Continuations of Ch'an Ink Painting into Ming-Ch'ing and the Prevalence of Type Images

Continuations of Ch'an Ink Painting into Ming-Ch'ing and the Prevalence of Type ImagesAuthor(s): James CahillSource: Archives of Asian Art, Vol. 50 (1997/1998), pp. 17-41Published by: University of Hawai'i Press for the Asia SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20111272 .Accessed: 16/06/2014 08:47

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Continuations of Ch'an Ink Painting Into Ming-Ch'ing and the Prevalence of Type Images

James Cahill

University of California, Berkeley

It is generally accepted that Ch'an Buddhist painting? and I bypass here the vexing question of how to define it,

simply adopting for now the definitions stated or implicit, for instance, in the Fontein-Hickman catalogue Zen

Painting and Calligraphy, or in the writings of Helmut

Brinker1?that Ch'an Buddhist painting reached the peak of its development in the late Sung and Yuan, when it also

received the most notice, mostly negative, from literati crit

ics. It is also generally accepted that it was scarcely practiced in later centuries, so that the painting of the so-called Four

Monk-Artists of the Ming-Ch'ing transition is best

regarded as a separate phenomenon, related only problem

atically to their status as Ch'an Buddhist monks.2

Seeing Ch'an painting as reaching its high period in the

thirteenth and fourteenth centuries seems justified, but

seeing it as more or less ending with the fall of Yuan and

the beginning of Ming may not be. The argument of this

paper, as the title suggests, is two-pronged. First, that Ch'an

painting as done by Sung-Yuan monk-artists such as Mu

ch'i continued to be practiced in Ch'an monasteries in

later centuries, but has not been preserved and has gone

largely unnoticed by critics and writers; its motifs and styles nevertheless "surfaced" from time to time in works by prominent literati artists, and reappear in the paintings of some

seventeenth-century masters, notably Pa-ta Shan-jen.

Second, that these motifs and styles tended to survive into the later centuries not so much as vital components of a

still-evolving tradition, but as what might be called type

images, by analogy with the established term type forms. By type images I mean simple images painted in ink mono

chrome that could be learned and executed?in many or even most cases one

might say "performed"?by artists of

divers schools and kinds, professional and amateur, even by those whose repertories did not ordinarily include the sub

jects in question. The introduction to Jan Fontein and Money Hickman's

1970 exhibition catalogue Zen Painting and Calligraphy, in a

section titled "The End of Ch'an Art in China," contains

these words: "With the triumph of landscape painting of

the Yuan period, Ch'an art gradually receded into the

background. . .

.Tung Ch'i-ch'ang's references to Ch'an,

and the artistic activity of the 'mad' painter Hsii Wei..., are

isolated instances of the survival of Ch'an elements in art."3 This is an accepted version of the matter, and not entirely wrong; it only needs qualifying and amplifying. Chinese lit

erary sources?at least, the well-known biographical com

pilations regarding Ming masters, such as Ming-hua lu, Wu

sheng-shih shih, and Tyu-hui pao-chien hs?-tsuan?would

appear to confirm what Fontein and Hickman write. Of

forty-odd painters recorded in these books who were

Buddhist monks, all but a few specialized in landscape, and

when their styles are specified they are typically those of revered "Southern school" masters such asTungY?an or the Four Great Masters of Yuan painting, especially NiTsan.A

few of them did ink bamboo and plum; two grape painters who followed Jih-kuan, the famous Y?an-period specialist

in that subject, are exceptions. If these compilations were our only sources, we would conclude that Ch'an painting afterYiian was absorbed into literati painting. Possibly, how

ever, some Ch'an monk-artists of these later periods still did the kinds of painting practiced by Mu-ch'i and other Sung

Yiian Ch'an masters, but went unnoted by the critics, who recorded only those who did the "respectable" kinds of

painting, those associated with the literati-amateur artists. This latter possibility I believe to be the truth of the matter.

A few isolated cases of Ming artists who were not Ch'an monks but who tried their hands at Ch'an-style figure painting are interesting but inconsequential, except insofar as they testify to the survival of examples from the Sung

Yiian period, or to a contemporary practice based on these, that the artists could take as models. Pictures of this kind by

Wang Wen (1497?1576) and Chang Hung (1577?1652 or

later) representing, respectively, the Ch'an figures Han-shan and Pu-tai, can serve as examples;4 they may have been

painted for Ch'an temples, or for Ch'an believers.The same

is true of the Ch'an figures that were painted sometimes by Che-school masters.5 A search for extant works by recorded Ch'an painters of the Ming period will not take us far, since, if we eliminate the landscapes with no special Ch'an

character, surviving examples are very few.6 Our pursuit of

post-Yuan Ch'an painting must be conducted on other

ground.

17


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Fig. i. FangWei-i (1585-1668), White-Robed Kuan-yin. Dated to 1655.

Hanging scroll, ink on paper; 56.5 x 26.6 cm. Palace Museum, Beijing. From: Ku-kungpo-wu-yiian ts'ang Ming Ch'ing hui-hua (Beijing: Palace

Museum, 1994), no. 64.

Fig. 2. Chueh-chiYung-chung (early 14th c), White-Robed Kuan-yin.

Hanging scroll, ink on paper; 78.9 x 31.7 cm. Inscription by Chung

feng Ming-pen (1263-1323). Cleveland Museum of Art.

18



Fig. 3. KuanTao-sheng (1262-1319), Kuan-yin with a Fish Basket. Dated

to 1302. Hanging scroll, ink on paper; 96.4 x 32.9 cm. Osaka Municipal Art Museum (formerly Abe collection). From Toda Teisuke, Kawakami

Kei, and EbineToshio, eds., Ry?kai, Indara (Liang Kai andYin-t'o-lo), Suiboku bijutsu taikei, vol. 4 (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1975), pi. 90.

In the exhibition of Ming-Ch'ing paintings shown

briefly at the Palace Museum in Beijing in December

1994,7 one of the surprises was a picture of Kuan-yin by the woman artist FangWei-i (1585?1668), done in 1655 when

she was seventy-one years old (Fig. 1). She was the aunt of

Fang I-chih (1611-1671), and a distinguished poet and

painter herself, favoring Buddhist subjects, especially the

White-Robed Kuan-yin. Li Shih s good catalogue entry for

this painting follows standard accounts from Fang Wei-i s

own time in naming as her stylistic sources the early figure masters Wu Tao-tzu and Li Kung-lin, especially the latters

pai-miao style. Those familiar with Ch'an paintings pre served in Japan, however, will be immediately struck by a

much closer similarity to portrayals of the same subject by the little-known early Yuan monk-artist Chiieh-chi Yung

chung, at least two of which survive, both inscribed by the

great Ch'an master Chung-feng Ming-pen (1263?1323), whose disciple the artist was.8 One is in a Tokyo private col

lection;9 the other (Fig. 2) in the Cleveland Museum of Art.

The painting by Fang Wei-i is so close to these in so many

respects as to raise forcibly the question of the relationship between them.

The wrong way to answer that question would be to

argue that a mid-seventeenth-century woman artist work

ing in Anhui somehow knew and imitated the work of an

early fourteenth-century Ch'an monk working in

Chekiang?an artist, moreover, who goes unrecorded in

Chinese sources. But that is the kind of absurdity we find

ourselves forced into so long as we remain bound to the

Chinese tradition of associating styles with "name" artists

and seeing artistic personalities in pictures in which this old

established practice is more or less inapplicable. It makes

better sense to recognize that certain pictorial configura tions came to be established as what I want to call type

images, available to anyone who chose to learn them, espe

cially amateur painters within whose technical capacities

they could comfortably fit. They were used as well, how

ever, by highly proficient professional masters when it was

to their purpose to produce images quickly and, as they often did, in multiples. Using type images was not a matter

of simple replication; as with type forms for trees and rocks

and other components of landscape, more or less of the

matic and compositional and iconographical variation

could be introduced, brushwork could of course differ a bit, and so forth; the image can nonetheless be properly said to

conform to an established type.10 It has been suggested thatYung-chungs drawing in line

of even breadth is derived from woodblock pictures, and it

could be argued that Fang Wei-i simply saw the same

printed pictures and imitated them. But too many similar

correspondences exist that cannot be so explained, making that explanation untenable.

It seems probable that such simple votive images of

Kuan-yin and other religious figures were painted in mul

tiples as a devotional act, to be given to believers by the

monk-artist, perhaps in return for temple offerings, or to

her friends by the woman-artist. A case is recorded for the

early Ch'ing period in which a woman artist, the wife of a

Grand Secretary, "painted five thousand Kuan-yin pictures

19



to give her mother-in-law to wish her long life."11 This

would accord also with the practice of more recent Ch'an or Zen masters who executed ens? circles in this way, or of

the Reverend K?j? Sakamoto of the Kiyoshi K?jin Seich?ji near Takurazuka, whom I knew very well in the 1950s?

1960s, who devoted a period of each day to executing and

inscribing bold calligraphic images of the triple flaming

jewel, symbol of his Three Treasures branch of Shingon Buddhism, for distribution to the faithful at his temple. These, of course, represent a further extreme of formaliza

tion, perhaps outside the properly pictorial.

Staying within the circle of Chung-feng Ming-pen, we

can introduce another painting of Kuan-yin inscribed by him, as well as by the artist, Kuan Tao-sheng, and by her

husband, Chao Meng-fu (Fig. 3). (Interesting issues that the

painting raises, such as the relationship of Kuan and Chao to Ch'an Buddhism and to Ming-pen, cannot be pursued

here for reasons of space.)12 Painted in 1302, the picture is more or less contemporary with the one by Ch?eh-chi

Yung-chung. But it is very different in style: jagged, discon

nected brushstrokes, fluctuating in thickness, with strong tonal contrasts and black accents; a rather heavy-jowled,

full-lipped face with bulbous nose. Kuan Tao-sheng claims in her inscription to be "copying" (lin) a work by the great

eighth-century figure master Wu Tao-tzu, but once more, the stylistic affiliations with certain Y?an-period paintings are much closer.

Some years ago, I dismissed this painting as "Copy of a

work in the Yin-t'o-lo manner, with interpolated signa ture."13 But I was probably committing the same error

against which I am now arguing: insisting on attaching names to styles, instead of recognizing that whereas some

styles were indeed individual and personal, others appear to

have enjoyed more or less common currency in their time.

The figure style associated with the mysterious Yin-t'o-lo

belongs, I think, to the latter type: although it is true that

female figures in paintings by Yin-t'o-lo himself exhibit this

manner,14 so do those in works by other artists?for example, a small hanging scroll representing "Kuan-yin with a Fish

Basket," once more bearing an inscription by Chung-feng

Ming-pen, now kept, surprisingly, in the Palace Museum,

Beijing (Fig. 4). The signature has not been identified; it is

probably that of another monk-amateur of the period. It

would appear that this manner of figure painting was cur

rent in Ming-pen's region, period, and circle, available for use by a monk-amateur or a lay believer such as Kuan Tao

sheng. In any case, a number of hands can be distinguished among the many extant figure paintings in the Yin-t'o-lo

manner, and perhaps Yin-t'o-lo should be thought of more

as a designation of style or type than as an artistic personal

ity. What part the actual monk who used the name Yin-t'o

lo played in the creation or popularization of it is a separate

question, and perhaps ultimately unanswerable.15

Similarly, one can recognize another type image, which

likewise allowed a considerable latitude for compositional

20

Jk??t

Fig. 4. Unidentified artist, Yuan period, Kuan-yin with a Fish Basket.

Hanging scroll, ink on paper. Inscription by Chung-feng Ming-pen

(1263-1323). Palace Museum, Beijing.

and other variation, in the small pictures of misty clumps of

bamboo growing beside rocks, to which the name of still

another artist unrecorded in Chinese sources, T'an Chih

jui, is conventionally attached in Japan.16 They were proba

bly produced by small-name artists working about the same

time, the early Yuan, in the Chekiang region. These small

pictures are "Ch'an paintings" by adoption, so to speak, inscribed by Ch'an monks and appreciated and used in Zen contexts in Japan, contexts probably unrelated to their orig inal circumstances of creation. Bamboo paintings ascribed to Kuan Tao-sheng mostly have more in common with the



*' ;:

v:-?*a;-^vs?''1i

Fig. 5. Hs? Wei (i 521-1593), Kuan-yin with a Fish Basket. Hanging scroll, ink on paper; 116 x 62 cm. Shanghai Museum. From Chung-kuo li-tai shu-hua t'u-mu, vol. 3 (Beijing: Wen-wu Press, 1990), no. 1-1120.

"T'an Chih-jui" type than with the kinds of ink bamboo

practiced by male literati artists of her time, including her

husband Chao Meng-fu.17 Perhaps here, too, she should be

regarded as participating in a regional development?she may well have had an important role in the formation of it, or at least in raising it from the status of a small local specialty.

Returning to Kuan-yin pictures: what would appear to

be a later echo of the Yin-t'o-lo type, somewhat softened but with most of its characteristic features preserved?dis connected, strongly fluctuating brushstrokes in pale ink, black accents?can be seen in a work by the sixteenth-cen

tury master Hsii Wei (Fig. 5). Although Hsii Wei might have had direct access to Y?an-period examples, it is equally

likely that he, too, is participating in a local (Chekiang) small tradition, a continuation of this figure manner into

the Ming, carried on as well by numerous others whose

paintings, since they were not by name artists like Hsii Wei, have not been preserved. I will return later to this issue of selective preservation.

Other figure types associated with Ch'an in Sung-Yuan

painting include the seated white-robed Kuan-yin, report

edly originated by Li Kung-lin, which by the thirteenth

fourteenth century had slipped into the status of a type

image, easily and endlessly repeatable.18 And among non

Ch'an subjects, certain conventional pictures of the demon

queller Chung K'uei, which were commonly executed by artists who were not otherwise practicing figure masters. It is just the currency of type images that facilitated this kind of production in areas outside the painter's training and cus

tomary practice.19

Among plant subjects for which type images were cur

rent, we can pass quickly over such obvious ones as sprays of bamboo and S-shaped blossoming plum branches in ink,

along with ink orchids, only pausing to point out that even

pieces now unique and treasurable started out as items in a

multiple, copious, and no doubt rather repetitious produc tion. In the case of the famous small ink painting of an

orchid plant by the Sung-Yuan loyalist artist Cheng Ssu

hsiao, its membership in such an extended series is betrayed by the dating seal (woodblock?) that the artist has stamped on it, with the cyclical year and the characters for "made this one scroll" imprinted and the spaces for the month and

day left blank to be filled in with a brush, to save the time

and trouble of dating individually each of the numerous

pictures produced that year.20 Such a practice does not

accord well, to say the least, with traditional accounts of

sketchy hsieh-i pictures coming into being in response to

sudden, spontaneous, one-time bursts of inspiration. A less common subject is long-stemmed vegetables, which, as

Alfreda Murck has recently shown in a study of the politi cal uses of such paintings, derives in part from two poems on the subject by Tu Fu.21 She reproduces three examples, two of them anonymous and a third signed by an obscure

early Ming painter. These too obviously belong to the cat

egory of type images; it would be difficult (and pointless) to

distinguish individual hands among them. One could con

tinue into many other subjects for which type images can

be identified.

From these relatively uncontroversial cases we can move

to one which, while stretching the boundaries of my definition only slightly, is likely to arouse more resistance:

21



Fig. 6. LiTsai (act. ca. 1425-1470), Hills in Clouds. Section of a short

handscroll, ink on paper; 28.2 x 116.2 cm. From Huai-an Ming-mu ch'u

t'u shu-hua (Huai-an and Beijing: Wen-wu Press, 1988).

type images in landscape. I dealt with these in an unpub lished article, offering as examples minimal and functional

farewell paintings,22 and also hills-in-clouds pictures in the

Mi manner. Of the latter, three can be found among the

group of paintings done in the late fifteenth century for a

certain Cheng Chiin; they were unearthed from the tomb

of a merchant-collector who had acquired them from him, the now-famous Huai-an tomb. Kathlyn Liscomb has pub lished a long, detailed, and generally excellent article on the

Huai-an tomb paintings,23 at the end of which she not so

much refutes as simply rejects my own still-unpublished ideas about them; she argues against them at greater length in a more recent article.24

The long-delayed publication of my piece will allow

those interested to read us both on the subject, look at the

pictures, and form their own conclusions. In any case, what

I pointed out about these paintings seemed to me all but

self-evident: the three hills-in-clouds paintings by Ho

Ch'eng, Li Tsai (Fig. 6), and Hsieh Huan (Fig. 7) look so

much alike that they can best be seen, not as spontaneous outbursts of self-expression, but as quick performances of a

conventional type, a kind of painting with political impli cations and uses that many artists of the time must have pro duced frequently, in addition to the individualized, one-of

a-kind works in which they invested larger measures of

time and creative energy. Once more, to the predictable

objection that the paintings are not absolutely identical, I

would respond: to be sure; the formula can be varied, the

components of the scene rearranged, trees of one type

replaced by another, the tien done larger or smaller. But the

differences are not of the kind that bespeak distinct personal

styles, or one-time urges toward the expression of individ

ual temperament and feeling. All three artists indeed had

distinctive styles, which they displayed in other works done on other occasions. But it would be surprising if anyone could identify them in these paintings.

Quickly produced, conventional paintings of this kind were not, in general, judged worthy of preservation by

22

Fig. 7. Hsieh Huan (act. 1426-143 6), Hills in Clouds. Section of a short

handscroll, ink on paper; 28.2 x 134.4 cm- From Huai-an Ming-mu (see

Fig. 6).

id$A.*.??

Fig. 8. Anon., Sung period (old attribution to Ch'ien Kuang-fu), Fish.

Album leaf, ink and colors on silk. Cheng Chi collection.

Fig. 9. Pa-ta Shan-jen (1626-1705), Fish. Section of the handscroll Fish

and Ducks, dated to 1689. Shanghai Museum. From Pa-ta Shan-jen hua

chi (Nanchang: People's Press, 1985), pi. 29.



ti *t^?

?f M:fv - '

J ?i ?c B $

?

jr^^^^^^^^^fr^i-vV^ . ' .:'.W'''

Fig. io.Ts'ai Chien (J: Saikan; act. 1652-1657), Bodhidharma Crossing the

Yangtze on a Reed. Sh?t? Museum, Tokyo (formerly Hashimoto collec

tion). From Hashimoto Korekushion (see n. 27), fig. 2.

Chinese collectors of the time and later; they survive only

by fortuitous circumstances such as burial in a tomb or

transport to Japan. We can assume that if all the pictures of

this cloudy-hills type from the second half of the fifteenth

century alone had survived, we could easily make up an

exhibition of a hundred of them, each by a different mas

ter, famous or forgotten. We can assume also that the out

come would be one of the most monotonous exhibitions

of Ming painting ever, and that we would walk through it

saying: Oh, another one; humph, another one; sigh, another one. Just as I once walked through an exhibition of ink

plum-branch paintings at the Palace Museum in

Beijing?quickly organized to replace another that had

been cancelled?pausing longer only before those by the

relatively few artists who managed to play individual and

interesting variations on the conventions: Hsii Wei, Ch'en

Hung-shou, Hung-jen, Shih-t'ao, Mei Ch'ing, a few others.

But that, as I mean to argue later, is exactly the point: it is

the ability and determination of these painters to not sim

ply replicate the formula, to use it only as a point of depar ture for adventurous and aesthetically rewarding explo rations, that is one of the principal criteria for setting them

off as major masters.

Before returning to the main argument for continuations

of Ch'an painting into Ming-Ch'ing, I want to pause and

propose an art-historical pattern within which the series of

individual cases I will present can be understood. Both the

argument and the elaborate metaphor I will use can be

loosely illustrated with two paintings of fish, widely sepa rated in period (Figs. 8, 9).

Let us suppose, leaving aside for the moment considera

tions of proof, that Ch'an painting by monk-amateurs con

tinues as an underground current, or subsurface river,

through the Ming period, practiced in monasteries in vari ous regions and cities, more or less unnoticed by those who

write the books and those who determine what is to be

preserved. As a consequence, it is not preserved. My term

"underground" implies a metaphorical surface, somewhat

permeable but mostly opaque, separating the visible part of

Chinese painting?what critics recognized and valued, what collectors chose to preserve?from the

more or less

invisible, what was not considered worthy of special notice

and preservation, and is now mostly unrecoverable. What is

below the surface?and of course late-period Ch'an paint

ing makes up only a small part of it, a subcurrent within a

much larger flow?is vastly greater in quantity than what is

above. A given image type "breaks the surface," so to speak, when some respected name artist decides to employ it and

his work is passed down to us. We in our time can see only these scattered protrusions, and we tend to construct our

arguments and our histories as though they made up a

whole, continuous terrain, writing about how this master

imitates that master, this painting underlies that painting. We

catch occasional glimpses of the submerged parts through fortunate chance survivals of types for which the likelihood

of transmission was small, and our art-historical accounts

are richer and truer to the degree that we include in them

these survivors, and make some attempt to reconstruct the

larger currents in which they originally belonged. The

chance survivals often occur in Japan. Our impression that

Ch'an painting dwindled away after Yuan quite possibly owes less to diminished production in China than to a sharp decline or even stoppage in the export of these paintings to

Japan, which alone would have allowed their survival in any number. That suggestion belongs, admittedly, in the realm

of hypothesis. But, as an instructive exercise, think of a sin

gle region and period, Chekiang in the late Sung and early Yuan, and contrast the account we can construct using

examples preserved in both China and Japan with another

23



based only on those preserved in China. And then extend

that pattern to other regions and periods. What if, in addition to occasional projections above the

surface, there were to be another window into the invisible

lower regions (my metaphor becomes murkier and

murkier), another opportune survival, like that for Sung Y?an Chekiang, of a substantial body of works out of our

hypothetical practice of Ch'an painting by monk-artists of

later periods? There is in fact another such window: the paintings done

by Chinese monks of the Huang-po (J: ?baku) sect of

Ch'an?none of them recorded, so far as I know, in Chinese

biographical compilations of artists. Some of these monks came to Japan from the coastal region of Fukien (speci

fically, from Mt. Huang-po in Fuchou Prefecture) in the

seventeenth century and continued there the practice of

amateurish ink-monochrome painting very much as they had done it, we can assume, in China?there is no reason to

suppose that their move to Japan affected significantly their

styles or choices of subjects.25 So the body of ink-mono

chrome paintings by Chinese monks of the Huang-po Ch'an sect surviving in Japan, whether actually done in

China or in Japan, can be taken to represent one geograph ical region and chronological period of practice, the Fukien

coast in the seventeenth century. If we had similar windows

through which to look down below the surface for the

Suchou region of Kiangsu in the late fifteenth-early six

teenth century, or the Shaohsing region of Chekiang in the

mid- and later sixteenth century, we could view, presum

ably, the bodies of practice upon which such name artists as

Shen Chou and Hsii Wei must have drawn for paintings

using Ch'an styles and subjects, some of which will be con

sidered below. But in fact only Shen Chou's and Hsii Wei's

paintings are to be seen, "breaking the surface," because

these were famous artists whose works were preserved. And

another such window, through which we could view the

practice of this kind of painting in Ch'an monasteries in the area of Nanchang in Kiangsi in the late Ming and early

Ch'ing, would permit us, I believe, to understand the start

ing point for the development of Pa-ta Shan-jen's painting.

Specialist figure masters working in the Fukien region, such as Ch'en Hsien and Wu Pin, made paintings for the

Huang-po sect,26 just as Yen Hui and other professional masters had painted for Buddhist temples in the Sung and

Yuan, and some Che-school masters had done earlier in the

Ming. Specialists in portraiture portrayed the ?baku patri archs and priests. But what concerns us here is the corpus of extant ink paintings by monk-amateurs of the ?baku

sect, of which there may be several hundred surviving in

Japan.27 Among them are pictures of familiar Ch'an figure

subjects, such as Bodhidharma Crossing the Yangtze on a Reed

by Ts'ai-chien (J: Saikan; act. 1650s) (Fig. 10) or the monk

Pu-tai by I-jan (J: Itsunen; 1601-1668) (Fig. 11); these are

based ultimately on Sung-Yuan models. Chi-fei (J: Sokuhi; 1616? 1671) did a painting of grasses and rock (Fig. 12) using

24

^):

* lit 'i * y *

?H ? * Ti

Fig. il. I-jan (J: Itsunen; 1601-1668), Pu-tai. Hanging scroll,ink and

light colors on silk; 86.5 x 36.4 cm. Inscription by Yin-yuan ( J: Ingen;

1592-1673). From Huang-po Ch'an shu-hua chan (see n. 27), no. 1.

a type image probably originated by the Yuan monk Po

Tzu-t'ing (1284?after 1353); a surviving work by the Yuan

artist proves to be closely similar (Fig. 13). Again, we cannot

simply impute the striking resemblance to the later artist

having seen the earlier painting. Less conventional ?baku pictures include another by

Chi-fei, dated to 1666, representing a pine tree with crane

and deer and presumably intended for presentation on

someone's birthday (Fig. 14), and one by Mu-an (J: Mokuan; 1611-1684), dated to 1682, representing lotus and

the moon (Fig. 13). These seem less dependent on type

images, more improvised and eccentric. If they remind us of

Pa-ta Shan-jen, they should: they are the same kind of paint

ings, done by monk-artists who were his contemporaries,



I f S *

^9 " ? I? lb M ' ?

?

Fig. 12. Chi-fei (J: Sokuhi; 1616-1671), Grasses and Rock. Hanging

scroll, ink on paper; 129.5 x 3?-2 cm- From Huang-po Ch'an (see n. 27), no. 7.

working under similar circumstances, drawing on roughly the same large tradition or current, exhibiting the playful ness and unworldliness expected of religious men. But nei

ther Chi-fei nor Mu-an, nor any other of the Huang-po amateur artists whose works are preserved,

was a good

enough painter to win recognition in China as a major master, one whose works merited preservation. There

were

doubtless dozens or even hundreds of other monk-artists in

this period, working in regions where Ch'an Buddhism was

still strong, doing paintings of this kind?we might call

them failed Pa-ta Shan-jens?all long forgotten, as Chi-fei

and Mu-an would be if they had not gone to Japan. (Some of the others might well, of course, have been excellent and

original artists, who nevertheless went unnoticed for the

Fig. 13. PoTzu-t'ing (1284-after 1353), Grasses and Rock. Hanging

scroll, ink on paper; 32 x 53.2 cm. KozoYabumoto, Amagasaki.

reasons suggested earlier.) Painting odd and eccentric pic tures was not what made Pa-ta Shan-jen famous?any artist

who chose to could do that. Pa-ta became famous by paint

ing odd and eccentric pictures that were also powerful and

disturbing, aesthetically satisfying, and multileveled in their

meaning.

The other circumstance in which the continuations of

Ch'an painting "break the surface," as suggested earlier, is

when they are done by big-name artists, who are likely also to be painters of enough power and originality to bring new life to them. Shen Chou was one of these; although his

real strengths and innovations were in landscape, many Ch'an-derived images appear in his work. A striking exam

ple is his album leaf representing grape vines (Fig. 16), which

resembles closely a work by the thirteenth-century special ist Tzu-wen Jih-kuan (Fig. 17). Between Jih-kuan s picture and Shen Chou's, it must be acknowledged, much of the

vividness and naturalism of the image has been lost. For

instance, Shen follows without quite understanding Jih-kuan s

device of leaving patches in reserve to represent lighter leaves superimposed on the darker. Once more, the point is

not that Shen Chou saw this particular picture, but that

both follow a type image, one that Jih-kuan was probably instrumental in establishing. Although not many pictures of

grape vines genuinely from his hand survive, we can assume

that he painted them by the hundreds or thousands.28

Shen Chou frequented Ch'an monasteries throughout his life, lodging in them, often for days at a time, when he

traveled to Hangchou and other places, and painting pic tures as gifts for the monks; on trips into Suchou he usually

stayed at the Tung-Ch'an Ssu (East Ch'an Temple) or at the

Hsi-Ch'an Ssu (West Ch'an Temple) where his close friend

the monk Ming-kung lived.29 He thus had ample opportu

25



Fig. 14. Chi-fei (J: Sokuhi; 1616-1671), Pine Tree with Crane and Deer.

Dated to 1666. Hanging scroll, ink on paper; 93.3 x 42 cm. Fukush?ji,

Kita-Kyushu. From ?baku bunka (see n. 27), no. 31.

nities to see Ch'an paintings that were kept in these tem

ples, some of them no doubt of Sung-Yiian date, as well as

to observe, I believe, the continuing practice of such paint

ing by some of the monks he met.

Shen Chou also knew, and composed a colophon for, a

handscroll attributed to Mu-ch'i that was owned by his

friend Wu K'uan, a work now in the Palace Museum,

Beijing (Fig. 18). He begins his colophon:

Although I began by painting landscape, I enjoy from time to time doing flowers and fruits, grasses and insects. For this reason I have gathered

together a great many of the creations of earlier artists [to use as models,

that is?or, dare one say, type images?]?even these fragments of paper and surviving ink I can never equal. [Further on he writes of Mu-ch'i:]

He doesn't use any color, and splashes the ink [as if] randomly on the

paper; and yet [the images] are amazingly lifelike. When we look back at

the styles of Huang Ch'iian and Ch'ien Hs?an, they really don't come

up to this.

26

Fig. 15. Mu-an (J: Mokuan; 1611-1684), Lotus and Moon. Dated to

1682. Hanging scroll, ink on silk; 32.6 x 38.5 cm. Kimiko and John Powers collection.

The Beijing scroll is one of two such "Mu-ch'i" scrolls

extant; the other is in the National Palace Museum, Taipei

(Fig. 19). Both appear to be copies, probably dating from the

fourteenth or early fifteenth century. (The Taipei scroll

bears the well-known ssu-yin half-seal, an inventory seal

which, if genuine, would indicate that the work predates the period 1373-84.) The likelihood that they are based on

Mu-ch'i originals is strengthened by loose correspondences of some of the images in them with older and finer paint

ings ascribed to Mu-ch'i in Japanese collections, which are

themselves believed to be fragments cut from handscrolls

(Figs. 20, 21). The scroll that Wu K'uan owned and Shen

Chou knew may, of course, have been an original Mu-ch'i

work, from which Shen s colophon was later transferred to

the copy; but it is more likely that Shen Chou accepted the extant scroll as from Mu-ch'i's hand, perhaps even finding it easier to admire and imitate than a Mu-ch'i original would

have been.30 In the best Ch'an paintings from Sung and

Yuan the brush drawing repudiates the disciplines of what

would be considered "good brushwork" by literati criteria

?necessarily, given the Ch'an masters' expressive aims?so

that traditional Chinese connoisseurs still have difficulty in

accepting and admiring the national-treasure-level exam

ples preserved in Japan. In his paintings based on Mu-ch'i

(e.g., Fig. 24), Shen Chou can be seen as either "taming" the

brushwork from a Mu-ch'i original, or (more likely) as fol

lowing imagery already tamed through copying. The difference, and what I mean by taming, can be illus

trated also by another pairing, the hibiscus (or rose mallow)

picture ascribed to Mu-ch'i in Daitokuji, Kyoto (Fig. 22) and one included in the Taipei copy scroll (Fig. 23). The

Daitokuji painting exhibits varieties of brushwork that can

be called scratchy, puddly, and so forth?undisciplined, "bad" brushwork in literati terms. In the copy every stroke



ntrnur Fig. 16. Shen Chou (1427-1509), Grapevine. Leaf

from 16-leaf album Drawings from Life. Dated to

1494. Ink and light colors on paper; 34.7 x 55.4 cm.

National Palace Museum,Taipei.

?*di?v *

& *....

',wss

Fig. 17. Tzu-wen Jih-kuan (d. 1295), Grapevine.

Hanging scroll, ink on paper; 31.3 x 83.1 cm. Private

collection, Berkeley.

Fig. 18. After Mu-ch'i (d. after 1279), Drawings from Life: Birds, Fish, and Fruits. Section of a handscroll, ink on paper; 47.3 x

814.1 cm. Palace Museum, Beijing. 27



?im

&

i

Fig. 19. After Mu-ch'i (d. after 1279), Drawings from Life: Birds, Vegetables, and Flowers. Dated to 1265. Section of a handscroll, ink on paper; 44.5 x

1017.1 cm. National Palace Museum,Taipei.

"W

SsyrV "

->^$:

Fig. 20. Attrib. Mu-ch'i (d. after 1279), Persimmons. Fragment of a hand

scroll (?), ink on paper; 35.1 x 29.0 cm. Ry?k?inTemple, Daitokuji,

Kyoto. From Toda Teisuke, Kawakami Kei, and EbineToshio, eds.,

Mokkei, Gyokkan (Mu-ch'i andY?-chien), Suiboku bijutsu taikei, vol. 4

(Tokyo: Kodansha, 1973), no. 67.

Fig. 21. After Mu-ch'i (d. after 1279), Persimmons. Detail from Taipei handscroll (see Fig. ig).

28



:^;:.-t .; ** ,

Fig. 22. Attrib. Mu-ch'i (d. after 1279), Rose Mallow. Fragment of a

handscroll (?), ink on paper; 34.5 x 36.7 cm. Daitokuji, Kyoto. From

Tokyo National Museum, So Gen no kaiga (Sung and Yuan Painting)

(Kyoto: Benrid?, 1962), pi. 75.

Fig. 23. After Mu-ch'i (d. after 1279), Hibiscus. Detail from Taipei hand

scroll (see Fig. ici).

-?

Fig. 25. Ch'en Shun (1483-1544), Peony. From the handscroll Studies from Life. Dated to

1538. National Palace Museum,Taipei.

i

4L

>

i

Fig. 27. Hsin-y?eh (J: Shin'etsu; 1639-1696). Peonies.

Hanging scroll, ink on paper; 107.7 x 29-5 cm. From

Huang-po Ch'an (see n. 27), no. 22.

Fig. 26. Hs? Wei (1521-1593), Peony. Detail from the handscroll Flowers,

Fruits, and Other Plants, ink on paper; 30 x 1053.5 cm- Nanjing Museum.

30



Fig. 28. Attrib. Mu-ch'i (d. after 1279), Turnip.

Fragment of a handscroll (?), ink on paper; 37.4 x

64.9 cm. Imperial Collection, Tokyo. From Toda

Teisuke et al., eds., Mokkei, Gyokkan (see Fig. 20), no. 69.

Fig. 29. After Mu-ch'i (d. after 1279), Turnips. Detail from

Taipei handscroll (see Fig. 19).

Fig. 30. Shen Chou (1427-1509), Turnips. Dated to 1489.

Hanging scroll, ink on paper; 56.7 x 30 cm. National

Palace Museum,Taipei.

31



fit SV3

Fig. 31. Pa-ta Shan-jen (1626?1705), Vegetables and Other Plants. Section of a handscroll, ink on silk; 22 x 186 cm. Palace Museum, Beijing. From I-yuan

to-ying 19 (1983), pp. 76-77.

Fig. 32. Pa-ta Shan-jen (1626-1705), Vegetables. Dated to 1684. Album leaf, ink on paper. Palace

Museum, Beijing.

or turnip) attributed to Mu-ch'i in the Japanese Imperial Collection (Fig. 28) and a corresponding section of the

Taipei copy-scroll (Fig. 2q), Shen Chou's depiction of the

subject, done in 1489 (Fig. 30), is in some respects closer to

the Sung work. The rough brushwork is suited to its sub

ject, which carries meanings of simplicity and freshness.

A notable recipient of all this, and the artist whose rela

tionship with Sung-Yuan Ch'an painting was the problem that inspired this paper, is of course Pa-ta Shan-jen, who

was also a monk of the Ts'ao-tung Ch'an sect from 1648 until about 1680. His earliest works, from the 1660s and

early 1670s, mostly take the form of handscrolls and albums

made up, like the Mu-ch'i copy scrolls, of isolated images of

flowers and fruits and vegetables (Fig. 31).32 Pa-ta's earliest

works already exhibit a striking originality; but when he

begins to integrate these images into more complex and

absorbing compositions, and eventually to subject both the

objects themselves and the space they occupy to radical dis

tortions (Fig. 32), he separates himself even more from his

many contemporaries who simply reproduced the images with insignificant variations, or who never mastered the

artistic power he displays, and whose works have accord

32

ingly disappeared?the ones referred to earlier as "failed Pa

ta Shan-jens." Another standout from the larger, more

repetitive practice was, of course, Shih-t'ao, who draws on

the Ch'an painting tradition in some of his paintings.33 But

I do not mean to address here the question of Ch'an

imagery in Shih-t'ao s works.

Certain compositional devices that Pa-ta Shan-jen

employs, such as the one of pushing the objects in his paint

ings partly outside the frame and then connecting them

with bold strokes that divide the picture space geometri

cally, have no precedents, so far as I know, except in Sung Y?an Ch'an painting. A leaf from Pa-ta s 1659 album with

the signature "Ch'uan-ch'i" (Fig. 33) can be compared, for

this device, with a well-known work by Jih-kuan dated to

1291 (Fig. 34). But aside from individual motifs and ele ments of style, a larger and deeper affinity is in Pa-ta s prac

tice, basic to his painting, of using images of birds, fish, and

other everyday things and creatures to convey cryptic but

somehow profound meanings by seeming to attribute

human-like feelings to them. Where else but in Ch'an

painting is there any precedent for this? Here, too, striking

correspondences can be observed between Pa-ta's paint



Fig. 33. Pa-ta Shan-jen (1626-1705), Peonies (?). Dated to 1659. Leaf from 15-leaf album Sketches from Life, ink on paper; 24.5 x 31.5 cm. National Palace Museum,

Taipei.

Fig. 35. Pa-ta Shan-jen (1626-1705), Mynah Bird on Branch. Album leaf.

From: Pa-ta shan-jen hua-chi (see Fig. a), pi. 16.

Fig. 36. Attrib. Mu-ch'i (d. after 1279), Mynah Bird

on Trunk of Pine. Detail from a hanging scroll, ink

on paper; 78.5 x 39 cm. Formerly Setsu collection,

Tokyo, From So Gen no kaiga (see Fig. 34), pi. 73.

Fig. 34. Tzu-wen Jih-kuan (d. 1295), Grapevines. Dated to

1291. Hanging scroll, ink on paper; 154 x 42 cm. Formerly

Inouye collection. From So Gen no kaiga (Kyoto: Benrid?,

1962), pi. 90.

33



mn

&* ; 1?^ ?*>

Fig. 37. After Mu-ch'i (d. after 1279), Pomegranates. Detail from Taipei handscroll (see Fig. i?).

H

i'.

* i ? -s + ?

* i# * t * ? 4* * * ? ? * .4. ? 7 J * 4

d??-:

Fig. 38. Shen Chou (1427-1509), Pomegranates. Section of a handscroll. National Palace

Museum, Taipei.

Fig. 39. Ch'en Shun (1483-1544), Pomegranates. Dated to 1544. From

album of plant subjects. Shanghai Museum. From Chung-kuo mei-shu

ch'uan-chi, painting vol. 7 (Shanghai: People's Art Publishing Co., 1989),

pi. 97.

ings, such as his several portrayals of mynah birds on

branches (Fig. 35), and Sung-Y?an paintings preserved in

Japan?in this case, the well-known picture attributed to

Mu-ch'i (Fig. 36), a typically enigmatic image of a mynah on a tree trunk, preening its feathers but appearing, in a

more subjective reading, to look suspiciously over its shoul

der. These correspondences?even to the device of leaving

ragged patches of white reserve in the plumage of the birds'

wings?raise once more the question: how could Pa-ta

have known a painting that had been in Japan for centuries?

The answer, once more, is that he couldn't have. Like Shen

Chou and others, he is drawing on the heritage we have

been tracing, having learned it, we can assume, partly from

34

old paintings to which he had access, some of them pre served in monasteries he visited or lived in, and partly from a contemporary practice of this kind of painting by monk amateurs. We cannot trace this particular motif through the

intervening period, but some others we can, and I will con

clude by considering two of these.

In the Taipei Mu-ch'i copy scroll is a pomegranate branch with two fruits, one of which has burst open to

expose its seeds (Fig. 37). Shen Chou does a further flattened

version in an album leaf,34 and again, even more simplified, in a section of a handscroll (Fig. 38). These read only as

rather uninspired replications of the motif, not as interest

ing plays on it. Ch'en Shun, once more, in a leaf from a 1544 album (Fig. 3g), appears to be following Shen Chou, but uses

a wetter, slightly freer manner of brushwork that gives the

image a more vivid presence. Hs? Wei does the motif in a

relatively straightforward way in some of his handscrolls of

fruits and vegetables, but in his great scroll in the Nanjing Museum depicts it with that dazzling reconciliation of cal

ligraphic freedom and trenchant description in which he is

unsurpassed (Fig. 40). We can see it performed somewhat

later, ineptly and inexpressively, by an ?baku monk-artist,

Po-yen (J: Hakugan; 1634-1673),35 about the same time

that Pa-ta Shan-jen used it for a strikingly original compo sition, another leaf from his 1659 "Ch'uan-ch'i" album (Fig.

41). In works from Pa-ta s fully mature and great period of

the 1690s (Fig. 42), the pictures seem to have broken all ties to their type-image origins, which become more or less

irrelevant except when we are pursuing serial relationships of images, as I am doing here.

The Taipei Mu-ch'i copy scroll includes also a passage

portraying two mynah birds on a hillock (Fig. 43), in which

the birds retain something of what must have been, in Mu

ch'i's original, the slightly malevolent look of the mynah in

the picture preserved in Japan (Fig. 36), or of mynahs



Fig. 40. Hs? Wei (i521-1593). Pomegranate. Detail from the handscroll

Flowers, Fruits, and Other Plants (see Fig. 26). Nanjing Museum.

Fig. 41. Pa-ta Shan-jen (1626-1705), Pomegranates. Dated to 1659. Leaf

from the album Sketches from Life (see Fig. 33). National Palace

Museum, Taipei.

Fig. 43. After Mu-ch'i (d. after 1279), Two Mynah Birds on Hillock. Detail frc

Taipei handscroll (see Fig. ig).

Fig. 42. Pa-ta Shan-jen (1626-1705), Pomegranates. Leaf

from 8-leaf album. From Pa-ta shan-jen hua-ts'e (Beijing,

1961).

35



'* #. ; - il. -

j, .. .

-/. fc-?;t."--iij

* * ? ? ? s ?' *

".t?*

-i*

Fig. 44. Shen Chou (1427-1509), Two Mynah Birds on Hillock. Section

of a handscroll (MH 91). National Palace Museum,Taipei.

Fig. 46. Pa-ta Shan-jen (1626-1705), Two Mynah Birds. Detail

from one of a pair of hanging scrolls, ink on satin; 204.5 x 54 cm. Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City (formerly

Contag collection).

*?*&

*

Fig. 45. Pa-ta Shan-jen (1626-1705), Mynah Birds and Lotus. Handscroll, ink on satin; 27 x 205 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

(formerly John Crawford collection). From I-yuan to-ying 19 (1983), p. 15.

36



V

Fig. 47. Pa-ta Shan-jen (1626-1705), Two Mynah Birds. Dated to 1694. Album leaf, ink on paper; 24.4 x 23 cm. Shanghai Museum.

depicted by Pa-ta. Even that much of darker meaning is lost

in the album leaf by Shen Chou (Fig. 44), whose birds seem

simpler-minded, less self-aware. Shen Chou keeps the basic

pattern of the pairing, with one bird in strict profile and the

other turning its head back; the latter bird seems off bal

ance, but not, like some of Pa-ta s, in a way that reads as

deliberate effect.

Pa-ta, in a handscroll from the early 1690s (Fig. 45), also

keeps the basic pattern of the pairing, even more closely than does Shen Chou. But in addition to catching more of

the slightly sinister overtones of Mu-ch'i's birds, Pa-ta

introduces quirky devices of his own that transform the

motif, once more, into an item of his own private imagery. The disapproving gaze or glare of the birds is now directed

at a seemingly innocuous lotus plant; the bird looking back

ward is now decidedly and deliberately off balance; and a

smaller bird perches incongruously on the back of the other.

No pairing could better illustrate the distinction I would

like to see made between simply adopting the inherited

image as a convenience for producing a painting quickly, and using it as a jumping-off point for truly creative ventures.

How much further Pa-ta jumped in his transformations

of motifs of this kind we all know; his pictures of paired

mynah birds could alone make up a small exhibition, and a

thoroughly engrossing one (Figs. 46, 47). And we could sim

ilarly show how he transformed other motifs and type

images that he appears to have inherited from the Ch'an

ink-painting tradition, beginning with Sung-Yuan exam

pies and ending with his brilliant manipulations of them:

melons, cranes, geese, fish, lotuses, others. I do not mean to

claim that the Ch'an tradition was Pa-ta's sole source, but it was a major one, and the one that is currently the most

overlooked. (Richard Barnhart discusses this briefly but well

in his Introduction to the Master of the Lotus Garden cata

logue, giving Shen Chou his proper role in the transmis

sion.)36 Recognizing and acknowledging Pa-ta's heritage from Ch'an painting, and the ways he used it, will at least rescue us from the type of na?ve account in which such

paintings came into being because Pa-ta lived near a hill

where mynah birds congregated in pairs, and he went out

every day to observe them, and felt a powerful urge to cap ture their images and behavior with his brush?and so

forth. Pa-ta must indeed have studied the habits of mynah birds, and he certainly was adept at catching their charac

teristic poses and movements; but all that, I believe, came

later, belonging to another, Gombrichian phase in which

the inherited schemata were altered to adapt them to the

artist's observations of nature as well as to his expressive purpose and state of mind.37 And it is these transformations, and the succession of brilliant works based on them, that in

the end matter most. We only demean the truly creative

masters when we fail to distinguish their best achievements

from the more or less routine performances of type images

by artists of less originality and attainment?or by the mas

ters themselves under certain circumstances.

37



Chinese Characters

Ch'an #

Ch'en Cheng-hung I*it*

Ch'en Hsien I* Jt

Ch'en Hung-shou *i*J&

Ch'en Shun I**

Ch'ienHs?an??

Ch'ing-cho Cheng-ch'eng vlH&itS'

Ch'ing-pai lei-cWao >^"#!S#

Ch'uan-ch'i#*

Chang Hung i?. *

Chao Meng-fu ?j??

Cheng Ch?n #^

Cheng Ssu-hsiao Jfp S ?

Chi-fei *P#

Chung K'uei ?? f?

Chung-feng Ming-pen 17 # ^ ^

Ch?eh-chi Yung-chung & l&* t

ens? IB 40

Fang I-chih if *X %

Fang Wei-i ^" $Mli

Hakugan: see Po-yen

Han-shan ^ ^

Hikk?en * # SI

HoCh'eng*f?

Hsi-Ch'anSsu ?#*

38

HsiangY?an-pien ^Rtg/F

Hsiao-an $k>?t

Hsieh Huan #?f

hsieh-i % M

Hsin-y?eh

Ni Tsan f?if

Obaku: see Huang-po

Pa-ta Shan-jen A^ Jj A

pai-miao ?i IS

PoTzu-t'ingtt^?

Po-yen ?? Jl

Pu-tai ^ ft

Saikan: see Ts'ai-chien

Seng-hui it 4&

Shen Chou >*$

S/?en C/zow nien-p'u }&$ %-tit

Shih-t'ao & j#

Shinetsu: see Hsin-yiieh

Sokuhi: see Chi-fei

ssu-yin ?l t?

T'an Chih-jui \%.Ai^%

T'u-huipao-chien hs?-tsuan H Htf *^$

T'ien Hsiu $l %

Ts'ai-chien ?# ffi

Ts'ao-tung # ^

Tsung-le rfc :S

Tu Fu #- itt

Tung Ch'i-ch'ang HAS

Tung Yuan ? ?S

Tung-Ch'an Ssu ^#^r

Tzu-wen Jih-kuan -? *8. Q |ft

Wang Wen i W

Wu K'uan & t

WuPin*#i

WuTao-tzu^it-?"

Wu-sheng-shih shih Mr^i^k.

Yen Hui ?ff

Yin-t'o-lo S P? H

Yin-y?an fit it

Yuan it

Notes

i. Jan Fontein and Money L. Hickman, Zen Painting and Calligraphy

(Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1970). Helmut Brinker, Zen in the Art of

Painting, trans. George Campbell (London and New York, 1987). Helmut

Brinker and Hiroshi Kanazawa, Zen: Masters of Meditation in Images and

Writings, Artibus Asiae Supp. 40 (Z?rich, 1988). 2. This question is the subject of a forthcoming Ph.D. dissertation by

Pei-hua Lee for University of California, Berkeley, titled "The Four Early

Qing Monk Painters: Their Affiliation with Chan Buddhism." The four

monk-artists of the early Ch'ing are, of course, K'un-ts'an, Chu Ta or Pa

ta Shan-jen, Hung-jen, and Shih-t'ao.

3. Fontein and Hickman, Zen Painting and Calligraphy, p. xxxvi.

4. Both in the National Palace Museum,Taipei (MV 412 and 676); for

the Chang Hung painting, see Ku-kung shu-hua chi 24, or Pageant of Chinese Painting 689. The Wang Wen painting has not, to my knowledge, been published.

5. See, for instance, Marsha Weidner, ed., Latter Days of the Law: Images

of Chinese Buddhism 830-1850 (Lawrence: Spencer Museum of Art, Univ.

of Kansas, 1994), pp. 389-96, "Ch'an Personalities."

6. The Hikk?en collective album of Sung-Yuan-Ming paintings in

the Tokyo National Museum contains a small painting of grapes attrib

uted to the early Ming master Hsiao-an, who followed Jih-kuan in this

specialty. 7. Ku-kung po-wu-yuan ts'ang Ming Ch'ing hui-hua (Beijing: Palace

Museum, 1994).The painting of Kuan-yin by Fang Wei-i is no. 64; for

notes by Li Shih on the painting, see p. 156. 8. A detailed study of the artist and of the Cleveland Museum paint

ing, by Wai-kam Ho, is in Eight Dynasties of Chinese Painting (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1980), no. 97, pp. 122-23. For a third Kuan

yin painting ascribed to him in the Fujita Bijutsukan, Osaka, see Brinker

and Kanazawa, Zen, no. 3.

9. See James Cahill, ed., So Gen ga: i2th-i^th Century Chinese Painting as Collected and Appreciated infapan (Berkeley: Univ. of California, Univ.

Art Museum, 1982), no. 3. Collection of the late S?shir?Yabumoto,Tokyo. 10. In writing about type images, I certainly do not mean to give sub

stance to the ill-informed arguments made by some scholars of art who

are not specialists in Chinese painting, including some of the best

?Ernest Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial

Representation, 2nd ed. (New York: Pantheon, 1961), pp. 148-50; Arthur

Danto, "Ming and Qing Paintings," in Embodied Meanings (New York:

39



Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1994), pp. 34?35?in which Chinese painting is

characterized as a "performance art" and distinguished in this regard from Western painting. We specialists feel a strong urge to tell them that

they are wrong, and they mostly are; but with regard to a substantial por tion of Chinese painting, their perception has an element of truth. Our

position will be stronger when we have granted and come to terms with

that truth.

11. Hs? Ko, ed., Ch'ing-pai lei-chao (Ch'ing Dynasty Miscellanea),

quoted in Daphne Lang Rosenzweig, "Court Painters of the K'ang-hsi Period" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1973), p. 32.

12. See Morris Rossabi, "Kuan Tao-sheng: Woman Artist in Yuan

China," Bulletin of Sung-Y?an Studies, vol. 21 (1989), pp. 67-84, esp. pp.

78-80. A woodblock-printed version of a text titled "Short Life of the

Bodhisattva Kuan-shih-yin" (Kuan-shih-yin p'u-sa chuan-lueh) in the cal

ligraphy of Kuan Tao-sheng, dated to 1306, survived into the early 19th

century. See Glen Dudbridge, The Legend of Miao-shan (London: Ithaca

Press, 1978), pp. 39-43. Dudbridge (p. 43) describes "Lady Kuan's pious exercise" as "the earliest datable example of the Miao-shan [Kuan-yin]

legend in its standard popular form."

13. James Cahill, An Index of Early Chinese Painters and Paintings

(Berkeley: Univ. of California Pr., 1980), p. 294.

14. See, for example, the female figure in Yin-t'o-lo's The Second

Coming of the Fifth Patriarch in Cleveland Museum of Art, Eight Dynasties, no. 98; or another in a painting of the same subject in the Ry?k?in

Temple, in Toda Teisuke, Kawakami Kei, and Ebine Toshio, eds., Ry?kai, Indara (Liang K'ai, Yin-t}o-lo), Suiboku bijutsu taikei, vol. 4 (Tokyo:

Kodansha, 1975), pi. 21.

15. ForYin-t'o-lo, see Jan Fontein's short essay in Herbert Franke,

ed., Sung Biographies: Painters (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1976), pp.

154-57. See also Howard Rogers's essay in Kaikodofournal (Spring 1996),

pp. 16, 179-80. 16. An example inscribed by Ch'ing-cho Cheng-ch'eng (1274?

1339) is in Fontein and Hickman, Zen Painting and Calligraphy, no. 27.

17. Kuan Tao-sheng's short handscroll Bamboo Groves in Mist and

Rain, dated to 1308, in the National Palace Museum,Taipei, is the most

reliable example from her hand; see Marsha Weidner et al., Views from the

fade Terrace: Chinese Women Artists 1300?1912 (Indianapolis and New York:

Indianapolis Museum of Art and Rizzoli, 1988), fig. a, pp. 20-21. This is

an original and substantial work, and I certainly do not mean to include

it in my category of type images. 18. For a good and datable example, see the anonymous work in the

Metropolitan Museum of Art inscribed byTsung-le (1318-1392), in Wen

Fong, Beyond Representation: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy 8th?14th

Century (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992), pi. 80.

19. For examples, see Mary Fong, "A Probable Second 'Chung K'uei' by Emperor Shun-chih of the Ch'ing Dynasty," Oriental Art, vol.

23, no. 4 (Winter 1977), pp. 423-37. The paintings reproduced in her

figs. 1 and 2 are "type images" of Chung K'uei in my sense; the resem

blance between them does not, then, necessarily indicate that they were

painted by the same artist, as she takes them to be.

20. James Cahill, Hills Beyond a River: Chinese Painting of the Yuan

Dynasty (1279-1368) (Tokyo and New York: Weatherhill, 1976), fig. 1.

21. Alfreda Murck, "Paintings of Stem Lettuce, Cabbage, and Weeds:

Allusions to Tu Fus Garden," Archives of Asian Art, vol. 48 (1995),pp. 32-47.

22. For two of these, see James Cahill, The Painters Practice: How Artists

Lived and Worked in Traditional China (New York: Columbia Univ. Pr.,

1994), figs. 1.10, 1.11. The article, "Hsieh-i in the Che School? Some

Thoughts on the Huai-anTomb Paintings," is in press. The main argu ment is summarized in Painters Practice, pp. 16-17.

23. Kathlyn Liscomb, "A Collection of Paintings and Calligraphy Discovered in the Inner Coffin of Wang Zhen (d. 1495 ce.)? Archives of Asian Art, vol. 47 (1994), pp. 6-34.

24. Kathlyn Liscomb, "Social Status and Art Collecting: The

Collections of Shen Zhou and Wang Zhen," Art Bulletin, vol. 78, no. 1

(March 1996), pp. 111-36.

25. Minoru Nishigami, in his brief paper "?baku kaiga no

40

genry??Min-matsu Shin-sho kaiga to no kankei" ("The Origin of

?baku Paintings?The Relationship between ?baku Paintings and

Chinese Paintings of the Ming and Qing Dynasties"), in Kyoto National

Museum, The Ueno Memorial Foundation for the Study of Buddhist

Art, Report no. 24 (1994), pp. 1-3, offers the view that certain of the

Chinese ?baku monks learned from traditional Japanese painting after

they came to Japan. But this view would have to be backed up with

examples to be persuasive; it may be based only on Nishigami's percep tion that these paintings do not fit easily into any conventional under

standing of seventeenth-century Chinese painting. I see no elements in

the paintings under consideration here that require any intervention of

Japanese style. 26. On Ch'en Hsien and his work for the ?baku sect, see Aschwin

Lippe,"Ch'en Hsien, Painter of Lohans,"y4r5 Orientalis, vol. 5 (1963), pp.

255?58. Lippe states that Ch'en was himself a Buddhist monk, since he

sometimes appends to his signature Fo ti-tzu, "disciple of the Buddha."

But lay artists working for Buddhist temples?Wu Pin, for instance

?sometimes sign this way, and it does not necessarily indicate that they had entered the Buddhist order. A huge Parinirvana painting by Wu Pin,

presumably done with studio assistants, is kept in an ?baku temple in

Nagasaki.

27. So far as I know, there is no collection of reproductions that

attempts to include all or even most of them. I have used three publica tions principally as sources: Hayashi Sekk?, ed., ?baku bunka (?baku

Culture) (Uji: Mampukuji, 1972); Huang-po Ch'an shu-hua chan (An Exhibition of Huang-po Ch'an/?baku Zen Calligraphy and Painting), cata

logue of an exhibition held at the University of Hong Kong, November

1989, drawn from the collections of three Kyoto dealers, Mizutani

Ishinosuke, Nakanishi Bunzo, and Yamazoe Sanju; and Hashimoto

Korekushion Ch?goku no kaiga, Raihaku gajin (Hashimoto Collection of Chinese Paintings, Artists Who Came tofapan) (Tokyo: Sh?t? Art Museum,

1986). A great many more examples must be in public and private col

lections. English-language discussions of ?baku painting include:

Stephen Addiss, "Obaku: The Art of Chinese Huang-po Monks in

Japan," Oriental Art, vol. 24, no. 4 (Winter 1978-79), pp. 420-32; Stephen Addiss and K. S. Wong, ?baku: Zen Painting and Calligraphy, exh. cat.

(Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas, 1978); and Joan Stanley-Baker, "Inkplay s by ?baku Monks," in Hie Transmission of Chinese Idealist Painting to fapan

(Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan, Center for Japanese Studies, 1992), pp.

29-35 28. These numbers may seem extravagant, but are not?Tomioka

Tessai (1836-1924), for instance, is estimated to have painted about

20,000 works, large and small, during his long career. The nature of East

Asian painting materials and styles, and a tolerance for simple and

sketchy work, permit such copious production. For other works by or

ascribed to Jih-kuan, see Howard Rogers in Kaikodo fournal (Autumn

1996), pp. 10, 198-202.

29. See Ch'en Cheng-hung, Shen Chou nien-p'u (Shanghai, 1993). References to Shen's staying in Buddhist temples, especially Ch'an, and

painting for the monks are on pp. 37,95,96,100,105,112,129,141,142,

148, 166, 185, 192, 210, 215, 222, 223, 229, 230, 239, 244, 249, 254, 265,

and 267.

30. On these two scrolls, seeT'ien Hsiu,"Nan Sung Mu-ch'i 'hsieh

sheng shu-kuo t'u-chuan'" ("Handscroll of Vegetables and Fruits

Drawn from Life by Mu-ch'i of Southern Sung"), Wen-wu, 1964, no. 3,

pp. 36-37.The author rejects, rightly, the theory that the two belonged

originally to a single scroll, but accepts both scrolls as genuine works of

Mu-ch'i, on the highly unfirm basis that they were judged genuine by such connoisseurs as Wu K'uan and HsiangY?an-pien in the Ming.

31. In the course of preparing this paper, I asked both my research

assistant Andrea Goldman and my student Pei-hua Lee to scan the writ

ings of Hs? Wei for references to his visits to Ch'an monasteries, associ

ations with Ch'an monks, and paintings of Ch'an subjects, including

Kuan-yin. Both turned up numerous references, and I am grateful to

them for thus confirming my assumption. Their findings are too ample,

however, to be even summarized here.



32. For an account of these early works from his "Buddhist" period, see Wang Fang-yu's essay in Wang Fang-yu and Richard Barnhart, Master

of the Lotus Garden: The Life and Art of Bada Shanren (1626?1705) (New Haven: Yale Univ. Art Gallery and Yale Univ. Pr., 1991), pp. 48-50.

33. For paintings by Shih-t'ao that follow the Ch'an tradition as

defined here, see his Lotus Roots and Lichee Fruits, dated to 1705, collec

tion of C. C.Wang, in James Cahill, Three Alternative Histories of Chinese

Painting (Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas, Spencer Museum of Art, 1988), fig.

81; and the handscroll "in the manner of Hs? Wei," former LiuTso-chou

collection, now in the Hong Kong Museum of Art, published in I-yiian

to-ying 32 (Shanghai, 1986), pp. 14-15.

34. Leaf 3 in the 16-leaf album titled The Essence of Things (MA 10), National Palace Museum, Taipei.

35. For the painting by Po-yen of pomegranates, see ?baku bunka, no.

106.

36. Wang and Barnhart, Master of the Lotus Garden, p. 16.

37. I allude here, of course, to Ernest Gombrich's famous formulation

in Art and Illusion, esp. chap. 5,"Formula and Experience."

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Issue Table of ContentsArchives of Asian Art, Vol. 50 (1997/1998), pp. 1-118Front MatterDong Qichang and Western Learning: A Hypothesis in Honor of James Cahill [pp. 7-16]Continuations of Ch'an Ink Painting into Ming-Ch'ing and the Prevalence of Type Images [pp. 17-41]Facing the Unseen: On the Interior Adornment of Eizon's Iconic Body [pp. 42-61]Floral Motifs and Mortality: Restoring Numinous Meaning to a Momoyama Building [pp. 62-92]On Viewing SC [pp. 93-98]Art of Asia Acquired by North American Museums, 1996 [pp. 99-111]Back Matter

Continuations of Ch'an Ink Painting into Ming-Ch'ing and the Prevalence of Type Images

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