Way of the Brush. Fritz van Briessen
there are always interstices, and the edge of a chopper being without thickness, it remains only to insert that which is without thickness into such an interstice. By these means the interstice will be enlarged, and the blade will find plenty of room. It is thus that I have kept my chopper for nineteen years as though fresh from the whetstone.
"Nevertheless, when I come upon a hard part where the blade meets with a difficulty, I am all caution. I fix my eye on it. I stay my hand, and gently apply my blade, until with a hwah the part yields like earth crumbling to the ground. Then I take out my chopper, and stand up, and look around, and pause, until with an air of triumph I wipe my chopper and put it carefully away."
"Bravo!" cried the Prince."From the words of this cook I have learned how to take care of my life."
The second parable from Chuang-tzu concerns a certain "man from Ying" who had a scab on his nose no thicker than the wing of a housefly. He sent for a stonemason to have it cut away. The stonemason wielded his adze with such skill that afterwards the man's nose was quite unharmed, and he had not even changed color.
These and many other passages from Chuang-tzu have often been taken for Taoist parables. But, adequately interpreted, they have a much wider significance. They suggest that, although technical skill alone is not enough, a mastery of technique leads the artist beyond the material limitations of this world to a higher knowledge, a perception of Tao. So skill is not simply a necessary step toward Tao but rather a part of it. The command of technique leads, through assiduous practice, through the reconciling of the inward and outward, through the conquest of material difficulties, toward a final liberation. A mastery of technique that has become so instinctive that it is absolutely unconscious makes possible a transcending of technique, a liberation into the world of the mind and—from our point of view—into the world of art.
Just as brushwork and magic were earlier shown to be integrated, so now idea and execution, which on one level look like opposites, become identical on a higher level. And here we touch on a principle enunciated by Chuang-tzu and many other Chinese: the principle of the identity of opposites. This basic principle seems to be very typical of Chinese thought. It permeates Chinese philosophy, Taoist religion, Confucian ethics, and everyday life and language as well.
Within the philosophic sphere, the two contraries are known as Yang and Yin, the two primary elements, which are united on a higher level in the great creative principle of T'ai-chi, the father of all things. The contraries of Yang and Yin are found in a vast number of parallel contraries, of which we shall name only a few here: masculine and feminine, sun and moon, day and night, hard and soft, rise and fall, unyielding and yielding, solid and liquid. One cannot think of these separately. The one always posits the other, and the relationship of each to the other defines the limits of their influence, the resultant of the forces they exert on each other. This is Tao, two opposite forces in equilibrium, and hence reconciled.
That this philosophy remained influential in China right down to recent times is proved by countless word formations in colloquial Chinese which are fairly new. The word tung-hsi, a combination of the characters for east and west, means " the object "; that is, presumably, whatever lies between east and west, between the borders of the Chinese world. Ta-hsiao, a combination of big and small, means "size" or "format"; that is, the big-small. Yüan-chin, a combination of far and near, means "distance," particularly "perspective." There are numerous other examples.
The philosophy of the identity of opposites, this matter of equating contraries, penetrated to the furthest reaches and the minutest details of Chinese art. Indeed one might almost say that Chinese painting, particularly landscape painting, is a projection in visual terms of Chinese philosophy, or of the Chinese mind. It is a demonstration of the endless process of harmonizing opposites which goes on, producing ever new combinations.
This concept is found in the Chinese art vocabulary even on the purely material level. The brush stands for the masculine principle, the ink for the feminine. The brush is masculine, too, in relation to the feminine paper. The straight line is masculine; the hooked line is feminine. Then we have the brush held perpendicularly and the brush held at an angle, the linear and the nonlinear. These are only a few of the pairs of opposites which stem from the same principle.
The principle is also found at work in the way the Chinese critics classify paintings by their subject matter. The Chinese mind loves to catalogue and systematize, but always on the basis of recognized maxims. Some of the more important subject-matter categories of Chinese art will make this point clear.
Jen-wu is portrait painting; literally the term means " people and things," the contraries of animate and inanimate, what lives and what only exists. Ling-mao is animal painting; literally, "feather and fur," the contraries of the flying and the earth-bound. Ts'ao-ch'ung is the painting of insects and small plants; literally, "grass and insects." Like ling-mao, this last term refers to the contraries of things growing on the earth, bound to one place, and those creatures which fly freely.
The most interesting category, and for us the most important—because we are concerned here mainly with landscape painting—is the word shan-sh.ui. Translated literally, the two syllables mean "mountain and water," opposing what is hard, solid, and resistant in mountain and rock to the feminine element of water, which is yielding, pliant, and changing. Water obeys the laws of gravity and yet—this is a typically Chinese attitude—its ceaseless flux forms mountains and rocks and occasionally conquers them. Out of these fundamental opposites, Chinese landscape painting was born. It is an attempt to show in visual terms the identity of Yang and Yin, their interplay and their unity at a higher level. As will be seen later, this idea pervades the whole of Chinese landscape painting at all stages from the lowest to the peak. The world of art is held together by it, bound tightly by the invisible threads which run all through it.
WE HAVE EMPHASIZED THE UNITY OF IDEA and technique in Chinese painting, pointing out, in contrast, how preoccupied Western art is with the separate problem of technique. But this is in no way meant to belittle the importance of technique in Chinese painting. Quite to the contrary: when technique becomes so integrated with idea as to be practically an instinctive process, its role thereby evolves all the more decisively.
If what follows concentrates upon the technical aspect of Chinese painting, it is partly in recognition of this decisive importance and also partly because other aspects have already been thoroughly investigated by Western authors whose works are easily accessible. Chinese painting has been examined from the historical point of view, the aesthetic, and the philological, as well as from the viewpoint of its origins. But there has been no work which has had as its primary object an explanation of the techniques of Chinese painting. Most books have contented themselves with short comments on the special characteristics of Chinese technique, and these have, moreover, been vitiated by misunderstandings. This is natural enough. For the Chinese literature dealing with the problems of technique in painting is extremely vague in its terms and cannot be understood unless the reader already has not only a profound knowledge of the old masters and their techniques but also a wide practical experience in the use of the brush.
For the educated Chinese reader, the technique of brush handling presents no problem at all, because he has learned from his childhood to write with brush and India ink, and perhaps even to paint with them. By the time he develops a critical appreciation of the art of his own people, or has the confidence to set his creative ideas down on paper or silk, he has already had fifteen or twenty years of experience with the brush. Thus for every Chinese artist or writer on art, the use of brush and ink has been, from the beginning of his career, a part of his very being, an instinct of his wrist, a spontaneous, intuitive ability to express his innermost thoughts and feelings.
A Westerner who tries to translate Chinese documents on art therefore finds himself in a labyrinth and manages to worm his way out only by desperate measures. These include both mistranslation, which, though not necessarily deliberate, may be due to a failure to understand, and misinterpretation, which may result from the application of Western categories of thought