File:Buddha and the gospel of Buddhism (1916) (14779499034).jpg

Identifier: buddhagospelofbu01coom (find matches)
Title: Buddha and the gospel of Buddhism
Year: 1916 (1910s)
Authors: Coomaraswamy, Ananda Kentish, 1877-1947
Subjects: Buddha and Buddhism
Publisher: New York, G. P. Putnam's sons
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress

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the foreground, explaining the content of the pictureby human action, but the Chinese artist needs no figure,nothing but a hint; the spectator must complete thethought himself. The world of Nature at this time had come to mean forthe Chinese artist something other than we are accustomedto think of in connexion with European landscape. Inone way he uses Natures forms as the phrases of a philo-sophical language, likening mountain and mist, dragonand tiger, to the Great Extremes : so that while themodern critic can perhaps appreciate much of their purelyaesthetic quality, it is only by an effort that he realizesthe depth of suggestion and mystical significance whichthese monochrome brush drawings have for the Chinesestudent steeped in Buddhist nature lore and Taoist philo-sophy. Very often also even this underlying philosophicalsignificance is, so to say, unexpressed. In any case,The life of nature and of all non-human things is re-garded in itself; its character contemplated and its344
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Plate H H KWANYIN Chinese painting, ioth-i2th century, after Wu Tao-tzu Collection of Mr C. L. Freer 3U The Far East beauty cherished for its own sake, not for its use andservice in the life of man. There is no infusion of humansentiment into the pictures of birds and beasts, of thetiger roaring in the solitudes, of the hawk and eagle onthe rocky crag; rarely is there any touch of the sports-mans interest which has inspired most European picturesof this kind.» Even the smallest flower, the most trivial insect can thusbe represented with such intensity of vision as to seem aworld in itself: and this world is a part of humanity,as man is a part of the world by nature. The worldof nature is not merely an object of interest, but a per-petual expression of the one life. Those strange linesof Blake The caterpillar on the leafReminds me of my mother s grief would have been immediately intelligible to every cultivatedreader of mediaeval Chinese and Japanese epigrams, andwould have inspired,

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