When the tea bowl met the tea stand
An exhibition in New York brings art, history and religion together
Few people who pass a tea set now on display in the Asian gallery of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York would give it a second glance, and why should they? After all, there’s not much to see. With the tea bowl in black and its accompanying stand in red with patches of black, the set, dimly lit by the museum light, is demure to the point of self-effacing, especially when seen together with all the glitter that surrounds it, from a gilt bronze Buddha statue to many long rolls of sutra written in gold on dark background.
But Joseph Scheier-Dolberg, the man behind the exhibition
Another World Lies Beyond: Chinese
Art and the Divine, says the two parts of the set traveled in both time and space for a meeting the Chinese would call “predestined”.
“The porcelain tea cup was made during the Song Dynasty (960-1279) around the 12th and 13th centuries, and its lacquered wooden stand in Muromachi Japan somewhere between the 14th and the 16th centuries,” he said.
Here in the Met gallery they came together not as strangers but long-separated soul mates steeped in the same aesthetic and philosophy. Minimally designed, both have embraced toned-down colors, if not immediately, then in time. The original lacquer to the tea stand was applied in two layers. Repeated use over time has abraded the upper layer of red to reveal the black layer underneath, as had been intended by its maker.
This worn beauty was equally cherished during the Song Dynasty, when history was celebrated as never before and never since. Teacups with their glaze softened and their sharp edges smoothed by time were especially revered.
“Both objects are embedded in the cultural and religious traditions of their time and place,” said Scheier-Dolberg, referring to the fact that the serving and drinking of tea were inseparable with the rise of Chan Buddhism in China and its subsequent spread in Japan, where it gained its more popular name Zen.
“Zen became an international phenomenon around that time, and it still is today,” he said.
By charting the mindscape of the Chinese, Scheier-Dolberg has inevitably waded into the river of history where different cultural tributaries converged, before running their separate courses into diverse spiritual lands. The exhibition offers an insight into interactions and exchanges between cultures that first started along religious lines but later evolved to exert a much deeper and enduring influence.
One gallery out of the nine dedicated to this exhibition tells the story of Gautama Buddha, or Shakyamuni, the very Buddha who founded Buddhism. On display are works of art and artifacts inspired by this great teacher and mendicant who pursued a middle road between sensual indulgence and severe asceticism.
One painting, done by an unidentified artist from the 13th and 14th centuries China, shows a disheveled and emaciated Buddha walking out of the mountains, having decided that living the life of an ascetic offered no path to enlightenment.
“This (The Buddha’s) espousal of the middle way, as we come to think of it, struck a perfectly harmonious note with Confucius China, run for more than 2,000 years by followers of the fifth century BC philosopher who sought balance in life and statecraft,” Scheier-Dolberg said.
Making clever use of powerful Buddhist symbolism, another artist who came 400 years later produced an album of vignettes centered on the life of Luohans, the disciples of the Buddha. Each scenario is executed in bright colors on real leaves of the ficus or bodhi tree, under which the Buddha is believed to have achieved enlightenment.
In fact, Scheier-Dolberg said, it is two ancient paintings of these wise old men that gave birth to the entire show.
“We have in our collection two famous paintings of Luohans that hadn’t been exhibited for a long time. They provide the starting point for my endeavor, which would eventually come to cover a much more broader area dominated not only by the Buddha and his successors, but a myriad of forces that both guided and guarded the existence of the Chinese, in this world and beyond.”
One of them is by Shitao (16421708), who employed thin lines in faint color in his depiction of mountainous caves, from which these reclusive men would emerge.
Shitao, whose original name was Zhu Ruoji, was born into the ruling Zhu family one year before the fall of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). Taken into hiding in a temple as a toddler as the rest of his family was massacred by the new regime, Shitao later spent many years in the temple, all the while finding it hard to forsake his longing for fame.
In his painting, one of the Luohans is pouring water from a thinnecked bottle. The stream runs off toward the end of the scroll, where it morphs into a dragon, the ultimate symbol of supernatural and regal power throughout Chinese history.
A more grotesque rendering of the Luohans was given by the Ming Dynasty painter Wu Bin, who lived a century earlier. With bulging forehead, slightly contorted face, the occasional side whiskers or bushy beard, and most notably, long curved fingernails more likely in Western folklore to be associated with a witch, Wu’s Luohans are combinations of a tough hide and a tender heart.
“Keeping in mind that Buddhism first originated in India, such depiction reflects the Chinese imagination of people from West Asia and the Indian subcontinent,” Scheier-Dolberg said. Not only that. For a large part in Chinese art history, painters who were subjected or opted for the influence of Buddhism were often those in exile, self-imposed or otherwise. With political ambition thwarted by reality, religion for them is as much a comfort as a refuge. Some also followed Taoism, founded in the sixth century BC by the Chinese philosopher Laozi, who advocated “inaction” or “action without intention” as a way of reaching harmony with nature and oneself. In the reclusive Luohans some artists have reluctantly discovered their alter ego.
Speaking of Taoism, the indigenous doctrine has spawned its own legion of gods and demigods who are protectors and well-wishers. Compared with their omniscient Buddhist divinities, some have humbler roots, two examples being the sixth century warriorsturned-door gods Qin Qiong and Yuchi Jingde.
Guarding entrances to people’s homes in the form of colorful wooden prints, they are more ubiquitous than those who stare down at the kneeling worshippers from the temple of their own, to say the least.
Here is something that is typical of the Chinese approach toward worship: rather than saying prayers to a set group of deities based on a certain belief, the Chinese embraced all, untroubled by even the slightest hint of sectarianism.
Zhang Xiping, a renowned professor at the Beijing Foreign Studies University, whose research covers Chinese philosophies and religions in China, said: “The merging of Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism became irreversible during the Ming Dynasty in the 14th century. Shying away from answering questions about life and death, Confucianism offers guidance for behaving and self-cultivation but not comfort to the soul. But those questions had to be answered and the soul comforted. That was where Buddhism and Taoism, the latter concerning itself with immortality, came in, together giving rise to Chan, or Zen Buddhism.”
“Since they dealt with different realms — this life and the next — these different ways of thinking complement rather than contradict each other. This also explains why in Chinese history, no war has ever been fought in the name of religion,” he continued.
This meditative inclusiveness is reflected in art: a large hanging scroll from the early 17th century teems with Buddhist and nonBuddhist immortals, each with power that the artist hoped to invoke.
Right at the center, sitting cross-legged on an open lotus, is Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy known outside China as Bodhisattva. Guanyin, famously cast as the female disciple of the Buddha in the 16th century Chinese novel
is without doubt the most venerated deity in ancient China, helping women in the fulfillment of their maternal duty, by bringing them an offspring.
In a potent example of what happens when a ruler became a devout Buddhist, Empress Dowager Cisheng of the Ming Dynasty commissioned her own incarnation of the all-compassionate Guanyin, accompanied by a child deity who appears on the lower left side of the painting and who is almost certainly the empress’ elder son, Emperor Wanli.
Politics and religion were inextricably intertwined, something of which the exhibition has plenty of proof. A small alcove linked to one of the galleries is occupied on three walls by three hangings, all dedicated to Tibetan Buddhism but belonging to the consecutive periods of China’s Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties (1271-1911).
On its way eastward from India, Buddhism had made stopovers in Tibet, where it morphed into Tibet Buddhism, a form of religion known for fueling an unparalleled passion among believer-artists determined to honor their god with countless hours of work. The accumulation of time and labor resulted in visually sumptuous works of art meant to dazzle the eye and the mind.
This taste, perhaps not by coincidence, appealed to the rulers of China’s vast empires, many of them, starting from the Yuan Dynasty in the 13th century, being followers of Tibetan Buddhism to varying degrees.
Together, the three wall hangings — two painted, one woven — shed light on forces at play in court. They also reveal the rulers’ desire to stay at the top of the game, by harnessing the powers that had a hold on their subjects from afar.
And they are a far cry from the simple-looking tea set loved by the Chinese — and their contemporary Japanese and Koreans — between the 10th and 13th century. The constantly evolving aesthetic hints at the complexity of the spiritual world that has always been for shaping, and that lies beyond the comprehension of most.
But it never harms to find oneself a place of quietness to sip tea, knowing that there is history to savor, wisdom to gain and philosophy to muse over.
This (The Buddha’s) espousal of the middle way, as we come to think of it, struck a perfectly harmonious note with Confucius China, run for more than 2,000 years by followers of the fifth century BC philosopher who sought balance in life and statecraft.” Joseph Scheier-Dolberg exhibit curator