Page 46 - China, 5000 years : innovation and transformation in the arts

making extensive use of allusions in poetry and
writing commentaries on the classics.
Although it is common to associate learning in
China with the Confucian literati, Confucian-
trained scholars were never the only significant
group of learned men who owed their standing to
mastery of a body of texts. In Han times the
astrologers, diviners, and experts in unseen forces
transmitted their knowledge both orally and
through texts. Buddhism had entered China as a
religion with a vast body of scriptures, and monks
gained standing, both within the Buddhist
community and outside it, by mastering a body of
texts and adding to the understanding of them
through writing commentaries. In the fourth and
fifth centuries religious Daoism acquired a large
body of revealed texts, and although these texts
were not publicly distributed the way the
Confucian classics or Buddhist sutras were, priestly
powers were closely tied to knowledge of them.
Words, including written prayers and charms and
oral incantations and hymns, were as much a part of
Daoist rituals as the odor of incense, the sounds of
flutes and drums, and the colors of robes and
banners.
But the story does not end there. The supremacy of
the written word and of those learned in the
written word did not go unchallenged in China. To
the contrary, from very early times important
philosophical and religious thinkers disputed the
priority given words, texts, the educated, and the
kind ot knowledge that gets created and promoted
through words and texts. They pointed to the limits
ot language and to forms of knowing that could
not be communicated through language. To put this
another way, some thinkers have always resisted the
way writing fixes, limits, and binds meanings, and
have tried to preserve or recover the reality that
exists prior to or beyond writing. These sets of
ideas have been as powerful in Chinese art as the
pro-text ideas, perhaps particularly because visual
symbols are not words.
The earliest formulation of this challenge to words
is found in the early Daoist classics. "The Way that
can be told is not the invariant Way" is the opening
line of the Laozi. Words and writing are assertive
and thus destructive. It would be better, the Laozi
asserts, if people knew less, if they gave up tools and Although the social standing of the educated in
abandoned writing. They would be satisfied with
their own lives and not envy their neighbors.
Zhuangzi argued that the labeling of experience
with words and its division into distinct categories
was a falsification from the start, since reality could always thought exclusively in pro-text terms. In
never be conveyed in this way. Zhuangzi placed the
knowledge of the craftsman above the knowledge
found in books. In one parable he had a
wheelwright audaciously tell a duke that books
THE INTELLECTUAL AND RELIGIOUS CONTEXT OF CHINESE ART
were useless since all they contained were the dregs
of men long gone. When the duke demanded
either an explanation or his life, the wheelwright
replied:
I see things in terms of my own work. When I
chisel at a wheel, if I go slowly, the chisel slides
and does not stay put; if I hurry, it jams and
doesn't move properly. When it is neither too
slow nor too fast, I can feel it in my hand and
respond to it from my heart. My mouth cannot
describe it in words, but there is something
there. I cannot teach it to my son, and my son
cannot learn it from me. So I have gone on for
seventy years, growing old chiseling wheels. The
men of old died in possession of what they
could not transmit. So it follows that what you
are reading are their dregs. 13
Truly skilled craftsmen do not analyze or reason or
even keep in mind the rules they once learned;
they respond to situations spontaneously.
Whereas Confucians, who saw truth in books,
recognized an obligation to bring this truth to the
attention of the ruler, Zhuangzi, who did not see
truth in books, felt no need to serve in
government. He told of receiving an envoy from
the king of Chu, bearing an offer to give him
charge of the entire realm. In response he asked the
envoy whether a tortoise that had been held sacred
for three thousand years would prefer to be dead
with its bones venerated or alive with its tail
dragging in the mud. On getting the expected
response, he told the envoy to go away; he wished
to drag his tail in the mud.
China owes much to Confucian ideas of the worth
of written traditions and men educated in them, it
would be a mistake to infer that the educated elite
particular, Daoist ideas that questioned the role of
words and texts appealed deeply to many educated
men. These ideas also colored the development of
Buddhism in China. The most Simfied school of
Buddhism, the Chan school (known as Zen in
Japan), rejected the authority of the sutras and
claimed the superiority of mind-to-mind
transmission of Buddhist truth through a series of
patriarchs, the most important of whom were the
First Patriarch Bodhidharma, an Indian monk who
came to China in the early sixth century, and the
Sixth Patriarch Huineng, a Chinese monk who
died in the early eighth century. The illiteracy of
Huineng at the time of his enlightenment was
taken as proof of the Chan claim that
enlightenment could be achieved suddenly through
insight into one's own true nature, even by people
who knew nothing of textual traditions. Chan