Tiger Paintings - a martial dimension

 

Maruyama Okyo (1733-1795)

 

If you were to make a list of typical ‘oriental’ motifs associated with the martial arts, tigers might come somewhere near the top. Not surprisingly, given their strength and ferocity, they have an obvious appeal to those involved in fighting arts. In China, they have provided inspiration for whole systems, as well as components and techniques in many others. 

 

While tigers are native to China, that is not the case with Japan, so there the attitudes and lore concerning these animals is primarily Chinese in origin. In art, as I mentioned in my previous post, early examples of tiger paintings from the continental mainland became models that Japanese artists were to copy for centuries.

 

Chinese C13th - possibly by Muqi
(from the collection of the
Tokugawa Museum, Nagoya)

Traditional Chinese painting (and thus Japanese, too) can be seen as taking a different approach from western art (or at least western art from the renaissance onwards). The cultural concerns of these two streams of art dictated different interests : although both were concerned with depicting reality at a deeper than simply surface level, they differed on what this reality was, their art emphasising themes that had the greatest resonance in each respective culture. 

 

In the west, stylistic developments were connected with increasingly close observation of subjects, combined with an interest in science, particularly optics, but also mathematics, harmonic scales, and anatomy. Developments in these areas can be seen in paintings from the Renaissance onwards. Artists developed an interest in depicting forms ‘in the round’, and utilising their knowledge of perspective, anatomical accuracy, proportion and harmony in composition, as well as the use of camera obscura and other optical aids. Chinese and Japanese artists were also interested in the natural world, but they were less interested in exact physical appearances rather than the spirit of their subjects, including such qualities as strength, softness, and flexibility. This, in turn, required the artist summoning up something of that quality in himself and imparting that during the execution of the work.

 

Rubens' Tiger Hunt (1616-17). The painter's concern
with the accurate physical representation of the tiger
is clear.

Knowing this suggests there may be more to Japanese depictions of tigers than meets the eye. At different periods, different styles are evident, but until relatively modern times, realism was not a primary concern. Certain features are repeated: the glaring eyes; the prominent eyebrows, the rhythmic line of the body, heavy paws, bristling whiskers and sinuous tail, and the stripes that both describe and break up the curves of the body. Rather than depicting a body of flesh and bone, many paintings seem to show a ripple of supple energy in a striped coat. 

Kano Sanraku (1559-1635) A contemporary
of Rubens, but with different artistic concerns.

 

Kano Michinobu (1730-1790)
In this later work from the Kano school,
the spirit of the tiger seems quite different.

This may very well be a personal interpretation, and it might be misleading to see Japanese painters as having particular insight into the kinds of energies of interest to bugeisha without any further evidence. Tigers had a range of widely accepted symbolic meanings, some of which were certainly applied to the manners and attitudes of classical bushi. These included the ideas of preparedness (a tiger always sharpens his claws) and virtue (tigers keep their claws sheathed and hide themselves away in bamboo thickets, not outwardly displaying their prowess or threatening others), as well as power and ferocity, and it is highly likely that both the painters and their audience would have had no problem seeing the paintings as illustrative of these. (I discussed an example of this kind of symbolism here).

From Nijo Castle - a sharp-clawed tiger

 

There is another area where the symbolism would have been recognisable to members of the warrior class, especially the higher ranking members, and this is the realm of military strategy; in particular, military divination.

 

Military divination is an area that has seen little research among modern historians, tainted as it is with the whiff of superstition. Nonetheless, it was given serious consideration by those involved in warfare. The link with art comes through research into the work of the 16^thcentury monk-painter Sesson Shukei (ca.1492-1577), and has only recently come to light.

 

Sesson was unusual as a painter; although he was highly accomplished, he did not work in nor had he ever visited the capital, Kyoto, but was based to the east, largely in the Kanto region around Odawara, another burgeoning cultural centre. Sesson travelled a fair bit, not that unusual for monks, from his birthplace in present-day Fukushima down to the Kamakura and Odawara area, and built up connections to several networks of learning, notably his Zen lineage and also the Ashikaga Academy, a center for studying Confucianism, medicine, strategy and I-ching divination, whose graduates often found employment from warlords as advisors, negotiators and diviners, skills that were much in demand in those unsettled times. Not all the roles were military – Confucianism was seen as an important tool of governance and experts who were well versed in these teachings were valuable – but military divination was also one of the valued skill sets.

 

Sesson’s travels took him close to the academy, and several of his works are based on themes closely aligned to its Confucian teachings. It would not have been surprising if he attended lectures there. His mentor and possibly dharma master, Keijo Shisui, had known connections with the academy, while the head of the academy, Kyuka, served Hojo Ujiyasu, the powerful lord of Odawara (and rival of Takeda Shingen and Uesugi Kenshin) and it was for Ujiyasu that Sesson painted his screen painting, Dragon and Tiger, (now in the Cleveland Museum of Art. There is another by him or his studio in the Nezu Museum, Tokyo). 

 

Sesson's Dragon (painted between 1546 -1556) -
perhaps the most human of dragons I have seen.
Note the powerful forces that swirl around the dragon,
obscuring and revealing its form. (click on the picture to see
a larger version)

Sesson's Tiger may look playful (Sesson's distance from
the cultural centre, Kyoto, meant he 
did not have access to the more famous models
of dragon and tiger painting), but it crouches,
waiting patiently for the opportune moment,
resisting the strong winds all the while.

For an artist interested in philosophical concepts of being and nothingness and the mutability of form and phenomena, sumi-e is a particularly apt medium. It is hard not to imagine such an artist embuing his works with aspects of his learning in these areas. The art historian Yukio Lippit sees Sesson’s Dragon and Tiger as an explicit representation of this knowledge – in particular, they show the interplay of yin and yang as represented by the tiger and the dragon. For a student of the I-ching, the world is in a state of dynamic flux, constantly generating and regenerating. The dragon, Lippit explains, illustrates the spacial element: visibility and invisibility – “states of exposure and hiddenness”, calling to mind the constantly changing dynamic of advantage and strategic opportunity. The tiger shows the temporal element: waiting, reading the situation, knowing how to choose action or inaction. For men such as Ujiyasu, all this would have been readily understandable. Lippit goes on to suggest a similar connection in Kaiho Yusho’s dragon paintings, as well as other dragon and tiger screens of the Muromachi and early Tokugawa periods.

Kaiho Yusho (1533-1615). One of a pair of dragon paintings
from Kitano Tenmangu Shrine, Kyoto. Looming from
the mists, it suggests the interplay of the visible
and the hidden. Kaiho Yusho was from a warrior family
and maintained contacts among the powerful members of that class. 

 

All of this is fascinating to me, as I had always felt (or imagined?) these works to embody some kind of deeper understanding related to the mix of spiritual and martial teachings that were connected to the traditional bugei. As yet, there has been little work on this area – Lippit’s own work is very recent – but I look forward to discovering more. I recommend this lecture by Lippit from early 2021 for those who want to know more. (The observations on military divination that I summarised above begin around the 30 minute mark).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voIECq_k1xE).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Happy New Year 2022 - Year of the Tiger

A rather friendly looking tiger from the Kano school

A Happy New Year to all my readers! 2021 has been a far less productive year than I had hoped, but fingers crossed that 2022 will be better. Japan having adopted a cross between the western and Chinese New Years, January 1st sees the start of the year of the Tiger, the perfect opportunity to take a look at tigers as the subject of traditional Japanese painting.

Tiger paintings have a long history in Japan, but the motif and much knowledge and lore concerning this most Asian of animals came from the mainland, especially China. Korea, of course, had a strong tradition of tiger painting, and this was also a major influence on Japanese artists.

Artists on the mainland had an advantage in that they may have had the opportunity to see live tigers. This was not the case in Japan, where the work of previous artists served as models. At least one famous artist (Maruyama Okyo) went as far as to buy the skin of a tiger to use as a model and this is probably as close to a real tiger as many artists would have come until the late C19th.

Japanese tigers come in many forms, and were used as a motif on hanging scrolls, folding screens and sliding doors, sometimes covering all four walls of a room. The necessary element of the imagination served to give the best of these images an impressive sense of energy and an identity and charm all of their own.  

This painting by Muqi, was the inspiration
for many later Japanese painters

The Chinese painter Muqi (Mokkei) (1210?-1269?) seems to have provided the initial models of tigers for Japanese artists. Not coincidentally, he also provided the first known example (in Japan) of the dragon and tiger motif. A Zen monk as well as a painter, Muqi seems to have been the master of a thriving atelier, and some of the work attributed to him may well be from the hand of painters who worked under him. His work was not regarded as highly in his homeland as it was in Japan - and the pieces held by the great Japanese Zen institutions of the time are among the finest examples of his work.

Not a great reproduction, but it shows the dragon
tiger pairing. You can also see the poetic lines about clouds
and wind at the bottom of each painting.

This pairing of the dragon and the tiger is rich in symbolism. Together, they represent the balance of forces in nature, the yang dragon in the sky also represents spring, while the yin tiger on the ground is a symbol of autumn. They are also associated with the clouds and wind respectively, and bamboo in the case of the tiger. This is an early association – the most famous pair of Muqi’s dragon and tiger paintings (see above) bear the lines ‘The dragon soars and brings the clouds; the tiger's roar, the ferocious winds’. The two creatures are always pictorially balanced, with the tiger at the bottom left (in early paintings this seems to be an invariable rule) and the dragon the top right. There is, too, the yin within yang and vice versa: although soaring in the clouds, the dragon has risen from the depths of the sea; similarly, while land bound, the tiger is associated with the mountains, and thus there is an acknowledgement of the opposite within each image. Both of them represent power, and they were often used to refer to well-matched opponents whose strength lay in different areas. A good example of this is the two well-known rival warlords, Uesugi Kenshin and Takeda Shingen, both among the strongest generals of the Sengoku period, though different in their personalities. They were known as the Dragon of Echigo and the Tiger of Kai.

Tigers pop up quite a bit in Zen, and this may help to explain why they became popular with Zen temples. As well as the works of Muqi, many of the earlier hanging scrolls and screens were painted by monk painters. The late Muromachi period saw the proliferation of professional painting studios, principally those of the Kano, who produced decorative schemes with whole rooms or suites of rooms being given over to tigers (amongst other motifs). These include the temples of Nanzen-ji, Manshu-in and Eikando in Kyoto, where they can still be seen in their somewhat faded but nonetheless impressive glory. These schemes were adopted from the warlords of the period, and it is easy to see why the military class would favor this symbol of power and control.

Nijo Castle - an old picture showing the original paintings. 

The virtuous, upright bamboo is clearly visible.

Nijo Castle in Kyoto offers a fine example of the warlords’ taste, although the original paintings are no longer in situ, having been replaced with newly painted copies. (I also wrote about this here: http://ichijoji.blogspot.com/2020/06. The symbolism is not subtle and it is used in the service of power, both legitimizing and intimidating visitors to the rooms. The visitors would be visiting lords, and the intention was not only to awe them with the trappings of power and wealth, underlining the visitors' own vulnerability, but to reinforce the message with specific reference to the motifs in the decorations.

Nijo Castle - a male and female 'tiger'

While the tiger represents power and ferocity - military virtues - a ruler should also be virtuous, an attribute which is signalled by the bamboo, which grows upright and remains unchanging, true to its nature, throughout the seasons. It also possesses the flexibility required of a virtuous ruler. As well as tigers, we can also see leopards (which were thought to be female tigers) in some of the rooms. This was no accident, but a reference to mating and thus the continuation of the shogun’s line.

Nanzenji - although a Zen temple, it adopted the motifs of the military class.

Temples also employed the same artists. There may be a greater emphasis on

the peaceful nature of the tigers in the temple scenes, but I wouldn't bet on it.

The intention to intimidate is obvious in the case of the bushi class, but in the grand decorative schemes in Zen temples, the meaning is a little less apparent. As noted before, tigers do crop up in Zen writings: the enlightened man is likened to a dragon in the depths or a tiger in its mountain fastness, serenely confident and at ease in his own attainment. While this might do for personal contemplation, they were also a means of impressing visitors. Partly, this would have been allowing them the pleasure and privilege of seeing such fine works of art. It also served to underline the importance of the abbot (and his temple) in having access to the very best in artists - the same ones, in fact, that were employed by the highest and most powerful figures in the realm. Religious institutions, it must not be forgotten, were very much a part of the body politic, and their abbots were powerful figures.

There is much more to be said of tiger paintings, and in the next post I intend to look a little closer at some of the major styles in Japan, as well as a recently discovered and deeper role in the arts of war.

More about this one in the next post.

The Wagtails Sing - when nature meets a sword school

 

Seen in a shop window - Wagtail on a Lotus Leaf
attributed to Sesshu

The traditional Japanese calendar was a complicated thing. In addition to the 12 months, auspicious and inauspicious days (still consulted, especially for weddings) there were also 24 months or mini seasons and also 72 micro seasons. I don’t know how widespread the observance of these micro seasons was – I imagine more so in literary circles…or perhaps only there, and knowledge of them is certainly not part of everyday life nowadays, but occasionally something happens to remind you of them.

Passing by an antique shop last month, I caught sight of an unusual painting – a work in ink depicting a wagtail on a dead lotus leaf. There is something about good sumi-e that draws you in, a living quality in the surface of the paper, the subtleties of the ink, the effect of age and decay as well. And it was clear that this was an old piece from the color and quality of the paper. The signature declared it to be by Sesshu, the doyen of Japanese painters, regarded as both the root and the highest exemplar of the style – I could not say if it was genuine, but it certainly looked to be at least 400 years old to my eyes.

Sesshu's signature...it must be genuine!!?

The age itself gives a work a certain frisson, and the subject was of interest, too, wagtails being an almost daily sight on the edges of the city. While not common (I don’t remember having seen an example before) the theme is not without precedent. In particular, there is a work by Muqi (J. Mokkei) of this subject, which I suspect became the model for this motif. Of course, unlike several other works of his that served as models for themes in Japanese paintings (his dragon and tiger, long-armed monkey (gibbon)), artists could see the subject for themselves and, perhaps, felt no need to copy his composition.

Muqi's verson of the wagtail on 
a withered lotus leaf (Courtesy of
the MOA, Tokyo)

The wagtail and the dead lotus are both symbols of the turn of the seasons as summer gives way to the early days of autumn, but the display of the painting was more deliberate than that. Sekirei Naku (wagtails call) is the name of one of the micro seasons (September 13-17), and wouldn't you know it, that was exactly the time the painting was on display. Those more attuned to the lore of Japanese poetics would, no doubt, have realised this straight away.

The wagtail itself is a common bird throughout Japan – certainly in Kansai. Their distinctive movement not only earned them their name in English, but lent its name to a sword technique that is particularly associated with the Hokushin Ittō-ryū and from there it came into kendo. There it seems to have become a descriptive term for an up-and-down movement of the tip of the sword (kissaki), with no clear consensus on the precise usage. However, it is still preserved in the Hokushin Ittō-ryū.

Sekirei no ken, as the technique is known, relies on the sensitivity of the kissaki and the ability to threaten an attack that cannot be accurately predicted. This may involve subtle movement of the tip of the sword, directing the i of the wielder, thus giving it its name. In kendo, this has become an up and down motion with the general aim of confusing the opponent.

The Hokushin Ittō-ryū is not the only school to make use of this kind of movement of the kissaki - an up-and-down movement was also used by the Kage-ryū, for example. In fact, it would probably be safe to say that every well-developed school of swordsmanship had teachings on the use of the tip of the sword, and there are probably more similarities than differences between the different schools. But the Hokushin Ittō-ryū is the only traditional school I know that uses the imagery of the wagtail for their technique. 

(Written on the last day of 'The ground starts to freeze').

This is the mokuroku (transmission document)
 awarded to Sakamoto Ryoma, a famous practitioner
of the Hokushin Ittō-ryū

Miyamoto Musashi's squirrel – samurai wordplay

Musashi's Squirrel and Grapes (cut off slightly on the right)

The bushi were a cultured lot – some of them, anyway – and Japan was a cultured society. Nowadays, when we look at the art of great civilisations, we tend to value it for its beauty – indeed, that is one of the things that attracts us to art in many of its forms. However, there is a lot more to art than that (as a cursory glance at any display of contemporary art will tell us) – and there always was. 

As a form of communication, art has messages and meanings beyond the aesthetic. Its value as a didactic and political tool was well understood by the rich and powerful of feudal Japan. Decorative schemes in castles, temples and residences contained subtle and not so subtle messages that their audiences were practiced in reading. They were messages about power, morals, aspiration – the usual things. The artists might also include details pointing to their lineage, linking to well-known works, thus emphasising the connection with more famous predecessors. (This was happening in the Kano school, where the sidelined Kyoto branch thought it necessary to point out that they were just as much, if not more, worthy successors to the Kano tradition than the politically favoured blood descendants of the founder who ran the Edo branch – their paintings were also beautiful, as you can see here). Other works of art operated on a smaller scale, with more personal messages for the satisfaction of the careful viewer.

Which brings us on to an often overlooked painting byMiyamoto Musashi: Squirrel and Grapes

As a subject, it was an auspicious one, symbolising abundance and fertility: grapes are obvious images of plently, while squirrels were seen as being like mice which were known for having large numbers of offspring. Perhaps not an obvious choice for Musashi, although it could be argued that it reflects a feeling of personal well-being and satisfaction with his position in the world. Indeed, at this stage, relatively late in his life, he was a guest of the powerful and cultured Hosokawa family in Kumamoto, far from the reverses he may have suffered in trying to establish himself in the capital. However, there is more to it than that.

A typical depiction of the squirrel and grapes theme on sword mountings

The title was also understood as a play on words: the word for grapes (budo) is a homophone for budo(martial ways), while squirrel (risu) is similar to rissuru, which means something like to dedicate or discipline oneself. Thus the picture is a pun that refers to discipline in the martial arts. It is in this connection that the motif was utilised by bushi as decoration in sword mountings and the like.  

Musashi’s treatment of the theme is distinctive. Like his more well-known paintings of birds, this one emphasises poise – the squirrel balances on the vine, its eyes sharp, and the tail sweeping up as it prepares to hop onto the next branch or reach out for the grapes below. This sense of dynamism is portrayed through the broad curves of the tail and the body, with the more precise details of the face and claws suggesting the focus and contained energy of a body about to burst into motion.  

Musashi’s work is notable for his sparing yet powerful use of dark ink to focus and control the composition, keeping the dynamism of the subject through rough but fluent brushwork. It was a style that stemmed from Muqi and Liang Kai, both 13^thcentury Chinese monk painters whose works were more admired in Japan than in their native China. Musashi’s artistic education is a matter for speculation, but his style and subject matter suggest he had seen some of these works as well as those of his older contemporaries, Kaiho Yusho and Hasegawa Tohaku, who were both influenced by these artists. Kaiho Yusho and Hasegawa Tohaku were based in Kyoto for much of their careers, and famous works by the two aforementioned Chinese painters were also held in temples in that city. 

 

The 6th Patriarch Chopping Wood by Liang Kai
This work is now in the Tokyo National Museum, but it is quite possible
Musashi had access to it at some time. (Lang Kai's paintings suffer greatly from
reproduction - you cannot really appreciate the subtlety in reproductions).

Crows by Kaiho Yusho. Yo can still get some idea of the power of this piece even though the reproduction is less than perfect.

Of course, early in his career Musashi spent some time in Kyoto, but what his position was is far from certain. At some time he completed some fine paintings for Toji Temple, which maintains he lived there for a period of three years or so after his duels with the Yoshioka swordsmen, and also suggests that he studied with Kaiho Yusho during this time, but this is far from certain. (The priest Takuan, who was linked to Musashi in the famous novel by Yoshikawa Eiji, was head of a sub-temple at the Daitoku-ji complex where Tohaku saw a triptych by Muqi that had a major influence on his style. Although there seems to be no firm evidence to back it up, the temple also claims a connection with Musashi – perhaps that is where Yoshikawa got the idea about Takuan being Musashi’s mentor.)

Wherever he developed his skill with the brush, it is difficult not to see in his works touches of his own experience, and to think that they express something of what was important to him in life.

Musashi often chose animals and birds for his subjects, and among those, it was the small and everyday varieties that he focused on. That he would choose these as subjects, in some cases strongly suggesting connections with aspects of his heiho– his martial art – rather than the powerful, regal creatures that we might normally associate with the arts of war, certainly says something about the man.

A close-up showing the squirrel and one of the well-nibbled bunches of grapes.

Can we read anything else into this inquisitive squirrel? I think we can. If we look carefully, we can see the grapes are mostly gone. Is it late in the season or has another squirrel been here already? Whatever the reason, this one seems unphased – it continues, as full of enthusiasm as ever. Is this the message then – the importance of continued discipline, even though many of the obvious rewards have gone? It would be in keeping with Musashi’s writings. But more than that, given the way the painting pulses with life, it suggests there is an enthusiasm, almost a joy in this. I would like to think that this, too, was part of his message.

You can read more about Musashi's paintings here: https://ichijoji.blogspot.com/2011/12/deeper-reading-of-musashis-painting.html