The same reason can explain the backwardness of Chinese music and sculpture. Those of us who are familiar with the great emphasis which Confucius and his early followers laid on music often cannot understand how this art failed to attain a higher level of development in subsequent ages. My own explanation is that the exaltation of music and dance by the early Confucianist school was overshadowed by two counterforces: the religious school of Mo Ti, which condemned all fine arts as useless extravagance; and the naturalistic teachings of Lao-tze, Chuang-tze and other Taoistic philosophers, who condemned music and the other fine arts as the distracting devices of an artificial civilization. Moreover, as the educated class over-emphasized bookish knowledge and purely literary pursuits, music came to be regarded no longer as an important part of the education of a gentleman but only as the art of the professional entertainer. The government and the orthodoxy of Confucianism continued religiously to preserve the most ancient musical instruments, which were to be played once a year in the temple of Confucius. Nobody knew nor cared to know how they were played or what they played. And all modern music and all modern musical instruments were sweepingly despised as vulgar and improper.
All these arts came from the people, reaching a certain level of development and then ceased to grow. But, whenever men of education and refined taste could overcome prejudice and actively take up any one of those arts, their participation often produced periods of marked progress. Such was the case of the development in landscape gardening during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of religious sculpture and modeling during certain periods of medieval China and of musical revival and its effect on the operatic dramas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The development of porcelain is even more strikingly illustrative. Every period of great progress in Chinese porcelain has been the result of active participation by cultivated artists under imperial patronage. The Ming porcelain was essentially the product of unlettered workers who had a primitive delight in the loud colors and vulgar designs. But the masterpieces of the early Ts'ing period were the result of refined taste, artistic design and careful study and experimentation by the best artistic talent which the wealth and power of the empire could command. When that imperial patronage and supervision declined, Chinese porcelain was again relegated to the level of a commercial craft.
It has been said that painting is the preeminent art of China. The historical fact is that painting happens to be the art preeminently suited to the life and training of the Chinese scholar and man of letters. Chinese painting requires the same skill and mastery in the wielding of the brush which the Chinese scholar must acquire in learning to write well. In fact, writing is almost the only occupation in which even the most bookish scholar must use his hands. This is the main reason, I think, why calligraphy and painting are the only two fine arts which the scholarly class in China has taken up and developed to such heights.
Yet it must have been a long time before the Chinese scholar discovered that his writing brush was essentially the same as the coarse brush of the house-painter and that the skill he had acquired in the art of writing was the best preparation and training for painting. Historically it actually took many centuries for the Chinese scholar to be sufficiently interested in the art of painting to make it his own. For, whereas calligraphy had long become an essential part of the scholar's life, painting in ancient China was still regarded as the work of the hired artisan. Even the portrait painter was a craftsman of no social standing. The following episode in the life of the great artist-statesman Yen Lipeng shows that, even as late as the seventh century, the term "painter" (hua shih, or "master of painting") was still distasteful and distressing to a scholar:
One day, when the Emperor (Tai-Chung) had a boating party on the Palace Lake, his attention was attracted by a group of beautiful birds alighting and floating on the water. He told his guests to write poems to celebrate the occasion and sent for the artist Yen Li-peng to paint the birds in color. The court couriers shouted the Emperor's order in relay: "Call the Painter [hua shil] Yen Li-peng!"
Yen, who was then already an official of some rank, hurried to the Palace, knelt by the lake shore, mixed his dyes and began to paint the birds. When he looked up and saw his colleagues sitting in the Emperor's boat, he felt ashamed of himself and his art.
When Yen returned to his home, he said to his sons, "I have pursued the scholarly life ever since my boyhood. But I am now appreciated only through my paintings and am treated on the same level as the servants and hired laborers. I went you never to learn my art!"
Historically, painting came to be adopted by the men of letters through two channels: religion and literature.
The almost national conversion to Buddhism after the third century A.D. brought into being a vast number of Buddhist temples and monasteries which were invariably filled with mural paintings depicting episodes in the life of Buddha, or stories from the sutras. Most of the pictures were painted by professional decorators. But because these episodes were taken from the Buddhist scriptures, scholarship was necessary to understand and interpret them. As the new religion reached the best families of the nation, the influence of the Buddhist laity was gradually felt in the improvement or refinement of both the literature and the art of Chinese Buddhism. Talented and learned artists of high standing were invited or voluntarily offered to undertake the religious murals for the great temples and monasteries which were intended as an effective means of education for the people. Stories were told of such mural paintings by Ku Kai-chih of the fourth century A.D., Chang Seng-yu of the sixth century, Wu Tao-tze of the eighth and others.
In addition to the influence of religion, there were taking place in this formative age of Chinese art, philosophical and literary movements which also played no mean part of in the development of Chinese painting. The prevailing school of Chinese thought during the third, fourth and fifth centuries were philosophical naturalism, vaguelly called "Taoism". It was in terms of this philosophical naturalism that Buddhist philosophical concepts and ideas were made intelligible to the Chinese student. This naturalistic philosophy, however, had no interest either in the extravagant architectural splendor and grandeur of the Buddhist temples or in the gaudy or horrifying pictorial representations of the bliss of paradise or the horror of hell. It was making itself felt in the rise of a new school of poetry in the fifth century, which was called the poetry of "Shan Shui" (mountains and water). The leading representatives of this new poetry were Tao Chien (d.427) These poets were writing of what they had seen and felt in the flowing streams, the singing waterfalls, the mist, the snow, the rugged rocks and the fallen leaves. It was from this school of poetry that Chinese landscape painting derived its name "Shan Shui".
Buddhism underwent fundamental and radical transformation after the eighth century when the Ch'an or Zen movement sought to sweep away all the formalism, verbalism and ritualism of Mahayana Buddhism by its esoteric and frankly iconoclastic philosophy. Much of the imagery and ritualism of earlier Buddhism survived. But they no longer attracted the great painters. The age of religious painting had passed. Religious fervor and the demand for religious paintings awakened the interest of the scholarly class in painting, but, even at the height of the medieval religions, Chinese artists were already broadening the scope of painting by devoting more and more attention to such secular objects as landscapes, human portraits, animals and still life.
The existing works of the poets and prose writers of the T'ang Dynasty furnish us with much material for our understanding of the history of Chinese painting during that most important period. The poetry of Wang Wei, for example, gives us the best evidence of the intimate connection between the "Shan Shui" poetry and the "Shan Shui" painting. "There is poetry in his painting, and there is painting in his poetry." This verdict of the critics best sums up the spirit and ideal of the landscape school both in poetry and in painting.
But the T'ang records also show us that the painting of that age was essentially realistic in its discipline and technique, and still far away from the impressionistic and poetic art of later periods. Tu Fu, who died in 770, described his artist friend Wang's "Shan Shui" painting in these lines:
"It takes him ten days to paint a stream,
And five days to draw a rock.
He refused to be pressed or hurried.
Only in this way will he consent to give us his realistic
Painting."
(可參考 孔壽山，《唐朝題畫詩注》，成都：四川美術出版社，1988 頁124-26。)
戲題畫山水圖歌（一本題下有王宰二字。宰，蜀人）（杜甫 唐詩）
十日畫一水，五日畫一石。
能事不受相促迫，王宰始肯留真蹟。
壯哉昆崙方壺圖，掛君高堂之素壁。
巴陵洞庭日本東，赤岸水與銀河通，中有雲氣隨飛龍。
舟人漁子入浦溆，山木盡亞洪濤風。
尤工遠勢古莫比，咫尺應須論萬里。
焉得並州快剪刀，翦取吳松半江水。
In his famous ode to General Tsao Pa, To Fu tells us that this great painter who retouched the imperial series of portraits of the founders of the impire was a most painstaking painter of horses and was the teacher of Han Kan, another great painter of horses. In the same poem, we were told that general Tao Pa was fond of making portraits of the people he met and liked, and that, during the war-stricken years in the middle of the eighth century, he even condescended to sketch the faces of the ordinary men of the street. A later poet (Su Shih, his literary name Su Tungp'o) quotes Han Kan as saying that his real teachers were the hundreds of horses in the imperial stables. It was this realism (shieh chen) in depicting secular, natural and living subjects which laid the foundation for the development of the freer school of painting in a later age.
蘇軾 "論畫以形似 見與兒童鄰" (1941/1/17 日記 Dean Merks " How Modern!")
With the decline of the medieval religions, with the development of the great schools of Zen Buddhism and with the revival and spread of secular learning through the invention of the printed book, the Chinese renaissance was entering its period of maturity during the Northern and Southern Sung dynasties. It was during this period that the Imperial Academy of Court Painters was founded first in the North and then in the South. And it was during the same period that Chinese "literary men's painting" first achieved its highest development in the hands of such great geniuses such as Su Shih, Mi Fei and Wen Tung. For the first time, color was consciously abandoned in favor of the black and white sketches, and realistic delineation of the object was consciously considered secondary to the impressionistic grasp and expression of the idea and the spirit. It was Su Shih (1036-1101) who gives us this famous dictum:
"To judge a painting by the standard of bodily likeness,
Is as naive as the thinking of a child."
How far has Chinese painting broken away from the realistic art of the house decorator and even from Hsieh Ho's six cannons!
This does not mean that the impressionistic artists did not have to go through the necessary discipline of a realistic portrayal of objects. On the contrary, the great painters since the time of Su Shih have always been great craftsmen, masterly wielders of the brush and careful students of the anatomy of objects. But they have sought to achieve more by transcending mere bodily likeness, by eliminating what they consider as nonessential, and by concentrating or even exaggerating, what they endeavor to express. As an early nineteenth century painter of bamboo has expressed it:
"The Bamboo are my teachers,
I do not imitate the old masters.
When the hand, the eye and the mind arrive together,
There under the brush the spirit is expressed."
The above account practically amounts to a defense of the preeminence of the "literary men's painting", which years ago certain art critics both in America and in Japan tried to discredit and even condemn. I have tried to show that Chinese painting has followed a historical development quite similar to that of many movements in the history of Chinese literature. The moral of this historical lesson has been that, while the art had its origin in professional artisans and craftsmen, it has achieved the greatest altitude and depth only when it has become the medium of expression of the thought and experience of the greatest cultivated minds of the times. The achievement of Chinese painting has been possible only because it embodies the best contribution of the best minds of the nation throughout the ages.
But the moral does not stop there. In Chinese painting, as in every phrase of Chinese literature, decadence sets in when free and creative experimentation gives way to slavish imitation and conservative solidification. Too much of Chinese painting was the product of unintelligent imitation by dilettantes or commercialized craftsmen. In every period of such complacent decadence, it was always the creative or "eccentric" artists, such as the Prince-monks of the seventeenth century or the "cranky" artists of Yangchow in the eighteenth century, who startled the art world with their bold creations and brought Chinese painting once more out of its slumbers of complacency and commonplace. Without these creative minds, Chinese painting could not have achieved its many renaissances.
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