ART REVIEW : A Hearty Look at Zen and the Art of Discipline : ‘Zenga--Brushstrokes of Enlightenment,’ with 70 superb black-and-white ink works, is painting that makes you feel good.

Literate Americans have known about Zen Buddhism ever since the ‘50s when Jack Kerouac and the Beat poets popularized it up around San Francisco. Even today many an artist tries to explain his work by mumbling that it has something to do with Zen. Society ladies may excuse a friend’s ditzy behavior with the observation that, “She is rather Zen.”

It’s attained the status of a household word, as familiar as the cat. Familiarity breeds the illusion that Zen is something we understand. We probably don’t. There is reason to suspect that nobody really gets it except a few holy souls who can only impart their insight by bashing you upside the head with a cudgel or telling you to wash you bowls.

It seems a matter less learned than soaked up by osmosis. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art provides a neat opportunity to do just that in “Zenga: Brushstrokes of Enlightenment.” Just opened in the Pavilion for Japanese Art, it includes about 70 black-and-white ink paintings of everything from Falstaffian monks to calligraphy so dynamic it makes Jackson Pollock look a little languid.

The show was organized by the New Orleans Museum of Art and is fleshed out here by LACMA curator Robert Singer. He’s added a gaggle of loans and promised gifts from local collections that attest to superb holdings hereabouts. Aside from that, there is just something about looking at Zen art that makes you feel good. It tells us we can look like bums, live like monks, drink like stevedores and still take more pleasure in life that most people. But it’s not about license. It’s about discipline.

History. Zen was brought to China in the 6th Century by the Indian monk Bodhidharma and in the 13th Century made its way to Japan, where the holy man is known as Daruma. Apparently, doctrinal Buddhism had accumulated complexities as thick as barnacles. Daruma’s idea was to break them down and go for meditation that led to direct enlightenment. Catalogue essays by John Stevens and Alice Rae Yelen explain the inexplicable with remarkable clarity.

The art that grew out of all this wasn’t intended as art in the normal sense. Its makers didn’t even regard themselves as artists. They were monks who wanted to express that sudden “Ah-ha!” of insight in apt form. Many of them didn’t have the urge until they were 50 or 60. In the case of Matsubara Banryu he didn’t feel sprightly enough until he was 80 in the shade. His wry portrait of Daruma shows the monk with the diaphanous skin of an ancient and that mingling of disgust and amusement that comes with wisdom.

As with any superior form of expression, the message is in the medium. Monks worked in black-and-white because it was considered “the painting of the mind,” where sensation is distilled to essence. Their whiplash calligraphic brush stroke was intended to embody the spontaneity of their gestalt. Characteristically, the monk sat and composed himself for hours (sometimes aided by a slug of sake ) then knocked off his painting in minutes. No erasing.

To Westerners, portraits of Daruma look like caricatures of a bald, burly, bearded roustabout of considerable ferocity. To the Japanese, this exaggeration is just a way of getting at the kernel of his character. Two giant portraits by the great 18th-Century master Hakuin Ekaku both show the goggle-eyed monk as monumentally disreputable but one is as intense as a boulder, the other shades off into Keystone Kop comedy.

Daruma’s demeanor recalls the anarchist Zen poet Ikkyu, who wrote a verse about a wandering monk forced to become abbot of a monastery. He felt so humiliated by his purple robes he ran away. The poem concludes advising those who might seek him to look in, “the brothels, the wine shop or the butchers.”

Earthy bunch.

Evidence in the exhibition includes Hakuin’s “Bonseki.” Overtly a representation of a miniaturized Japanese rock garden, it is, in fact, a phallic pun whose pious-sounding inscription uses word-play to inquire if the monk is going to the local house of joy to play with the ladies.

Speaking of word-play, Singer had a fine and instructive time juxtaposing two sets of scrolls. Both show the traditional representation of the dragon and the tiger. In one pair, images of the animals and their calligraphic signs are both shown. In the other, the image is replaced by just the calligraphic sign. This idea of using word for image sounds contemporary to us but the Japanese have long considered the idea very pure as in the ultimate minimalization of everything to the simple Zen circle--the one by Torei Enji, for example.

The circle can translate back into the fat bag of goodies carried by the legendary Santa Claus monk Hotei. He is a happy-go-lucky fellow who symbolizes Zen’s freedom and joy as against Daruma’s embodiment of its lasered concentration.

The exhibition is in two parts. No sooner will this half close April 28, than the second will open (April 29-May 26).

Very Zen.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. Closed Mondays. (213) 857-6000.