The Lone Samurai

by William Scott Wilson

  THE BRUSH AND THE MIND

  Monochrome india ink wash painting, or suibokuga, was imported to Japan from China during the Kamakura period (1192–1333) along with Zen Buddhism, with which it is closely connected. At its simplest, this style of painting requires only an ink stone, ink, brush, and paper. Necessitating intense concentration and control, it is said to be the perfect art for the student of Zen. In this style, everything unessential is shorn away and each irreversible stroke is fueled by the intensity and disciplined energy of the artist. The mind must be harmonized with the artist’s brush, exactly as it must be harmonized with the samurai’s sword: the stroke, once executed, cannot be withdrawn.

  It should be no surprise, then, that the first practitioners of suibokuga in Japan were Zen monks and the warrior rulers of the thirteenth century. The warriors, newly in control of the nation, were searching for both the proper mental framework with which to govern the country and a sense of culture that would add an aura of legitimacy to their rule. The Chinese Zen priests who were immigrating at that time from the deteriorating Sung Dynasty provided both. Zen meditation and philosophy helped to foster the spontaneity necessary to conduct military affairs and also to eliminate the fear of death, while the study of continental culture and administrative skills gave the warriors a basis from which to direct national affairs.

  Of all the Buddhist sects, warriors seemed to relate best to Zen, with its emphasis on self-reliance, or jiriki. Both esoteric Buddhism, which was primarily taken up by the aristocracy, and the Pure Land Buddhism of faith that was embraced mostly by the masses, tended to rely on the Other, or tariki, whether that other be mantras and mudras or the grace and compassion of the Buddha Amida. This breakdown of class and sect was by no means rigid—all types of Buddhism were, at least in theory, open to all classes of men. However, the paradox of Zen—that through one’s own disciplined and strenuous emptying of the mind, the self is transcended—was one that the warrior could deeply appreciate, for obvious good reason.

  This trend—the study of Zen and its accompanying arts and letters—would continue through the Muromachi period of the Ashikaga shogunate (1338–1573) until it became the predominant cultural and religious force in the country, and resulted in the flowering of nearly everything we associate with the classical culture of Japan: Noh drama, tea ceremony, garden and landscape design, and, quintessentially, the monochromatic india ink painting, suibokuga. The Ashikaga shoguns were patrons of the national cultural scene, which centered in Kyoto, culminating with the third Ashikaga shogun, Yoshimitsu (1356–1408), who was brought up, incidentally, largely by Hosokawa Yoriyuki. Yoshimitsu not only studied Zen but built the Sokokuji (which is today the largest Zen temple complex still extant in Kyoto) and constructed the Temple of the Golden Pavilion on the outskirts of the capital. With the deterioration of Ashikaga control and the neardestruction of Kyoto during the Onin War (1467–77), however, the Zen priests and artists fled to the relatively stable capitals of the provincial warlords. These warlords in turn practiced meditation and cultivated the arts associated with Zen, spreading the culture throughout the entire nation.

  By the early seventeenth century, however, after years of civil wars and disturbances, the new Tokugawa shogunate turned its focus toward strict control of national affairs, and neo-Confucianism—predominantly ethical and social in outlook—became the dominant national philosophy. Attention now turned to the great ateliers of the Kano school and Tawara Sotatsu; and Zen and its arts, while still widely practiced, lost the patronage of the central government, and took on the status and character of the outsider.

  It was the Zen art of suibokuga that was the medium of the ultimate outsider—the artist, Niten, also known as the swordsman Miyamoto Musashi.

  PAINTING WITH THE MIND OF THE SWORD

  It is not known exactly when Musashi first began painting, although at the age of thirteen he executed a painting of Daruma at the Shoren’in temple in Hirafuku in Harima, where he stayed after leaving his father’s home. It is clear, however, that he was already an extraordinarily talented artist by the time he entered Kokura in northern Kyushu in 1634, and all of his extant paintings date from this period until his death in 1645.

  Musashi clearly stated in The Book of Five Rings that he had no teacher for his study of the Way of the sword or for any of the other Ways that he practiced, and we can only surmise that this was true for the art of suibokuga as well. Quite obviously he applied the same dedication and discipline to this art as he did to his sword technique: in his words, training himself morning and night, and investigating it thoroughly. Although he once signed his name to a register of the disciples of Yano Kichiju, a painting master employed by the Hosokawa clan, this would have been done during a courtesy call. Musashi himself was a fully mature artist by this time.

  If Musashi did have a teacher, it was his own Way of the Sword. The Kaijo monogatari, published twenty years after his death, gives this interesting account of his approach to the brush. This account also shows quite clearly that his relationship with Tadatoshi was not simply defined by instruction in the sword:

  Once Musashi was ordered by his lord to do, in the lord’s presence, a painting of Daruma, but his skill was not forthcoming and he was unable to finish it that day. That night he turned in, but suddenly the solution came to him and he leapt out of bed, finishing the painting beneath a lamp. It came out exactly as he desired and was, indeed, exquisite. Musashi then turned to a disciple and said, “My painting is still not up to my sword technique, and the reason is this: under the gaze of my lord, I painted with the intention of doing the work well, but in fact it turned out to be quite inferior. I did the work just now, however, using my martial art, and it turned out just as I wanted. In my martial art, when I step out grasping my sword, neither I nor my enemy exists. My viewpoint is one of destroying both Heaven and Earth, and thus I have no fear. Well, I can see now that my painting is as yet no match for my skill with the sword.

  Later, Musashi would write in The Book of Five Rings: “With the principles of the martial arts, one makes a Way for all the arts and accomplishments, and will not misunderstand them.”

  He would surely have agreed with the Chinese calligrapher who wrote:

  When the Mind is correct, the brush will be also.

  心正即筆正

  Despite the setback described in the story above, Musashi handled the brush with astonishing clarity and strength, and seemed to grasp the very spirit of his subject matter. He was a remarkably keen observer of nature and of the nature of things. His victory in over sixty individual matches, his survival through six major campaigns, and the paintings he left to us all speak of this in different tongues, but to the same effect.

  It was the assessment of the Zen Buddhist painters that in suibokuga the mind was translated spontaneously to the brush, and that the character of the artist was seen clearly in the brush’s stroke. Musashi, in his insistence that the Way of the Sword provided a path for all other Ways, said in essence that the stroke of the sword and the stroke of the brush were the same: that with each stroke, the mind of the practitioner could be observed with certainty.6

  With his paintings, then, we may add yet a sixth chapter to The Book of Five Rings, and observe what the master was indicating as his ink and brush demonstrated the Fundamental Way.

  THE PAINTINGS

  Underlying Musashi’s prolific output at this time was the fact that he was now living in the extraordinarily cultured domain of the Hosokawa; the artistic milieu in Kumamoto was far beyond even what it had been with the Honda and Ogasawara. Through his friendship with Hosokawa Tadatoshi and his father, Tadaoki, he would view some of the best art in the country, periodically drink tea using the exquisite utensils collected by the older Hosokawa lord, and engage in discussions of art with the two of them. Tadatoshi’s death, however, brought several major changes that would influence the intensity of his creativity. The first, of course, was his grief. The loneliness of his solitary search
for the Way that Musashi must have felt throughout his career surely multiplied exponentially with the loss of this close friend and patron. Now Musashi devoted himself all the more to the more introspective arts. At linked poetry meetings, his voice was so low that it could not be heard by people in the next room, despite the thinness of the walls. He spent more time chanting from the librettos of Noh drama and dedicated more time to the quiet ceremony of tea. If Tadatoshi’s absence drove Musashi ever deeper inside himself, however, it also gave him more time to concentrate on these arts. The hours he had spent at his lord’s side were now given over to working with brush and ink.

  Second, and no doubt connected to the daimyo’s death, was Musashi’s increased study of Zen meditation. At about this time, he was befriended by the two monks who were responsible for the Hosokawa’s family temple, the Taishoji. The older of these, Obuchi Genko, talked with him about the depths of Buddhist thought, while the younger, twenty-year-old Shunzan, was his companion in zazen. Accompanied by Shunzan, Musashi would often walk out to the mountains to sit atop the boulders there that overlooked the expansive scene beneath, meditating. During one such retreat, as the two sat deep in meditation, a snake crawled up over Shunzan’s lap and made its way towards Musashi. When it got within a foot of the swordsman’s knee, however, it raised its head and remained still for a moment, then turned and veered off into the rocks. Musashi laughingly took this as an admonishment: his commitment to Zen meditation had not yet overcome his adversarial nature, it seemed. Yet his study of Buddhism and the practice of zazen were serious matters for him, and his intense involvement in this discipline was sharpening both the concentration and spontaneity he needed for the work he was now doing with brush and ink.

  Finally, Musashi was ill. He had had inklings of this even before coming to Kumamoto, but at this point the disease—believed now to have been some sort of thoracic cancer—was progressing. There were days when this was apparent: once, when he went to Nagaoka Okinaga’s mansion, everyone was making their greetings at the entranceway and Musashi was about to ascend the steps. For some reason, his steps faltered and he put his hand to the hip of his hakama and gave a groan as he started up. Okinaga’s retainer, Yamamoto Gen’emon, came forward and asked if he could use a hand; but Musashi declined the help, saying that it wasn’t that bad, and continued up the steps.

  On the other hand, Musashi at times exhibited an inner strength that demonstrated the superiority of mind over matter. Shortly after that same meeting at Okinaga’s, there was a large fire in a section of Kumamoto called Yaoyamachi. During the confusion, someone was seen leaping from rooftop to rooftop, helping to put out the encompassing flames. Later it was revealed that it had been none other than the old man who had stumbled at Okinaga’s mansion.

  Generally speaking, however, Musashi realized that his once almost invincible body was growing more and more frail. This did not stop him from continuing to take his long walks through the forested sections of Kumamoto, or from instructing his students at the dojo. Decreasing physical strength, however, gives all but the most superficial an increased sense of mortality, and Musashi’s illness no doubt led him to meditate all the more deeply on the world of nature around him and its connections to Buddhist truths. These insights into nature would be some of the major themes of many of the more than forty of his art works still extant.

  In the tradition of Zen Buddhist painters, Musashi painted mostly portraits of the Zen patriarchs and scenes with birds and animals. He did not paint larger landscapes in the style of Sesshu, the great suibokuga artist of the fifteenth century, or in the style of Hasegawa Tohaku or Kaiho Yusho, with whom he is often compared.

  Some of his best-known paintings are of birds and, of these, Shrike on a Withered Branch (Figure 1) is his signature work.7 In the single, unhesitating swordlike stroke of the branch and the concentrated stare of the shrike into the void, the viewer feels as though he is looking directly into the spirit of swordsmanship itself. The shrike seems to be in a state of what might be called intense repose, and brings to mind the opening words of the priest Takuan in the “Annals of the Sword of Taia”:8

  Presumably, as a martial artist, I do not fight for gain or loss, am not concerned with strength or weakness, and neither advance a step or retreat a step. The enemy does not see me. I do not see the enemy. Penetrating to a place where heaven and earth have not yet divided, where Yin and Yang have not yet arrived, I quickly and necessarily gain effect.

  FIGURE 1. Shrike on a Withered Branch by Miyamoto Musashi, signed with his artist name Niten. Scroll. Ink on paper 22 x 50 inches (54 x 125 cm). Kuboso Memorial Museum of Arts, Izumi.

  The intense, concentrated quality of this painting cannot be overstated. In the unblinking eye and hooked beak of the shrike, one can sense the almost nonexistent border between life and death—a reminder that its creator had experienced over sixty individual matches and six major battles. And yet, with a slight shift of the imagination, it is a perfect scene of nature: a bird on a branch. This is the perfect quality of Musashi’s Zen: nothing is as it seems; nor is it otherwise.

  Another work that demonstrates Musashi’s skill at the brush and his keen observation of nature, while also providing insight into his view of swordsmanship, is his painting of a cormorant (Figure 2). The long-necked bird is perched on a small ledge, no doubt over an unseen river, with a look of a Zen priest who has seen the Other Side.9

  Cormorant fishing was at one time a popular trade in the Far East and it can still be observed in some parts of China and Japan. In this practice, the fisherman goes out into the river at night with large lanterns or torches suspended from his boat. When fish, attracted by the lights, approach the boat, the fisherman “releases” his cormorants into the water to catch the fish. Throughout, the cormorants are leashed with cords around their necks that allow them to take fish into their beaks, but not to swallow them. Once the birds are retrieved, the fish are taken from their captors and placed in the hold.

  Musashi would have seen these birds many times in his travels about Japan—both wild and captive fishers—and likely saw them often on his walks along the Tsuboi River in Kumamoto. Surely he must have admired their skill and singleness of purpose. And he may very well have had an old Japanese phrase in mind when he first perceived one as a possible subject for his art. The phrase is worth remembering for both the sword practitioner and the layman:

  FIGURE 2. Cormorant by Miyamoto Musashi, signed Niten. Scroll. Ink on paper. 22 x 47 inches (56 x 119 cm). Eisei Bunko (collection of the Hosokawa family).

  The crow imitating the ways of a cormorant

  U no mane suru karasu

  A crow imitating a cormorant cannot swim and so will nearly drown. In the same way, every man should be true to his own craft or, in swordsmanship, his own talents and training. Musashi would have us be the cormorant if we are the cormorant, and the crow if we are the crow. On this principle stands life and death. As he wrote over and over again in The Book of Five Rings, “You should investigate this thoroughly.”

  Musashi’s painting of an owl on an oak tree may have been conceived with a related concept in mind. Musashi’s owl—a small horned owl called the konoha-zuku in Japanese (or in English, the Scops owl)—perches among a number of oak leaves, its eyes fixedly watching something below our sight and its ear tufts extended out to the sides, indicating a relaxed curiosity. This small owl—all of eight inches tall—would have wintered in Kumamoto and no doubt come to Musashi’s attention on the swordsman’s rambles along the river or other warmer paths.

  Owls are well known for their ability to strike silently. Musashi, however, may have been inspired for this work by a line from Ch’uang T’zu, a Chinese Taoist author from the third century B.C.E. whose writings were widely read by Zen adepts: “The horned owl catches fleas at night and can spot the tip of a hair, but when daylight comes, it cannot see a mound or a hill. This refers to a difference in nature.”10

  The cormorant and the owl both teach us that w
e all have different natures or abilities developed through our own training, and that we should be true to them. Musashi states this clearly in The Book of Five Rings: “Without imitating others, you should take what is appropriate to yourself and use a weapon you can handle. It is wrong for either general or soldier to have a preference for one thing and to dislike another. It is essential to make efforts in these things.”11

  Both of these paintings were executed to be kakejiku, or hanging scrolls, to be placed on the wall in the recessed alcove for tea houses or the like. Musashi, however, did not paint only on this small scale. In what was likely either a response to a request by one of the members of the Hosokawa clan or a gift to the same, Musashi illustrated two large folding screens, each about eleven-and-a-half feet long by five feet high, with flocks of geese among the reeds at the edge of a river.12 This is a monumental work that might have been ordered from a professional atelier and that demonstrates not only the high level of Musashi’s skill but also the degree to which his works were admired by the cultured Hosokawa.

  In these large-scale paintings, Musashi portrays the beauty of these birds and their social character as well. One of them is caught perfectly in mid-flight while being watched with intense interest by others in the flock. In China the goose was believed to have great spiritual qualities and was a symbol of the male principle. Such factors may have been considered by the Hosokawa, who were well acquainted with continental art, when they asked Musashi to do the work. At any rate, paintings of geese and reeds were popular among the Zen priests in China, and such paintings were among those brought to Japan in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Musashi surely encountered a number of these in his travels around the country.