Experiencing Art: Beyond the Symbol

Editors' Note : This article is part of the Patheos Public Square on Religion and Visual Art. Read other perspectives here. One of my favorite things in the world is the thirty-foot-high bronze Buddha statue known as the Daibutsu (literally, "Big Buddha" or "Great Buddha") in Kamakura, a small city located in the hills outside Tokyo. Zazen Ultraman ©Tom Swiss There's another ancient bronze Daibutsu in Nara, near Kyoto; and while Nara's Daibutsu is both older and larger — and the regional pride I soaked up during the months I lived in Osaka means I usually favor the Kansai region (Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, Nara) in its longtime rivalry with Kanto (Tokyo, Yokohama, Kamakura ) — I have to give the edge to the Kamakura Daibutsu because of its outdoor location. This is one of those art-by-accident things: over five hundred years ago a tsunami destroyed the temple buildings but was unable to do much to the 120-ton statue itself. So Kamakura's Great Buddha sits in the open air, wooded hills for a backdrop, immovable in his centuries-long meditation, undisturbed by the fury of the elements. The early Buddhists would be shocked by both of these giant Buddhas, or indeed by any statue of their teacher. (For purposes of this discussion I'm going to punt on the distinction between the historical Shakyamuni Buddha and the various cosmological Buddhas of later Buddhism.) For the first few centuries of Buddhism, artists rarely if ever created depictions of their main holy man, instead using symbols such as an empty throne or footprints marked with the "Wheel of the Law." There seems to have been a sort of anti-idolatry philosophy in effect, either formally or informally. (The practice of making statues of the Buddha was probably adopted later from the Greeks when the remnants of the Hellenistic empire of Alexander met the expanding Indian Buddhist culture of the emperor Ashoka. See Fields, pp. 14-16.) There's a certain sense to that anti-idolatry. A famous Buddhist analogy (popularized by a Bruce Lee monologue in Enter the Dragon ) speaks of teachings as a finger pointing to the moon, and the importance of not focusing on the finger. If religious art is to be a pointer to a religious experience, it must not be too captivating, must not tempt the viewer's eye to stick on the finger rather than continuing on to the moon. The same idea is likely at the root of the Islamic prohibition on images of Muhammad that has caused such trouble recently. It is entirely reasonable for Muslim teachers to be concerned about people focusing on the messenger and not the message, and even to discourage artistic depictions of their Prophet as a means to keep a check on idolatrous tendencies to miss the moon for the sake of the finger. Now, when I say there's a reasonable concern, I don't mean I agree with a ban. Yes, there is a potential pitfall of mistaking the map for the territory, of setting the bottle of medicine up on a pedestal for admiration rather than taking the stuff. But to turn "there is a hazard here, beware" into "there is sure damnation here, woe unto thee!" is an error — perhaps one of the most common in the field of religion — creating a black-and-white, Manichean morality. And to then turn that religious teaching into a civil law, enforced by the sword or the gun, is a grave sin, going far wide of the mark. It's a shame not just because it results in people being ostracized, caged, beaten, or killed, but because it limits the tools that we have available to create religious experiences. In his magnum opus The Meeting of East and West , F.S.C. Northrop wrote about two distinct functions of art and how they match up with two separate components of the nature of things. Our experience has a theoretical component, and one function of art is to convey aspects of that theory via analogy and symbolism. This was how the majority of Western art, particularly religious art, worked prior to the 19th-century Impressionist movement. But our experience also has an aesthetic component, immediately and empirically given, and art can be an experience of this component for its own sake. (See Northrop, pp. 303-306.) Creation of Adam, Michelangelo (public domain) Consider the contrast between Christian art and Taoist art. Almost any classical Christian art will portray Jehovah or Jesus or angels or some saint. It will make reference to some narrative or bit of doctrine. The Sistine Chapel's portrayal of the Creation, Leonardo's "Last Supper," any given painting of the Crucifixion, or Madonna and Child, or the nasty death of some martyr: they all assume some familiarity with the Christian mythos, and seek to inspire the viewer relative to that. Its appeal to someone not familiar with the narrative can be limited. I'm reminded of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode where Captain Picard is stranded on a planet with an alien whose language consists solely of references to his culture's mythos — mysterious utterances like "Shaka, when the walls fell!" Entirely comprehensible to his fellows, but baffling to the Enterprise crew. Lest the reader think I am singling out Christianity, the same applies to much of Buddhist art. The painting on my wall of a pop-eyed bearded man standing surfboard-style on a reed is meaningless to someone not familiar with the story of Bodhidharma, but it serves to remind me of certain characteristics of that red-bearded barbarian. This theoretical aspect of art is a fine and useful thing, but it is not the entirety of art or of human experience. In contrast we have the Taoist tradition of naturalistic art. (This is also true of much Zen art, as Zen is a descendant of Chinese Taoism as well as of Indian Buddhism.) A Taoist painting makes no reference to history or myth, but instead attempts to convey something about the nature of things, to evoke an aesthetic experience. Yes, if we want to play art critic or historian it's useful to know a little about the concepts of yin and yang or to be able to quote the Tao Te Ching, but one doesn't need any such knowledge to be moved by the grandeur of a landscape view or the mystery of a boat on misty river. Such works attempt to evoke a moment of what Zen calls "mushin," "no mind"; "mind" in this context refers to the theoretical, intellectual, voice-in-the-head sort of consciousness, so necessary to getting things done but so incapable of producing satisfaction on its own. Joseph Campbell explained this sort of experience as one which "evokes in us a sense of existence" as opposed to "an assurance of meaning." (See Campbell, p. 186.)...[E]ven a brief shock (say, for example, when discovering the moon over city roofs or hearing a sharp bird cry at night) can yield an experience of the order of no-mind: that is to say, the poetical order, the order of art.... In fact, both the magic of art and the art of magic derive from and are addressed to experiences of this order. Hence the power of the meaningless syllables, the mumbo jumbo of magic, and the meaningless verbalizations of metaphysics, lyric poetry, and art interpretation. They function evocatively, not referentially; like the beat of a shaman's drum, not like a formula of Einstein.... [W]e have had, for an instant, a sense of existence: a moment of unevaluated, unimpeded, lyric life — antecedent to both thought and feeling; such as can never be communicated by means of empirically verifiable propositions, but only suggested by art. (Campbell, pp. 186-187) Operating evocatively, the Taoist artist may speak of "becoming one" with their subject: losing their "self," opening up to the aesthetic experience, and in so doing being able to put the "soul" of a their subject on paper (Northrop, pp. 340-341). As Northrop puts it, "in their paintings they portray the aesthetic manifold primarily, and the external three dimensional objects, which Westerners tend to seek for in these paintings, only incidentally, if at all" — recording an experience rather than a set of objects (Northrop, p. 330). The Kamakura Daibutsu was probably intended by its sculptor to symbolize some theoretical aspects of one or another school of Buddhism. But in wiping out the temple, the hand of nature turned viewing the statue into an overwhelming aesthetic experience. An old wall conceals the Daibutsu as one enters the temple grounds; and so when the viewer turns the corner and beholds the huge old thing out under the vast sky, reflecting direct sunlight, a companion-piece to the hills and the trees, the immediate experience can be the sort of which Campbell speaks — a brief shock that momentarily silences the jabbering monkey-mind, a crack in time through which the Pure Light may shine directly, with little reference to the theoretical or verbal doctrines of Buddhism. The combination of the sculptor, history, and natural forces have created the possibility of an experience of enlightenment. Or perhaps not. Perhaps by writing about it I have ruined the shock for you; if you should travel to Kamakura and fail to have a mystical experience upon your viewing of the Daibutsu, I'm sorry. (No refunds.) Boating Near Lake Shore with Reeds , Southern Song Dynasty, c. 13th-century, artist unknown; via University of Oregon Libraries, public domain But this is why we must continually create bold new art, and rediscover and reinterpret that which is ancient and forgotten. For that which has no capacity to surprise us has no capacity to cast magic upon us or to enlighten us. If art is to be a means of inducing actual experiences of the Divine, rather than merely another means of passing on the doctrine of some religious sect, it must remain free to experiment, to question, to shock, even to offend and to court charges of blasphemy. References Campbell, Joseph. The Flight of the Wild Gander. New York, NY: HarperPerennial, 1990. Fields, Rick. How the Swans Came to the Lake. Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications, 1992. Northrop, F.S.C. The Meeting of East and West. New York, NY: Collier Books, 1968.