Far Eastern Arts; 2; The Living Brush

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . of 3 ,000 years ago, saw a woman like this. Eventually, in its adaptation, first to the technique of stoning, graving, and later of brush painting, the character

became like this. That is, an abstract and conventional symbol, rather than an image. Now, we add to the woman her child, woman and child. What does the combination come to the Chinese? That which is desirable, to desire, to like, to be pleased, a certain happiness, no poet, no philosopher could express it better. Certainly, not more succinctly. Woman plus child equals happiness. This is a bird, a little simplified, very similar, by the way, to an Egyptian hieroglyphic for bird. Now, when we adapt this bird to the technique of writing

with a brush, it becomes like this. And now, we have to know what it means. We can no longer recognize it. It's head and it's plumage and it's feet. Now, we add to the bird a mountain there underneath. The meaning of the combination is rather peculiar and would not occur to us immediately. It means island, seafarers, birds are lighting, mountains rising from the watery horizon, birds on mountains. A tree is partly visible with its branches reaching up and partly invisible underground with its roots reaching down. In the pictograph, we see it all. Although, again, in the modern form, we have to guess. Now, how many pebbles make a heap? Anyway, in

Chinese, two trees. Two trees, one, and there's the other one, are sufficient to make a forest. Now, if you don't see the forest, it is obviously because of the trees. Now, let us add the bird to the tree, one bird to one tree, but then singular and plural do not exist in Chinese grammar. And therefore, one bird may mean many birds. Birds in a tree, this means collection, collection of poems, collection of sayings, and of proverbs. The sun, this is simply a circle, occupied with a dot, its piercing radiance. And the moon, the old pictograph is even more obvious. Now, sun and moon combined, what could this mean as a then bright or illustrious? In its Chinese pronunciation, Ming, this is the name of a famous dynasty, the

Ming dynasty of the painted vases. In Japanese, this character is pronounced May. It is the first part, for instance, of the name of Emperor May G, under whom, after 1867, the modern Japanese emperor system was established. Sun plus moon is shining bright. And we put the sun behind a tree, that means that the sun is just rising from the horizon. This then means east. West, by the way, is conveyed in a different image, the nesting bird. When the sun is setting, the bird comes to rest. And that, of course, is west. In recent years, a certain far Eastern philosophy, known to Japanese and

Americans, is Zen Buddhism or simply Zen, has become somewhat of an intellectual fashion. It is well known that the central concept and Zen Buddhism is a word that is usually rendered in English as nothing or nothingness. Let us take a look at this nothingness. Flames, the ancient image for fire, while it probably represents a fire spitting mountain, a volcano, the first and original contact, between men and fire. Now, we put these flames, which are still visible down there, under a faggot of wood. Obviously, connoting destruction. Now, nothingness may well be conceived in the image of destruction. We must also remember that the Buddhist concept of Nirvana is usually paraphrased as the extinction of the flames of human desire.

The great philosopher of Zen, Chinese of the early Middle Ages, gave himself the name No Gate. Here is the Gate. And here is his full name, No Gate in Chinese, movement in Japanese, Mu -Mong. Now, if you put an obstruction in the gate, it becomes a barrier in Chinese Kuan. Mu -Mong called his book Mu -Mong Kuan. Here you see it, and its old form is a personal seal. No Gate barrier. We do that once more. No Gate barrier. Like the wall of Kierkegaard, that is the borderline between God and man. If man wants to be in God, he must attain the other side of the wall, which has no opening. Wisdom, East and West

is the same. The image of the Gate provides us with two other very beautiful Chinese metaphors. We are looking at an ear, both in its old and very decorative semblance, and in its abstract form. And now, we stick our ear into the gate. We eavesdrop, we spy. What is the result of this? News, we have become news -gatherers, and we have become journalists. On the other hand, what would a tree and the gate signify? Neglect, slavonilus, abandonment, decrepitude, far from it? It means silence, leisure. That particular leisure, which from time immemorial, has been the fountain of wisdom. The wise man plants a tree in the gate and obstructs the traffic. The fool spends his

time busying himself with unnecessary occupations. This was hard work. We have tried to penetrate this almost impenetrable edifice, the Chinese language and system of communication. Now, we shall try to take a look at the act of writing itself. The far eastern calligraphist always writes in water -soluble ink on absorbent paper. He always uses a brush. The ink is not liquid to start with. It comes in little sticks, black or red. In order to make liquid ink, a special stone is necessary, an ink stone. The stone has a depression on its surface. Just large enough to contain just the quantity of ink the writer intends to use in one sitting. And what he doesn't use, he pours away. For the ink must

not be allowed to dry on the stone. Patiently, the writer robs his ink. This is something he always does himself. In robbing his ink, he gathers his thoughts and sets his mind for the creative act. Just as a pianist may walk up and down backstage and mumble words to himself before he appears and plays his concerto. The brush is bound in bamboo. As we shall see, there are many connections between calligraphy and bamboo. The brush is shaped so that when filled, it will make a point. Now, his brush is full and he is ready to write. He holds the brush very differently from the manner in which we hold a pen or pencil and looking at his hand position. It seems as if it were at first difficult to imagine the delicacy with which the

soft point of the brush is conducted and it's definitely three -dimensional journey. Dao, this complex character represents the central concept of a school of philosophy named after it, Daoism. We may translate it the way, the path, the road, but it has acquired high metaphysical significance and may be likened to the Greek word logus, which we usually translate as the word. Dao begets, this is a plant with a single symbolic leaf growing out of the earth, meaning generation, youth, begetting, growth, crescence. Dao begets one or oneness or unity or more primordially simply being. Now, this oneness, character for one repeated, begets, you will see this character again repeated. We are

obviously involved in a story about the making of the world itself, a creation myth, in fact. The oneness begets two or oneness or duality or conflict. Heaven and earth, mind and matter, male and female, light and darkness, the above and the below, the out and the in. From the beginning, the Chinese possessed a pair of concepts for this primordial duality. They called it the Yin and the Yang, where the Yin signifies the dark, the earthy, the nether, the female, nocturnal principle, and the Yang on the contrary, the light, the heavenly, upper, male and diurnal principle. This duality then begets, for we are not yet at the end of our creation story, the two begets, well, we can guess that, the three, the

Trinity. Men and women create the child, heaven and earth, contrive to bring forth man. The far eastern Trinity then is heaven, earth, man. Now what is there still to be created? It is the manyfold, the 10 ,000 things. The Trinity then, and again we see the character begets, or we might say, out of the Trinity, they come, and now the manyfold, rendered by two characters. First, the 10 ,000. Now this character, for 10 ,000 in its original form, represents a small insect, an ant, or something like that. An insect's team, they do not occur in less than 10 ,000. And 10 ,000 things, originally, things mean is a cow on the left side and an ox on the right. And the most important things to possess. From the eternal way,

there grows being. Out of being, there comes conflict and the balance of contrasts. Out of this, there arises a unified universe, the Trinity, and that is the origin of all things and of the manifold. I mentioned that calligraphy, that the bamboo has a close connection with calligraphy. In fact, the young calligraphic artist starts his career by exercises in which his subject matter for many, many lessons are the various shapes of the leaves and stems of the bamboo. The artist might well, in the fullness of his mastery, paint on the stone for the engraver to engrave his brush strokes after him. And for the modern art lever, 12 centuries later, to make a stone robbing of that ancient engraving of the more old master's

calligraphy, representing a young shoot of bamboo. And, of course, applied as it should be with his signature and his personal seal. I've mentioned seals before, and the far east seals take the place of personal signatures, and so are the means by which an ego asserts its identity. The seal itself is a piece of sculpture, often carved like a small monument of an animal, a lion or a deer. The engraving, of course, is on the underside. In using the seal, it is pressed like a rubber stamp into a sticky, red substance. The seal impression, and besides being a signature, may also serve as something like a personal inscription into a friend's guest book. It can even become a collector's item. People in the far east collect seal impressions as we collect stamps. The seal characters are so geometric and stylized that it is about as difficult to decipher them as it would be for

European tourists to read a Latin inscription in an old cemetery. But their abstract beauty has always appealed to the aesthetic sense of the Chinese and the Japanese. The material of these seals may be jade or marble or perhaps ordinary stone shaped outlessly or hardly shaped at all. Often these seals occur in twos or in threes containing the two or three names by which a painter or a calligraphic artist wishes to be known to the public and to posterity. Sometimes the material is rock crystal, the glass like mineral of a hardness second only to diamond. The engraving of rock crystal seals takes infinite labours and pains. I have invited you to take a new and perhaps a last look at this strange semantic universe which is

the Chinese system of writing. Last look well the forces of westernization and the exigencies of modern technology are not conducive to a living and the aesthetic realm living which has made possible this art and this system of communication over the last 30 centuries. Not that the shapes themselves need modernization, even the most abstract, even the most personal styles of calligraphy can be found distributed over the ages, over 2000 years. In the far eastern arts we move forward and backward without the well -defined awareness of period that characterizes the history of our western painting and sculpture and architecture. In the east there has never been a premium on originality or newness as

such and for its own sake imitation has never been despised. From the beginnings the far eastern creative personality has moved freely between the extremes of total self -abnegation and of the most sumptuous self -display. Excentricity has been regarded as a great virtue, independence is natural, even outrageous whimsicality not as necessarily insane. On the other hand discipline has been practiced to a degree hardly known by the occidental even during the age of monasticism and other worldliness. Chinese or Japanese to most of us an impenetrable realm but with little patience it might be possible to find a door in this high wall, a gate through which we may

enter the land in which birds on a mountain make an island, in which a woman and a child add up to happiness and in which a tree in the gate means leisure. That leisure which is the fountain of all wisdom. This

is NET, National Educational Television.