It may be argued that at the time when legends about the great masters began to be told, the belief in magic was already dead, and those legends were nothing more than an attempt to interpret the present in terms of the past. As a matter of fact, however, in the Asiatic world, belief in the supernatural power of the artist remained alive over greatly prolonged periods. In evidence of this, more recent examples can be supplied from Japan, a country which may be called the immediate artistic extension of China.
There is, for instance, the story translated into English by Lafcadio Hearn under the title "The Boy Who Drew Cats" and charmingly illustrated in Japanese Fairy Tales, published at Tokyo by T. Hasegawa and Son in the late nineteenth century. Although it seems likely that the story goes back to more ancient Chinese sources, it still has a well-established tradition in Japan, and one is justified in believing that the Japanese accepted it as a matter of historical fact. The boy of the tale, from an early age, showed unusual talent in drawing cats. He drew cats on every slip of paper within his reach and also on the walls and sliding panels of his parents' house. At long last he was apprenticed to a very severe master in the hope that he would be dissuaded from ruining walls. Alas, the urge to paint triumphed over discipline, and the disgusted master dismissed his apprentice as a hopeless case. On his subsequent wanderings the boy one night entered an abandoned temple. Before lying down to sleep in one of the lonely rooms, he swiftly sketched a few cats on an old discarded screen (Fig. 1). During the night he was harassed by the sound of terrible yowling and screeching, and when he finally awoke in the morning, he found a huge ghost rat dead on the floor (Fig. 2). The cats on the screen had blood smeared all over their claws and fangs—and very pleased looks on their faces.
Another legend concerning a Japanese master painter dates from the sixteenth century, extracting its essence from within our own historical period. It is the story of young Sesshū, who was made a Zen acolyte in boyhood but displeased his abbot by a constant unruly preference for drawing over prescribed religious duties. As punishment the abbot one day bound the boy to a tree. Sesshū at first cried and wailed, but then after a while, with his toe, he began drawing pictures in the tear-wet sand. It was mice that he drew, and so lifelike were they that when he had completed a good number of them they sprang to life and gnawed through the ropes that bound him (Fig. 3).
Dated even later than Sesshū's magic is that of Maruyama Ōkyo (1733-95), who is credited with originating the ghost-picture genre in a painting commissioned by a leading daimyo. Incidentally, one delightfully ironical feature of the story consists in the detail that he used his aunt as model for the ghost. This much only by the way. The important part of the tale lies in its relation of what happened after the master had completed his last brush stroke. The master, it is said, had hardly stepped back from his picture with a satisfied grunt when the painted ghost detached itself with a gliding motion and disappeared from the room.
Today the usual interpretation of such legends places primary emphasis upon the extraordinary realism of the paintings and explains the events in reference to this realism, deducing it to be the very cause that made the paintings come to life. Such conclusions entirely miss the point of the legends, which should no more be thus interpreted than should the story of Myron's cow or of the cherries of Apelles. The afore-cited stories are all tales of magic, pure and simple.
In the East, until as recently as the turn of the nineteenth century, art and a belief in the magical powers of the artist were intertwined concepts. Even in our own age, therefore, the painter in Japan, just as in China, has not doubted that great art and magic are one and the same. Whether this has been explicitly admitted or not is of no importance. An implicit acceptance of the basic idea has been rooted so deeply in the Oriental mind that there has been no need for conscious expression. Mention may here be made of the magazine Tien Shih, a forerunner of the modern illustrated, which was published in Shanghai during the early years of the present century, just before the founding of the Republic. It reported contemporary events in a traditional style, with lithographs, and featured many "authenticated" instances of magic and the supernatural.
In a comparison between Chinese and Western painting, the unity of technique and idea in the former becomes more obvious. Western art lost its magical elements at an early date because of the influence of Christianity. It is true that certain aspects of the supernatural continued to be expressed, but only insofar as they had been transfused into the body of Christian thought. Technical skill, though, no longer had anything magical about it: it evolved from no formula of magic but rather from the search for ways of overcoming the problems presented by the various materials of artistic expression—a search that has always produced a different answer in each epoch. And once the unity of technique and idea had ceased to exist, doubts and perplexities concerning technique began to arise. It is precisely such doubts and perplexities that have destroyed more works of art, by preventing their creation, than have all the fires and floods and wars of history. The East has suffered from an equally destructive mechanism in that the almost ritualized technique which necessarily developed out of magic resulted in the mass production of skillfully executed but mediocre paintings.
From this short and incomplete survey we can see that until our own times no distinction was made between technique and idea in Chinese painting. The two concepts were one and the same. Hence those who seek to know the art of the East must study the technical significance of forms with just as much determination as they study the finished compositions. Most essentially, they must persevere until they reach the point of perceiving the real identity of those apparent opposites: material appearance and spiritual essence. Only from that point on will the world of Eastern art truly open itself to the Western observer.
BESIDES MAGIC, THERE IS YET A SECOND approach to an understanding of Chinese art: one which leads through Chinese philosophy. And this we may now try. We have already stated that in the East, and especially in China, there was no absolute division between magic, religion, and philosophy. Doubtless they were never, as in the West, fundamentally opposed to each other, even if in certain points differences or distinctions were recognized.
Some scholars assert that Taoism is the typically Chinese philosophy, having been the primitive philosophy of the Han race. They also suggest that Chinese Buddhism has taken over some essentially Taoist features. And one can agree that the Book of Changes, in the version which we know (until recently attributed to Confucius), in fact expresses a thoroughly Taoist attitude within the framework of its Confucian ethos, at least in the sense of presenting a typically Chinese state of mind.
In the works of the Taoist philosopher Chuang-tzu there occur two passages that are worth noting for our purposes. The first is the often-quoted parable concerning Prince Hui's cook; in the translation of H. A. Giles it goes as follows:
Prince Hui's cook was cutting up a bullock. Every blow of his hand, every heave of his shoulders, every tread of his foot, every thrust of his knee, every whshh of rent flesh, every chhk of the chopper, was in perfect harmony—rhythmical like the dance of the Mulberry Grove, simultaneous like the chord of the Ching Shou.
"Well done!" cried the Prince."Yours is skill indeed."
"Sire, " replied the cook, "I have always devoted myself to Tao. It is better than skill. When I first began to cut up bullocks, I saw before me simply whole bullocks. After three years' practice, I saw no more whole animals (but saw them, so to speak, in sections).
"And now I work with my mind and not with my eye. When my senses bid me stop, but my mind urges me on, I fall back upon eternal principles. I follow such openings or cavities as there may be, according to the natural constitution of the animal. I do not attempt to cut through joints; still less through large bones.
"A good cook changes his chopper once a year—because he cuts. An ordinary cook, once a month—because he hacks. But I have had this chopper nineteen years, and although I have cut up many thousand bullocks, its edge is as if fresh from the whetstone. For