Zen Culture Part 6

_For we are lovers of the beautiful, yet simple in our tastes, and we cultivate the mind without loss of manliness.

_Pericles, ca. 430 B.C.

_SILVER PAVILION, KYOTO 1482

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_Golden Pavilion, Kyoto

_THE FLOWERING of Zen culture might be described as the Periclean age of j.a.pan. As with fifth-century Greece, this was the era that produced j.a.pan's finest cla.s.sical art at the same time that rampant plagues and internecine warfare bled the land as never before. Government, such as it was, rested in the hands of the Ashikaga clan, men ever ready to sacrifice the general good in furtherance of personal interests. That these interests happened to include Zen and the Zen arts probably brought scant solace to their subjects, but today we can weigh their selfishness against the culture they sponsored. In any case, all who admire the cla.s.sic Zen cultural forms should be aware that their price included the heartless taxation of and disregard for the entire peasant population of j.a.pan.

The historical backdrop for the Ashikaga era reads like a Jacobean tragedy peopled by cutthroat courtiers ever alert to advantage in chambers or in battle. The political shape of the Ashikaga era began to emerge in the early years of the fourteenth century as the once invincible Kamakura rule of the Hojo family dissolved, plunging j.a.pan into a half-century of war and feuding over the ident.i.ty of the rightful emperor. Throughout much of the century the provincial _daimyo _warlords and their _samurai _warred up and down the length of the land, supporting first one emperor, then another. It was during this time and the two centuries following that Zen became the official state religion and Zen monks served as foreign diplomats, domestic advisers, and arbiters of taste.

The political troubles that ended the Kamakura warrior government and unseated the Hojo seem to be traceable to the war against the Mongols.

It was a long and costly operation which left most of the _samurai_ impoverished and angered at a government that could give them only cheerful thanks rather than the lands of the vanquished as was traditional practice. The general discontent found a focus in the third decade of the fourteenth century when a Kyoto emperor named G.o.daigo attempted to unseat the Hojo and re-establish genuine imperial rule. After some minor skirmishes, the Hojo commissioned an able general nanied Ashikaga Takauji (1305-1358) from an old Minamoto family to march on G.o.daigo and settle the difficulty. Along the way Takauji must have thought things over, for when he reached Kyoto instead of attacking the emperor's forces he put the Hojo garrison to the sword.

Shortly thereafter, another general supporting the imperial cause marched out to Kamakura and laid waste the Hojo capital. The last few hundred Hojo supporters committed suicide en ma.s.se, and the Kamakura age was ended.

G.o.daigo gleefully set up the new j.a.panese government in Kyoto, and soon it was like old times, with aristocrats running everything. In a serious miscalculation, he a.s.sumed that the

provincial warlords had joined his cause out of personal loyalty rather than the more traditional motive of greed, for he gave the Hojo estates to his favorite mistresses while regarding warriors like Takauji as hardly more than rustic figures of fun. As might have been expected, another war soon broke out. This time the conflict lasted for decades, with almost unbelievable convolutions, including a number of decades in which j.a.pan had two emperors. At one point Takauji found it necessary to poison his own brother, and it has been estimated that his military exploits cost some sixty thousand lives, not to mention the general ruin of the country at large. The end result was that the forces of G.o.daigo were defeated, leaving j.a.pan in the hands of the Ashikaga family.

For all his bloodletting, Takuji was also a patron of the Zen sect, giving it a formal place in the national life and encouraging its growth and dissemination. One of his closest advisers was the great Zen prelate Muso Soseki (1275-1351), whose influence made Rinzai Zen the official religion of the Ashikaga era. An astutely practical man, Muso established the precedent for doctrinal flexibility which allowed Zen to survive while emperors and shoguns came and went:

_Clear-sighted masters of the Zen sect do not have a fixed doctrine which is to be held to at any and all times. They offer whatever teaching the occasion demands and preach as the spirit moves them, with no fixed course to guide them. If asked what Zen is, they may answer in the words of Confucius, Mencius, Lao Tzu or Chuang Tzu, or else in terms of the doctrines of the various sects and denominations, and also by using popular proverbs.1

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Like many Zen teachers, Muso enjoyed the company of the powerful. He began his career in statecraft as a supporter and confidant of the ill- fated Emperor G.o.daigo. When G.o.daigo was deposed, he adjusted his allegiance and became the high priest of the Ashikaga house. He was soon the constant companion of Takauji, advising him on policy, flattering his taste in Zen art, and secretly trying to give him a bit of polish. Although Takauji could scarcely have had time for extensive meditation amid his continual bloodletting, Muso preached to him in odd moments and soothed his occasionally guilty conscience.

Since Takauji was clearly haunted by his treatment of G.o.daigo, Muso suggested that the former emperor's ghost might find repose if a special Zen temple was built in his memory. The project was well underway when funds ran low, whereupon the resourceful Muso suggested sending a trading vessel to China to raise foreign-exchange cash. The venture was so successful that before long regular trade was established-- naturally enough under the guidance of Zen monks. In later years a special branch of government was established devoted exclusively to foreign trade and directed by well-traveled prelates of Zen. (The Chinese regarded this trade as the exchange of Chinese gifts for j.a.panese tribute, but the j.a.panese were willing to overlook the insult in the interest of profit.) Muso's other lasting contribution to the growth of Zen influence was persuading Takauji to build a Zen temple in each of the sixty-six provinces, thereby extending state support of the religion outside of Kyoto ruling circles.

Takauji was the founder of a line of Ashikaga shoguns who gave their name to the next two centuries of j.a.panese history. His entire life was spent on the battlefield, where he concentrated his energies on strengthening the shogunate through the liberal application of armed might. In a sense he prefigured the att.i.tude of John Adams, who once lamented that he must study war so that his grandsons might fashion art and architecture. Indeed, Takauji's grandson was the famous aesthete Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (1358-1408), who ascended to shogun in 1368 and soon thereafter brought to flower a renaissance of the Zen artistic tradition of Sung China.

Yoshimitsu was only nine years of age when he became shogun, so the early years of his reign were guided by regents of the Hosokawa clan, who put to rest any remaining dissidence. Consequently, when Yoshimitsu came of age, he felt secure

enough in his office to tour the country, visiting religious shrines and establishing his place in the pageant of j.a.panese history. More significantly for the rise of Zen culture, he also turned his eyes abroad, encouraging the trade with China by stabilizing political relations and becoming the best customer for the silks, brocades, porcelains, and--most important--Sung paintings brought back by the Zen monks.

In a very short time, Yoshimitsu had become addicted to the Chinese finery and antique Ch'an art of the Sung which his monks were importing. He was fortunate that the country was stable and peaceful enough to allow him his whims, especially since he almost entirely lost interest in all functions of government save taxation, which he found necessary to apply to the peasants in ever greater measure in order to support his patronage of the arts. Absorbed with aesthetics and Zen art, he became a cloistered sovereign whose luckless subjects were left on their own to weather fortunes that alternated between starvation and the plague, leavened by intermittent wars among provincial chieftains.

The peasantry, however, was not blind to his callous priorities, and it is said that his reputation survived into the nineteenth century, maintained by country folk who would trek to a certain temple to revile an old statue of the Ashikaga shogun.

His personal failings notwithstanding, Yoshimitsu was the key figure in bringing about the rise of Zen art. His contributions were manifold: he founded a Zen monastery which became the school for the great landscape painters of the era; his personal patronage was largely responsible for the development of the No drama; his example and encouragement did much to bring into being the identification of Zen with landscape garden art; his own practice of _zazen _under the guidance of a famous Zen monk set an example for the warrior court; his interest in tea and poetry served both to set the stage for the development of the tea ceremony as an aesthetic phenomenon and to temper the literary tastes of his warrior followers; and, finally, his interest in Zen-inspired architecture was responsible for the creation of one of the most famous Zen chapels in j.a.pan.

When Yoshimitsu retired in 1394 to enter Zen orders, leaving the government to his nine-year-old son, he ensconced himself in a palace in the Kyoto suburbs and proceeded to build a chapel for Zen meditation. The Golden Pavilion, or_ Kinkaku-ji_, as it came to be known, was a wooden teahouse three stories high whose architectural beauty is now legendary.

There were few if any previous examples of this type of multistory structure, although it has been suggested that the idea may have been copied from a comparable temple in southern China. (The turn-of-the- century American critic Ernest Fenollosa suggested that it was modeled after the structure Kublai Khan constructed for a garden in Shang-tu, which Coleridge called Xanadu, after the translation of the name by Marco Polo: "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/A stately pleasure-dome decree.") Whatever its origins, the building superficially resembled a low-rising paG.o.da--each successive story was a more or less smaller version of the one below. The two lower floors were used for evening entertainments of music, poetry, and incense, while the top floor was a tiny meditation chapel (whose ceiling was covered with gold leaf, thereby giving the building its name). Set in the midst of a beautiful landscape garden, the sweeping roofs, painstaking wooden joinery, and exquisite unpainted woods of the Golden Pavilion were a landmark of Zen taste destined to influence the course of j.a.panese architecture for centuries.

The Golden Pavilion was the crowning act of Yoshimitsu's career, a fitting monument to the man who, more than any other, was responsible for the rise of Zen culture. Under his rule, j.a.panese monks first brought back from China the finest examples of Ch'an-inspired art, from which they derived and mastered the artistic principles of the vanished Sung era and went on to re-create if not surpa.s.s the great Sung age of artistic production. The momentum for Zen culture produced by Yoshimitsu lasted through the reign of his grandson Yoshimasa (1435- 1490), the last great Ashikaga patron of Zen art.

As a shogun, Yoshimasa was even more distracted by Zen than his famous grandfather. He concentrated on encouraging

the school of Sung-style ink painting, the Zen ritual of ceremonial tea, the art of flower arranging, and new styles of Zen-influenced architecture. Unfortunately, his apparently hereditary absence of interest in affairs of state ultimately brought about the disintegration of the j.a.panese political fabric. As the office of shogun weakened to the point of symbolism, Yoshimasa's power to tax became so frail that he was finally forced to borrow from the Zen monasteries. The real power in the land pa.s.sed to the local feudal lords, or _daimyo_, men who governed entire domains, raised their own armies, and exercised far greater power than the _samurai_ of earlier times.

What remained of Yoshimasa's power came to be exercised by his mistresses and his scheming wife, Tomi-ko. By his late twenties he was ready to retire entirely, the better to pursue Zen and its arts, but none of the women in the palace had yet presented him with a son who could become t.i.tular shogun. By 1464 Yoshimasa's patience was exhausted and he turned to one of his brothers who was in monastic orders and persuaded him to begin an apprenticeship for the shogunate. The brother wisely hesitated, pointing out that Tomi-ko, who was still in her twenties, might yet produce a son; but Yoshimasa won him over with solemn a.s.surances that all sons who arrived would be made priests.

Less than a year later Tomi-ko did indeed bear a son, setting the stage for the struggle that would eventually destroy Kyoto and signal the decline of the Ashikaga age of Zen culture. As it happened, there was already an animosity between Yoshimasa's princ.i.p.al adviser, Hosokawa Katsumoto, and Hosokawa's father-in-law, Yamana Sozen. When the child was born, Hosokawa, a member of the historic family of Ashikaga regents, favored retaining Yoshimasa's brother as shogun, so the ambitious Tomi-ko turned to Yamana to enlist his aid in reverting the office of shogun back to Yoshimasa and thence to her son. With a natural excuse for conflict finally at hand, the two old enemies Yamana and Hosokawa gathered their armies--both numbering near eighty thousand-- outside Kyoto. The impending tragedy was obvious to all, and Yoshimasa tried vainly to discourage the combatants. By that time, however, his voice counted for nothing, and in 1467 the inevitable conflict, now known as the Onin War, began.

The war raged for a decade, until virtually all the majestic temples of Kyoto were burned and pillaged. Ironically, one of the few temples to escape destruction was Yoshimitsu's Golden Pavilion, which fortunately had been situated well outside the

precincts of the main city. Although both Hosokawa and Yamana Thed in 1473, the fighting continued, as partic.i.p.ants on both sides defected, changed leaders, and fought among themselves until no one could recall what the original war had been about. Finally, after ten full years of almost constant fighting, it became apparent that the carnage had accomplished nothing. One dark night the two armies folded their tents and stole away--and the war was no more. A remarkably senseless conflict, even by modern-day standards, the Onin War effectively obliterated all evidence in Kyoto of the marvelous Heian civilization, as well as the early Ashikaga, leaving nothing but a scorched palette for the final century of Zen art.

Yoshimasa, in the meantime, had long since removed himself from affairs of state. Since his shogun brother had switched sides during the war and become a general for Yamana, the succession question was simplified. Tomi-ko took time out from her vigorous war-profiteering to prevail upon Yoshimasa to appoint her son, then four years old, shogun.

She thereby became de facto shogun herself, encouraging Yoshimasa in his desire to retire while enriching herself handsomely with imaginative new taxes. The war proved a windfall for Tomi-ko, who lent funds to both sides to keep it going, and her cupidity played no small role in the final destruction of ancient Kyoto.

Immersed as he was in the world of Zen and Zen culture, Yoshimasa seemed oblivious to the sea of official corruption around him, and indeed there was probably little he could have done to prevent it. He loved the refined company of women and avoided warriors, whose rough manner offended him but in whose hands lay the only real power in the country. As the government disintegrated, he made his own contribution as a connoisseur and patron of the fine arts, bringing to culmination the movement in Zen art that left j.a.pan a legacy far more lasting than any that mere diplomacy could have left. Like his European counterparts, the Medici, Yoshimasa balanced his failings in politics with faultless aesthetic judgment, endowing the Zen arts with new standards in architecture, painting, gardening, the No theater, the tea ceremony, and ceremonial flower arranging. Perhaps he should not be faulted for doing what he understood best.

Yoshimasa also left a physical monument intended to rival the Golden Pavilion. In 1466, as he contemplated retirement, he began plans to construct a villa for meditation. With the outbreak of war he was forced for a number of years to devote his attentions to the repair of the imperial residence, but after the war he renewed his intentions to retire into Zen aesthetics. His decision was strengthened by family troubles, including Tomi-ko's displeasure with the number of his mistresses, a problem that finally exploded when her young son, the shogun, demanded to marry one of them rather than a girl of Tomi-ko's choosing. In 1482, amid the general ruin and confusion, Yoshimasa resolved to begin the construction of his retirement villa. Financial circ.u.mstances had changed since his original plan eighteen years earlier, and his interest in Zen was even deeper, so instead of the sumptuous palace once planned, he built a small pavilion of exquisite taste and restraint. It stands today, a forerunner of the traditional house, and is known as the Silver Pavilion, or _Ginkaku-ji_, because of the popular belief that he originally planned to cover portions with silver leaf. _Ginkaku-ji _has two stories, the first in Zen temple style and the second in _shoin _style. The deliberately unpainted wood exterior of the two-story chapel has weathered to the color of bark, and it has all the dignity its five hundred years demand.

There were almost a dozen Ashikaga shoguns after Yoshimasa, but none had any influence on the course of history. The century after his retirement is known as the Age of the Country at War, and it is remembered for almost continuous civil strife among _daiymo_, the provincial chieftains who had swallowed up the _samurai_. In this period j.a.pan was less a nation than several hundred small fiefdoms, each controlled by a powerful family and constantly in arms against its neighbors. Little wonder that many of the greatest Zen artists left Kyoto never to return; the capital was a desolate ruin, without power and without patrons. This condition prevailed until late in the sixteenth century, when individuals of sufficient military genius to reunite the country again appeared.

The influence of Zen was probably as pervasive in medieval Ashikaga j.a.pan as Christianity was in medieval Europe. A Zen monk was the first Ashikaga shogun's closest adviser, and in later years Zen monasteries virtually took over foreign policy. (Indeed, Zen monks were the only j.a.panese educated enough to deal with the Chinese.) Yoshimitsu formalized the relationship between Zen and the state, setting up an official Therarchy among the Zen temples in Kyoto (the so-called "Five Mountains" or Gozan, of Tenryu-ji, Shokoku-ji, Kennin-ji, Tof.u.ku-ji, and Manju-ji). These state temples became the resident schools for Zen painters and artists and also provided diplomats and government officials for the China trade. (They made Yoshimitsu so ardent a Sinophile that he once had some j.a.panese pirates who were troubling Chinese trading vessels captured and boiled alive.) Under the reign of Yoshimasa the China trade dwindled, but Zen monks continued to influence the government in directions that best suited their own interests. Wealthy from their commercial undertakings, they were in a position to finance some of Yoshimasa's more lavish projects, and in later years they helped him design the garden of the Silver Pavilion, including a detached building for tea drinking and meditation--the forerunner of the modern teahouse. This was the finest hour of Zen influence in official circles, for Yoshimasa was the last Ashikaga shogun whose preferences had any influence on the course of j.a.panese life. After his death, the artists who had surrounded him scattered to the provinces to find patrons. Within a decade the Silver Pavilion and its garden were virtually abandoned. Zen as a religion also went to the provinces, and gradually its following grew as sympathetic teachers who no longer cared for the company of the mighty were content to explain the rewards of nonattachment to the people at large.

The many faces of j.a.panese Zen were paradoxical indeed. The Kamakura warriors turned to Zen for strength on the battlefield, whereas the Ashikaga court found in it aesthetic escapism and spiritual solace in a crumbling world. That an age such as the Ashikaga could have nourished high arts has puzzled historians for centuries, and no entirely satisfactory explanation has yet been advanced. Perhaps art flourishes best when social unrest uproots easy conventions. Fifth-century Athens produced its most enduring art at a time when the land was rent by the fratricidal Peloponnesian War and the city itself was haunted by the plague. Renaissance Florence is another example. Today Kyoto, like modern Athens and modern Florence, is a living museum, concerned more with traffic and tourist hotels than with the long-forgotten blood baths which once raged in its streets. Seemingly forgotten, too, are the warring Ashikaga, at whose behest the n.o.ble Zen arts of j.a.pan were shaped.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Zen and the Landscape Garden

_To see a World in a grain of sand,

And a Heaven in a wild flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,