LIKE POETRY, the visual arts also give shape to this cosmology of Absence and Presence in ways that create it as an immediate emotional experience, that engage 心 as both a full heart and empty mind. The practice of calligraphy is similar to the practice of meditation. It changes our relation to language, the medium of identity; and finally, it reweaves identity into the existence-tissue. Normally when we read, we pay attention only to the black text itself. The empty space around it is of no interest to us. It is quite different in classical Chinese, as we have seen, where linguistic Presence emerges from generative Absence. Calligraphic practice heightens this dramatically, for a gestural brushstroke (Presence) brings the empty space around it (Absence) to life, energizing it. The wilder and more artistic forms of calligraphy also animate and liberate the emptiness within the structure of each ideogram, opening and releasing it into the emptiness surrounding the ideograms, as in this quite typical moment from Huang T’ing-chien’s calligraphic scroll in Plate 2, where the form of the ideogram 銀 unfurls into:
When a calligrapher first touches inked brush to a blank sheet of paper or silk, it is that originary moment where Presence emerges from Absence; and as the brush-stroke traces through its arcs and twists, animating empty space, it is always at that originary moment. But this is not an originary moment in the sense of a beginning as it is conceived in our linear time, for here we encounter again that deeper and more accurate concept of time as an ongoing generative present in which Presence is perpetually burgeoning forth from Absence. And calligraphic practice is a way of returning to the primal experience of moving there in that generative moment where the Cosmos perennially creates itself.
In calligraphic practice, the ongoing originary moment moves also in consciousness, for the calligrapher creates calligraphy with an empty mind, a mirror-deep mind that is the same space as the empty sheet of paper or silk. The dance of the brush at that originary moment therefore unfurls through the empty space of Absence in three realms that we normally separate but which are part of the same tissue: consciousness, page, and Cosmos. Chinese texts are written from top right down, and the strokes of individual ideograms are written from top left to bottom right. Reading calligraphy with an empty mind, mirroring it as a spiritual practice, a reader follows the dynamic line of the brush as if the focus of awareness were the tip of the brush in motion, and thereby shares the calligrapher’s experience, inhabiting that originary moment where the ten thousand things well up into existence.
As with those primal artists chiseling petroglyphs into rock, it is in this originary space that calligraphers craft their personal expression. Calligraphy was considered a clear window into the profound levels of a person’s character, and Stone-Waves’ calligraphy reflects his own deepest dimensions, dimensions that are also represented in the painting as a whole. Stone-Waves’ calligraphic transformation of the ideograms can be seen by comparing the calligraphic script from his painting with the poem in standard form opposite, written in the traditional sequence, from top right down (and not including material appearing after the poem itself: Inkstone-Wander’s name, the location, and Stone-Waves’ signature):
Stone-Waves’ ideograms are somewhat misshapen, as if from the grief of exile, of living where home and civilization are lost in distances, and they reflect in their precision a mind that shares the severity of the season, with its cold sea-mists and bare branch-tangles. But at the same time, the ideograms have an effortless feel, which belies that grief and severity, and they seem infused with a good-naturedness and acceptance animated by a liveliness, an almost childlike whimsy. And finally, these dimensions combine to reveal a joyful energy and deep wonder at existence.
But this dimension of personal expression always springs from the spiritual dimensions of calligraphy as Ch’an practice, as the energy of the Cosmos made visible, for calligraphy’s deepest artistic intent was to carry us back to the beginning, sculpting that space where we inhabit the existence-tissue wholly, each master inscribing a singular form of empty mind and full heart. This is calligraphy as a form of Ch’an practice in the same way that poetry was, and it too was sometimes spoken of that way: “calligraphy-Ch’an.” It was transmission of mind outside words and ideas. And as a Ch’an master, Stone-Waves no doubt thought of it like painting, as a way of teaching Ch’an.
Stone-Waves’ writing is a quirky version of an ancient script known as “clerical” (隸), which perhaps gives it a sense of antiquity that is especially poignant at this moment when China had just been taken over by foreigners. Clerical script allowed very expressive possibilities, and Stone-Waves took full advantage of those possibilities to render Ch’an insight in a singular way. But there is a wilder and more philosophically revealing form of calligraphy known as “cursive” (草: literally “grass,” and here meaning something more like “a careless or hasty draft”). Huang T’ing-chien (1045–1105 C.E.), another accomplished Ch’an adept whom Stone-Waves surely revered as an ancient master, created a singular form of cursive script from which Stone-Waves no doubt learned deeply, for its spirit can be found in his calligraphy. One of Huang’s calligraphic enlightenment moments came from watching the oar-strokes of rowers: long, steady, strong. And his calligraphy reveals a deep wisdom of exactly those characteristics, with the balanced power of its wander-and-wave forms, the long meander that shapes his lines so that in this detail from the scroll in Plate 2, 初入 becomes (reading top down) the intense and yet lazybones script below, where Huang is so unconcerned with convention that he doesn’t bother to shape 入 with any more precision than a giant cross, meandering carefree and bemused and utterly self-assured in its power, all at the same time:
This is subtly present in Stone-Waves’ calligraphy, where lines are often overlong, thin and undulating. And Stone-Waves’ quirky script, with its comically misshapen ideograms constructed of those strange undulating lines, is always informed by the same sense of whimsy and wonder as Huang’s script. For both of them, this reflects a mastery of the technique of no technique. But at the same time, Huang’s art as revealed in his Li Po’s “Thinking of Long-Ago Travels” (Plate 2) contains its own very powerful character, reflecting his edgy but forceful self-assurance—determined and yet carefree, a little gnarled and cantankerous celebrating the profound and strange transformations his virtuosity can bring to the ideo-grams, transformations always informed by a Ch’an-inspired gleefulness. Huang’s ideograms seem to take command of space, slashing and opening, and in them one feels that the insight of his virtuosity is vast as the entire Cosmos.
You can feel in Huang’s cursive the basic structures of meaning and identity, the ideograms themselves, unraveling into abstract gestures and meaningless forms, another aspect of calligraphy’s function as a form of Ch’an practice. Calligraphers were very aware of the pictographic dimensions of ideograms, so in a sense cursive calligraphic practice was a form of painting, for the ideograms begin as images representing the ten thousand things, which are then transformed into abstract gestures. At this deep level, calligraphy is truly a wordless practice. It doesn’t matter much what the ideograms mean, and they are indeed often unreadable, for they are simply the material in an art-form that most closely resembles abstract-expressionist painting. What matters is that you can feel the liberating dance of ideograms trailing out through the spatial silence of Absence, returning meaning to the meaningless tissue of existence itself, identity become nothing more than existence rustling, decorating itself with wavelength festoon, wander-deep confetti, eye-lit celebration. And in that emotional space, you can feel empty awareness and the expansive presence of existence as a single tissue here in the beginning.
With his singular and profound sensibility, and the mastery of his brush, Huang T’ing-chien transforms this array of text from a Li Po poem (again reading in the traditional sequence, from top right down) into a dramatic, artistic composition:
Color Reproduction: Plate 2
While such calligraphy renders the mental realm, it also renders the entire cosmological process, an achievement dramatically evident in the work of Huai Su (737– 785 C.E.). Huai was a supreme master of wild-cursive script, a form that pushes cursive script to the extreme. Huang T’ing-chien once borrowed Huai Su’s fabled About Myself (Plate 3) and copied it over and over for days, the deepest way of inhabiting the movements of a master’s insight, and it brought Huang to a kind of enlightenment, the moment he fully mastered wild-cursive script. And Stone-Waves, too, no doubt revered Huai Su as an ancient sage teacher, just as Ch’an adepts would look back to great Ch’an masters. Like Stone-Waves, Huai Su spent many years as a monk in a Ch’an monastery, and he too became a Ch’an teacher of sorts. Eventually he left the monastery to pursue calligraphy, and several of his great moments of enlightenment happened outside the monastery. One came when he saw the calligraphy of Chang Hsü (ca. 675–759), the great wild-cursive master from the preceding generation. And at least one great moment of enlightenment came to him through landscape practice, on a day when he was watching the transformations of mountain peaks among the billowing emptiness of clouds and mist, not unlike those in Stone-Waves’ painting.
As with Stone-Waves and Huang T’ing-chien and virtually all other calligraphers, calligraphy represented for Huai Su another way of practicing Ch’an. He felt that cursive writing was a practice wherein he achieved samadhi, the deepest form of meditation. In his calligraphy, Huai so completely liberates himself from self-identity that personal expression meant for him a Taoist/Ch’an practice of selfless participation in the cosmological process.
Huai’s wild-cursive script enacts the elemental forces of the Cosmos. In it, we can feel Presence tumbling through its myriad transformations like mountain peaks among windblown cloud and mist, appearing out of Absence as a dark ink-soaked stroke begins, twisting and folding as its form unfurls and evolves, sometimes headlong and sometimes lazy, sometimes thick and sometimes thin as it leaps and falls, writhing with the energy of a dragon, feathering into Absence as the ink dries up and emptiness sifts into the brushstroke, and then finally disappearing back into Absence where the stroke ends. That dynamic movement appears concisely in this detail from Huai Su’s About Myself (Plate 3):
In creating such gestures, a calligrapher like Huai Su acted as a force of nature, moving with the same selfless energy as the Cosmos itself, enacting the essential movement of that magisterial cosmological process, the movement of dragon, both within consciousness and without. The brushstroke is always here in the beginning, at the ongoing originary moment of Presence burgeoning forth from Absence; and at the same time, as it unravels ideogram after sprawling ideogram, it opens the experience of words returned to Absence, the source they share with the things they “name” in our mimetic concept of language. This is to move with the spontaneity expected in a successful koan answer, making calligraphy a kind of answer to the Cosmos as koan. In following the movement of that brushstroke with the mirror-deep clarity of Ch’an empty mind, much as Huang T’ing-chien did when he copied Huai Su’s About Myself, we experience thought and identity returned to the existence-tissue here in the beginning. We participate in an unbridled mind soaring free of the tangles that mire our lives in day-to-day concerns, a mind full of creative energy and elemental joy, wherein thought and identity and language are purified to the sheer energy of the Cosmos. Huai Su’s About Myself (Plate 3) is one of the great examples of this. In it, we can feel Presence itself dancing through Absence here in the beginning, and Absence through Presence.
