水墨画を支えた源流The Sources Behind Japanese Ink Painting

When Japanese ink wash painting achieved its remarkable artistic development, what lay at the source of the history that had been transmitted through the generations?

It was not a single thing. It was born from many tributaries flowing into one. In this piece I want to look at the great current that formed the source itself. The figure who must be spoken of here is not a Japanese painter but a Chinese one. His name is Muqi.

Muqi was a Rinzai Zen monk who lived from the late Southern Song dynasty into the early Yuan period in the thirteenth century. He came from the mountainous province of Sichuan and later moved to Shaoxing, where he is said to have entered the school of the eminent Zen master Wuzhun Shifan (1177–1249). Wuzhun Shifan had deep ties to Japan. He was the master who produced a number of outstanding Japanese monks who went on to spread Rinzai Zen within Japan, foremost among them Enni Ben'en. Enni took the Rinzai teaching transmitted directly from Wuzhun Shifan as his foundation, but rather than adhering exclusively to Zen he blended it with Japanese esoteric Buddhism and spread Zen in Japan from his own distinctive vantage point. His contributions, however, were not limited to religion. After studying in Song China and returning to Japan, Enni founded temples in Hakata on Kyushu and in Kyoto and became one of the leading figures in the propagation of Zen. In his later years he returned to his hometown, and this gave rise to a culture that continues to this day. That culture is Shizuoka tea.

Enni's hometown was in what was once called the province of Suruga, present-day Shizuoka City in Shizuoka Prefecture. Shizuoka Prefecture still possesses some of Japan's most renowned tea fields and ranks among the top producers in the country. Shizuoka tea is traditionally said to have begun with Enni. When he returned to his hometown of Shizuoka in his later years, he had the tea he had brought back from Song planted and promoted tea cultivation. Enni himself drank tea daily and followed the belief of the time that tea possessed the power to extend life. Through Zen, Enni exerted a major influence on the cultural development of his homeland. Unlike those driven by self-serving ambition, Enni genuinely wished for the future of the place he came from and lived seriously for that purpose. This was a culture born through Zen, and I feel this perspective is critically important. Zen is the entrance, not the destination. I have long believed that Zen is something that envelops life, not an answer in itself. The spirit of Zen resides in each individual act of living daily life. It is something anyone can practice without undergoing special training at a temple. Historically, outstanding Zen monks have shared this perspective. But behind them, I cannot help sensing the influence of Wuzhun Shifan in China.

What I want to draw attention to here is that among Muqi's fellow students under Wuzhun Shifan were Mugaku Sogen (Wuxue Zuyuan, 1226–1286), who would later travel to Japan, and Gottan Funei (Wuan Puning, 1197–1276). Both were Rinzai monks and both had a major impact on Rinzai Zen in Japan. Gottan Funei also studied under Wuzhun Shifan and is believed to have interacted with Enni during his period of study. In fact it was Enni who invited Gottan Funei from Southern Song to Japan in 1260. Gottan Funei was appointed as the second head of Kencho-ji in Kamakura at the request of Tokiyori Hojo, the supreme leader of the Kamakura shogunate. Tokiyori Hojo was a leader deeply committed to the spread of Rinzai Zen. Since Kamakura and Shizuoka are neighboring provinces, the influence of Rinzai intensified in this corridor. What matters is that the Zen monk Wuzhun Shifan stood as the spiritual pillar behind this entire religious and cultural milieu. He was most likely a generous-minded leader with a deep understanding of culture, one who did not cling to any single teaching. It is Japan's good fortune that this Rinzai lineage flowed into the country, and it is no exaggeration to call it the lineage of Wuzhun Shifan. This lineage would go on to connect directly to the history of ink wash painting.

Muqi too is thought to have absorbed Wuzhun Shifan's generosity of spirit through his interactions with fellow monks. And what is important is that although Muqi himself never visited Japan, the Chinese monks who had studied alongside him were later invited to Japan. Through these connections Muqi's name became known within Japan. The enormous popularity of Muqi's ink wash paintings in Japan was made possible because the network of Chinese and Japanese monks centered on Wuzhun Shifan had built a direct tributary flowing into Japan. Behind the transmission of Muqi's paintings to Japan lay not a simple commercial transaction but the existence of the Rinzai Zen religious network itself. In the course of Rinzai Zen's spread within Japan, Muqi's ink wash paintings achieved such popularity that by the mid-fourteenth century countless forgeries were being produced. And above all, Muqi's ink wash paintings were not valued in China.

To understand Muqi's ink wash painting, it is essential to grasp the Zen thought that lies behind it. As I have already written, ink wash painting is not simply a product of artistic talent. It is the reflection of Zen as a way of living daily life itself. Without Zen there would be no ink wash painting, and yet ink wash painting is not a tool for propagating Zen either. This sensibility may be difficult to grasp in places with a strong religious consciousness, but the essence of Zen resides precisely here. Zen is not something that is taught, nor something that is learned. In the presence of a good master, the true worth of Zen manifests in the smallest gesture of daily life. There is no need for sermons. The history of Zen in Japan is rich with anecdotes of this kind.

One of the fundamental principles upheld by the Rinzai school is furitsu monji (不立文字). This is the conviction that enlightenment cannot be transmitted through written characters or spoken words but only through the direct encounter between master and disciple. It is fundamentally different from the older Buddhist position that sought to learn the Dharma by reading scriptures and interpreting texts, and it was a reaction against the monopolization of Buddhist teaching by a limited few. Stripped of complexity, the idea is that the truth of the Dharma is already present in the ordinary daily contact of master and disciple, face to face. And this is not confined to the Zen relationship of master and disciple. It is open to everything. I suspect that Wuzhun Shifan understood and practiced this truth more deeply than anyone, and that this is why his disciples emerged and left a mark not only on China but on the history of Japan. In Zen it has long been held that rationalized systems of language and formalized rules are precisely what obstruct the attainment of enlightenment. In the present day this is something difficult to realize. It is not limited to Zen. It is simply a matter of looking seriously at the one person in front of you. But nothing is more difficult in the modern world than this simple act.

The thought of furitsu monji is naturally reflected in Muqi's ink wash painting. His paintings contain none of the three-distance compositional methods that the orthodox Chinese ink painting of the time prescribed, none of the precise texture-stroke techniques, none of the strict bone-method brushwork. According to orthodox technique, mountains were to be rendered with texture strokes that expressed material quality. Muqi grasped the mountain together with the atmosphere surrounding it using nothing but the bleeding and tonal gradation of ink. To call this simply "a rebellion against form" is insufficient. It can be understood as the result of pursuing a direct apprehension that does not pass through form at all. The very idea of "rebellion against form" may function within the Western art-historical context, but it is an evaluation that does not reach Muqi's lineage. If Muqi had thought about "form" and intentionally deviated from it, he would not have moved the hearts of Japanese painters. Nor would he have captured the hearts of the Rinzai monks who transmitted his works. The limits of thinking about ink wash painting through the lens of form are concentrated precisely in this point. There was no form in Wuzhun Shifan's Zen.

Of course, Muqi's work cannot be expressed in the language that conventional art history employs. It inevitably gravitates toward evaluations such as "revealing the invisible by not over-painting." This is unavoidable given the fate of art history, which must verbalize its evaluations. And it is equally unavoidable that such evaluations lead to the assessment that Muqi "translated the spirit of Zen into painting." Certainly if one must verbalize, this is what must be said. But the moment this evaluation is taken at face value, can it truly be said that Muqi's ink wash painting seizes your heart? This is the only point I wish to raise. When everyone ceases to doubt that Muqi's ink wash painting is something that can be verbalized from the standpoint of art history, the work that becomes visible is no longer Muqi. That gaze no longer carries the heart that once moved Muqi's friends, the Zen monks who crossed the sea, and the Japanese painters who encountered his work. What we truly need to think about is here. Understanding history and culture is undertaken for this purpose. It is not the purpose itself. If it were something so tedious, the dramatic development of Japanese ink wash painting that began with Muqi would never have occurred. The wellspring flowing through this cultural lineage is not technique, not Buddhist law, not fame, not orthodoxy. What exists there is only the heart that is capable of thinking sincerely about the one person standing before it at this moment. In Muqi's ink wash painting this happens to manifest as an encounter with nature. What they were doing was nothing more than a single posture of being human. Southern Song Zen was outstanding because it understood this more deeply than anyone. I believe it was truly fortunate that the Zen that developed so richly in the Southern Song exerted such a great influence on Japan. Because the spirit, or rather the feeling, shared a common wellspring between China and Japan.

Certainly, within Zen thought there is the idea that Buddha-nature dwells within nature itself: "The mountains, rivers, and great earth all become the Buddha's way" (山河大地、皆成仏道). This differs from the idol-worshipping Buddhist view that venerates personified Buddhas such as Kannon and Nyorai. It is a worldview in which the fog-enshrouded mountain, the gibbon cradled in the branches of a pine, and the crane standing in the bamboo grove can all stand on the same picture plane as equal manifestations of Buddha-nature. The heart with which Muqi placed Kannon, gibbon, and crane side by side as a triptych in his Kannon, Gibbons, and Crane can be seen as a visual expression of this thought. And the fact that he painted even everyday fruit can be seen as a manifestation of the Zen sensibility that perceives Buddha-nature in all things of daily life. But a caution is needed. This was not the product of an intentional or self-serving motivation that deliberately sought its subjects in the everyday. For people of the present age, understanding their heart is extremely difficult and in fact effectively impossible. This is why modern people, when they try to think about Muqi, inevitably try to direct their gaze intentionally toward the everyday, or intentionally produce empty space in their compositions. But the willfulness behind that consciousness is neither Zen nor ink wash painting in the context of Muqi. This distortion is a problem that gradually arose in both China and Japan and eventually became a primary cause of Zen's decline. The decline of Zen was inevitably dealt its death blow by the advent of modernity, which sought to grasp Zen through consciousness. In a world where everyone can only speak of the world through the establishment of the subject and the achievement of autonomy, a condition that might be called "the poverty of the heart," how can anyone claim to understand their heart?

During his lifetime Muqi had a connection to Jia Sidao, a powerful chancellor, and he received a certain degree of recognition as a painter positioned within the mainstream of Southern Song Jiangnan landscape painting. But the destruction of the Southern Song by the Yuan became the direct cause of the decline of the outstanding Zen spirit and ink wash painting that had been cultivated on the Chinese side. The Southern Song fell in 1279. When we look again at the dates of Enni (1202–1280), Mugaku Sogen (1226–1286), Gottan Funei (1197–1276), and Muqi, whose birth and death dates are unknown but who lived from the late Southern Song into the early Yuan, it becomes clear that all of them emerged in the final period of the Southern Song. This tells us that the era in which Zen expressed its essence most fully in China was located in a period of social upheaval at the end of the Southern Song. On the Japanese side this lineage was inherited primarily by the Rinzai school, and the collapse of the Southern Song in fact worked in Japan's favor. This was inseparable from the fact that when the rulers shifted from Southern Song to Yuan, the new rulers began negating the culture and spirit of the Southern Song.

The negation of old rulers by new rulers is something that happens throughout history, not only in this era. But the fact that outstanding Chinese monks and cultural figures chose Japan as a destination of refuge during the process of the Southern Song's decline from its late period to its final days was critically important. Gottan Funei came to Japan in 1260. Mugaku Sogen crossed in 1279, the year the Southern Song fell. Practicing Song-style Zen in their homeland had become difficult. Fortunately, the Japanese founder of the Rinzai school, Eisai (1141–1215), had already spread Southern Song Zen in Japan a generation earlier. Thanks to Eisai's efforts, the Kamakura shogunate's leadership had been captivated by Zen. This was truly fortunate. In Eisai's time the connection had amounted to the construction of Kennin-ji in Kyoto under the patronage of the second Kamakura shogun Minamoto no Yoriie. But the current strengthened as political power within the shogunate shifted to the Hojo clan. The most important figure in this context was Tokiyori Hojo.

Tokiyori Hojo held the office of regent from 1246 to 1256 and was an extraordinarily rare leader of deep personal character, profound faith, and unwavering commitment to a plain and grounded life. His historical reputation exceeds that of the shogun himself. While strengthening the shogunate's governance to its peak, he devoted himself to thinking about the common people more than anyone and worked tirelessly to build a world in which everyone could live. Japan was fortunate to have such a figure at the helm. And this fortune had an unexpected impact on the Southern Song Zen monks. As the Southern Song began to collapse and these outstanding monks gradually lost their place, they began crossing to Japan in search of a new land. Mugaku Sogen also came during this era. Although he had no direct interaction with Tokiyori Hojo, who died in 1263, the Zen monks who emigrated from the Southern Song held Tokiyori's character and governance in high regard. What they had witnessed in the Song was the corruption of their own leaders. Across the sea they found an exemplary political leader. And Tokiyori Hojo himself had been inviting Song-born Zen monks to Kamakura. Chief among them was Rankei Doryu (Lanxi Daolong, 1213–1278).

Rankei Doryu came to Japan in 1246 through his friendship with a Japanese monk studying in Song China, bringing disciples with him. He devoted himself to spreading authentic Southern Song Rinzai Zen, primarily in Kyushu and Kyoto. Eventually he received Tokiyori Hojo's request for ordination and moved to Kamakura. In 1253 Tokiyori founded Kencho-ji in Kamakura, designated it as the main temple of a Rinzai branch, and appointed Rankei Doryu as its first head. By the final period of the Southern Song, word of Japan as a new land had gradually entered the ears of Song Zen monks, and many were considering emigration. But when the outstanding leader Tokiyori died in 1263, the situation began to shift. The cause was the rise of the Mongol Empire across the sea.

The advance of the Mongol Empire brought a threat to East Asia. During the invasion attempt of 1274 aimed at conquering Japan, Rankei Doryu was accused by the Japanese authorities of being a spy for the Yuan and was stripped of his position and sentenced to exile. The first Mongol invasion of 1274 came before the formal fall of the Southern Song, but the Japanese rulers effectively viewed the Song as having already fallen and considered the continent to be in the Yuan era. Zen monks of the Southern Song like Rankei Doryu were therefore suspected of having infiltrated Japan as Yuan agents to facilitate the Mongol conquest. Under a leader like Tokiyori such a thing would never have occurred. But for the Japanese side confronting the Mongol threat in 1274, the problem was grave. Rankei Doryu was sent into exile but eventually returned to Kencho-ji, where he died in 1278. His successor was Mugaku Sogen.

Mugaku Sogen came to Japan during the period of the Southern Song's collapse, expecting only a brief stay. But a second stroke of fortune intervened. Tokimune Hojo, the son of Tokiyori, assumed the position of regent. The upheaval of the Southern Song's fall and the Mongol invasion were having an enormous impact on Japan, and the Kamakura shogunate's leaders were in a state of intense confusion. It was Tokimune Hojo who held the reins of shogunal governance through Japan's greatest period of upheaval from 1268 to 1284. Though he was not the figure of character his father had been, he appears to have inherited his father's understanding of Zen. He was the one who brought Mugaku Sogen to Japan and personally persuaded him to stay. Mugaku Sogen was installed as the head of Kencho-ji and devoted his life to establishing Zen on Japanese soil. The Hojo house, though not shoguns themselves, held actual political power in the shogunate, and it was Japan's fortune that they had entered an era of receptivity to Southern Song Zen.

The soil prepared by the Southern Song Zen monks and the Hojo house of Kamakura proved its strength after the fall of the Southern Song. The figure who drew the greatest attention through this good fortune was Muqi. In China, Muqi's ink wash paintings were gradually forgotten after his death. In the Yuan period they were dismissed with the harsh assessment "rough and lawless, lacking in the old methods." Behind this lay the rise of literati painting, which dominated the critical landscape and left Muqi, who did not belong to its lineage, undervalued. And since Muqi never consciously constructed technique or deliberately selected his motifs as the literati painters did, the truth was that his work was simply difficult to evaluate, then as now. The inability to verbalize the unverbalizable and the desire to display one's learning by forcing language onto it is what intellectuals do. Behind Muqi's dismissal in China one can see the figure of critics who simply could not find the words. The language of Muqi's ink wash painting is the heart. It is not characters, books, forms, or techniques. This spirit was lost on the Chinese side with the advent of the Yuan. And yet, remarkably, it entered a period of flourishing on the Japanese side.

That said, the critical standards for ink wash painting in China had been established during the Song dynasty. Under Song norms, the line drawn with the brush was the skeleton of the painting and ink was merely its assistant. The principle of hitsu shu boku ju (筆主墨従) was enforced. Spatial composition governed by the three-distance method, the proper arrangement of the four treasures of the study, and the requirement to paint in the orthodox manner all served as standards of evaluation. Judged against these standards, Muqi's paintings met none of the criteria and could not even enter the arena of criticism. Muqi himself knew that such things were irrelevant to the essence of painting and were nothing more than intellectual play, and he kept his distance. That this distance would have a profound impact on later history was something even he could not have imagined.

In fact, the low esteem in which Muqi's paintings were held in China was, ironically, the direct cause of their easy passage to Japan. The upheaval of dynastic transitions from the late Southern Song to the early Yuan and again from the late Yuan to the early Ming led to the outflow of artworks. Combined with the strong networks that had been formed between Zen temples in China and Japan, Muqi's ink wash paintings reached a turning point at which they rapidly became known in Japan. As noted, among Muqi's fellow students were Mugaku Sogen and Gottan Funei, Zen monks who came to Japan and devoted themselves to spreading Zen. Enni and many other Japanese monks who had studied abroad had experienced Southern Song culture firsthand. At this time, masterpieces that were valued as treasures in China were unlikely to leave the country. But Muqi's paintings, dismissed by the Chinese establishment, found a natural passage to Japan through the Zen network spanning the sea. By the end of the Kamakura period in the early fourteenth century they had reached Japan, and by the mid-fourteenth century they were so popular that numerous forgeries were being produced. In the literature of the era, to say simply osho (和尚), the venerable monk, was to mean Muqi.

This was not merely a case of Muqi's paintings putting down roots in Japan. It was the moment when Muqi's heart connected through the cultural spirit of the Zen network. The particular character of Kamakura itself, where the shogunate was based, also played a role. As I have discussed in the On Dogen series, Japan at this time was in a transitional period in which political power was shifting from the court aristocracy to the warrior class. The newly risen warrior class needed a distinctive culture to underwrite its own authority. They sought not the traditional culture of the aristocracy but a culture specific to the warrior class, and the center of that search was Kamakura. The attention that fell on Zen imported from China in this context of a new culture befitting the warrior class was decisive. What mattered was that the Zen temples of Kamakura at the time had created an environment that was in many respects "Southern Song itself." At Kencho-ji and elsewhere, sermons were delivered in Chinese by Chinese monks. Spaces were decorated with Chinese-made objects and calligraphy and paintings. The latest Chinese culture permeated into the finest details of daily life. The number of Japanese monks who could study abroad was limited, but Japanese monks had the good fortune of being able to continue their training under outstanding masters who had not returned to China, and pure Zen developed under favorable conditions.

However, the practice of Zen necessarily entails a transformation of thought. Because Zen upholds furitsu monji and requires no scriptures and is rooted in the direct confrontation with humanity, the spiritual attainment of the practitioner will inevitably be deeply colored by the sensibility of that person's native landscape. Naturally, the Zen attained by Japanese monks carried within it, unconsciously, a Japanese sensibility. And that Japanese sensibility differed greatly depending on whether the practitioner was in Kamakura or Kyoto or Hakata. In other words, a systematized Zen does not truly exist. The enlightenment of Zen expresses something profoundly indigenous. Because the vessel that received Southern Song Zen in this era was the Japanese landscape, the Zen inevitably became Japanese, and the ink wash painting born from it inevitably became Japanese too. But this is not meant to emphasize Japanese uniqueness. It must never be forgotten that the wellspring lay in the spirit of the compassionate monks of the Southern Song. Japanese Zen possessed the power to move the world over the past century because of this fortunate history. I see no meaning in celebrating this as a Japanese achievement. Rather, I feel we must once again recognize that the spirit of Zen lies at the source of this cultural intersection. Given that it is doubtful whether the Zen monks of present-day Japan are themselves conscious of this lineage, whether what they practice can truly be called Zen seems a question that demands serious consideration.

The fact that the reception of ink wash painting in Kamakura was biased toward Zen painting carried decisive significance. In China, academy paintings and literati paintings were considered orthodox, and Zen paintings of this kind were dismissed. But in Japan, the Zen monks in the Zen temples selected these works through their own hearts. As a result, the very Zen paintings that had been devalued in China were received as the orthodox standard of connoisseurship in Japan. That this gap between the Chinese and Japanese sides was played out through the supreme symbol of Muqi is profoundly interesting.

The era in which Muqi exerted his greatest influence in Japan was not, however, the Kamakura period that had served as the first movement of his heart's permeation. It was the Muromachi period that followed. The international exchange of Southern Song Zen nurtured in Kamakura, the seat of the shogunate, would unexpectedly exert its explosive influence after the Kamakura shogunate was overthrown and the Muromachi shogunate was established on the Kyoto side. The Kitayama culture that emerged under the patronage of the third shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu holds a particularly important position. Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, who served as shogun from 1369 to 1395, was a leader who loved Muqi above all. According to the Gyobutsu Onge Mokuroku, the catalogue of the shogunal art collection compiled by the cultural advisor Noami, the greatest number of Chinese paintings in Yoshimitsu's collection were works by Muqi. It is conceivable that Yoshimitsu's collecting served political intentions beyond mere aesthetic taste. He idealized the Southern Song cultural system in which Zen was patronized at the state level, and by superimposing that model onto his own rule he sought to claim cultural legitimacy. Unlike the Kamakura shogunate, which was based far from Kyoto, the Muromachi shogunate was located within Kyoto itself, the city where aristocratic rulers had held sway since the Heian period.

This meant that the culture distinctive to the warrior class, nurtured throughout the Kamakura shogunate era, was now entering the heartland of aristocratic governance in Kyoto and beginning to exert its influence in earnest. Inheriting and developing the Kamakura shogunate's identification of warrior culture with Zen, the Muromachi shogunate strategized to elevate Zen to the level of political influence. Through this political calculation of the Ashikaga, Muqi's works were hoarded one after another in direct contradiction to their reputation in China. Paintings that had been harshly criticized in China and sold abroad at low prices now reigned in Japan as the supreme standard of pictorial art. A complete inversion of value had occurred. The great cultural era born from this context was called Higashiyama culture. If the opportunity arises I will write about the history of ink wash painting through the lens of Higashiyama culture in a future piece.