THE
IDEALS OF THE EAST
In
fifteen chapters, Okakura Kakuzo
offers a chronological account of Japanese art history from antiquity
to the
Meiji period. His aim was not so much to explain stylistic developments
as to
elevate the status of Japanese art and, with it, that of the Japanese
nation.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many Westerners
saw
Japanese art as no more than pretty objects, products of craft and
industry and
devoid of higher meaning. Okakura tried to change this view by
constructing an
elaborate network of geographical, religious, and historical
relationships. In
chapter i, he identifies Japan
as part of a much larger geocultural sphere that includes China, India,
Persia, and other
regions in
Asia. He also claims it as the
repository of
all the best traditions born of this sphere. The book is replete with
characterizations of Japan
tliat emphasize its unique superiority. Indeed, he more than matches
the
condescending tone of some Western "Orientalists" in this regard.
Japan Is a Museum of Asiatic
Civilization
Asia
is one. The Himalayas
divide, only to accentuate, two mighty civilizations, the Chinese with
its
communism of Confucius, and the Indian with its individualism of
the Vedas.
But not even the snowy barriers can interrupt for one moment that broad
expanse
of love for the Ultimate and the Universal, which is the common
thought-inheritance of every Asiatic race, enabling them to produce all
the
great religions of the world, and distinguishing them from those
maritime peoples
of the Mediterranean and the Baltic, who love to dwell on the
Particular, and
to search out the Means, not the end, of life. . . .
For if Asia be one, it is also true that the Asiatic
races form
a single mighty web. We forget, in an age of classification, that types
are
after all but shining points of distinctness in an ocean of
approximations,
false gods deliberately set up to be worshiped, for the sake of mental
convenience, but having no more ultimate or mutually exclusive validity
than
the separate existence of two interchangeable sciences. If the
history of
Delhi represents the Tartar's imposition of himself upon a Mohammedan
world, it
must also be remembered that the story of Baghdad and her great
Saracenic
culture is equally significant of the power of Semitic peoples to
demonstrate
Chinese, as well as Persian, civilization and art, in the face
of the Frankish
nations of the Mediterranean coast. Arab chivalry, Persian poetry,
Chinese
ethics, and Indian thought, all speak of a single Asiatic peace, in
which there
grew up a common life, bearing in different regions different
characteristic
blossoms, but nowhere capable of a hard and fast dividing-line. Islam
itself
may be described as Confucianism on horseback, sword in hand. For
it is quite
possible to distinguish, in the hoary communism of the Yellow
Valley, the
traces of a purely pastoral element, such as we see abstracted and
self-realized in the Mussulman races.
Or, to turn again to
eastern Asia from the West, Buddhism—that great
ocean of idealism, in which merge all the river-systems of Eastern
Asiatic
thought-is colored not only with the pure water of the Ganges, for the
Tartaric
nations that joined it made their genius also tributary, bringing new
symbolism, new organization, new powers of devotion, to add to the
treasures of
faith.
It
has been, however,
the great privilege of Japan to realize this
unity-in-complexity with a special clearness. The Indo-Tartaric blood
of this
race was in itself a heritage which qualified it to imbibe from the two
sources, and so mirror the whole of Asiatic consciousness. The unique
blessing
of unbroken sovereignty, the proud self-reliance of an unconquered
race, and
the insular isolation which protected ancestral ideas and instincts at
the cost
of expansion, made Japan
the real repository of the trust of Asiatic thought and culture.
Dynastic
upheavals, the inroads of Tartar horsemen, the carnage and devastation
of furious
mobs—all these things, sweeping over her again and again, have left to
China no
landmarks, save her literature and her ruins, to recall the glory of
the Tang
emperors or the refinement of Song society.
The grandeur
of Asoka—the ideal type of Asiatic monarch, whose edicts dictated terms
to the
sovereigns of Antioch and Alexandria—is
almost forgotten among the
crumbling stones of Bharhut and Buddha Gaya. The jeweled court of
Vikramaditya
is but a lost dream, which even the poetry of Kalidasa fails to evoke.
The
sublime attainments of Indian art, almost effaced as they have been by
the
rough-handedness of the Hunas [Huns], the fanatical iconoclasm of the
Mussulman, and the unconscious vandalism of mercenary Europe, leave us
to seek
only a past glory in the moldy walls of Ajanta, the tortured sculptures
of
Ellora, the silent protests of rock-cut Orissa and finally in the
domestic
utensils of the present day, where beauty sadly clings to religion in
the midst
of an exquisite home-life.
It
is in Japan
alone
that the historic wealth of Asiatic culture can be consecutively
studied
through its treasured specimens. The Imperial collection, the Shinto
temples,
and the opened dolmens, reveal the subtle curves of Hang [sic]
workmanship. The
temples of Nara are rich in representations of Tang culture, and of
that Indian
art, then in its splendor, which so much influenced the creations of
the
classic period—natural heirlooms of a nation which has preserved
the music,
pronunciation, ceremony, and costumes, not to speak of the religious
rites and
philosophy, of so remarkable an age, intact.
The
treasure-stores of the daimyos, again, abound in works of art and
manuscripts
belonging to the Song and Mongol dynasties, and as in China itself the
former
were lost during the Mongol conquest, and the latter in the age of the
reactionary Ming, this fact animates some Chinese scholars of the
present day
to seek in Japan the fountain-head of their own ancient knowledge.
Thus Japan is
a museum of Asiatic civilization; and yet more than a museum, because
the
singular genius of the race leads it to dwell on all phases of the
ideals of
the past, in that spirit of living Advaitism which welcomes the new
without
losing the old. The Shinto [believer] still adheres to his old
pre-Buddhist
rites of ancestor worship; and the Buddhists themselves cling to each
various
school of religious development which had come in its natural order to
enrich
the soil. . . .
Art with us,
as elsewhere, is the expression of the highest and noblest of our
national
culture, so that, in order to understand it, we must pass in review the
various
phases of Confucian philosophy; the different ideals which the Buddhist
mind
has from time to time revealed; those mighty political cycles which
have one
after another unfurled the banner of nationality; the reflection in
patriotic
thought of the lights of poetry and the shadows of heroic characters;
and the
echoes, alike of the wailing of a multitude, and of the mad-seeming
merriment
of the laughter of a race.
Any history
of Japanese art-ideals is, then, almost an impossibility, as long as
the
Western world remains so unaware of the varied environment and
interrelated
social phenomena into which that art is set, as if it were a jewel.
Definition
is limitation. The beauty of a cloud or a flower lies in its
unconscious
unfolding of itself, and the silent eloquence of the masterpieces of
each epoch
must tell their story better than any epitome of necessary half-truths.
My poor
attempts are merely an indication, not a narrative.
[Okakura, The
Ideals of the East, pp. 1-10; AY]
from DeBarry p. 812