Abstract ideas and attributes are
expressed in the art language not only of Japan, Korea and China, but
also in that of India and even of Persia and Greece,[27] until one
wonders how an Aryan religion, like Buddhism, could have so conquered
and unified the many nations of Chinese Asia. He wonders, indeed, until
he remembers how it has itself been transformed and changed in popular
substance, from lofty metaphysics and ethics into pantheism for the
shorn, and into polytheism for the unshorn.
Looking at early Japanese pictures with the eye of the historian, as
well as of the connoisseur of art, one will see that the first real
school of Japanese art was Buddhistic. The modern school of pictorial
art, named from the monkish phrase, Ukioye--pictures of the Passing
World--is indeed very interesting to the western student, because it
seems to be more in touch with the human nature of the whole world, as
distinct from what is local, Chinese, or sectarian. Yet, casting a
glance back of the mediaeval Kano, Chinese and Yamato-Tosa styles, he
finds that Buddhism gave Japan her first examples of and stimulus to
pictorial art.[28] He sees further that instead of the monochrome of
Chinese exotic art, or the first rude attempts of the native pencil,
Buddhism began Japanese sculpture, carving and nearly every other form
of plastic or pictorial representation, in which are all the elements of
Northern Buddhism, as so lavishly represented, for example, in that
great sutra which is the book, _par excellence_, of Japanese Buddhism,
the Saddharma Pundarika.
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