Sudden Enlightenment

By ROBERT HUGHES

Of the many forms of Buddhism, the one best known in the West is Zen. Its guiding principles of inward meditation versus doctrine, of emphasis on the visceral and spontaneous as against the cerebral and structured, of inspiration rather than linear "logic," were seized on by the early beatniks, taken up by many of the young today, and were incorporated into the mystique of America's counterculture. But what kind of art did Zen provoke in China and Japan? In a brilliant show that took a year to assemble, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts has provided a definitive survey of the course of Zen ideas and disciplines as reflected in Oriental art from the 13th to the 19th century. The result of long negotiation with the Japanese government, it includes several scrolls of such rarity that they are seldom exposed even in Japan.

To the casual gallerygoer, Zen art might not appear vastly different from classical Oriental art and indeed is customarily exhibited as part of its main body without special classification. In fact, Zen is distinctive for two reasons: 1) it was created largely by Zen monks, who did not consider themselves primarily artists, to illustrate a philosophical Zen concept; 2) it had to be done with maximum spontaneity. In Zen, as opposed to the controlled symmetries of scholarly painting, the inky brush spatters and runs on the paper in a kind of ecstatic exuberance--a sort of Oriental forerunner of action painting. The essence of Zen thought is satori --sudden enlightenment. It comes unpredictably; meditation prepares the artist, but guarantees nothing. One ancient monk, Yun-Men, achieved satori when his teacher slammed a door on his foot. Another, Wen-Shu Ssu-yeh, had it while butchering a pig, and celebrated the occasion in verse:

Yesterday the heart of a bloodthirsty

Yaksa [demon],

Today the face of a Bodhisattva [a prospective Buddha].

Between the Bodhisattva and the

Yaksa

There is not a shred of difference.

This sense of revelation, bursting through the simplest acts and objects, was central to Zen art. A night heron, painted in the early 16th century by

Tan'an Chiden, is poised to whip a fish from a stream; the bird becomes a metaphor of the mind and its power to seize what is spiritually relevant. The monk Hakuin Ekaku meditated on a terrifying Buddhist deity and expressed that terror by simply "writing" the deity's name--the heavy strokes conveying a menace beyond what the ideograms spell out: "Blue-countenanced Bearer of the Thunderbolt." A swift sketch of two cackling women gets the inscription:

Their entire life they wield the broom to muddle up useless things

Where in the beginning there was not even a speck of dust.

The Zen distrust of theory and doctrine was summed up by Liang K'ai, an artist of the early 13th century, who captured in a few exquisitely jagged brush strokes an illiterate patriarch, howling with glee, tearing up a sutra, or sacred text. It is an Oriental parallel to St. Paul's remark that "the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life."

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