“Zen Art” in a Monastic Context

by Martin Collcutt

To clairify the medieval Japanese monastic context in which Zen Buddhism of the Rinzai (C: Linji) tradition was practiced, this essay will closely examine the foundation and religious practice of Kenchoji, a leading Zen monastery in Kamakura. There, from the mid-thirteenth century, rigorous Zen training was pursued by Japanese monks, first under the guidance of émigré Chinese masters and then of Japanese masters, some of whom had received training in Chinese and Korean monasteries. Although Zen meditation was the core activity in Zen monasteries, and monks were actively discouraged from the distractions of reading and art appreciation, in their environment they were surrounded by Chinese/ Chan art and culture, from the architecture of the buildings and the use of space; to the various Buddha images, painted and sculpted, in the Zen Hall, Lecture Hall, Buddha Hall, even the bathhouses and latrine; to the layout and design of the gardens they tended; to the calligraphy they read; and the portraits of venerable Zen masters hanging in alcoves.¹

We should also bear in mind that the Zen monastic life was far from static. Zen monks were referred to as unsui (“clouds and water”), reminding us that they were mendicants, traveling from master to master, monastery to monastery, in search of awakening. All they could carry with them as they walked would be contained in a wicker hamper on their backs, which held little space for books and none for paintings. They might have room for a Zen text or some other small piece of Buddhist calligraphy. Any “art” they carried, however, would be in their mind’s eye. Only when they settled in one particular monastery, moved up through the official hierarchy, and became one of the teachers or administrators or, in time, the abbot, were they free to indulge in reading the Zen Buddhist classics, in composing poetry, or in painting or calligraphy.

Medieval Kenchoji

Kenchoji was established in 1253 in the warrior garrison town of Kamakura in eastern Japan. This event marked the consolidation of Rinzai Zen monastic practice in Japan. Kenchoji was not the first monastery in Japan in which seated meditation (zazen) was practiced by monks. But it may fairly be described as the first Zen monastery in which a full-scale Song Chinese-style Chan/Zen monastic setting had been created in Japan; in which the Chan monastic life would be fully realized in buildings designed for Chan practice under Chan monastic regulations (C: qinggui, J: shingi ); in which all the religious, artistic, and cultural practices then in use in Chinese monasteries were emulated. At the core of Zen practice in Kenchoji was the intensive seated silent meditation—at least eight hours each day in four two-hour sessions; frequent encounters and koan interviews with the Zen master; chanting of sutras; work around the monastery; brief, frugal meals; bathing; and little sleep. Many monks would leave their sleeping mats at night to sit in meditation and work on their various koan. If we are looking for a specifically religious context for “Zen Art,” perhaps we may find it at Kenchoji.

Antecedents: Zen in Nara- and Heian-Period Japan

Chan/Zen Buddhism was already taking root in Japan when Kenchoji was built. In fact, the Zen meditative tradition had a long prior history within Japanese Buddhism. Meditation was practiced in the Nara period (710–794) by the eminent Hosso-school monk Dosho (629–700), who learned of Chan in China from the great Chinese Buddhist translator Xuanzang (600?–664). Upon his return to Japan, Dosho opened a Zen Meditation Hall at the temple Gangoji (in Nara) and taught zazen.²

In the Heian period (794–1185) zazen was one of the central practices advocated by Saicho (767–822), transmitter of the Tiantai (J: Tendai) teachings from China to Japan and founder of the Japanese Tendai school. Saicho espoused the practice of shishu zanmai, a system of four types of meditation set forth by Zhiyi (538–597), the Chinese founder of the Tiantai school, in the treatise Great Concentration and Insight (Mohe Zhiguan). Among these four practices was joza zanmai (“constant sitting meditation”), which in content was essentially zazen, involving silent meditation in the full lotus posture over periods of many days and nights.³

Meditation was thus intrinsic to traditional Buddhist practice in early Japan. But it was only one part of a Buddhist religious life that might concentrate on sutra study and recitation; the study of Esoteric texts, doctrines, and mandala; or devotion to the Buddha Amida and hope for salvation in the Western Paradise, expressed in repeated recitation of Amida’s name (nenbutsu). In this setting there was little chance that zazen would become the central pursuit of Buddhist practice or that a Zen school would emerge as an independent and influential branch of Japanese Buddhism.

The Zen Surge from the Late Twelfth Century

Things changed in the late twelfth century. Several Japanese monks who had been trained at the traditional centers of Tendai and Shingon Buddhism, especially at Enryakuji, the great Tendai monastery on Mt. Hiei, came to feel that the Buddhism taught there was unresponsive to their own needs and the needs of the age. In response to a pervasive belief that Japan had entered the Latter Age of the Buddha’s Dharma (J: mappo), in which salvation by one’s own efforts became impossible, they questioned the efficacy of the traditional Buddhist life and looked for new teachings. Some monks advocated sincere devotion to the Buddha Amida. Several young monks went to China, the great fountainhead of Japanese Buddhism, in search of a more vital Buddhist practice. There they found Chan to be the most vigorous and challenging teaching in the monasteries they visited. It was the Chan masters, rather than the Vinaya, Tiantai, or Esoteric masters, who were drawing monks to the great monasteries. Minnan Yosai (Myoan Eisai; 1141–1215), a Japanese priest of the Tendai school, left Japan in 1187 to study the teachings of Chan Buddhism in Song-dynasty China. In 1191 he returned, bearing with him seeds of the tea plant and certification of dharma transmission in the Linji (J: Rinzai) lineage of Chan. Following a brief stay on the island of Kyushu, he travelled to Kyoto intending to teach Zen; but meeting with the opposition of the Tendai authorities, he continued on to Kamakura, the headquarters of the warrior government known as the bakufu. There he was warmly received by the shogun Minamoto no Sanetomo (1192–1219) and the shogun’s politically influential mother, Hojo Masako (1157–1225), under whose patronage he established the Zen temple Jufukuji in the year 1200. Yosai had practiced meditation in Chinese monasteries, and he brought back with him texts and perhaps some paintings of the kind used in the Chan monasteries he had visited. He would have been familiar with the Chan account of its own early history and of mind-to-mind transmission.

Important as Yosai was in the history of Japanese Zen, however, his welcome in Kamakura owed less to his Zen understanding than to his expertise in the Esoteric practices of Tendai Buddhism. He maintained lifelong ties with the Tendai tradition even after becoming abbot of Kenninji, a large temple of mixed Zen-Tendai observance established in Kyoto under the protection of the Kamakura shogunate in 1202. Yosai sought to make Chan more acceptable in Japan by arguing in his work Propagation of Zen for the Protection of the Nation (Kozen Gokokuron) that, in teaching zazen, he was simply reintroducing a long-lost meditative practice, one that had been endorsed by Dosho, Saicho, and other early teachers. The established Buddhist traditions, however, upheld not zazen, but the practices of Esoteric ritual and the nenbutsu. Further increasing their resistance was the difference between the Zen of earlier teachers and the Song-dynasty Chan promoted by Yosai, which stressed meditation and enlightenment and used distinctive teaching devices such as koan.⁴

Nor were Yosai’s immediate Japanese successors wholly successful in securing acceptance in Japan of the full-scale contemporary Chan teachings. Yosai’s disciples Taiko Gyoyu (1162–1241), Myozen (1184–1225), and Eicho (d. 1247) taught, respectively, the historically important Zen monks Shinchi Kakushin (1207–1298), Enni Ben’en (1202–1280), and Dogen Kigen (1200–1253), but even these, eminent though they were, remained in many ways peripheral to the transmission process. Shinchi Kakushin and Enni Ben’en followed Yosai in combining the Zen teachings with Tendai Esoteric practices, and their lineages failed to form significant currents in the subsequent history of Japanese Zen.

Dogen, who in 1223 travelled to China and studied the Caodong (J: Soto) school of Chan (a tradition different from that of Yosai), was no more successful than his predecessor in spreading his teachings in Kyoto. In 1243 he removed himself, together with a few disciples, to the mountains far north of the capital. There they built the temple Daibutsuji, soon renamed Eiheiji. Though his lineage eventually developed into the influential Japanese Soto school, for several generations it remained relatively isolated from developments elsewhere in the country.⁵

Another notable figure in early Japanese Zen was Dainichi Nonin (ca. 11th–12th c.), a self-enlightened monk whose understanding was later recognized by the Chinese Linji mas- ter Zhuoan Deguang (1121–1203). Nonin’s so-called Daruma school, active in the region south of Kyoto, was one of the first proponents of the Zen teachings in Japan, but it too was suppressed by the older Buddhist traditions; in the early thirteenth century it was largely absorbed by the Soto school and disappeared as an independent tradition.⁶

Growing Warrior Interest in Zen

Official attitudes toward Zen started to change with the fifth shogunal regent, Hojo Tokiyori (1227–1263). Tokiyori invited the Japanese masters Enni Ben’en and Dogen Kigen to Kamakura, apparently in the hope that these eminent monks, recently back from China, would agree to teach traditional, pre-Song, Chinese Chan in the local temples. But both Dogen and Enni soon left the bakufu capital and returned to central Japan, Dogen to found (what was later called) Eiheiji in Echizen Province (Fukui Prefecture) and Enni to establish Tofukuji in Kyoto. Tokiyori apparently sought in Zen an ideological basis for a new warrior culture, to counter what he saw as the decadence of Kyoto court society. It was a role for which Zen was in many respects well suited.

Here a note of caution must be sounded. Zen, in its Japanese context, is sometimes referred to as “the religion of the samurai.” And, as it turned out, members of the Japanese warrior elite did become the principal patrons of Zen in Japan. This does not mean, however, that Zen was intrinsically militant, or that Zen monks specifically sought out patrons who were warriors. Japanese and Chinese monks who pursued and promoted Chan/Zen did so in the conviction that it offered the surest and most direct path to the enlightenment experienced by the Buddha Sakyamuni. In Song-dynasty China Chan had appealed to nobles, bureaucrats, and merchants of both sexes, as well as to rulers. In thirteenth-century Japan, however, warriors proved most receptive to this new Buddhist practice from China. Some noble patrons and, later, townspeople also became devotees of Zen. But in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries it was the warrior chieftains in Kamakura, Kyoto, and the provinces who sponsored the visits of Zen masters, built monasteries for them, and encouraged others to practice, and to promote, Zen.⁷

The Zen masters, Chinese and Japanese, displayed a vigor and directness that commended them to the Kamakura warriors, and the path they taught stressed discipline and strength of spirit. It was, moreover, a self-reliant path, centered on meditation as a way of transcending the limitations of ego and awakening to one’s innermost nature, thereby fostering a spirit of equanimity even in the face of death. Japanese warriors naturally admired the Chinese Chan monk who, when confronted by Mongol warriors, faced them down saying: “You are wielding a sword that brings death. Show me the sword that gives life!”

The direct, practical teachings of Zen did not require the doctrinal and ritual sophistication of the Tendai and Shingon schools, nor did followers have to leave the world for the monastery—“everyday mind is the Way,” in the words of the great Chinese Chan master Mazu Daoyi (709–788). At the same time the new wave of Chan was flowing strongly from China and carrying with it a whole range of Chinese Buddhist culture. Although few warriors had the education or inclination to master all of the texts and images associated with Zen, they were given access to a spiritual, cultural, and intellectual heritage in which they could, through meditation, become as well versed as the Kyoto nobility, who had always dominated the Japanese cultural tradition.

With its emphasis on discipline and self-reliant effort, Zen was temperamentally suited to warriors, who on the battlefield required skill and courage. The ultimate goal of Zen is, of course, spiritual awakening and the attainment of Buddhahood, but the concentration and equanimity fostered by the practice of meditation and the directness of mind and expression called for in koan encounters were of great practical use to even the most unenlightened of samurai.⁸

Chan Monks Journey to Japan

Hastening the acceptance of Zen in Japan was the arrival in Kamakura of several eminent Chinese Chan Masters, the first and probably most influential being Lanqi Daolong (J: Rankei Doryu; 1213–1278) who journeyed to Dazaifu in Kyushu in 1246 and soon found his way to Kamakura.⁹ Daolong was thirty-four years old when he left China for Japan, and a fully trained Chan monk. A native of western China, having entered a monastery in Chengdu when he was thirteen, he studied in several great monasteries in the Hangzhou region under such distinguished masters as Wuzhun Shifan (1177–1249) and Beijian Jujian (1164–1246) before having his enlightenment recognized by Wuming Huixing (1160–1237).

Daolong’s reasons for coming to Japan are not clear. It is known that he had not been issued a formal invitation, so it is likely that his decision to board a trading vessel at Ningbo in 1246 and sail for Japan was a personal one. He was probably urged to visit Japan by Japanese monks who were enrolling in Chinese monasteries. That would have told him that Zen was gaining ground in Japan and that a Chan monk with his experience would make a great difference in the level of Chan practice, and would find a welcome there.¹⁰

With him on the ship was Getto Chikyo, a priest of the Kyoto temple Sennyuji of the Ritsu (S: Vinaya) school, which was closely connected with Zen. After helping Daolong make his way from the port of Hakata to the capital city of Kyoto, Chikyo—aware perhaps of Daolong’s desire to teach unadulterated Chinese Zen—recommended that he travel on to Kamakura. Zen in Kyoto, though represented by the monasteries Kenninji and Tofukuji, was forced to coexist with the dominant Tendai and Shingon traditions, and thus remained syncretized with Esoteric Buddhism. Chikyo realized that Kamakura offered Daolong a better chance of establishing a purer form of Zen practice.

Butsuden (Buddha Hall) of Kenchoji, Kamakura, viewed from Sanmon (Triple Gate). Roofline of Hatto (Dharma Hall) visible behind Butsuden.

Daolong was warmly received by Tokiyori. The master first resided at the temples Jufukuji and Jorakuji, opening at the latter in 1248 a Zen Meditation Hall (J: Sodo) soon filled to overflowing with monks seeking instruction.¹¹ Tokiyori and Daolong quickly conceived a plan to establish a major monastery at which contemporary Chinese Chan observances would be strictly followed. In 1253 this temple, called Kenchoji after the Kencho era (1249–1256) in which it was founded, began operation as the first Rinzai monastery in Japan run along true Chinese Chan lines (Figs. 4.1–4.3).

Daolong’s Contributions

Among the many contributions made by Daolong to the development of Zen in Japan we can mention the following.¹²

Chan Experience

Although at age thirty-four he was too young to be thought of as a venerable Zen master, Daolong was deeply experienced in Chan life and practice. As a novice and young monk he had practiced in some of the great Chan centers of China. He had accumulated thousands of hours of meditative experience, had engaged in daily encounters (J: mondo) with leading Chan masters in which he had presented his understanding of the koan he was working on, and finally had his own awakening confirmed by Wuming. In the process of his monastic training he had internalized every aspect of Chan meditative practice, monastic organization and administration, and Chan Buddhist culture and tradition. He was an authentic bearer of the full Chan tradition, and this was immediately recognized in Japan by monks and lay patrons alike.

Emphasis on Zazen

Exterior view of Sairaian Shodo (Patriarch’s Hall), Kenchoji, Kamakura.

Daolong made it very clear to his students that the core of Zen practice was mastery of the Buddha’s path, resolving the meaning of life and death and attaining the self-same enlightenment as the Buddha. Central to these attainments was zazen, which meant maintaining the “four daily sessions of zazen.” Since each of these sittings was about two hours long, this meant that monks were sitting quietly in the lotus posture for a minimum of eight hours each day. In addition, there were even more intensive monthly retreats, and monks were encouraged to sit at night instead of sleeping.¹³

Emphasis on the Monastic Rule

With the path to enlightenment so difficult, demanding, and ultimately unsure, its attainment could most effectively be pursued within the framework of rigorous Chan monastic rules, devised over time by the great masters to focus and maximize the energies of communal life and individual practice. Chan monastic codes are not the same as the Buddhist Vinaya, the traditional disciplinary code that governs the behavior of all Buddhist monks and nuns. An interesting example of the divergence is provided by the Zen monastic emphasis on manual labor. Whereas the Vinaya forbids gardening and other such work because of the inevitable deaths of insects and other small creatures, the Zen monastic codes actually mandate such labor, both as a means of providing for the monastery’s needs and as a way of expressing the insights of meditation in the everyday activities of life. Such “working meditation” is known in Zen as samu (“work duty”).

Interior view of Sairaian Shodo, Kenchoji, Kamakura.

The strict, active, meditation-centered, rule-based Zen practice introduced at Kenchoji by Daolong is reflected in a short treatise of his, the Dharma Words and Regulations (Hogo Kisoku), a portion of which may be paraphrased as follows: “A horse that runs only when shown the whip is not a good horse; a monk who practices only when admonished is not a good monk. . . . The purpose of Zen training is to resolve the Great Matter of life-and-death. You must never indulge your feelings and become neglectful, even when resting after the bath.” In the Hogo Kisoku, Daolong continues:

Elders and head monks must attend carefully to their training, without regard to the opinions of others. You wear robes and receive the donations of the faithful; if nothing comes of this, when can you repay the debt? From now on even on bath days zazen must be practiced in the evening and early morning; those who do not go to the Meditation Hall but head for their quarters will be punished by expulsion.¹⁴

Chan Monastic Architecture and Layout

During the centuries prior to and after the building of Kenchoji, meditation was practiced in lay residences as well as monasteries. It was never believed that enlightenment through meditation could be found only on the mats of the Meditation Hall. Attainment could come during zazen or in confrontation with one’s teacher, or while chanting before a Buddha image; but it could equally well be attained while working outside or doing some household task, or cleaning the latrines, or meditating in the moonlight, or walking a mountain path. Having said that, there was a strong tradition in Chinese Chan practice that the monastic setting should be optimized for the efficient, focused, communal meditation of several hundred monks. Thus a distinctive layout for Chan monasteries was gradually realized. Daolong may not have been a temple architect, but he knew intimately what was essential in the various monastery buildings, and he was able to ask Chinese monks coming to Japan to bring with them ground plans and details of Chinese monasteries.

Diagram of the Kenchoji grounds.
Painter unknown.
Japanese, Edo period, 1732.
Hanging scroll, ink on paper; 177.1 x 83.7 cm.
Kenchoji, Kamakura

No visual record seems to have survived of Kenchoji in the 1250s, when it was newly built and Daolong was its abbot. There is, however, a detailed ground plan, the Kenchoji Sashizu (Fig. 4.4), showing the layout of the monastery as it was in the early fourteenth century. This document has an interesting history. When in 1331 the Kyoto Zen monastery of Tofukuji was being rebuilt after a great fire, a copy of the then surviving ground plan of Kenchoji was made for reference. This was preserved at Tofukuji. The original Kenchoji ground plan was lost in a fire in the early seventeenth century. An inscription on an old storage box indicates that Kenchoji monks visiting Tofukuji in 1732 learned that the plan made in 1331 was still preserved at Tofukuji. They secretly borrowed and copied it.¹⁵ From this ground plan showing Kenchoji as it was prior to 1331, it is very clear that medieval Kenchoji was built to a plan that Daolong would have advocated.

Set in a quiet, deeply wooded valley, Kenchoji was approached from the south. The great gate, Buddha Hall (Butsuden) and Dharma Hall (or Teaching Hall; Hatto) were on a central axis (Fig. 4.1), with the Abbot’s Quarters in the north of the compound. In keeping with traditional Chan layout, the administrative and service buildings were on the eastern side of the monastery, the Zen Meditation Hall, bathrooms, and latrines on the western side.

Monastic Organization and Administration

Kenchoji’s layout reflected the characteristic Chan administrative organization, which Daolong would have set up, i.e., a fundamental division into eastern assembly (tohan) and western assembly (seihan) sections. The tohan section held the six administrators (roku chiji), including tsusu (head administrative monk, in charge of overall affairs, duties shared with the kansu, a similar post); fusu (treasurer, in charge of the monastery’s material supplies and financial affairs); ino (duty monk, in charge of overall supervision of the assembly); tenzo (head cook, in charge of the kitchen); and shissui (maintenance officer, in charge of the physical upkeep and repair of the monastery).¹⁶

Monks in the seihan section were more directly involved in the meditation practice, and held posts known as the roku choshu (“six officers”): shuso (head monk, in charge of meditation in the Meditation Hall); shoki (secretary, in charge of handling the various writing tasks associated with monastery correspondence and ritual); zosu (librarian, in charge of the monastery’s sutra collection), shika (guest-master, in charge of receiving visitors to the monastery); chiyoku (bath monk, in charge of the monastery bathhouse); and chiden (sexton, in charge of all matters relating to the upkeep and operation of the Buddha Hall).

These divisions are further indicated on the Kenchoji map by the presence of buildings marked, to the east, kansuryo (kansu quarters), tsusuryo kyakuden (tsusu quarters and guesthouse), and chosaisho (kitchen); and, to the west, “Daitetsudo” (the name of the Monks’-Hall complex, or Sodo), inoryo (ino’s quarters), and zendoryo (head monk’s quarters). The ino’s quarters, traditionally on the eastern, administrative side, are here located on the western side, reflecting the fact that the ino’s duties were intimately related to the activities of the Monks’ Hall.

The various posts were seen not merely as administrative duties, but as integral elements of Zen training. The job of cook is a representative example of a task inseparable from the practice of Zen. The novelist Minakami Tsutomu (b. 1919), commenting on Dogen’s treatise Instructions to the Monastery Cook (Tenzo Kyokun), writes, “The most notable feature of this text is Dogen’s emphasis on the fact that cooking is not mere kitchen work, but a task involving a level of thoughtful- ness and care that makes it the noblest of human occupations.” ¹⁷ In washing rice, for example, Dogen urges the cooks to be constantly mindful lest they allow a single grain of sand to find its way into the cooking cauldron.

Brush Traces (Bokuseki)

The calligraphy of Zen monks is known as bokuseki (“brush traces”). Monks in training at Kenchoji would have read and pondered the words of masters in the Rinzai Zen tradition. They would have been surrounded by examples of fine bokuseki. Many would have trained as calligraphers and aspired to produce their own elegant expressions of Zen as their insight deepened and they found their awakening.

Hogo (Dharma Words to Enlighten) and Kisoku (Regulations).
Lanqi Daolong (1213–1278).
Japanese, Kamakura period, 13th c. Ink on paper; Hogo: 85.2 x 41.4 cm, Kisoku: 85.5 x 40.7 cm.
Kenchoji, Kamakura

Daolong was himself a fine calligrapher and no doubt brought calligraphic scrolls and texts from China, or had them sent to him in Japan (Fig. 4.5).¹⁸ Monastic buildings were identified by plaques over the entrance doors. Monks entering the Meditation Hall, for example, might notice a plaque reading “Place Where Buddhas Are Made” (senbutsujo). On the walls of the Meditation Hall itself, in the chambers of the abbot and the senior monks, and in the room where monks met their master for mondo, calligraphic scrolls—phrases from the Chan/Zen tradition—would be prominently displayed. A young monk in the Meditation Hall, wrestling with his particular koan—let us say he has been told by his master to “Show me your original face”—may have been struggling day and night for weeks to see his “original face” and to find the words or gesture to demonstrate to his master that he had truly “seen” it. While presenting his koan response to the master in his chamber, and being briskly rebuffed and told he was getting nowhere—he still cannot “see” or “show” his face—the despondent monk might notice a scroll behind his master’s back with calligraphy from one of the Zen classics, perhaps “honrai mu-ichibutsu” (“Originally there is Nothing”). This might provide him with a hint as he returned to the Meditation Hall to grapple again with his koan. But he will also have been warned time and again that true awakening was to be found in direct experience, not in somebody else’s “words and letters,” however insightful they might seem.

Painting, Sculpture, and Visual Imagery in the Zen Monastery

Paintings and Sculptures

“Never seek Buddha outside,” Zen teaches—“the Buddha is found within.” In line with this injunction is a tendency to think of Zen monasteries as austere meditation centers, unadorned with paintings and sculpture, and relieved only by their graceful rooflines and elegantly simple rock and gravel gardens. Certainly Zen does not encourage the kind of devotional practices performed in Pure Land Buddhism, which looks to Amida for salvation, nor are Zen monastic halls normally adorned with vivid polychrome paintings symbolically recreating the Pure Land or depicting the process of awakening. Zen has placed little or no emphasis on the accumulation of merit through the construction of temples or the carving of images. Furthermore, Zen, in its spare use of sculpted and painted religious images, stands in stark contrast to the Esoteric Buddhist schools, which employ a wide variety of sacred imagery for their elaborate mandalas and rituals. But this is not to say that the Zen monastic tradition has been hostile to painting and sculpture and has had no use for decorative art. A visit to any Zen temple will quickly reveal Buddha images in the Buddha and Dharma Halls, before which prayers and incense are offered and ceremonies conducted. The Monks’ Hall will almost certainly have a statue of the bodhisattva Mañjusri (J: Monju) as an exemplar of superior wisdom and enlightenment, to which all may aspire. Other buildings, including the kitchen, bathhouse, and latrine, will all contain statues or paintings of their various protective deities, to which prayers will regularly be offered. The Main Gate (Sanmon, literally, “Triple Gate”) at Kenchoji is richly decorated with statues of the Five Hundred Arhats. Zen monasteries employed a wide range of painting and sculpture throughout the monastery. Monks venerated or simply enjoyed these images, reminded by their teachers that respect and appreciation of images might help in their practice but that the search for their own Buddhahood lay within.

Portrait of Lanqi Daolong.
Painter unknown.
Inscribed by Lanqi Daolong (1213–1278).
Japanese, Kamakura period, 1271.
Hanging scroll, colors on silk; 104.8 x 46.4 cm.
Kenchoji, Kamakura

Among the types of images particularly prized in Zen monasteries were painted and sculpted portraits of eminent monks, known as chinso.¹⁹ Zen holds a tradition of receiving, upon completion of one’s formal training, the portrait or surplice (kesa) of one’s teacher, as evidence of dharma transmission (inka shomei). These often became cherished temple possessions, as did the portraits and sculptures of eminent priests who were associated with the temple and, in many cases, buried on the temple grounds. From this there evolved the genre of Zen chinso art. Temples also possessed paintings of such figures as Sakyamuni (the historical Buddha), Bodhidharma (the sixth-century Indian monk said to have transmitted Zen to China), and the various bodhisattvas and arhats (enlightened Buddhist sages), as well as collections of flower vases, candle stands, censers, incense containers, and other accoutrements necessary for the performance of ceremonies. Important temples sought the highest quality in such objects, with the result that Song-dynasty temples, and their Japanese successors, were filled with artistic masterpieces made of celadon, red lacquer, and bronze. The range and variety of these objects can be seen from the entries in the Catalogue of Treasures Belonging to the Butsunichian (Butsunichian Komotsu Mokuroku). This is a fourteenth-century inventory of artistic and other properties of Butsunichian, a subtemple of Engakuji in Kamakura, built by Hojo Tokimune in 1282. According to a postscript, the catalogue was begun in 1320. The document records Chinese chinso, butsuga (iconic Buddhist paintings), zenki zu (paintings of Zen in action), and ryuko zu (paintings of dragons and tigers), all from the Song and Yuan dynasties, as well as bokuseki, hoe (vestments), and ceramics. A key document for the study of karamono (Chinese objects introduced to Japan) from the thirteenth century, it also records how various warrior lords, daimyo, and Ashikaga shoguns purchased art works from the Butsunichian collection. The original document is still kept at Engakuji. The Butsunichian Komotsu Mokuroku tells not only what kind of art objects Zen temples held, but that these objects were carefully catalogued and treated as treasures.²⁰

Portrait of Lanqi Daolong in Walking Meditation.
Painter unknown.
Japanese, Kamakura period, 14th c.
Hanging scroll, colors on silk; 90.9 x 38.5 cm.
Kenchoji, Kamakura

Like other Zen monasteries, Kenchoji had many portraits of its founder-abbot Daolong, and his Chinese masters and Japanese successors, hanging in alcoves in the Abbot’s Quarters or stored in its treasure house. Among the extant portraits of Lanqi Daolong, that dated Bun’ei 8 (1271) and inscribed by Daolong himself (Fig. 4.6) is one of the finest examples of the chinso genre. The portrait is strikingly individual. It conveys not only the powerful physical presence of a demanding Zen master, but also a sense of the master’s inner conviction. The piece was presented by Daolong to a certain Layman Ronen (thought to be the regent Hojo Tokimune; 1251–1284), and thus appears not to have been a certificate of dharma transmission. A portrait of Daolong in Walking Meditation owned by Kenchoji is another fine depiction of the master, walking quietly in meditation in a natural setting (Fig. 4.7). In this exhibition are two fine examples of painted chinso (Cats. 29, 30).

Portraits of distinguished Zen masters were often sculpted as well as painted. These might be placed in the Teaching Hall, or in the Abbot’s Quarters. In a seated sculpture of Daolong in the possession of the Kenchoji subtemple Sairaian (Fig. 4.8), the master’s emaciated ribs stand out, and the numerous folds of the robes are clearly defined. Daolong’s features, sensitively depicted, convey an aura of great spiritual power and energy.

Poem-Painting Scrolls (Shigajiku)

Shigajiku—hanging-scroll paintings inscribed with Chinese poems (kanshi ), often by Zen monks—were also painted and written in the Abbot’s Quarters in Zen monasteries. On many of these one monk would add an appropriate calligraphic inscription to a painting done by another monk. Or several monks might add suitable verses to a single illustration. Originally composed as expressions of insight or pointers to insight, over time—especially as they expanded from the monastic context into the society of lay patrons—they could quickly become part of a growing literary corpus known as the Literature of the Five Mountains (Gozan Bungaku), a literary tradition centered around a group of influential Zen temples known as the Gozan (Five Mountains). Zen monks and laypeople who seriously pursued enlightenment were aware, however, that they would not find their own enlightenment in any of these shigajiku, however appealing and insightful they might seem.

Ink Paintings (Suibokuga)

Seated Figure of Lanqi Daolong.
Sculptor unknown.
Japanese, Kamakura period, 13th c.
Lacquered wood with inset crystal eyes; h. 62.9 cm.
Kenchoji, Kamakura

Lanqi Daolong, and the Chinese Chan monks who followed him to Japan later in the century, also transmitted Chanrelated Chinese visual and literary culture to Japan. Vessels coming to the port of Hakata in Kyushu from Song- and Yuan-dynasty China were packed with art objects, books, and scrolls. These objects soon found their way to the growing number of Zen monasteries in Kyoto and Kamakura, and, by the fourteenth century, were present throughout the country. We now describe much of this influx as “Zen Art,” yet in the monastic context it was hardly considered as “art,” but rather as expressions of insight attained or as visual stimuli toward awakening—hints to enlightenment, finger pointing at the moon. Monks were not producing “art” for enjoyment or appreciation, but to help themselves and others express, deepen, or question their insight; or to remind themselves of the tradition in which they were practicing; or to depict revered masters who had found their enlightenment, or famous moments or encounters in the history of Chan.

Zen Art and Aesthetics Beyond the Medieval Monastery

Zen-related calligraphic scrolls, portraits, ink paintings, aesthetic tastes, and styles of architecture, garden design, and tea drinking were never confined to monasteries. Although Chan/Zen monasteries were the major sources of what we now call “Zen Art,” they were not the exclusive sources. From early times, in both China and Japan, some practitioners of painting or calligraphy on Zen themes were lay people, whether householders or wandering hermits. Talented Zen monk-painters left their monasteries and consorted with laymen. Laymen and women who patronized and visited Zen monks and monasteries were eager to receive paintings or pieces of calligraphy from monks whom they revered. Some who practiced Zen deeply were given chinso or verses as a mark of their attainment. Some brought sketches for monks to sign and add verses or comments.

Lay patrons admired what we might describe as a Zen monastic aesthetic. Its traits included simplicity, austerity, tranquillity, and freedom from worldly attachment. It also demanded directness, tight organization, and economy of time and movement. And in discussion with Zen monks, or in viewing painting and calligraphy by Zen monks, laymen would encounter the positive value ascribed to naturalness, eccentricity, asymmetry, simplicity, and subtle profundity (yugen) or refined poverty (wabi). All of these qualities have been assigned as characteristics of “Zen Art” by Hisamatsu Shin’ichi, D.T. Suzuki, and other commentators on the relationship between Zen practice and the arts in China and Japan. Their views have been addressed by Gregory Levine in his essay in this catalogue. Here, I would simply point out that Hisamatsu and D.T. Suzuki can be criticized for idealizing “Zen Art,” detaching it from its broader Buddhist context, and identifying it too closely with Japan and Japanese cultural ideals.²¹

By the Muromachi period (1392–1573) in Japan monks of the Zen schools, especially Rinzai Zen, had formed close ties with the warrior and aristocratic classes, and had undergone a considerable degree of secularization. Senior priests were increasingly accepted as members of the educated and cultured elite, and many of their activities seem to have been as much cultural and artistic as religious in nature.

Monks joined in poetry gatherings with warriors and nobles. Skill in impromptu poetry composition and command of Chinese poetry helped Zen priests attain social recognition, fostering the rise of Gozan Bungaku.²²

Art related to the tea ceremony (Chanoyu) is outside the scope of this exhibition, but deserves mention because it, too, had a Zen monastic origin and only later became a secularized aesthetic. Monks in Chan/Zen monasteries offered simple meals and powdered green tea (J: matcha) to visitors, and, as the vogue for tea drinking spread into lay society, they helped to shape its aesthetic practice. Tea masters from the time of Sen no Rikyu (1522–1591) have all practiced Zen. Chanoyu, the refined aesthetic of tea, particularly in its simplest form, called wabicha, is often presented as an archetypal example of “Zen culture.” But in fact it was created by merchants and warriors in secular society rather than by Zen monks. And the expense incurred in the building of elegantly rustic tea rooms and the acquiring of famed teabowls and other accessories belied the Zen goal of freedom from self, from human entanglements, and from material acquisitiveness in the search for enlightenment.²³

The “Zen garden”—based upon rocks and raked gravel as expressions of nature, infinity, and emptiness—was also transformed, and in some measure secularized, over time. The gardens around the Abbot’s Quarters in the early Kyoto and Kamakura Zen monasteries and subtemples may well have been conceived by Zen monks on the basis of Chan designs and an aesthetic imported from China, and constructed by them at the monastery as part of their daily work duty. As Zen temples proliferated, however, and the aesthetic of the “Zen garden” spread into lay society, gardens were designed by garden-design families and constructed by their lowly laborers (sansui kawaramono), in Kyoto, Nara, and Kamakura. Many of the designers and builders of such famous rock gardens as the magnificent one at Ryoanji, Kyoto, were not devotees of Zen, nor particularly inspired by the spirit of Zen. They may have consulted with Zen monks as they conceived of and designed the garden, but the aesthetic principles behind the composition were no longer exclusively “Zen.” And when, over the centuries, repairs to or redesign of a Zen garden was needed, as at Ryoanji in the eighteenth century, the likelihood that the garden designers were professional Kyoto artisans, rather than Zen monks, was even greater.²⁴

In the graphic arts too, over time Zen principles and ideals of conception and composition extended far beyond the circle of Zen practitioners and devotees. Ink paintings, which had once been the preserve of Zen monk-artists (gaso), had a powerful appeal in lay society. Over time many striking ink landscapes and bird and figure paintings illustrating Zen characters, themes, and ideals were painted by artists who had been trained in the traditional style (so-called yamato-e), and who were requested by their patrons to produce works similar to those of Chinese painters of the Song dynasty.

Hasegawa Tohaku (1539–1610), for example, is often presented as a representative Zen artist. Certainly, his wonderful painting of Pine Trees, on two long screens, embodies the underlying principles of what we think of as Zen painting in its subtle use of line and shading to depict aging mountain pines shrouded in mist. But Tohaku was a devotee of the Nichiren school of Buddhism, generally thought of as unsympathetic to Zen. He was not a Zen practitioner, but he came to prefer the ink paintings of artists like the Zen monk-painter Sesshu Toyo (1420–1506) to the brightly colored paintings of the then dominant Kano school of Japanese artists, including one of his own teachers, Kano Eitoku (1543–1590). As a master of ink landscape, familiar with Chinese and Japanese landscape paintings in Zen monastic buildings in Kyoto and in the homes of merchants in Sakai, he was also sufficiently master of the Zen tradition to paint truly “Zen paintings,” much admired by Zen monks themselves. By contrast with the richly colored paintings of the Kano school, most of Tohaku’s later works are simple compositions in ink, created for Zen monasteries in Kyoto.²⁵ By his day, the Zen art aesthetic was out of its monastic box and available to talented artists, poets, dramatists like Zeami, and to tea masters like Rikyu, who used it creatively as part of a broad cultural expression that lay artists and their patrons were now thinking of as “Zen Art.”

As we enjoy the wonderful paintings in this exhibition, aware of the long historical movement of Zen and Zen-related monastic life and culture within China, from China to Japan, and then within Japan, we are both constrained and liberated. We are constrained to recognize that “Zen Art,” in its narrow, core definition as an expression of the Zen spiritual quest, can only emerge from Zen experience. At the same time we are liberated in knowing that over the centuries in China and Japan and the West, a richly creative interaction has occurred between monks and laymen, in which calligraphy, painting, poetry scrolls, ox-herding pictures, gardens, No plays, tea ceremony, architecture, and use of space have been inspired by the visual, spiritual, and intellectual depth of the culture associated with Chan/Zen and practiced for centuries in Chinese and Japanese monasteries and nunneries. This realization should allow us to enjoy the exhibition at several levels, asking ourselves as we look at the paintings, What is “Zen” about this?

Notes

1. Particularly relevant for this essay, and for this exhibition, is the volume Kamakura: The Art of Zen Buddhism (Kamakura: Zen no Genryu), the catalogue of an exhibition of art from Kamakura temples held at Tokyo National Museum in June and July 2003. The catalogue was compiled by the TNM and published by Nihon Keizai Shinbunsha in 2003. The introductory essay, “Kamakura: The Art of Zen Buddhism,” by Asami Ryusuke, trans. Thomas Kirchner, is especially helpful.
2. On the introduction of Chan/Zen meditation practice in the Nara and Heian periods, see Ibuki Atsushi, Zen no Rekishi (Kyoto: Hozokan, 2001), pp. 173–86.
3. Ibid.
4. On Yosai’s contribution, see, for example, Ibuki Atsushi, Zen no Rekishi, pp. 188–90.
5. There is a massive literature on Dogen and the Soto school. For a lively introduction, see Hee-Jin Kim, Dogen Kigen, Mystical Realist (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1975; paperback reprint, Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2004).
6. On Nonin, see Ibuki Atsushi, Zen no Rekishi, pp. 189–90.
7. Warrior patronage of Zen in medieval Japan is discussed in Martin Collcutt, Five Mountains: The Zen Monastic Institution in Medieval Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 57–129.
8. D.T. Suzuki has stressed (perhaps overstressed) the relationship between the samurai spirit and Zen. See, for example, Zen and Japanese Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959).
9. On Daolong, see Tsuji Zennosuke, Nihon Bukkyoshi (A History of Japanese Buddhism), vol. 2 ([Tokyo]: Iwanami Shoten, 1949), which contains the posthumous Record of Lanqi, the Daikaku Zenji Goroku. Also Matsuo Kenji, “Toraiso no Seiki” (The Century of the Immigrant Monks), in Nihon Chusei no Zen to Ritsu (The Medieval Zen and Vinaya Schools) (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kobunkan, 2003), pp. 122–31. Kamakura: Zen no Genryu contains numerous references to Daolong and Kenchoji. In English, see Collcutt, Five Mountains, pp. 65–68.
10. According to the monk Kokan Shiren (1278–1346), author of the Genko Shakusho (completed 1322), Daolong made the trip because he had heard from Japanese monks in China that the Japanese islands offered a promising mission field for Chan. Genko Shakusho, vol. 6, p. 78, in Dai-Nihon Bukkyo Zensho, vol. 101 (Tokyo: Dai-Nihon Bukkyo Zensho Kankokai, 1931).
11. For the history of Jorakuji, see Kamakura-shi Shi, Shaji-hen (A History of the City of Kamakura, Shrines and Temples) (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kobunkan, 1959), pp. 413–18.
12. On Daolong’s contributions, see also Kamakura: Zen no Genryu, pp. 11–19 (also vi–x).
13. Ibid., p. 15 (also vii).
14. Ibid.
15. On Zen monastic architecture and the Kenchoji Sashizu, see Bruce Coats, “The Architecture of Zen Buddhist Monasteries in Japan” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1985), pp. 44–107, 209–40.
16. On Zen monastic organization and the functions of the various officers of the eastern and western ranks, see Collcutt, Five Mountains, pp. 221–47.
17. Cited in Kamakura: Zen no Genryu, p. vii.
18. Examples of Daolong’s calligraphy can be found in the catalogue for Zen Painting and Calligraphy, an exhibition at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1970. See p. 52 for a translation of colophon added to a painting of a Red-Robed Bodhidharma and pp. 52–53 for a Buddhist hymn composed by Daolong. Illustrations of these works will also be found in Kamakura: Zen no Genryu, pp. 40, 41. See also Yukio Lippit’s essay in the present volume for the painting and inscription.
19. On chinso, see Kamakura: Zen no Genryu, pp. ix, xiv. The catalogue includes many examples of painted and sculpted chinso. See, for example, the splendid portrait of the Chinese Chan master Wuzhun Shifan on p. 96.
20. On the Butsunichian Komotsu Mokuroku, see JAANUS (Japanese Architecture and Art Net Users System), http://www.aisf.or.jp/~jaanus/ deta/b/butsunichiankoumotsumokuroku.htm (accessed 16 November 2006).
21. Hisamatsu’s views on “Zen Art” will be found in his book Zen and the Fine Arts, trans. Tokiwa Gishin (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1971). D.T. Suzuki’s many books include several devoted to Zen and the arts. See, for example, Zen and Japanese Culture. Critiques of Hisamatsu and Suzuki have been made by Yoshiaki Shimizu in “Zen Art?” in Zen in China, Japan, and East Asian Art: Papers of the International Symposium on Zen, Zürich University, 1982, ed. Helmut Brinker et al. (Berne: Peter Lang, 1985), pp. 73–98; Alexander Soper, review of Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture, in Artibus Asiae, vol. 23, no. 2 (1960), pp. 139–40, among others.
22. On the Gozan Bungaku literary movement in Japan, see Marian Ury, Poems of the Five Mountains: An Introduction to the Literature of Zen Monasteries (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1992).
23. The development of Chanoyu and the importance of Rikyu and other tea masters in the shaping of Japanese aesthetics of “refined poverty” is discussed in many works, including Sen Soshitsu, The Japanese Way of Tea from Its Origins in China to Sen no Rikyu, trans. V. Dixon Morris (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1998); Herbert Plutschow, Rediscovering Rikyu: And the Beginnings of the Japanese Ceremony (Folkstone, Kent, U.K.: Globe Oriental, 2003).
24. The “Zen” character of Ryoanji’s and other Zen monastic gardens is discussed by Loraine E. Kuck, The World of the Japanese Garden (New York: Walker-Weatherhill, 1968); François Berthier, Zen in the Stones: The Garden of Ryoanji (London: Frances Lincoln, 1999).
25. On Hasegawa Tohaku and the painting of Pine Trees, see Ichimatsu Tanaka and Masao Ishizawa, Heritage of Japanese Art (Tokyo: Kodansha America, 1992).