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Zen Buddhist Landscape Arts of Early Muromachi Japan (1336-1573). By JOSEPH PARKER. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. xiv, 302 pp. $24.95.
The "Zen-ness" of "Zen art" is an enduring and slippery trope, and Joseph Parker probes it by exploring the meaning of artistic activity in the Five Mountains (Gozan) monastery system of Japanese Zen. Parker proposes that Gozan abbots understood culture "to be a valid mode for the production of religious value, just as they saw the Zen meditation hall as a place for the deepening of Buddhist insight" (p. 3). In so arguing, he targets two entrenched views of Zen art. Historians such as Tamamura Takeji, on the one hand, have labeled Gozan prelates "literati monks" whose preoccupations with poetry and painting were injurious to monastic practice, symptomatic of secularization, and thus empty of "Zen." D. T. Suzuki, on the other, promoted Zen art as aestheticized "Oriental nothingness" and saw too much "Zen" in everything cultural. Parker's reading, meanwhile, keeps the "Zen" in the art of the Gozan but attends to its social and soteriological complexity.
Parker's narrative focuses upon a Gozan epistemology of landscape art expressed in poetry, prose, painting, and garden design. Landscape, he argues, was a topos of the phenomenal world through which monks cultivated the mind, sought "spirit communion" with ancient poet-sages, and practiced enlightened activity. His "prime objects" are extant poem-painting scrolls (shigajiku) produced during the Oei era (1394-1428) which feature prefaces and poems in Chinese inscribed above ink and landscape paintings. Shigajiku have long been art historical territory, and Parker acknowledges the scholarship of Shimada Sh5jir6 and later art historians. Readers anticipating object-focused studies of individual scrolls, their panoply of inscriptions, and paintings will be disappointed, however, since Parker's project is macrotextual. He excises prefaces from surviving scrolls, culls texts from poetry anthologies, and sets them afloat into the Gozan's vast literature: discourse records and koan collections; Mahayana Buddhist works including the Vimalakirti Sutra, Taoist and Confucian classics such as Chuang tzu and Mencius; and the writings of the Sung literatus Su Shih (d. 1101). joining this ocean of primary text are publications in Buddhology, Chinese literary...