His importance can well be compared with Bach’s in Western music. Sesshu (1420-1506) has a monochrome style and so is the successor to Shubun, though so unique is his production that it stands out for its difference from all that went before, more than as its successor.

Here in Eka Showing His Severed Arm to Daruma, dated 1496, we see a major Zen subject. Daruma, Bodhi Dharma, was the Indian bhikshu esteemed to be the First Patriarch, the one who brought Dhyana/Chan/Zen to China (around 540 CE). It is him who sits facing the rock wall, rapt in his nine years of meditation. [He is recognizable by his bulging eyes, whose lids he had previously torn off in frustration when, during a similarly lengthy meditation they closed and allowed him to lose concentration by falling asleep! (The attached folk tale is that they blossomed into the plants we call tea and this explains both the wrinkled form of the tea plants’ leaves and their associated ability to keeps us awake.)]

Behind Daruma is Eka (Ch: Hui-Ke) offering his arm to the invincible mediator, to attract his attention and demonstrate his own commitment to learning meditation as his deciple. It is decipleship here that is primary, even more perhaps than the final goal of satori (nirvana). The interior of the cave is rendered in blunt and rational marks. They vary greatly in tone, creating an effectively measured space and mood and yet maintaining their integrity as brush strokes. Daruma, in his undetailed robe is striking for the simplicity of his outline and for, again, the separate life of each of the strokes used to outline him. However plain the calligraphy, the wetness of the initial or final dot is clear and effective in creating both the subject and maintaining the lines life. Only the faces bear a bit of wash modulation. Most of what we see is created by bold distinct strokes.

The inscription reads: This was painted at age seventy-seven by Sesshu, holder of the chief seat at Taintong Siming" (That is, at Jingde Si on Mt. Tiantong, near Siming {present day NIngbo} in China {!}, I was honored as Chief monk")

So here is Zen painting: a Zen monastic from its most famous esthetic lineage painting a Zen subject in a characteristically Zen style–a Chinese on peculiarly associated with the Japanese’ favorite Chan monastics.

Of the two styles in which Sesshu worked, this is in the shin, sharp, angular, and relatively complex. (The other is the so, it is wet, soft, ultra simplified and explosive. It is also called hatsuboku, or ink splashed.)

ink & slight color on paper 15 3/4" x 52’

Probably his most famous work, and one of the most admired in all Japanese painting is his Long Landscape Scroll. It is a single symphonic handscroll composition, 52 feet long! The cliché from it in your book shows a bit of the path with a pair of figures resting upon it, a jump past crags into space defined as mist with a Buddhist tower in the background. Though the fact is the work is not of a Buddhist subject but of nature: climbing rocks and jutting trees. It is a Chinese scene as Lee puts it. The angular lightning zig-zag of the tree may be called Shubun’s, but it is a standard form. And so is every individual motif and even the slow movement through the seasons of the year that the full composition offers as a thematic guide. But it is the use of these conventional forms that sets Sesshu’s work out.

It is know from his own memoirs that he studied the work of the Southern Song masters Li Tang, Ma Yuan and Xia Gui and others. It is also known that he travelled to China in 1468-1469 on a diplomatic mission. There he met well known painters of the day and saw the work of many others. It is also know from his hand that seeing these great and prestigious contemporaries and their even more famous predecessor was one of his main interests in China. What can tell us most about both Sesshu and about the Japanese vision of Chinese art was his response. He sought this work out because of its great cultural prestige, but once he found it his reaction was to note that no one then working in China was the equal of the finest Japanese masters, most notably his own teacher, Shubun!

However overawed the Japanese were with what they considered to be Chinese art, the fact was they were quite assured that their own versions of it were quite as good as those they sought to emulate. Their freedom to follow their own intuitions within the established genres was absolute.

However, much Sesshu sought a Chinese style, it was his Japanese sensibility and associations that guided his response. We can see that well in Lee’s detail. Strong individual strokes, great modulations of tone, a variety of strokes, but over all a much simpler, more literal and definite depiction that one would find in a Chinese work: far more blunt and powerful, far less subtle. A man is followed by a little boy across a spit of a bridge. Rocks stick out all around, a stream flows beneath. Direct, decorative, abrupt. Dry rocks and wet trees. What is a set of individually brilliant strokes in the Chinese is distinct brush strokes in a highly decorative scene in Japan.

ink & slight color on paper 66 3/4"

Ama no Hashidate is the "Bridge of Heaven" seen as the spit of land coursing the center of the painting. It is a portrait of a well known scenic location. Looking at scenery is a major Japanese tradition, [with major roots both in the esthetics of poetry and the ideology of Shinto]. Here the well established tourist and pilgrimage center is given a somewhat literal interpretation. A tourist or we might better say nature viewer’s sight, it was also the location of important Buddhist temples, and so a pilgrimage goal as well.

The work is represented in cold blue ink, with touches of warmer orange-red wash at a few temple structures. As this was the color in which they were painted. Though decorative strength is unabated this work is more literal and less individualistic or connoisseur rich in bravura brushwork. It is less about painting and more about its subject. This is a more literal version of his shin style.

We can also see here the typical Japanese rolling hills that contrast both in stereotypical model and in some general fact with the sailing crags of Chinese mountains. Sesshu was not unique in his interest in traveling around Japan to experience its physical beauties first hand.

ink & slight color on paper 12 7/8" x 58 1/4"

The hatsuboku style, or purely untrammeled style, is what Chan was famous for in Japan, even if it was relatively disfavored by later Chinese critics. Indeed it was therefore in Japan that most of these Chinese works ended up In Japan it was this that Zen artists often favored. Sesshu’s work in this vein came only at the end of his long life. This one, painted for his deciple Josui Soen in 1495, is the most famous. In part the inscription reads, "...my eyes are misty and my spirit exhausted..." Another monk, Ryuto added,

The poems and painting, the one mans work and that of his associate are all part of a single composition, drawn on a thousand years of East Asian traditions. At the same time they represent a Japanese transformation of a Chinese vision and a peculiarly personal Buddhist exchange.

Unlike the hand scroll that passes in sections before the viewer’s gaze, the hanging scroll is seen all at once with its poems included. This does not prevent one from closely observing the painting’s elements. But like the aria in a Western opera, it presents the work as part of a defining context.

The Muromachi in architecture also saw a return to Chinese interests in temple styles, though what was brought in was quickly adapted as it was absorbed by the ongoing style. The ongoing ideal was ‘light, simple, and serene,’ in the case of teahouses and aristocratic structures. Temples tended to the over elaborate by contrast.

This is the most famous structure of the late Kamakura will remind us of the self-conscious contrast between the imported and indigenous styles of that era. Its most striking characteristic today is the heavily-thatched double-roof, which is a patently indigenous characteristic, which is a later replacement for an earlier tile roof. The original tile roof and the extremely elaborate brackets that supported it were multiplied beyond any structural purpose. That, plus the finely articulated windows, lattices and doorway are, on the other hand, peculiarly Chinese in orientation. The temple is thus an example of kara yo, that is what was known as the Chinese Chan style.

The better known buildings of the Muromachi are the teahouse garden pavilions. Sites for contemplation of the seasons or the moon, and of the tea ceremony. Ginkaku, the Silver Pavilion, was originally the private Kannon chapel of Yoshimasa, the 8th Ashikaga shogun, built for his Higashiyama Villa, later turned into a temple called Jisho-ji. And thus its popular name Ginkaku-ji. The fact is, however, that the silver leaf for which it is named was never actually applied.

It is a two story pavilion. set in a garden designed by Soami. (Nearby is the Togu-do, an Amida chapel and study and the first actual chashitsu, or teahouse.) The Ashikaga shoguns made collections of karamono (Chinese things). The design here with its square pillars and shingle roof mixes indigenous forms with windows that remind one of traditions from China. The cultured samurai was attuned to a complex mixture of styles and tastes. Here are wood posts and pilings. This was the setting developed for the tea ceremony The siting was to be a carefully designed garden

These gardens were to an extend modeled on the paradises of previous Buddhist art. To some extent they were unique inventions of their own where miniature shrubs and rooks evoked wider landscapes and mountains and sand stood in for water. The designers of these gardens were as well known as the day’s architects or painters. Indeed they combined many of the skills of both, since their basic intention was to be objects of contemplation. Too close an approach or entering them would spoil their designs.

The entirety of this miniature landscape is within the walls on one side of the abbot’s house, from which it is to be seen. It total it covers less than 92 square yards. That is more or less a 10 x 9 yard square. Here rocks stand in for mountains as the sand does for the sea. We have seen landscape painting. This is the creation of a landscape for viewing, out of living materials. The sand is raked to create the impression of waves. [Where Indian meditation was on Theravada and Mahayana philosophical concepts such as emptiness, and Vajrayana meditation on the taking on the forms and personalities of complex supernatural beings, these gardens were for contemplation of nature itself.

The most famous of the dry gravel gardens is at Ryoan-ji, one of Kyoto’s Zen temples, where 15 rocks stand isolated in a field of 260 square yards of small pebbles. Here the key note, as Lee says, is on austerity. The result is as surprising and seemingly spontaneous as a Hatsuboku ink painting. And to make the point most clear, not only are they composed of a raked sand that cannot be walked on, it is surrounded by a wall that restricts all entrance and allows only for the viewing from selected vantages.

The tea ceremony (cha no yu) was a development of the Muromachi period and the ultimate expression of contemporaneous taste. The full context involves the garden site and teahouse setting and paintings for contemplation as much as the implements of the tea drinking itself. Its origin was an informal gathering around a drinking of tea. The result was, as Lee puts it, "a rigid cult of taste, as rituallistically and artificially dedicated to simplicity as a Byzantine coronation was dedicated to mystic splendor." Let’s think about that, "dedicated to simplicity."

Tea was first imported from China in the 9th century. It was popular and then abandoned. It was then reintroduced by the monk Myoan Eisai on his return from China in 1191 as a part of Zen monastic life. In China the drinking of tea was used among the Tang and Song literati and Chan monks, as an occasion for esthetic appreciation, where the quality of the drink could be savored and judged along side similar appreciation of fine painting and poetry. In Chan monasteries tea was used as a medicine and a stimulant.

At the beginning of the Muromachi period the drinking of tea combined with the use of Temmoku tea bowls was made in the Zen monasteries. And as the period developed the process of meeting, preparing and drinking the tea was codified into a rigid ritual. The founder of the ceremony was the Zen priest Murata Shuko (c 1422-1502). He designed the first teahouse for the shogun Yoshimasa. The most famous "tea master" was Rikyu who codified the ceremony. His ceremony had four requirements: harmony, respect, purity and tranquillity. The two all important qualities of Rikyu’s taste were sabi (the beauty of work and rustic things) and wabi (cultivated poverty). And the point of both were an avoidance of court splendor and luxury.

The ceremony begins with invited guests (usually five) approaching the teahouse in an informal garden. They stop on the way to cleans their hands and mouths in a stone water basin, in a Shinto tradition. The house they arrive at is a rustic-(peasant)-looking structure. The entrance is so low they have to crawl in. Symbolically this removes their status. Once inside all admire the flower arrangement and the painting or calligraphy in the room’s tokonoma, niche. They arrange themselves on a mat. At that point the host appears to serve each with a cup of green tea. Each cup is prepared separately from a combination of implements: Iron kettle, bamboo water dipper, stoneware water jar, lacquer or ceramic tea caddie, bamboo scoop and whisk for mixing, incense from a ceramic or lacquer box, and carefully folded and unfolded silk napkins. The full ceremony includes the number of sips one takes and the ways in which the bowls are handled and turned in the process. At the end the vessels and implements are admired and discussed. Everything within the asymmetrical rusticity of the setting. Silence is maintained throughout most of the activity and through the departure.

The idea is to develop exquisite taste around the simplest of items and actions. The rusticity aims at modesty, the connoisseurship toward the refinement of the individuals sensitivity to the material world: textures, colors, tastes. All of the most natural and basic forms. But what began in the 15th century as an informal gathering ended in a studied expression of nonchalance with overtones of poverty masking luxury and power, where the expressed values may be fairly controverted by the actual ones.

In the teahouse the rusticity and simplicity is emphasized. Though, since this is a totally artificially simulated rusticity and simplicity there is always some confusion between the model and the practice. Like the monk’s robe of 7 rags that may in fact be quilted out of most exquisite fragments of the finest silk.

Shino wares are produced at the Mino kiln complex. They use thick, opaque, bubbly white glazes that are transparent where they are thin. They include hastily brusquely drawn geometric or floral designs. Orange-brown streaks occur where the paint bleeds into the glaze yielding accidental and random patches of color. It is used mostly for cold water vessels and tea bowls.

Here we see a peculiarly Japanese expression with total disregard for Chinese precedents and taste. A hyper estheticism applied to an explicitly unsophisticated format. Both the sophistication of the estheticism and the apparent but transcended vulgarity of the object are remarkable and peculiarly Japanese.

This is the section with which Lee ends his treatment of the Muromachi. "A recurring problem in East Asian at is to discover the similarities, differences, and relationships between Chinese and Japanese works," he says. In the 6-9th centuries it is particularly difficult.

[This may be less so today than it was in Lee’s youth. Indeed you probably have little trouble in distinguishing among many of the things labeled Chinese and those labeled Japanese for those dates. The Hokke Mandala (CP 14, p 205) may be difficult even for specialists, but you’ll find nothing in Lee’s Chinese discussions to match the Nyorin Kannon of CP 29 of Lee or much to match most of the things that Lee uses Japanese works to illustrate supposed Chinese models.

In the Heian period the Japanese turned more self-consciously to less Sinicized art and the works developed stand out more clearly as unlike the Chinese so admired previously. In the Muromachi period when there is again a deep interest in Chinese models the question becomes more interesting. Just what is adopted? Lee says Japanese production is "clearly derived fro;m near-contemporary China," though "given final shape by a people with some six hundred years of sophisticated, complex, urban artistic production behind them." He then compares Ma Yuan’s Landscape in Rain (478) and Shubun’s Color of Stream and Hue of Mountain (579). For Lee, "the Chinese work seems more solid, closer to nature in its representation, more rational in its careful location of receding planes and specific treatment of foliage. Shubun’s painting, a nostalgic view of a China he has never seen, appears more casual and improvisatory, suggestive rather than explicit."

Later Chinese scholars rejected both of these forms and failed to even collect such things by Chinese masters, while the Japanese collected both. Another good comparison would be Xia Gui’s long handscroll (481) Clear and Distant Views of Streams and Hills and Sesshu’s Long Landscape Scroll (fig 561). "One of the most manifest differences between them lies in the extremes of tone and brush stroke practiced by the Japanese artist in contrast to the ‘blander,’ more even approach (suggestive of the Confucian "Middle Path") of the late southern Song master." [I hope everyone will enjoy the beauty of the "Confucian" middle path.]

He goes on to not Chinese restraint, symmetry, controlled refinement as contrasted to Japanese bold asymmetry or representational distortion, extravagance and decorative bravura...characteristically Japanese qualities–decorativeness and exaggeration–see[n] merely vulgar to Chinese mainstream critics." Chinese landscapes are settings through which the viewer may journey in spirit, whereas landscapes in native Japanese style hold the viewer outside the picture plane, looking in."

"[T]o summarize, perhaps too simply but usefully, in pairs of categorical opposites:

my version of which has been: balanced / caricatural

The point that this misses, and that I have been trying to develop is one entirely overlooked by Lee, due to his assumption that the Japanese is so essentially based on the Chinese. Despite all that they do share and that the Japanese are absolutely interested in acknowledging, the Japanese variations on Chinese formats and models have been to free from the Chinese sources and so intensively developed within Japanese culture that they usually bear only the slightest possible relationship to them. And where 17th and 18th Chinese art has such clear roots in previous Song and Tang culture, Japanese work by the Nara was already so different than these roots that we seldom mistake the two, unless our model for Chinese is what is found in Japan.

Nichiren (1222-1282) is the founder of the Nichiren-sho-shu, the third of the Mappo inspired sects to be developed in the Kamakura period. It was the first sect to have no distinct Chinese or Korean centered model, and the first in Japan to be named after its founder. Like so many Buddhist leaders before him in Japan, Nichiren looked to Buddhism to be the Nation’s unifying element. He began within the Tendai synthesis as a monk on Mount Hiei. He followed Saicho’s focus on the Lotus Sutra, but he rejected Saicho’s adding of other sutras. For Nichiren it was the Lotus alone that should be the fountainhead of all understanding. Indeed he rejected all other Buddhism as misleading and so evil. His adopted name Nichiren means Sun Lotus.

He also adopted a bit of tantra, "Tantric doctrine of the dharani that contains in one phrase the truth of all true dharma statements." He recommended a simple practice the daimoku (title) mantra: "Namu Myoho Renge Kyo" (Homage to the Scripture of the Lotus of the Perfect Truth" and placing faith in the Eternal Buddha Shakyamuni, the truth of the sutra, and that all beings were essentially one.

He developed a mandala called the gohojan upon which one would focus while repeating the daimoku.

I have illustrated that on the handout. The syllables down the center make up the phrase "Homage be paid to the Lotus Sutra of the Wonderful Dharma" (Namu Myoho Renge Kyo). A variety of Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and Shinto Kami are represented in surrounding writing. Nichiren considered himself to be the incarnation of a Bodhisattva and that one is listed too. Of course, we are all one. It is the full title of the Lotus of the True Law, that he takes to be the epitome of all included within it.