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Zen painting -- an exceptional tradition
Although it is not along the main lines of our topic, it is important to note one other contributor to the tradition of literati painting -- Buddhism, and specifically Zen School Buddhism (actually, "Zen" is the better known Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese term name for this school: Chan). During the late Song, among the non-professionals who took to painting as a form of self-expression (or, perhaps, no-self-expression) were Zen monks and lay practitioners. They worked towards a highly reduced form of brush painting -- just as Zen, the Buddhist school which prized nothing but meditation itself, was the most stripped-down form of Buddhism. The painting below, by a Song painter who went by the pseudonym of Muqi, is celebrated as the ultimate in painterly simplicity. Six persimmons are represented by ink lines and washes so elementary that it would seem like a school kid could have done them (the same type of comment later made of Picasso in the West) -- yet the rendering and placement of the persimmons was an unprecedented artistic innovation.