Page 169 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

outward forms of Buddhas and arhats or, indeed, of any subject
that he chose to paint. Already in the last century of the T'ang Dy-
nasty there were artists practising techniques as wildly eccentric as
those of any modern Western action painter. None of their work
survives, but contemporary descriptions of it suggest that these
individualists were cither Ch'an adepts or were fired by the same
impulse toward irrationality and spontaneity as that which in-
spired the Ch'an painters. Only slightly later was Kuan-hsiu who,
after a lifetime of painting Buddhist subjects in the lower Yangtsc
region, came, full of years and honour, to the court of Wang
Chien at Chengtu, where he died in 912. His arhats were drawn
with that exaggeration bordering on perversity which is typically
Ch'an; with their bony skulls, huge eyebrows, and pronounced
Indian features, they have the ugliness of caricature, as if only by
deliberate distortion can the sudden, electrifying experience ofthe
Ch'an mystic be suggested. For the experience itself is incommu-
nicable; all the artist can do is to give the viewer a shock which may
jolt him into awareness. But even to suggest that these paintings
have a purpose may be suggesting too much, and wc should see
them simply as pictorial metaphors for an event, or "happening,"
in the mind that cannot be described. "Illumination," they seem
to say, "is like this."
The few surviving copies of Kuan-hsiu's work arc treasured in
Japan, where Zen long outlasted its popularity in China. When
Kuan-hsiu died, his mantle fell upon Shih K'o, a wild and eccen-
tric individual who, according to an eleventh-century historian,
"liked to shock and insult people and compose satirical rhymes
about them." By this time, writers were fond of classifying paint-
ers into three grades: neng (capable), miao (wonderful), and then
(divine, superhuman); but for Shih K'o and his like even shen was hi the manner ol Shih K 'o (active
1-
1
1
not enough, for it still implied obedience to the rules. For them mid-tenth century). TwoMindtin
t
they coined the term i, meaning "completely unrestrained by Harmony. Partofahandscroil. inkon
piper. Sung Dynisty.

149

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