by Alex Kerr
Manpuku-ji, however, was another matter. The young Shogun delegated real authority to Ingen and welcomed his disciples and a large Chinese trading community which was based in Nagasaki. When Ingen died, his disciple Mokuan, who had come over with him from China, succeeded him as leader of the Obaku sect. Twenty-one generations of Chinese abbots (with the exception of one or two Japanese) presided over Manpuku-ji for one hundred and twenty-three years, until Japanese abbots finally took over due to a lack of Chinese immigrants. At this point the coating process began, and the temple is slowly being turned into another pearl. But even so, Manpuku-ji never abandoned its Chinese identity; it is the single most successful and long-lasting venture initiated by foreigners in Japanese history.
But all this is incidental to the real importance of Manpuku-ji: it was the center of Japan’s literati. Since they first appeared on the scene in Japan in the sixteenth century, the literati have exerted an immense influence, and they still exist today in their thousands. However, in a world that equates Japanese culture with Zen, the literati are almost completely unknown.
Japan is the land of the ‘Ways’ – the Way of Tea, the Way of the Sword, and so forth – and all these Ways seem to involve the utmost seriousness. The emphasis is on martial discipline; there is little room for free spirits. But in the process of art collecting, I discovered objects divorced from such Ways. These included the calligraphy scrolls of Edo-period scholars and the implements of sencha.
In the Edo-period calligraphy scrolls was a playful point of view completely at variance with the rigid rules of the Ways I had encountered. One scroll I found early on was by the great Confucianist Ichikawa Beian. It read: ‘The lover of wine is ashamed of nothing under heaven or earth’. This didn’t sound like a very serious Confucianist to me. Beian and his circle were Japanese literati. They traced back to a long line of Chinese literati, called bunjin in Japanese, which means literally, ‘man of literature’. Soon I began to see their presence everywhere.
One of the utensils popular in sencha is the fly whisk, called a hossu. I found a variety of these: flowing tufts of horse or yak hair fixed on staffs of red lacquer, woven bamboo or gnarled branches. In old books illustrating scholars’ gatherings, they could be seen hanging next to the tokonoma. I found that hossu whisks went back to the Chinese Taoist sages of the fourth century, who used them to brush away flies as they engaged in seidan (‘pure conversation’) with their friends. In time, the whisks came to symbolize brushing away the flies of care. Hanging one nearby meant that you were going to engage in ‘pure conversation’.
In Tenmangu I keep a collection of hossu on one wall by the sofa, indicating ‘this space is for pure conversation’. Of course, most of my guests are wholly unaware of this – they probably just think I have a bad problem with flies! On the opposite wall is a pair of scrolls, a conversation in the form of calligraphy. The first, by a Kyoto potter of the 1930s, reads, ‘With the hossu, I brush away all worldly desires’. Next to it is the reply by the Zen abbot Nantenbo: ‘I brushed away everything, but the dust won’t move!’ From scrolls such as these and implements like the whisks I surmised the existence of the Japanese literati; but there are no illustrated books about them, no museums devoted to their art, and no hereditary schools dedicated to passing on their wisdom. It was only because of an experience at Oxford that I knew what to look for.
It was during my third year at Oxford that I first met John Sparrow, Warden of All Souls College. Of the forty or so colleges making up Oxford, All Souls is the most exclusive. Over the centuries, it raised its admission standards so high that about two hundred years ago it stopped taking new students altogether; now there are only dons at All Souls. They are not required to conduct research or teach – all they have to do is think. All Souls is the original ‘think tank’.
John Sparrow had been Warden of All Souls for decades, and was in his last year before retirement. He was an avid book collector, a prolific writer on obscure literary topics, and friend to many of the better-known British writers and artists of the twentieth century. In his long life of leisure, he had cultivated a peerless wit, so fine as to be almost transparent: with a word he could make you smile, although later you could hardly recall what it was that he had said. Sparrow took me under his wing, and during my last year I went to live in All Souls. It was a dreamlike opportunity. In the late afternoon, I would join him in his study for tea, and we would pore over old letters to him from Edith Sitwell and Virginia Woolf.
Sparrow and his friends were erudite and proud of it. However, as knowledgeable as they were, the hallmark of their talk was the light touch. Academic explanations were forbidden. If asked to explain something, they would divulge their meaning in a gesture or a phrase succinct as a haiku. One day Lady Penelope Betjeman, wife of the poet laureate Sir John Betjeman, came to lunch. She was describing her travels in Nepal, when someone asked her what she meant by a Tibetan prostration; Penelope, a dignified woman in her sixties, rose from the formal dining table and cast herself flat on the floor to demonstrate. Another of Sparrow’s friends was Ann Fleming, widow of ‘007’ author Ian Fleming. She would rise at about one o’clock in the afternoon, and come downstairs in a pink nightgown to stroll with us on a lawn surrounded by rosebushes. Waving her ivory cigarette holder, she told us stories of her friend Evelyn Waugh, who was hard of hearing and used an ear trumpet. Once at a dinner party, in the midst of an argument with Ann, Evelyn began to pretend he couldn’t hear what she was saying. So Ann reached over, stuck her cigarette holder into his ear trumpet and rattled it noisily about inside. This got his attention.
Ann Fleming with her pink nightgown and ivory cigarette holder, the lawn sparkling in the afternoon sun, the eyes of John Sparrow as he laughed – it was truly a world of exquisite indolence. At that time I had no very clear concept of ‘literati’, although through Sparrow I had already entered into that world. They were people whose whole lives were devoted to art and literature, but for whom nothing was too exalted to question or laugh at. They were free spirits.
I returned soon afterwards to Japan to start work at Oomoto, resigned to the knowledge that I would never meet people like John Sparrow and his circle again. However, the learned but witty comments I found on old calligraphy scrolls and the concept of ‘pure conversation’ symbolized by the hossu whisks in my collection seemed suspiciously close to what I had seen at Oxford. It was clear that literati had once thrived in Japan, and I later found that they still exist today. However, when I delved further I found that the Japanese literati were very different from their counterparts in the West.
The roots of the tradition in Japan went back to the Chinese literati, who were a hybrid of Confucianism and Taoism. From Confucianism came the serious side, the basis of which was a love of learning, exemplified by the first line of the Analects: ‘To study and at times put your learning into practice, is that not a joy?’ The Confucianist scholar was expected to study the wisdom of the past, and in the process acquire a mysterious ‘virtue’ that would influence all around him. This virtue radiated outwards, and according to ancient teachings, its mere possession was enough to transform the world. That was the logic behind the text I saw the first day I opened a book of Chinese philosophy in the Kanda market: ‘If you wish to rule the state, first pacify your family. If you wish to pacify your family, first discipline yourself. If you wish to discipline yourself, first make right your heart.’
The first step was to discover how to make right the heart: the answer, as it developed in China, was to practice the arts. In addition to a wide knowledge of literature, the literati were expected to master the Three Perfections of poetry, painting and calligraphy. In time this grew to encompass all the fine arts involved in the scholar’s studio: bamboo work, ceramics, metalwork, stone carving, paper, ink, brushes, inkstones, and much more.
The drawback to Confucianism, however, was the heavy emphasis on virtue. Although we are taught that ‘the virtuous man is not alone’, a life devoted solely
to virtue does not seem very appealing. This is where Taoism came in. Taoism was the world of untrammeled sages walking in the hills. ‘The sage has his wanderings,’ said the Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi; ‘for him, knowledge is an offshoot.’ Taoists saw life as free as water or wind – who cared about virtue? They loved mountains, waterfalls and the moon so much that the poet Li Bo drowned one night at a boating party, when he reached out over the water to embrace the moon. They were hermits who wanted nothing more than to withdraw from the dust of the world and enjoy ‘pure conversations’ with their friends.
In time, these two opposite images – the cultured scholar and the free-spirited nature lover – coalesced into one ideal: the literati. By the Ming dynasty a clearly distinguishable literati culture had grown up. It centered around the inkyo, or hermitage, where the literati were supposed to live in semi-retirement. There were clear guidelines for what the hermitage was to be like. According to one Ming writer’s advice: ‘It is best to live deep in the mountains. Then the rural countryside. Failing that, the suburbs. Even if you can’t live among cliffs and valleys, the literati cottage must have an air of retirement away from the mundane world. Ancient trees and exotic flowers in the garden; artworks and books in the study. Dwellers in this house will not know the passage of years, and guests will forget to leave.’
The development of the literati up until the fifteenth century took place entirely in China; Japan, in the meantime, had become the land of martial, as opposed to literary, arts. Warriors ruled from the headquarters of the Shogunate, which was called the bakufu (‘tent government’). Centuries later, when the Shogun lived in a magnificent palace in Edo dozens of times larger than the Imperial Palace in Kyoto, the word bakufu was still used, as a reminder that the country was basically under the administration of soldiers in tents.
This military ethos is still a dominant force in Japanese society. Before coming to Japan, Trevor and Edan asked me what life in Kameoka was going to be like. I answered, ‘Like joining the army.’ It turned out to be even truer than I suspected. The very first word of Japanese that Edan learned in third grade was Kiritsu! – ‘Attention!’ On arriving in class, all the students had to stand up smartly with their hands at their sides and bow in unison to the teacher, like soldiers on review. When you read the many books written by foreigners who played baseball in Japan, or practiced Zen, or worked for a stock brokerage, the army-style discipline is the one unifying thread in their experiences.
This was brought home to me in a visual way when I helped translate for a photographer involved in the production of the book A Day in the Life of Japan. To create the ‘Day in the Life’ series, several dozen photographers descend on a certain country to take photos during a twenty-four-hour period. When the book on Japan came out, there was an astonishing number of photos in which people were lined up in rows: police, students, department-store service attendants, businessmen.
Japan would thus seem to be the last place that the literati ideal could take root, but by the 1600s the centuries of warfare were drawing to a close. It became possible to enjoy a life of leisure, and leisure is fertile ground for the literati. In fact, it is indispensable – the literati will allow nothing to get in the way of their life of leisure. The ‘exquisite indolence’ of Ann Fleming and her friends was not a mere fluke of the British class system – it was an essential ingredient of literati culture, in both the East and West. Literati are rarely great academics, because their curiosity leads them into odd byways that tend to disqualify them from serious scholarship. Likewise, they may not be the greatest of artists or writers, because they rarely have the ambition to build reputations in society or establish themselves commercially. In short, they are amateurs, those whom the Chinese called hogai (‘outside the system’). It is for this reason that they have been so little studied and are so hard to find.
The first literati to surface in Japan were the tea masters of the sixteenth century, sheltered from the war and turmoil of their age by the Zen establishments of Kyoto. They took the Ming ideal of the inkyo hermitage and developed wabi teahouses. The teahouse was a place to escape the mundane world, and in it were all the arts of the literati: calligraphy in the tokonoma, poetry, ceramics, bamboo, stone and iron. Tea came out of Zen, which has not only a pronounced military side but also a witty irreverent one, going back to Lin-chi and the shocking and humorous things he said to his disciples. The tea masters applied their wit to everything around them, producing a world of fantastically varied play. Oribe created off beat tea bowls with twisted, lopsided edges; Enshu surprised his guests after a heavy downpour of rain by throwing a bucket of water into the tokonoma instead of setting out the usual flower arrangement.
By the early 1600s, literati culture stepped out from under the umbrella of Zen and a true flowering began. One of the first great literati was Ishikawa Jozan, a failed military commander who retired to Kyoto and built himself a hermitage, called Shisen-do, which still survives. He had absolutely no interests other than amusing himself inside his hermitage, and it is said that even when the retired Emperor Go-Mizunoo came to visit, Jozan refused to come out and greet him. To paraphrase Jozan’s philosophy, ‘At times I pick a garden flower; at times I listen to the cry of the geese. At times I sweep fallen leaves; at times I plant chrysanthemums. Climbing the eastern hill, I sing to the moon; at the northern window, I read books and recite poetry. Other than this, I do nothing.’
Soon there were hundreds and thousands of literati doing nothing the length and breadth of Japan. Doing nothing is only one step away from subversion. The Shogun had established a university at Yushima Confucian Hall in Edo, the purpose of which was to educate schoolmasters to train the nation in Confucian loyalty and good manners. The graduates of Yushima were expected to return to their native districts and set up academies in their native towns. However, the policy backfired, because many of these local scholars became literati, and the literati are loyal to no system. In their leisure they began to study ancient Shinto. Soon they were publishing books denouncing the Shogun and calling for the return of the Emperor, thus laying the groundwork for the fall of the Shogunate. Meanwhile they traveled constantly, exchanging letters, poems and calligraphy.
Right in the midst of all this ferment, Ingen arrived, bringing with him Ming calligraphy and sencha – Chinese-style tea ceremony, which was anything but wabi. Sencha involves ordinary green tea such as is still drunk in most places today, rather than the thick powdered kind used in Japanese tea ceremony, so it was much more relaxed and manageable. Sencha had a minimum of ceremony, and a maximum of play; it was tailored perfectly to the tastes of the newly wealthy Edo merchants, and it swept the nation. Today, there are dozens of sencha schools with tens of thousands of adherents, the national headquarters being at Manpuku-ji.
Two of the most remarkable of the Edo literati were Beian and Bosai, whose calligraphies I collect. As in China, the Japanese literati were an unstable combination of two opposites – Confucian scholar and free-minded Taoist – so they tended to lean to one side or the other. Beian and Bosai represent the two poles. Beian was a strict moralist who refused to teach dubious people like geisha or Kabuki actors, and as the result of his high standards of conduct attracted thousands of disciples, including many feudal lords. He was a great art collector and scholar, and wrote a book of calligraphy quotations that is still a standard text today. He wrote a crisp, classic style of calligraphy which he learned from a Chinese merchant in Nagasaki.
Bosai, sometimes called ‘the literati of the downtown’, was constantly drunk, and his calligraphy was completely unreadable. He loved to give parties, to which geisha and Kabuki actors came in great numbers. Bosai habitually walked around his home naked, even when guests were present, and he definitely did not get on well with feudal lords. Once he was called to the Shogun’s palace for an interview with the chief minister, Lord Matsudaira Sadanobu. But Bosai was in the habit of buying his clothes second-hand, so the crests on his upper kimono did not match hi
s lower kimono. Sadanobu dismissed him in disgust, and that was the end of Bosai’s official career.
The first Japanese literati I met was Sawada Minoru, the tea master at Oomoto. Sawada grew up in a poverty-stricken farming village on the Sea of Japan coast, coming to Oomoto as a young man to work as a gardener. He was a wild youth, famed for once smashing all the windows in the headquarters on a drunken spree. One day, Sawada was invited to the residence of Naohi, the old Mother Goddess of Oomoto, and as he sat there talking, he had a cigarette. When he was finished, he looked around for an ashtray and found none. Luckily, nearby was a floor hearth, just like the ones he had grown up with in his village, so he stubbed his cigarette out in it. ‘Don’t you realize that is a tea-ceremony hearth?’ scolded one of the other guests. Sawada was so ashamed of his ignorance that he decided to learn tea ceremony just to get the better of the man who had scolded him. Today, he is one of the famed tea masters of the Kyoto area.
Sawada’s approach can be seen in the following story. The tea used in the ceremony is finely powdered green tea, carried in a lacquered caddy called a natsume, which is shaped like an egg with a flat bottom and top. One day, a student failed to support the body of the caddy, taking only the lid in his hands, and the caddy dropped from the height of about one meter directly onto the tatami. The powdered tea puffed up high into the air in a cloud, and tea settled in a green ring on the mat before our startled eyes. Everyone was petrified. In the silence, Sawada asked us, ‘What is the appropriate thing to say at a time like this?’ Nobody could answer. He said, ‘You should say, “How beautiful!” ’
