Zenga (Zen painting) usually designates the pictures and calligraphy of the monks of the Edo Period (1600-1868). As these ecclesiastics had not usually been taught painting, their spontaneous work did not rely on painting traditions. They had, on the other hand, studied calligraphy and consequently knew the discipline of ink and brush.
In any event, they wanted to communicate without spoken words. Zen has long maintained that although it cannot be directly communicated, it can be suggested.
This is the task of Zenga. As Stephen Addiss has elsewhere said: "At its best, Zenga is at once a personal statement of Zen enlightenment and an art form that can be appreciated by in purely artistic terms."
The Zen monk-artist had many iconographic means. Fugai Ekun (1568-1654), the first and perhaps greatest of this line, painted the likeness of the Zen patriarch Bodhidharma, locally known as Daruma. He also drew the eccentric Hotei and the reclusive Myosan -- also known as Lazy San -- who lived in a cave and successfully survived on potatoes cooked with cow dung.
Hakuin Ekaku (1685-1768), the best known and most prolific of the Zenga artists, painted the by-then standard repertory but is most famous for his many renditions of Kannon, the female bodhisattva of compassion. One of the stories told is of an enormous gathering of Zen adepts where Hakuin drew a Kannon for each and every guest.
It is said that he never aimed for beauty, that his ambitions were higher. He consequently never corrected mistakes: If the ink splashed, it stayed splashed; and when his cat walked across the still wet picture, its paw prints became part of the general effect.
Third among the most popular and prolific of the Zen artists was Sengai Gibon (1750-1837) whose pictures became so popular that he is supposed to have said that "people must think my hermitage is a toilet because they bring so much paper here." He is said never to have turned down a request for a sample of his visual Zen. "Worldly painting has a method," he said, "Sengai's painting have no method. As Buddha said, "The true Law is no Law."
He nevertheless permitted himself many a comment. When a samurai named Kenyu refused to leave without a picture, Sengai brushed two large round circles. When asked their meaning, he is supposed to have said: "Kenyu [really has a lot of] balls."
Actually, the large round circle (enso), which is of major iconographic importance in Zenga, has many meanings, all of them apposite to the aims of Zen. It "lacks nothing but has nothing in excess." It is a "bright full moon" and a "great round mirror," and there is a Zen tradition that "even when an enso is painted, it is not really painted."
John Stevens, author of "Sacred Calligraphy of the East," in his excellent introduction and his very thorough notes to this publication, calls Zen "the meditation tradition of Buddhism." It is fully illustrated in this well-designed and beautifully illustrated catalog of the Art Gallery of New South Wales' current showing of Dr. Kurt Gitter and Alice Rae Yelen's Zenga collection, housed in the Gitter-Yelen Art Study Center in New Orleans.
Begun in 1965, this has become one of the finest collections of Zen painting and calligraphy in private hands. It contains prime examples of the monk-artists mentioned above, and many more.
It almost did not survive last summer's Hurricane Katrina. Floodwaters at the New Orleans Center rose to within centimeters of where this collection was stored. There was one casualty, a scroll devoted to Daruma by Shaku Soen (1859-1919), which was torn from the wall by the force of the flood and -- writes Gitter -- "lay twisted and soaked, unrecognizable on our living room floor."
The rest survived and theirreproduction is here made available.
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