Mind Walking Through a Landscape

Mind Walking Through a Ch’an Landscape Painting
(Taoist Thought and Ch’an painting)

Standing in front of a Chinese Ch’an landscape painting, I take a deep breath and mentally walk into it. Dark clouds, thunderous moments ago, show glimpses of bright sky. Pouring rain changes to a drizzle. The moistened air smells of pine. I cross a bridge and walk towards the foothills of a formidable mountain through the everlasting pines. A path through the pine forest reveals a waterfall. Over to the left, emerges a distant valley. I am drawn into the scene as I descend the winding path and reach the edge of a stream. A ferryboat glides me through the water. I pass a village and notice, behind a veil of mist and above the treetops, the roof of a monastery. I get down from the boat and saunter in that direction. A monk invites me in. I sit, fan myself and drink tea in the company of monks.

I return to nature. Like fish in the stream, and clouds and birds in the sky I have my place. Nature continues to unfold; scenery changes and I discover fresh beauty at every step. I climb a mountain, ride a buffalo, carry a bundle, sail a boat, and like the rest of the beings, let te, the power of the eternal Tao, work through me. Like a Taoist temple that is nestled against the hills, recessed backwards and under the trees, I blend in with the environment. Although I’m an integral part of the landscape, I’m its miniscule component.

The painter/sage, the maker of this landscape, only paints certain key details–those moments when he glimpsed eternity. The key to receiving insight is simplicity and naturalness. The Ch’an painter sits for days or months in the landscape, losing himself in the natural surroundings. He becomes the mountain, the waterfall, the pine or the cherry blossom. The unessential blurs into obscurity. Back in his residence he makes spontaneous strokes with black ink laden brush and paints what he has embodied within–the mountain-ness, the pine-ness, the water-ness–the essence of all that he meditated upon earlier.

The painter pours the same energy on white silk that the nature quickens him with. He is not concerned with “framing” the landscape. He knows he can never make a “complete” picture because he can never know everything. His emphasis is on solitude, spontaneity and freeing the mind of material dross. He seems to have compressed silence, beauty and grandeur of nature in a space that is simultaneously present and infinite. What he has expressed is not an imitation of the veil of the mist, solidity of the mountain, the fall of the water, the wisp of the wind, gentle ripples of the stream but what he felt when he observed them with his keen sight.

For a few moments, the imaginary journey makes me forget my mundane day-to-day troubles. I feel the essence of nature as it slowly unfolds its beauty. An imaginary journey through Chinese Ch’an landscapes, painted between the ninth and tenth centuries, takes me out of myself and puts me in touch with my inner self.

(My three favorite Chinese landscapes are painted in black ink on hanging scrolls. They were painted during Northern Sung Dynasty and include “Buddhist Temple in the Hills after Rain” attributed to Li Ch’eng, “Traveling amid Mountain and Gorges” by Fan K’uan, and “Early Spring” by Kuo Hsi.)