Fig. 6.6 — Yang and Yin
Now when our eyes survey a country scene, say, of mountains, waterfalls, and lakes, what we see are light and dark, light and dark: wherever they turn, it will be the inflections and various degrees of light and dark that they will see. An artist with his brush, therefore, could place black on white, dark on light, to represent such a view. And just that, in fact, will have been the first principle of his whole training: how, by using light and dark, he should depict the forms that in their essence, as well as in their appearance, are of the power of light and dark, the yang and the yin. The outer form, light and dark, is to be rendered as a manifestation of what is within. So the artist, with his brush, is manipulating tinctures of the very principles that underlie all nature. The art work, thus, brings forth and makes known the essence of the world itself, that essence being an interplay of these two, the yang and the yin, through no end of modulations. And the delight of contemplating this interplay is the delight of the man who does not wish to break through and beyond the walls of the world display but to remain within it, playing himself with the potentials of this infinitely and incessantly changing universal duad.
The artist’s eyes in China and Japan are open to the world. Does he intend to depict bamboo? Let him assimilate the rhythm of the yang and yin in bamboo, know bamboo, live with bamboo, watch it, feel it, even eat it. In China we learn of what are known as the six canons, six principles, of the classical painter’s art; and these hold true for Japan as well. The first of the six is rhythm. When observing bamboo, one is to get the feel of the rhythm of bamboo; when a bird, the rhythms of its bird-life, its walk, its poise, and its flight. For rendering anything, the first necessity is to have known and to have experienced its rhythm. So that rhythm, then, is the first principle of the canon, the indispensable first vehicle of art. And the second principle is organic form. The line, that is to say, must be a sound, continuous, living line: itself organic and not the mere imitation of something alive. But in its life it must carry, of course, the rhythm of the object represented. Canon three is trueness to nature. The artist eye does not turn away. It holds to nature—which does not mean, however, that the work is to be photographic. It is to the rhythm of the object’s life that the artist is to remain true. If the picture is of a bird, the bird is to be birdlike; if of a bird perched on bamboo, the two natures of the bird and the bamboo are equally there. The fourth principle, then, is color, which includes the whole mysterious lore of light and shade, the light and the dark, rendering the essences of energy and inertia. Fifth there comes—and this, I have noticed, is a principle strikingly honored today in Japanese photography— the placement of the object in the field. In Japan there is, for example, a kind of painting known as “one-corner painting,” where some relatively small subject in a great emptiness (say, a fishing-boat in a mist) is placed in just such a way, in one corner of the work, that its influence will affect and bring to life the whole scene. And finally there is the matter of style, the requirement that the style employed—the force, roughness, of refinement of the brushstrokes, etc.—should be appropriate to the rhythm of the subject.
Now, of course, in order to experience what is before him, the artist has mainly to look; and looking, finally, is an unaggressive activity. One does not say to one’s eyes, “Go out and do something to that thing out there.” One looks, looks long, and the world comes in. There is an important Chinese term, wu-wei, “not doing,” the meaning of which is not “doing nothing,” but “not forcing.” Things will open up of themselves, according to their nature. And so, just as a god might show himself to the meditating Indian artist, the world shows itself in its inward form to the eye of the Far Eastern. “The Tao is close at hand, yet people seek it afar,” is an old saying of the Chinese philosopher Mencius. The idea of the universe coming to form with a spontaneity of its own, which is at one, finally, with the spontaneity of the nature of the artist, and the spontaneity, then, of his brush as it renders in black on white the Tao of things, is one that is altogether essential to this Taoist view.
There are two contrasting Chinese words for law, defined and elucidated in the second volume of Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilization in China:5 the word li, and the word tse. The word li is believed to have referred originally to the natural markings on a piece of jade, the veins in the jade, and, by extension, the natural grain of life; whereas the second word, tse, seems originally to have had reference, rather, to the markings made on a caldron by a stylus, markings made by man, its reference accordingly being to social laws, decreed and contrived, as against natural; laws thought up by the mind, as against those experienced as of the very pattern of nature. But the function of art is to know and to make known the latter, the laws and patterns, that is to say, of nature and the way nature moves. And to know these, the artist cannot force his own intentions upon nature. Thus it is in the sensitive work of coordinating his own concept of nature, his concept of the task to be done and his disciplines of action, with the actual given patterns of nature, that the balance between doing and not doing is achieved that yields the perfect work of art.
Furthermore, this principle of doing through not forcing informs every discipline of the Far East having to do with effective action. When I was last in Japan, the Sumo wrestling championship matches were in progress in Tokyo, the bouts of those great big fat fellows—and they certainly are big: as someone has said, they illustrate the law of the survival of the fattest. During the greater part of each contest, the two are settled in a squat position, measuring each other. They assume this pose, hold it for a while, then break, walk to the side, pick up a handful of salt, toss this carelessly to the floor, and assume their positions again. They repeat this act a number of times, and the Japanese crowd, meanwhile, is in ecstasy, shouting, watching for that sudden moment—when, bang! they will have grabbed each other and one of the two will already have hit the mat. The bout is finished. And so what was it they were doing during all of those rounds of simply assuming a preparatory stance? They were both measuring each other and finding center in that point of stillness in themselves from which all action springs, each in balance in relation to the other, in a sort of yin-yang correlation; and the one who was caught off-center was the one who went down.
I am told that in the old days a young person desiring to learn swordsmanship in Japan would be left by the master largely unattended for a time, doing chores about the school, washing dishes, and so on; and every now and again the master himself would come popping out from somewhere and give him a smack with a stick. After a season of that sort of thing, the victim will have begun to be prepared. But that will be of no use to him, either; for when ready for the blow to come at him, say, from over there, he will get it from back here; and next, from nowhere at all. At last the baffled youth will arrive at the realization that he will do best not to ready himself in any specific direction, because if one has a notion of where the danger may be lurking, he will be attentive in the wrong direction. The only protection, then, is to be in a perpetual state of centeredness in undirected alertness, every ready for sudden attack and immediate response.
There is an amusing anecdote of a certain master of this kind who told the young men of his school that he would himself bow before anyone who, in any way whatsoever, could catch him by surprise. Days passed, and the master was never caught. He was never off guard. But then, one day when he had returned from an afternoon in the garden, he asked for some water with which to bathe his feet, and it was brought to him by a ten-year-old. The water was a bit cold. He asked the youngster to warm it. The little fellow returned with it hot, and the master, without thinking, put his feet in, quickly pulled them out, and went down on his knees in a very deep bow before the smallest boy in his school.
The sin of inadvertence—not being alert, not quite awake—is the sin of missing the moment of life; whereas the whole of the art of the non-action that is action (wu-wei) is unremitting alertness. One is then fully conscious all
the time, and since life is an expression of consciousness, life is then lived, as it were, of itself. There is no need to instruct it or direct it. Of itself it moves. Of itself it lives. Of itself it speaks and acts.
And so it is that throughout the Oriental world, in India as well as in China and Japan, the ideal of art was never—as it has been largely with us of late years—of an activity set apart from life, confined to studios of sculpture, painting, dancing, music, or acting. Art in the ancient East was the art of life. In the words of the late Dr. A. K. Coomaraswamy, who for some thirty years was a curator of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, “The artist, in the ancient world, was not a special kind of man, but every man a special kind of artist.” In all living and working, as in all the crafts, the highest concern, the required aim, was to be in the perfection of the work—which is just the opposite (is it not?) from the contemporary union ideal of how much one is to be paid for it and how short the hours are to be. “The adult workman should be ashamed,” wrote Dr. Coomaraswamy in one of his discussions of this subject, “if anything he makes falls short of the masterpiece standard.”6 And indeed I must say, my own impression as I have studied for years the works of art of the ancients—whether of Egypt and Mesopotamia, Greece, or the great Orient—has frequently been that the craftsmen of those incredible productions must have been elves or angels; certainly, in any case, not such as we are today. And yet I think also that if even we today could acquire the knack of maintaining undistracted consciousness between coffee breaks, we too might find that we possessed angelic talents, powers, and skills.
Now as I have already said, whereas the Indian mind and Indian arts tend to soar in imagination out of this world of ten thousand things, the Chinese arts and artists of the Tao prefer to remain with nature, in harmony with its wonder. And as the old texts tell us of the ancient Chinese Taoist sages, they too were lovers of the hills and watercourses. They are generally pictured as having abandoned city living to retire alone into the wilderness, there to dwell in harmony with nature. However, in Japan this cannot be done. For there are so many people everywhere that you simply cannot be alone with nature—at least, not for very long. Climb to the summit of even an inaccessible peak and you will find a jolly picnic party already up there before you. There is no escape there from mankind. There is no escape from society. Hence it is, that although the Japanese and Chinese ideograms for the concept “freedom” (Japanese jiyū ; Chinese ziyou) are exactly the same in form, the Chinese by implication means liberation from the human nexus, but the Japanese, compliance with the same through willing devotion to secular activities:7 on one hand, freedom away from society, under the great vault of the skies, on the misty mountaintop, picking mushrooms (”No one knows where I am!”); and on the other hand, freedom within the undeniable bonds of the given world, the social order in which, and to the ends of which, one has been raised. Remaining within that field, one yet experiences and achieves “freedom” by bringing to it the full consent and force of one’s good will: for, after all, the life that is found on the mountaintop lives within the heart of man when in society too.
There is a curious, extremely interesting term in Japanese that refers to a very special manner of polite, aristocratic speech known as “play language,” asobase kotoba, whereby, instead of saying to a person, for example, “I see that you have come to Tokyo,” one would express the observation by saying, “I see that you are playing at being in Tokyo”—the idea being that the person addressed is in such control of his life and his powers that for him everything is a play, a game. He is able to enter into life as one would enter into a game, freely and with ease. And this idea is carried even so far that instead of saying to a person, “I hear that your father has died,” you would say, rather, “I hear that your father has played at dying.”8 And now, I submit that this is truly a noble, really glorious way to approach life. What has to be done is attacked with such a will that in the performance one is literally “in play.” That is the attitude designated by Nietzsche as Amor fati, love of one’s fate. It is what the old Roman Seneca referred to in his often quoted saying: Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt: “The Fates lead him who will; him who won’t, they drag.”9 Are you up to your given destiny? That is the challenge of Hamlet’s troubled question. The ultimate nature of the experience of life is that toil and pleasure, sorrow and joy, are inseparably mixed in it. The very will to life that brought one to light, however, was a will to come even through pain into this world; else one never would have got here. And that is the notion underlying the Oriental idea of reincarnation. Since you came to birth in this world at this time, in this place, and with this particular destiny, it was this indeed that you wanted and required for your own ultimate illumination. That was a great big wonderful thing that you thereupon brought to pass: not the “you,” of course, that you now suppose yourself to be, but the “you” that was already there before you were born and which even now is keeping your heart beating and your lungs breathing and doing for you all those complicated things inside that are your life. You are not now to lose your nerve! Go on through with it and play your own game all the way!
And of course, as everybody knows who has ever played at games, the ones that are the most fun—to lose as well as to win—are the ones that are the hardest, with the most complicated, even dangerous, tasks to accomplish. And so it is that artists are generally not content, either in the Orient or in the Occident, with doing merely simple things—and much soon becomes simple for an artist that for the rest of us would be difficult. The artist seeks the challenge, the difficult thing to do; for his basic approach to life is not of work but of play.
And so finally, now, this attitude toward art as an aspect of the game of life, and life itself as the art of a game, is a wonderfully joyous, invigorating approach to the mixed blessing of existence—quite in contrast to this of our Christian West, based on a mythology of universal guilt. There was that Fall, back there, in the Garden, and we have all been congenital sinners ever since. Every act of nature is an act of sin, accompanied by a knowledge of its guilt. Whereas in the Orient there is the idea of the inherent innocence of nature, even in what might appear to our human eyes and sentiments to be its cruelties. The world, as they say in India, is God’s “play.” It is a wondrous, thoughtless play: a rough play, the roughest, crudest, most dangerous, and most difficult, with no holds barred. Often, it seems, it is the best who lose and the worst who win. But winning, finally, is not the aim; for as we have already learned in mounting the way “rich in pleasure” of the kuṇḍalinī, winning and losing in the usual sense are experiences only of the lower cakra s. The aim of the ascending serpent is to clarify and increase the light of consciousness within, and the first step to the gaining of this boon—as told in the Bhagavad Gītā , as in many another wisdom text—is to abandon absolutely all concern for the fruits of action, whether in this world or in the next. As the Lord Kṛṣṇa on the battlefield said to the warrior prince Arjuna, “To the work alone are you entitled, never to its fruit... He who knows that the way of renunciation and the way of action are one, he verily knows.”10
Life as an art and art as a game—as action for its own sake, without thought of gain or of loss, praise or blame—is the key, then, to the turning of living itself into a yoga, and art into the means to such a life.
There is a little Buddhist story that will serve, I think, to drive this message home with an amusing image. It is of a young Chinese scholar, Chu, who went with a friend for a stroll in the mountains. There they chanced on the ruins of a temple, where among the broken walls an old monk had established his hermitage. Catching sight of the two arriving, the old fellow, adjusting his robe, came toddling forward to show them around. There were some statues of the immortals, as well as, here and there on the remaining walls, a number of lifelike paintings of people, animals, and flowery scenes. Both Chu and his friend were enchanted, and particularly so when, high on one of the walls, they noticed the view of a pretty lit
tle town with a lovely girl standing in the foreground, holding flowers in her hands. Her hair was down, which meant that she was unmarried, and Chu no sooner saw her than he was lost altogether in love. His imagination was holding him to the lovely smile on her lips, when, before he knew it—by the power of the foxy old monk, who thought to teach him a lesson—he was there in that little town street himself, and there too was that lovely girl.
She gladly greeted him and led him to her home. And they became engaged immediately in a passionate affair of love that went on for several days. Her friends, discovering them living that way together, laughed and teased and said to her, “Oh, oh! And your hair is still down?” They brought enameled hairpins, and when her hair had been nicely put up, poor Chu was more in love with her than ever. However, a day came when there was heard out in the street a very frightening noise of voices, rattling chains, and heavily tramping boots, which brought them to their window, and they saw a company of imperial officers coming to scout out unregistered aliens. The terrified girl told Chu to hide, which he did. He hid beneath the bed. But then, on hearing a still greater commotion outside, he leaped out from under and, rushing to the window to look, felt his sleeves suddenly fluttering and found that he had passed right out of the picture and was coming down through the air to his friend and the old monk below. The two were standing where all three had been but a few brief moments before; and when Chu, coming down, rejoined them, both he and his friend were amazed. They turned to the monk for an explanation.
“Visions are born and die in those who behold them,” he said simply. “What can an old monk say?” But he raised his eyes, and they theirs, to the picture. And what do you know? The girl’s hair was up.11
[Discuss]
Myths to Live By Page 14
