Zen Ceramic Art

_ Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity.

_ John Keats, _Ode on a Grecian Urn

Shino tea bowl

Raku tea bowl

_ALTHOUGH j.a.pAN had been a nation of potters almost from prehistoric times, it was only after the rise of Zen influence and a popular interest in the tea ceremony that ceramics was raised from craft to high art. The great age of j.a.panese ceramics occurred several hundred years after the heroic periods of Chinese ceramic art in the T'ang and Sung dynasties, but, as in other cases, the j.a.panese eventually equaled and in some ways surpa.s.sed their mainland teachers.

The Stone Age Jomon tribes in j.a.pan created some of the richest figurine art of any of the world's prehistoric peoples. These Jomon figurines, fired at low temperatures and rarely over six or eight inches in height, are a cla.s.sic puzzle to anthropologists and art historians, for they sometimes seem Polynesian, sometimes pre- Columbian, and sometimes pure abstraction in the modern sense of the term. Indeed, certain Jomon figurines could pa.s.s as works of Pica.s.so or Miro. At times the features of the body were rendered recognizably, but usually they were totally stylized and integrated into the figure as part of some larger interest in material and pure form. It was a n.o.ble beginning for what would be a permanent j.a.panese interest in the look and feel of natural clay.

When the Jomon were displaced around the third century B.C. by the Yayoi, their beautiful figurine art disappeared, and for several centuries j.a.pan produced mainly pedestrian crocks and drinking vessels.

The few figurines created retained little of the sophisticated Jomon abstraction. Around the turn of the fourth century A.D., however, Yayoi potters found their metier, and began the famous _haniwa _figurines, hollow-eyed statuettes in soft brown clay which were used to decorate aristocratic tombs, and simple but elegant vases and water pots in low- fired brown clay, which often were dyed with cinnabar and which give evidence of being thrown on some form of primitive wheel.

This domestic ware was in such demand that a cla.s.s of professional potters came into being--inevitably leading to a gradual falling off of the individualistic character of the pots, as craftsmen began to ma.s.s- produce what had previously been a personal art form. The Korean Buddhist culture which reached j.a.pan in the fifth and sixth centuries brought the j.a.panese new techniques for high-firing their stoneware pots, introducing a process whereby ashes from the kiln were allowed to adhere to the surface of a piece to produce a natural glaze. These new high-temperature pots had a hard surface texture and an ashen- gray color, while the existing native wares of low-fired porous clays retained their natural brown hues.

Typically the average j.a.panese preferred the natural-colored, soft clay vessels, and so the two types of pottery continued to be produced side by side for several hundred years, with the aristocracy choosing the hard-surfaced mainland-style gray works

and the common people continuing to use the simpler, underrated brown vessels, which were often fashioned by hand. The importance of this instinctive j.a.panese reaction for the later acceptance of Zen-inspired ceramic art cannot be over-stressed. Not only did the j.a.panese love of natural clay make them reject glazes for centuries after they had learned the necessary techniques, they also seem to have had little spontaneous interest in decorating their pots or using high-firing or mechanized techniques for their production, perhaps because the technology came between man and object, distancing the potter too far from his handiwork. j.a.panese potters cherished their regional individuality, and they continued to express their personal sensibilities in their work, so there were a multiplicity of rural kilns and a wide variety of styles.

The pa.s.sion for Chinese culture during the Nara period of the eighth century led to a brief fling with Tang Chinese-style three-color glazed wares among the imitative j.a.panese aristocracy; but these seem to have been too much at odds with native instincts, for they were soon forgotten. After the government moved to Kyoto and launched the Heian era, both the indigenous pottery techniques--the low-fired, brown, porous pots for the common people and the high-fired, gray, polished bowls for the aristocracy--continued to thrive side by side. However, technical advances in the high-firing kilns brought about subtle changes in the mock-glazes of the aristocratic wares. It was discovered that if they were fired in an atmosphere where there was abundant oxygen, the fused particles of fueled ash on the surface would turn amber, whereas if oxygen was excluded from the kiln, the surface ash would fuse to a pastel green. Thus by varying the baking process, Heian potters could produce a variety of light colors, creating a pottery considerably more delicate than had been possible before. Aside from this refined technique for firing, however, the j.a.panese steadfastly refused to change their traditional methods of making pots.

For this reason, j.a.panese ceramics were deliberately kept at a technically primitive stage until the early part of the thirteenth century while the Chinese were making considerable advances in the art.

During the years from the ninth to the thirteenth century, while the j.a.panese isolated themselves from the mainland, the Sung Chinese were learning of new glazes far more subtle and refined than those employed during the T'ang. In the early years of the thirteenth century, when j.a.panese monks journeyed to China to study the new faith of Zen, they were dazzled by the sophisticated new Chinese wares they encountered.

Through the offices of Zen a second revolution in j.a.panese ceramics occurred.

The instrument for this second revolution (according to tradition) was the priest Dogen, founder of j.a.panese Soto Zen, who on one of his trips to China was accompanied by a j.a.panese potter known as Toshiro. Toshiro stayed in China for six years, studying the Sung techniques of glazing, and on his return he opened a kiln at Seto, where he began copying Sung glazed wares. Although he has been called the father of modem j.a.panese ceramics, his attempts to duplicate the highly praised Sung products were not entirely successful. Furthermore, the wares he did produce, decorative and thick-glazed, found no acceptance except among the aristocracy and priesthood, both of whom favored Seto wares for the new pastime of drinking Chinese tea. But while the Zen aesthetes and tea drinkers amused themselves with Seto's fake Sung celadons, the commoners continued to use unglazed stoneware.

All this changed dramatically around the middle of the sixteenth century with the rise of an urban middle cla.s.s and the sudden popularity of the Zen tea ceremony among this new bourgeoisie. Zen, which had brought Chinese glazes to j.a.pan in the thirteenth century, sparked the emergence of a brilliant era of glazed ceramic art in the sixteenth. No longer content with primitive stoneware or reproductions of Chinese vessels, the potters of j.a.pan finally developed native styles at once uniquely j.a.panese and as sophisticated as any the world has seen. It was another triumph for Zen culture. Rural kilns with long traditions of stoneware water vessels converted to the production of tea-ceremony wares, and throughout the land the search was on for colored glazes. The craze reached such heights that the shogun generals n.o.bunaga and Hideyoshi rewarded their successful military commanders not with decorations but with some particularly coveted tea-ceremony utensils.

Although ceramic tea caddies and water jars were required for the ceremony, the real emphasis was on the drinking bowl, for this was the piece that was handled and admired at close range. A proper bowl, in addition to being beautiful, had to be large enough and deep enough to allow sufficient tea for three or four drinkers to be whisked; it had no handle and consequently had to be of a light, porous, nonconducting clay with a thick, rough glaze to act as a further insulator and to permit safe handling between drinkers; the rim had to be thick and tilted slightly inward, to provide the partic.i.p.ants with a pleasant sensation while drinking and to minimize dripping. In other words, these bowls were as functionally specialized in their own way as a brandy snifter or a champagne gla.s.s of today.

A number of styles of tea bowl developed during the sixteenth century, reflecting the artistic visions of various regional potters and the different clays available. What these bowls had in common, beyond their essential functional characteristics, was an adherence to the specialized dictates of Zen aesthetic theory. Equally important, they were a tribute to the historic j.a.panese reverence for natural clay.

Even though they were glazed, portions of the underlying clay texture were often allowed to show through, and the overall impression was that the glaze was used to emphasize the texture of the underlying clay, not disguise it. The colors of the glazes were natural and organic, not hard and artificial.

The social unrest preceding the rise of n.o.bunaga caused a number of potters to leave the Seto area, site of the fake Sung production, and resettle in the province of Mino, where three basic styles of tea bowl eventually came to prominence. First there was the Chinese-style tea vessel, which had been the mainstay of the older Seto kilns. Yellow glazes, once the monopoly of Seto, were also used at Mino, but different clays, combined with advancing technical competence and a new willingness to experiment, produced a new "Seto" ware that was a rich yellow and considerably more j.a.panese than Chinese. Second there was a new, thoroughly Zen-style bowl developed by the Mino potters. It was broader-based than the Chinese style, with virtually straight sides, and it was covered with a thick, creamy off-white glaze. Warm and endearing in appearance, with a flowing sensuous texture inviting to the touch, it became known as Shino.

Some say Shino bowls were named after a celebrated master of the tea ceremony, while others maintain the term was taken from the j.a.panese word for white, _shiro_. Whatever the case, this was the first glazed ware of truly native origins; and it marked the beginning of a new j.a.panese att.i.tude toward pottery. No longer inhibited by reverence for Chinese prototypes, the makers of Shino let their spontaneity run wild.

The new white glaze was deliberately applied in a haphazard manner, often covering only part of the bowl or being allowed to drip and run.

Sometimes part of the glaze was wiped off after it had been applied, leaving thin spots where the brown under-clay could show through after the firing. Or bubbles, b.u.ms, and soot were allowed to remain in the glaze as it was fired. Sometimes the white glaze was bathed in a darker coating in which incisions were made to allow the white to show through. At other times, sketchy designs, seemingly thrown down with a half-dry brush, were scribbled on the white bowls so that they appeared to be covered with Zen graffiti. Throughout all these innovations, the potters seemed to want to produce works as rough, coa.r.s.e, and unsophisticated as possible. Before long they had a gray glaze as well, and finally they produced a shiny black glaze whose precise formulation remains one of the unsolved mysteries of Momoyama art.

The next color to enter the Mino repertory, after yellow, white, gray, and black, was a stunning green. This was the third style of Mino tea bowl, and it was invented by a disciple of Rikyu whose name, Oribe, has been given to an incredible variety of wares--tea bowls, tea caddies, water jars, incense burners, and a host of dishes for serving food.

Sometimes the wares were solid green, but Oribe also had a habit of splashing the green over one section of a piece, or allowing it to run into one corner of a plate and freeze there in a limpid puddle. The portions of Oribe wares not covered with the splash of green were dull shades, ranging from gray to reddish brown, and on this background artists began to paint decorative designs- flowers, geometrical figures, even small sketches or still-lifes--something new and revolutionary for j.a.panese ceramics, but the forerunner of the profusion of decorative wares that appeared after the Momoyama. Shino had broken the bonds of the centuries of unglazed stoneware and proper copies of Chinese pots by introducing a native style of glazing and a new aesthetic freedom; Oribe led the way into a new world of anything- goes pottery, with half-glazes, painted decorative motifs, and experimentation in new, hitherto unknown shapes and types of vessels.

While the native j.a.panese potters at Mino were expanding their craft, another important development with far-reaching consequences for the Zen arts was taking place in the far south of the j.a.panese archipelago near the Korean peninsula. The ceramic arts of Korea were quite advanced at the beginning of the sixteenth century, with high-fired glazed wares as heavy and st.u.r.dy as the peasant stock from which they sprang. But the pots were made by building up coils of clay and beating them into a solid walled vessel rather than throwing them on a wheel.

This combination of high and low seems to have appealed to the j.a.panese clans living near the Korean mainland, for they brought a number of Korean potters to the southern city of Karatsu and started an industry.

The staple product of the Korean craftsman was a crude medium-sized bowl with sloping sides, used in their homeland for individual servings of rice. The primitive quality of these bowls perfectly suited the growing inverse sn.o.bbery of the tea ceremony, and soon j.a.panese aesthetes were drinking tea and admiring the Zen beauty in the Korean rice bowl. While the Mino potters were deliberately making the Sung tea bowl rougher and rougher (that is, adding _wabi_), those in Karatsu found themselves with a foreign bowl ready-made for tea.

When Hideyoshi invaded Korea during the last decade of the sixteenth century, he and his generals were careful to kidnap as many Korean potters as possible, whom they settled over a large part of j.a.pan. No longer restricted to a small area in the south, the Koreans injected a vigorous transfusion of peasant taste into all of j.a.panese ceramic art, extinguishing the last remnants of the refined Sung ideals. The Momoyama tea masters were given a new but still foreign standard of rustic chic perfectly in accord with _wabi_ tea.

Not surprisingly, it was Sen no Rikyu who synthesized the new native freedom and the fresh influx of mainland technology to create the undisputed glory of j.a.panese ceramics--the famous _raku_. Unquestionably j.a.pan's most original contribution to the history of ceramics, _raku _is produced in a manner entirely different from earlier techniques, and it is impossible to speak of _raku _without speaking of Zen. As might be expected, _raku_ was invented in the Zen center of Kyoto, a city with no previous history of ceramic production, and it came into being when Rikyu happened to take a fancy to the roof tiles being produced by a Korean workman named Chojiro. Rikyu hit upon the notion that the texture and feel of these tiles would be perfect for _wabi_- style tea, and he encouraged Chojiro in the making of a few tea bowls with the materials and firing techniques used for tiles.

The bowls Chojiro made were neither thrown on a wheel nor built up from coils, but molded and carved like sculpture.

A mixture of clays was first blended to gain the desired consistency of lightness and plasticity, after which a spatula and knife were used to shape a rough-sided, textured bowl whose sense of process was flaunted rather than obscured--an overt tactile quality perhaps first seen in the West in the rough-hewn sculptures of Rodin. These bowls were fired in a most unconventional manner: rather than being placed cold in a wood- burning kiln and gradually heated, baked, and cooled over a period of days, they, like the tiles, were thrust directly into a torrid charcoal kiln for a blistering thermal shock, which gave them an instant look of the ravaged face of ancient _sabi_. Raku wares were first made in black with an iron-like glaze that is almost like frozen lava, but the later repertory included glazes that were partly or wholly red or off-white.

Unlike the Shino and Oribe bowls, _raku _pieces were not decorated with designs or spots of color; they were _wabi _and _sabi _with unpretentious, weathered grace. The last term you think of when seeing _raku _is ornate.

Rikyu found _raku_ bowls perfect for the tea ceremony; they were austere, powerful, seemingly wrenched from melted rock. In shape they were broad-based with gently rounded, one might almost say organically rounded, sides leading to an undulating lip, wrapping in slightly over the tea, thereby holding the heat and preventing drips. Not only were they light and porous, allowing for minimal heat conduction and comfortable handling, their center of gravity was so low they were almost impossible to tip over, permitting easy whisking of the powdered tea as they rested on the _tatami_-matted floor of the tea room. (It should be noted that special bowls for summer usage de-emphasized certain of these characteristics: they were thinner-walled and shallower, since the object in hot months was to dissipate heat rather than conserve it.) But the most appealing qualities of the _raku _were its sculptural sense of natural plastic form and its soft, bubbly, almost liquid glaze, which virtually invites one to hold it in his lips. Also, the colors of the glazes just happen to contrast beautifully with the pale sea-green of the powdered tea.

This was the end of the search for the perfect Zen tea bowl, and Hideyoshi was so pleased with Chojiro's handiwork that he gave the potter's family a seal bearing the word that would give the form its name: _raku_, meaning pleasure or comfort. Chojiro's descendants became the _raku _dynasty, as generation after generation they set the standards for others to follow.

Hideyoshi's act of official recognition meant that j.a.panese potters were no longer merely craftsmen, but fully accredited artists. In later years, j.a.panese ceramics became distinguished in many areas--from the traditional wares produced at a multiplicity of local kilns to a vast new nationwide porcelain industry producing decorative works for both export and home consumption. Tea-ceremony vessels were created in great profusion as well, but, unfortunately, genuine art cannot be ma.s.s- produced. By the eighteenth century, the great age of Zen ceramic art was over, never to be recovered. Today the early wares of the Zen Momoyama artists command their weight in gold, perhaps platinum. This is the great irony of the _wabi _tea vessels, if not of all Zen culture.

Tea bowls, the major expression of Zen art, seem at once both primitive and strikingly modern. To begin to understand this contradiction we must go back to our own nineteenth century in the West, when tastes ran to decoration for its own sake and the rule of perfect, symmetrical, polished form was the aesthetic ideal. Into this smug, serene sea of aesthetic sureties, which in some ways reached back to the ancient Greeks, the English critic John Ruskin threw a boulder when he wrote:

_Never demand an exact finish for its own sake, but only for some practical or n.o.ble end. . . . [t]he demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art. . . . Imperfection is in some sort essential to all we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body. . . . To banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed.1

_

Ruskin was rediscovering a large piece of Zen aesthetic theory while laying the groundwork for many of our modern ideals of beauty.

To see the similarity, let us examine for a moment a few of the finer points of Zen aesthetic theory as exemplified in the cla.s.sic tea bowls.

In form the bowls are frequently asymmetrical and imperfect; the glaze seems to be a species of moss still in the process of spreading over portions of the sides it somehow never managed to reach, and it is uneven, marred by cracks, lumps, scratches, and foreign contaminants.

If imperfection is the goal, these bowls extend well beyond Ruskin's original standards. But not only are they imperfect, they also seem old and weathered, with the natural patina of a dried-up riverbed. They show absolutely no evidence that any conscious attempt was made to create a work of art; they appear to be completely functional.

It is all a deception. Master potters spend literally decades perfecting the Zen art of the controlled haphazard. One of the first principles they honor is _wabi_, which deplores nonfunctional decorative objects, polished surfaces, artificiality in shape or color, and anything unnatural to the materials used. Works of art without _wabi_ may have superficial external beauty, but they forfeit inner warmth. Bowls out of shape, with cracks, blobs, and ashes in the glaze, invite us to partake of the process of creation through their asymmetry and imperfection. They also lead us past the surface by virtue of its being deliberately marred.

Making a bowl with _wabi _is considerably more difficult than

making a smooth, symmetrical, perfectly glazed piece. The creation of contrived "accidents," on which much of the illusion of artlessness depends, is particularly difficult. Everywhere there are scars, contaminants, spotty glaze--all as deliberate as the decoration on a Dresden plate; connoisseurship consists in admiring how the artist managed to make it seem so natural and unavoidable.

The same skill goes to make a piece look old, the essential quality of _sabi_. By suggesting long years of use, the bowls acquire humility and richness. There is no need to "wear the new off" in order to give them character; they are already mellow and unpretentious. The potter's genius has gone to create the sense of wear, a quality considerably more difficult to realize than an aura of newness.