Lessons Found Within the Brush Strokes of ‘Zen’

A Zen student seeking enlightenment is like a cicada slipping out of its cocoon, declared the great 18th century Zen master Hakuin. The cicada can’t manage its task if help is given from the outside. If the issue is forced, and the cicada is pulled out, “it will die without ever flying or singing.” Like the cicada, the Zen student has to go it alone.

Though Zen is fundamentally a do-it-yourself enterprise, teachers, writings, art and ritual do provide a little help from the outside. They channel the gaze inward, prompting the student to see more lucidly the nature of his or her own being.

“The Art of Twentieth-Century Zen,” a new show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is one such exhilarating catalyst. More than just an elegantly presented chapter in Japanese art history, the show, ink-scroll by ink-scroll, invites and challenges the viewer-cum-student to look within. An explicit tone of instruction is rare among the paintings, tea bowls and works of calligraphy--one scroll does bear the unusually blunt inscription: “See your own nature, become Buddha”--but implicitly, each object embodies a Zen-infused lesson about the importance of direct, unmediated experience, life as it is lived, free from the encumbrances of the striving, doubting mind.

Zen teachings tend to suggest, rather than explain, and irony, humor, observation, anecdote and history are all called upon as teaching tools. A humble, softly painted image of a snail reinforces the Zen notion of self-reliance. A few vigorous brush strokes spelling out the phrase “I know not” hints of the importance of intuition over knowledge, of achieving the pure Zen state of mindlessness, while also triggering a significant historical reference. When the 6th century Chinese Emperor Wu faced Daruma, the first Zen patriarch, and asked who stood before him, Daruma answered assertively, obliquely, “I know not!”

On one level, such images and phrases are like koans to be deciphered, their enigmatic simplicity as startling as a whack from a Zen trainer’s stick. We’re all asleep to the essence of our own existence, Zen teaches, and the goal, which those sticks literally impress upon monks in training, is to wake up.

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Yet on another level, meaning announces itself directly through the vigor and immediacy of the brushwork. Considered direct expressions of the Zen master’s mind, these flurries of ink extend the legacies of the 13 Japanese monks and one nun represented in the show. Co-curators Audrey Yoshiko Seo and Stephen Addiss, who organized the exhibition for the Marsh Art Gallery at the University of Richmond, track matters of lineage within the Zen monastic system in the show’s comprehensive catalog. They provide compelling biographical sketches of each roshi (revered teacher) and describe the masters’ efforts at reinvigorating the Zen sect, which had enjoyed official sanction off and on during its 800-year history in Japan, but reached a low point during the Meiji era (1868-1912), when the government named Shinto the state religion, dismantled many Buddhist temples and encouraged public disfavor with the movement.

Most of the work in the show dates from the first half of the century (only one of the monks is still living), but matters of chronology, interesting as they are, are wisely left to the catalog. Dates and historical context matter little in the exhibition itself, where few works are labeled with the year of their execution. Many of the paintings belong to a distinct tradition of Zen expression (within the Rinzai sect), in which it is felt that the brush strokes express not only the Zen mind of the monk who laid them down but also that of his teacher, and his teacher before him, all the way back to the Daruma himself. They are part of a continuum, but everything on it is insistently of the now.

It takes a lifetime to reach the profound simplicity embodied in these works, many of which were painted by masters in their 70s, 80s, even 90s. The enso is the ultimate reductive image, a simple circle brushed in a single breath, signifying vastness, emptiness, purity and wholeness. Whatever is represented, from a puppy to Daruma himself, is stripped of extraneous details, pared down to its essence. An extraordinarily compact Daruma by Shoun refers to a period following the confrontation with Emperor Wu, when the patriarch sat in meditation before the wall of a Chinese monastery for nine years. Distilled to one continuous stroke, a vague spiral, the robed patriarch asserts a presence as universal and organic as a seashell.

This is minimalism of the most profound kind, a manifestation of intuition rather than intellect, a minimalism rich in reference and suffused with meaning. Though the calligraphy is not legible to those not fluent in Japanese, it is nevertheless accessible because its form so often echoes its content, which is made available in translation.

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In writing “No money, no things, no teeth, just me,” Santoka’s characters themselves seem to shed weight and encumbrances, stripping themselves down to essentials.

There are works here of breathtaking beauty--cascades of ink that exhaust themselves across the page, sinuous lines that bear the rhythm of their maker’s breath, urgent passages of “flying white,” where the hairs of the brush have separated to reveal streaks of white paper beneath.

If the calligraphic vigor of these works feels akin to the gestural paintings of the Abstract Expressionists--Kline, Motherwell and Pollock especially--it should be remembered that Zen thinking was widespread among artists and poets in New York in the 1950s, when the influential Japanese scholar D.T. Suzuki started teaching at Columbia.

Practitioners of Zen aspire to rid their lives of duality, the distinctions between inner and outer, thought and feeling, yet the way these paintings thrust one deep into oneself seems to generate a potent duality of its own. They are at once calming curatives and unsettling tests. Zen has restorative, therapeutic value, as Jung recognized. It is a discipline in quieting the mind. But it is also, in the words of Suzuki, “a moral anvil on which your character is hammered and hammered.”

* “The Art of Twentieth-Century Zen,”the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-6000, through Jan. 2.