A Chikuto Landscape: Ruminations by Zen priest & scholar Glenn Taylor Webb

Mountainous landscapes with tiny human figures (or none at all) can be found in paintings from various times in Western (i.e., European) art. But they are rare, whereas they are ubiquitous in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese painting history. Keeping in mind what I have just written in the previous paragraph (Man in the East and God in the West), it is perhaps less shocking to remind ourselves that the subjects of most Far Eastern paintings are indeed mountains, whereas most subjects of Western paintings are people. If landscape paintings are ubiquitous to the East, figure paintings are ubiquitous to Western art.

I’ve tried to account for at least part of why that should be so, without taking on more generalizations than necessary. One of course must be careful not to jump to conclusions about what paintings of any place or age may mean to the artists or to the people viewing them. There is a difference between art history and art appreciation. Some old books on the subject of Chinese landscape painting, written by Western scholars, have missed that difference when they make value judgements about the “originality” of one work or another. But if we look at Chinese-style landscape paintings in general, there are basically two types of landscapes at issue: philosophical and narrative. The message of one is vague, the message of the other is immediately apparent.

The Chikuto landscape belongs to the former, which is by far the more numerous type. Its origins can be traced all the way back to the 7th century, but its closest ancestors are Yuan Dynasty works by artists such as Ni Tsan (1301-1374), whose birth name (倪瓚)

Ni Tsan was from a landowning, wealthy, educated family. As such, he was typical of the Chinese literati painters of his day, who took special pride in not being professional court artists. The Mongols of the Yuan Dynasty had just overrun the country, in the mid-1350s, deposing the last Song emperors and all their competitors from rival Chinese families. Similar but much smaller invasions by non-Han-Chinese had taken place earlier in Chinese history, but this one by the Khans would change China forever. All of the Song Dynasty literati, thousands of whom were magistrates and social dignitaries, suddenly had nothing to offer foreign invaders, even if asked. A small group did help the Mongol rulers learn Chinese ways, and they painted landscapes, but in the “antique” style of earlier times (a style that Ni Tsan made famous.)

Frankly, from ancient times these men considered themselves in touch with what they considered the universe in themselves, and thus far more advanced than illiterate, ordinary Chinese. So how could they do anything but shun Mongol barbarians? Our first real evidence of Chinese literati is with the “Orchid Pavilion Scroll” of Wang Hsi-chih (Wang Xizhi), which commemorates a party he gave in 352, for his fellow poet-scholars. The original scroll is said to have been buried with the emperor, but Wang’s calligraphy has been preserved in stone rubbings that are the model that every Japanese calligraphy teacher I know uses for students to copy.

The party at the Orchid Pavilion was held in a famous garden with a meandering stream running through it. The scroll itself consisted of Wang’s preface and careful transcription of all the poems written by the guests. Servants are said to have set cups of rice wine on trays that floated down the stream, and each participant was to write a poem about enlightenment after drinking each cup of wine. For obvious reasons, enlightenment was sometimes confused with drunkenness. (Indeed, the 8th-century poet Li Po is said to have drowned after a night of drinking, when he jumped from a boat into the moon’s reflection in a river.)

In T’ang times, views of Daoist and Confucian enlightenment were expanded by Ch’an/Zen priests who followed the fierce meditation regimen of the 6th-century Indian Buddhist priest Bodhidharma, whose arrival in China had challenged the Chinese emperor himself. Within a decade the court had adopted the new form of Buddhism as the state religion. It was then that the stories of famous Chinese Zen priests were collected and used to inspire young novices in Buddhist temples.

Technically, all paintings of the Orchid Pavilion story belong to the type of Chinese-style landscape paintings that I have labeled “narrative” paintings. These paintings may contain geographical elements, such as the mountainous setting of the garden, but the stream and poets on its banks in this case, place the story front and center. Another famous story that Chinese literati sometimes paint is the one depicting the “Peach Blossom Spring” that was discovered by a lowly Chinese fisherman. Somewhat like Rip Van Winkle, who lost his way in a New York state forest before the American Revolution, got drunk with a group of forest-dwellers (Indians?) there, went to sleep, and only woke up 20 years later, long after the war was over.

In the case of the Chinese fisherman, he lost his way home in a maze of river routes, only to find a village of happy people living in eternal springtime, with peach trees always in bloom. He, too, lost track of time, but after many years decided to say goodbye and return home. There he told people of the Peach Blossom Spring, and set out with them, hoping to share paradise with them. But he never found it again, and he had to live out his days together with his friends in his old village. The literati interpretation of this story is that anyone may reach enlightenment, a full perception of the way things are (in the peach-tree springtime), but sharing it with others is impossible.

While I was doing my doctoral research in Kyoto, in the sixties, I met many Japanese literati painters. One of them lived near our house, between Kamigoryo Shrine and Doshisha University. His name was Kohno Shuson 河野秋邨 (1890- 1987). At the time my wife and I, and our 4-year-old son, were living in the house of the late great Zen scholar, Abe Masao, who introduced me to Master Shuson (which means “Autumn Village”) on one of our walks. We spent most of the afternoon in his spacious studio, which doubled as a Zendo (meditation hall) for his students. As we left he gave me three of his small works.

Two of them are landscapes in rich black ink. One has a path on the left, leading up to a plateau between two mountain peaks that soar upward off the border of the painting. Trees and possible shelters dot the lower mountain tops. A pale pink wash on the path seems to indicate where human beings might find footing. The signature reads Shajin Shuson (謝人秋邨), “Grateful Man, Autumn Village” – two names he most often used to sign his works.

The other landscape has almost the same composition, of perhaps the same mountain location up closer. But this time we can clearly identify two shelters on the plateau and a bridge, as well as what may be the top stairs of the path. Most importantly, there is an intriguing title in addition to his names (reversed, in this case, to Shuson Shajin), which reads, “Mountains Reveal White Clouds, Clouds Reveal Mountains” (山吐白雲雲吐山), with “reveal” being a polite way of saying “spit out” or “vomit.”

The third little painting, of a Japanese raku teabowl, was done on the spot just for me, urging me to add tea practice to my practice of Zen in Kyoto’s Zen temples. He used the phrase, well used in Japan, “Tea and Zen taste the same” (茶禅同味). At the time (1965) I had no intention of adding the so-called Japanese tea ceremony to my schedule, but in 1970, when I began bringing UW students to Kyoto on the UW study-abroad program, I followed Kohno’s advice.

Sen Soshitsu XV, now retired head of the 500-year-old Urasenke school of tea, recommended teachers for my students. In 1980, Dr. Sen offered to help the city of Seattle rebuild a teahouse in the arboretum, and also offered to train me and my wife and son Reg on the family estate. Thirty years later I became the president of the LA association of Urasenke, a post I now hold in honorary (名誉) status. So I hope the grateful man from the autumn village is listening. His little painting of a teabowl also bears his name, along with a two-character title, “Packed with Silence” (詰閑), with “silence” a euphemism for full awareness.

Up until his death, Kohno Shuson was on the board of the Japanese literati artists association. After assuming my post in the School of Art at the UW, I arranged for Mr. Kohno and his fellow artists to have an exhibit in Seattle on the university campus, in August 1978. Fifteen of them came, each sending one of their works in advance with information that I included in a catalogue. The men spent a week at a nearby hotel, at their own expense, and I enjoyed taking them different places, where they sketched everything in sight.

Unfortunately, one of them, Master Tsukiori Shinko (月居宸光), had his passport stolen from his room. It took another week, after the others had returned to Japan, for it to be replaced. So he stayed with us in our home in Redmond, which had a backyard that looked out on a dense forest. His full name means something like “Moon-Dwelling Emperor of Light” and as such, he spent many hours painting the forest, the moon, crickets, and a wildly blooming bush-clover in our garden that he said reminded him of Kyoto.

As for my landscape painting by Chikuto, the sight of it always makes me think of a former UW student of mine, Kawasaki Kazuhiro (who went by “Hiro” then, as he still does.) Hiro was in the graduate program in Japanese art history, and one of the students I challenged to work with me on a wonderful collection of Japanese paintings that a former teacher of mine in Kyoto, the late Mori Toru, had helped gather for the Fred an Isabel Pollard Collection in the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, in British Columbia. For months my team worked on English essays that would help visitors understand what they were looking at. We piled onto the ferry that took us over to Vancouver many times. It was a wonderful time.

The catalogue – JAPANESE ART — was published in 1972, under my name and the names of John Vollmer and Colin Graham, of the Royal Ontario Museum and the Art Gallery, respectively. My students, besides Hiro, were Jin K. Lee, William Rathbun, Mark Sandler, Yuri Takahashi, and Carla Zainie. The articles they wrote bear their initials. I just read them again, and they are even better than I had remembered.

Sadly, I have lost touch with most of those students, two of whom (Mark and Yuri) are dead. But when I started looking at my Chikuto landscape the other day, the first person who came to my mind was Hiro. So I called him at his old number, and it worked! After explaining why I was calling, we talked about the catalogue. Hiro wrote six catalogue entries, including one on a landscape painting by Chikuto. He mentions that Chikuto painted this work (No. 21 in the catalogue) in the autumn of 1842, in the manner of Huang Kung-wang (1269-1354), who like Ni Tsan is considered one of the great masters of the literati painting tradition in China.

Unlike my black-ink-on-white-paper Chikuto, the Victoria Gallery Chikuto is almost colorful, with a pale yellowish caste to the paper, and pale pink and blue washes accentuating block-like shapes of boulders that (in Hiro’s words) “pile up and merge together to produce a quivering effect across the painting’s surface.” The lighter touch of the brush strokes also adds to the overall “unstable and almost transient quality” of this painting when compared to the robust brushwork of my Chikuto. The lone human figure waiting in the open thatched hut in the right is invisible until scrutinized closely, in contrast to the almost cartoonish figures in my painting.

Still, for all their differences, I find these two paintings to be more alike than not. I see them as I would two performances of the same piano concerto by two different pianists, their interpretations dependent on their feelings at the time, and maybe on the attention of the people in the audience. Painters and musicians alike must do what they do best to protest the utter ignorance of the misbegotten world they find themselves in, a world that in spite of everything, is of their own making. But I am not so naïve as to believe the efforts of artists can really change the direction of history.

As a matter of fact, none of the masters of the arts in the history of the world have been able to do that. Chinese literati painters, as strong as their expressions of displeasure with their government were, could not hold back or change their Mongol, Manchu or Maoist opponents’ policies. And the glorious music of German composers not only did not stop Hitler, it was appropriated by him and used against them. But we live in a different time. Revolutions have gradually produced democratic governments of various construction, which have been able to actually dismantle dictatorships. We seem to be forgetting that.

Looking at these old paintings has taught me many lessons, including some that came from my own interaction with the people now as well as then. In my old age those lessons were surprising and maybe the only ones that matter. Life is miraculous. But the political activism that is available to me now, and to all Americans and people of other nations who will stand up for democratic values, must not be squandered. I see those values, which I consider to be as close to ultimate reality as anything else, being squandered by people who say we cannot do anything.

We should criticize Christians for supporting Trump’s anti-Muslim stance; we should call anyone out who tolerates Trump because he thinks women who have abortions “should be punished” or who applies ancient Near Eastern laws that tell slaves to obey their masters and condemns homosexuality. The Japanese attitude of “nothing can be done” (shoganai), may seem like Buddhist doctrine. But it is not. It certainly did not prevent the militarization of Japan in the 1930s. Similarly, some Zen students today, whose mistaken view of emptiness has robbed them of their voice and ability to act, are infected with helplessness. This is wrong. This is not using skillful means. This is not compassion. This must not be the direction my world takes before I say goodbye.

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Dr. Glenn Taylor Webb was born in Lawton, Oklahoma in 1935. At the age of 3, he started learning classical piano, which he continued, reaching the highest level of national competition. He studied in New York with Julliard teachers and gave recitals around the country, until the age of 17. During one of his recitals in New York, he met Daisetsu Suzuki, who first brought Zen Buddhism from Japan to the West. Dr. Suzuki’s world view inspired Webb’s interest in Japanese studies and religious studies.

Dr. Webb attended Abilene Christian University in Texas, where he met and married his wife, Carol St. John. He graduated with a BA in Art and Religion in 1957, after which he was a graduate fellow for a year at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Supported for the next 7 years by U. S. National Defense Foreign Language grants, he studied Japanese language and culture in the Art History and East Asian Studies Program at the University of Chicago, where he earned a Masters degree. In 1964, Dr. Webb won a Fulbright Scholarship, which allowed him to pursue doctoral work at Kyoto University for two years. There, Dr. Daisetsu Suzuki, whom he had met at 16, became his mentor, along with other prominent Japanese scholars. Webb additionally trained in Buddhist temples to gain a deeper understanding of Buddhist teachings and was even ordained in the Rinzai Zen priesthood. Along with his wife, Carol, he also began studying Urasenke chanoyu, and they both became accredited instructors. After returning to the States, Dr. Webb earned a PhD in East Asian studies from the University of Chicago, with his dissertation entitled Japanese Scholarship on Momoyama Culture.

In 1966, Dr. Webb began teaching full time at the University of Washington’s School of Art and Jackson School of International Studies. He co-directed the Center for Asian Arts and promoted cultural exchange between the United States and Japan. One of his projects was running the Kyoto Program, wherein University of Washington students studied in Kyoto under the foremost figures in Japanese traditional arts. In 1970, Dr. Webb published his first book, “The Arts of Japan – Medieval to Modern,” based on the work of renowned art historian Seiroku Noma. To further students’ study of Zen and chanoyu, Dr. Webb established the Seattle Zen Center, which is still in operation today. He also worked to incorporate the study of chanoyu into the curriculum of the University of Washington, laying the first foundation of today’s vibrant chanoyu community in Seattle.

Dr. and Mrs. Webb moved to Malibu, California in 1987, where he undertook the directorship of the Institute for the Study of Asian Cultures (ISAC) at Pepperdine University. While there, Dr. Webb invited many leaders of Buddhist groups, including the Los Angeles Zen Center and the Jodo and Nichiren Temples to speak at Pepperdine. He also invited the Bukkyo University in Kyoto to bring its students for visits to Pepperdine’s Malibu campus, promoting the cultural exchange between Japan and the United States. Even after his retirement in 2004 and his move to Palm Desert, Dr. Webb has continued to maintain a strong connection with Bukkyo University in Kyoto and Los Angeles, in which he serves as academic advisor and visiting professor.

Finally, as Emeritus Professor, Dr. Webb maintains a relationship with Pepperdine University, and both of the Webbs have been actively involved in the Urasenke Tankokai Los Angeles Association since they moved to Southern California. After serving as a president for 12 years, Dr. Webb is now the association’s honorary president. But the true legacy of Dr. Webb’s career is found in the large number of students he has touched – in both Japan and America – during his 50 years of teaching.