Page 191 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

201 Mu-ch'i. The \S1\itt-RoM Kwnyin,
school of painters specialising in water buffaloes); flowers and flanked by crane and gibbons. Central
portions of three hanging scrolls. Ink on
birds; ink bamboo; and vegetables and fruit. The last category re- silk. Southern Sung Dynasty.
quires no special mention; and bamboo we will leave to Chapter 9.
But before leaving the subject of Sung painting wc must say a
word on the subject of dragons. To the man-in-the-street the
dragon was a benevolent and generally auspicious creature, brin-
ger of rain and emblem of the emperor. To the Ch'an Buddhists he
was far more than that. When Mu-ch'i painted a dragon suddenly
appearing from the clouds, he was depicting a cosmic manifesta-
tion and at the same time symbolising the momentary, elusive vi-
sion of truth which comes to the Ch'an adept. To the Taoists, the
dragon was the Tao itself, an all-pervading force which momen-
tarily reveals itself to us only to vanish again and leave us wonder-
ing if wc had actually seen it at all. "Hidden in the caverns of in-
accessible mountains," wrote Okakura Kakuzo,
or coiled in the unfathomed depths of the sea, he awaits the time when he
slowly rouses himself to activity. He unfolds himself in the storm
clouds; he washes his mane in the blackness of the seething whirlpools.
His claws are in the forks of the lightning, his scales begin to glisten in
the bark of rain-swept pine trees. His voice is heard in the hurricane
which, scattering the withered leaves of the forest, quickens the new
spring. The dragon reveals himself only to vanish. 6
Ts'ao Pu-hsing in the third century had been the first prominent
painter to specialise in dragons, but the greatest of all was Ch'en
Jung, who combined a successful career as an administrator dur-
ing the first half of the thirteenth century with a somewhat unor-
thodox technique as a dragon painter. His contemporary, T'ang
Hou, tells us that when he was drunk he would give a great shout,
seize his cap, soak it with ink and smear on the design with it, af-
terwards finishing the details with a brush. His celebrated Nine