Cuadros Zen.De lo celestial a lo cómico.

Art Review | 'Awakenings'

Portraits in Zen, From Celestial to Comic By HOLLAND COTTER Published: April 6, 2007

Kyoto National Museum "The Four Gentlemanly Accomplishments," a work by Oguri Sokei from the early 16th century.

"The Four Gentlemanly Accomplishments," Left Panels. "The Four Gentlemanly Accomplishments," Right Panels.

Japan Society, which is celebrating its centennial, has a history of producing exquisite shows of Buddhist art. They appear, on average, every 5 to 10 years, and they can be life-changers. After I saw a show of early Buddhist sculpture there in 1983, I went home, packed a bag and flew to Tokyo. I needed to go to where that art came from, and I spent a month visiting temples and monasteries across the country. "Awakenings: Zen Figure Painting in Medieval Japan" may not be quite so powerful a stimulus to travel. But with four dozen paintings of Buddhist gods and saints hung in shrinelike alcoves, it is certainly visually transporting. And it covers a broad swath of time and geography, bringing together 13th- to 16th-century hanging scrolls not only from Japan but also from China, where Zen, called Chan in Chinese, originated. In the West we still have a 1950s hipster notion of what "Zen painting" means: jazzy, exclamatory slashes and splats of black ink on white ground. An art of the "wow." The Japan Society show gives us a different approach through portraits of some of the personalities, real or fantastic, who generated such energy to begin with. And they're a formidable crew — some of them loftily celestial, others straight from Comedy Central. The show begins with celestial: the Buddha himself in his earthly guise as an Indian prince-turned-ascetic named Shakyamuni. Three hanging scrolls, one Chinese and the other two Japanese, depict him coming down a mountain after six years of practicing extreme austerities in an effort to figure out how to live a spiritual life. He is stooped and frail. The Chinese picture's faint, hazy, apparitional brushwork is a stylistic echo of his emaciation. But despite being wasted, he is smiling. He has the knowledge he was after, though it's not what he was expecting, and it can be expressed in a single phrase: Lighten up! To torment your body, he discovered, is really to value it every bit as much as you do when you coddle it. So leave it alone; do it no harm. Do no harm to anything. Time, the recycler, takes care of that job, constantly, dispassionately, inevitably. Which means you're free: free to be nothing, or nothing in particular, which really is freedom when you consider the grief you caused yourself trying to be something special. Freedom brings responsibility. Shakyamuni explained to his followers his awakened vision of existence and how it works. After his death, generations of those followers carried his word, simplified or elaborated, beyond India and into the rest of Asia.

Kaz Tsuruta/Japan Society "Fish-Basket Kannon," a 15th-century scroll by Bokkei Saiyo, is part of the current Japan Society exhibition.

Kaz Tsuruta/Japan Society "Fish-Basket Kannon," Detail.

One of these messengers was the Indian monk called Bodhidharma, who, in the sixth century A.D. in China, initiated Chan Buddhism, sometimes defined as a body of ideas and practice that emphasized individual meditation over communal ritual and customized master-to-pupil teaching over memorized scripture; eventually it developed methods for achieving the sort of instant enlightenment popularized in the West as satori. By all accounts, Bodhidharma was a forcible, not to say willful, personality. When the Chinese emperor refused to meet with him, the great teacher didn't plead or remonstrate. He left the court, crossed the Yangtze River by balancing on a floating reed and plunked himself down facing a bare cliff wall to meditate on what to do next. He didn't budge for nine years. During that time, various would-be pupils tried to get his attention. Finally one named Huike Shenguang managed to do so by slicing off his own arm. We see the two men together in a marvelous 13th-century Chinese painting from the Cleveland Museum of Art: Bodhidharma, cloak-shrouded and looking like Big Bird, stares at his wall; Huike huddles patiently nearby. Maybe they're communicating telepathically. In any case, Huike became Bodhidharma's first East Asian disciple and, as the inheritor of his Chan teaching, the first link in a grand lineage of individual transmission that traveled from China to Korea and then to Japan, and helped make Chan and Zen, in their many forms, a distinctive strain of Buddhism and source of a distinctive art. But was medieval Chan and Zen art actually as distinctive as is usually assumed? Not necessarily. The exhibition's curators — Gregory Levine of the University of California, Berkeley, Yukio Lippit of Harvard and Yoshiaki Shimizu of Princeton — demonstrate that in fact most of it was conceived within the context of monastic ritual and conformed to figurative painting styles and themes current among artists of the Chinese Song dynasty (A.D. 960-1279). It was this Song art that provided the direct model for early Japanese Zen painting, while what we conventionally think of as Zen art — "untrammeled" ink painting, tea ceremony paraphernalia — was a later, largely secular or non-Buddhist development.

Kaz Tsuruta/Japan Society "Portrait of Mokuan Shuyu," a scroll made in 1373 by an unknown artist.

True to its religious functions, medieval Chan/Zen painting drew in part on an orthodox Buddhist pantheon for its subject matter. A favorite deity was the bodhisattva called Avalokiteshvara in Sanskrit, Guanyin in Chinese and Kannon in Japanese. A kind of multitasking performance artist, he took on dozens of roles, including that of the pretty, stalwart young woman nicknamed the Fish-Basket Kannon. The story goes that she arrived one day in a seaside village populated by wrong-living non-Buddhist types, promising to marry any man who could recite a long and insanely difficult Buddhist sutra at one sitting. Many tried and failed. When someone finally accomplished the task, presumably becoming a convert in the process, she married him, then promptly died. She had done her job. In a neat little postscript to the tale, an old wandering monk revealed her true identity to the stupefied villagers, then beamed himself up to heaven before their eyes. Here we are in a realm of medieval religious devotion that would seem to have little connection to a modern Zen of rock gardens and teapots. Yet in a cross-dressing god and levitating holy man we may spot the roots of the Zen crazy-wisdom that so appealed to the postwar, postbomb, existentialist West, and many of the other characters in the show might be taken to project a comparably absurdist spirit. One is the figure of Manjushri, the bodhisattva of wisdom, as an androgynous adolescent. Depicted with long hair, a strange smile and a rosy complexion, he holds a folded-up sutra, resembling a remote control, in his hand. And there's Tenjin, a Japanese Shinto god who went to China and became a bodhisattva but appears in paintings dressed as a Daoist priest, thus encapsulating Zen's intercultural makeup. But anyone seeking the shock-effect dynamic for which Zen teaching is famous should seek out the images of some of the renegade characters who exist way beyond the fringes of orthodoxy. One is the vagabond monk named Budai, a giggling, baby-faced, pot-bellied lump of flesh. He was basically a folk deity who worked a Buddhist beat part time, and his grossness was part of his charisma. Some people crossed the street when they saw him coming; others hailed him as the Buddha of the future and kissed his feet. You can tell from paintings of him — there's a beauty from the Kyoto National Museum on view now, and another will arrive on May 8, when several pieces in the exhibition rotate — that artists adored him. His weirdness lets them go wild. Imaginative in the same way are images of the so-called Four Sleepers: the itinerant priest Fenggan, his poet friend Hanshan, his cook Shide and his pet tiger, all shown napping together in a blissful snoring, grinning heap. But why do sleepers appear in an art about being awake? In part to remind us that we are all dozing our lives away. But also to point out that sleep produces dreams, and dreams, to medieval Buddhists, were sources of a self-knowledge that can rouse us, sometimes rudely, from slumber. The Japan Society show, with its dim alcoves and apparitional saints and clowns, has a dream-state feel itself. Every turn of a corner brings a surprise. Each image holds your attention, centers you right where you are. Even after you've left and your eyes have adjusted to the everyday light, you really feel you've been somewhere out of the ordinary. And you have. "Awakenings: Zen Figure Painting in Medieval Japan" continues through June 17 at Japan Society, 333 East 47th Street, Manhattan; (212) 715-1258, japansociety.org.

Copyright by the New York Times 2007