Chinese astrology rose out of these correspondences. The orbit of Jupiter around the sun was rounded to 12 years. Each year was assigned a Zodiac animal. The combination of yin and yang elements and the Five Elements were assigned to each Zodiac animal. Combining the 12 zodiac animals and the Five Elements produced a 60-year cycle. In other words, it would take 60 years for a yin earth ox combination to occur again. A person’s birth year is associated with one combination in the cycle. A person’s birthdate was also linked to a lunar month and a corresponding inner animal. The two-hour timeframe of the person’s birth was linked to a secret animal. All of these factors were used in determining a person’s natural traits so one could be guided to a suitable profession, identify an appropriate mate, and avoid the possible negative behaviors associated with the animal signs. In this way, the Chinese Zodiac was looking to the natural world for guidance and trying to support the Confucian ideals of good behavior.
After the repression of the creative arts in the Qin dynasty, the Han emperors gave artists official recognition and encouragement. However, painting was still considered a craft for recording appearances. Painters did architectural renderings, recorded historical events pictorially, and did portraits of virtuous officials and famous people.
The ancestor portraits of high officials were done in a paint-by-feature style. The artist never saw the subject. A clerk analyzed a person’s features and gave the artist numbers. The person might have a #1 nose, #4 eyes, and a #6 mouth. No wonder the portraits typically look very stiff, flat, and grim. The clothes were most important. The sitter could pick the clothes and their colors as long as they were of the period and did not elevate his position. Only the Han emperors were allowed to wear the imperial symbol, the dragon, or the imperial color, yellow. Officials and important people wore squares on their clothes with symbols to identify their status. These symbols enabled others to recognize the person and his family so that people could associate only with people of similar status.
The insistence on Confucian ritual ultimately became too rigid for some people. Creative people became more influenced by Daoism as a channel for the more romantic side of their nature.
In the later Han dynasty, agrarian crisis, peasant revolts, and factions at court caused the empire to fall apart into three natural geographical divisions. This led to the era of the Six Dynasties and the end of a unified empire.
The Six Dynasties
For a period of three and a half centuries (222–589 CE), China suffered extreme political confusion with the Three Kingdoms, the Jin dynasty, and the Northern and Southern dynasties. Invasions of barbarians in the north for a hundred years drove Chinese aristocrats in the north to migrate southward. They built great independent manors that were sustained by the labor of peasants fleeing from the north or conquered southerners. In this way, people of Chinese descent supplanted aboriginal tribes in the south. The aristocratic families also gave rise to future generals who became emperors in later dynasties based on the southern capital in Nanjing.
The Introduction of Buddhism
Although Buddhism had reached China as early as 65 CE and had established a foothold at the collapse of the Han dynasty in 220 CE, it did not gain wide appeal until about the time of the Northern Wei dynasty (386–534 CE). Confucian literati were no longer in power to oppose it. The central Asian rulers in the north employed Buddhist monks as ritual specialists and political aides and were ready to accept the new religion. Monks also became a part of the cultured elite who had fled to the south. For the common people, Buddhism promised an answer to suffering and provided some comfort amid the constant political turmoil. As an organized religion, Buddhism filled a religious void. In practice, Confucianism focused too narrowly on ethical behavior. Daoism had diverged into philosophical Daoism for speculative minds and religious Daoism as a popular cult of superstition and magic with no edifying perspective. Buddhism had a coherent explanation of life and the universe and addressed human suffering and destiny. The spiritual qualities were expressed by a moving ritual and a rich tradition of art and iconography.
The Mahayana (“Great Vehicle”) branch of Buddhism that reached China emphasized liberating all living beings from suffering. The Buddha was elevated to a God-like status as an eternal, omnipresent, and all-knowing liberator. He is accompanied by a pantheon of quasi-divine Bodhisattvas that devote themselves to personal excellence to help rescue others from suffering. The most popular among these in China was the Guanyin, “Goddess of Mercy,” who assists those who call out her name in time of need. Statues of the Guanyin are common, and her figure is even sculpted on the top of stone seals used on paintings and calligraphy.
Initially, Chinese artists copied Buddhist art from India in its Indian forms. Then the images were merged with indigenous Daoist motifs. In northern China in the 4th century, the rulers promoted the painting of Buddhist art in cave-temples. Chinese artists painted murals on walls and caves as the Indians did, but the Chinese murals were more sensitive and expressive. A Sinicized style of the Buddha emerged with a slender waist and a plump face with delicate features. The inspiration and expressiveness of these murals raised the appreciation and status of painting in China.
The scriptures of Mahayana Buddhism were translated into Chinese, and that Sinicized Mahayana was then passed on to Korea, Vietnam, and finally to Japan in 538 CE. The East Asian Buddhism was furthermore divided into a variety of strands. One form that became strong in both China and Japan is the meditative school known as Chan (Chinese) or Zen (Japanese) Buddhism.
The Indian patriarch Bodhidharma founded Chan in the 6th century CE by combining the Buddhist practice of meditation with Daoist concepts, such as the importance of intuition, the insufficiency of words to convey deep truths, and a love of the absurd and unexpected.
The Chan teaching uses but does not depend on sacred texts. It provides the potential for direct spiritual breakthroughs to Truth through the Buddha nature possessed by each sentient being. Through meditative riddles or puzzles or just sitting and meditating, a person can detach the mind from conceptual modes of thinking and perceive reality directly. Enlightenment can occur instantly when a person loosens the grip of the ego and cuts through the dense veil of mental and emotional obscurations. Appealing to intellectuals, the Chan form of Buddhism had a great influence on Chinese calligraphers and painters after the 6th century.
The Beginnings of Landscape Painting
Literary fragments from the 5th century speak of the feelings and aspirations of landscape painters. They provide evidence that landscape painting had already emerged as a type of painting on its own worthy of discussion. Tsung Ping (375–443) and Wang Wei (415–443) both wrote about how the artist seeks through landscape painting to convey nature’s spirituality so that the beholder can re-experience nature’s grandeur. The artist is not just depicting the visible reality but is expressing the spirit indwelling his subject matter. The painters reflect the Daoist view of nature and the role of the artist, like a sage, leading viewers to a connection with the spirit in the natural universe.
At the end of the 5th century, Xie He (Hsieh Ho) distilled the traditional ideas about painting into Six Principles as a basis for evaluating and classifying painters. The first and most important principle involves Qi, the life-breath of everything, animate and inanimate. It can be interpreted as spirit, vitality, or the result of the activity of the spirit. The vitalizing spirit should resound harmoniously through a painting to impart spiritual significance. A painting may convey the outer likeness of its subject, but it fails if it does not manifest the resonance