JAPANESE ART—PAINE 
ficult to find in Chinese art a seascape 
thus treated for its own sake. In the 
same way these flower paintings are 
decorative transcriptions from nature 
without any admixture of the animals 
or insects which so generally appear in 
Chinese paintings of this kind. Again, 
the Japanese love of nature, that sense 
of joy in the actual world around them, 
presents itself without the addition of 
elements dependent on a_ foreign 
philosophy. 
Too frequently the question of the 
origin of an art has been emphasized 
more than that of the meaning of the 
art to the people for whom it 
was made. When one considers the 
amount of Buddhist art which has 
survived in Japan even from the eighth 
century and contrasts this fact with 
the scarcity of extant Buddhist paint- 
ings from Central China, the idea ari- 
ses that for long periods the Japanese 
were more pious believers than the Chi- 
nese. Religious art is definitely emo- 
tional. In China its thoughts were 
opposed by the dominant Confucian 
tradition. Again, one finds in Japan 
the emotional preferred to the rational 
or philosophic attitude. The great 
paintings of the Shingon sect are 
difficult for us to appreciate just be- 
cause they are dominated by foreign 
dogmas about the magical powers to 
be attached to word or form, yet these 
beliefs harmonized closely with the 
ritualistic attitudes common from the 
ninth to the twelfth centuries. 
In the later Pure Land sects of 
Buddhism in Japan in which the 
doctrine of salvation by faith, and 
faith only, was insisted upon, one finds 
a favorite subject of Buddhist sculp- 
ture and painting in the descent of 
Amida from heaven(pl. 2, right, lower). 
His attendant bears a lotus throne, 
symbol of the believer’s place in the 
heaven in the west. This type can 
be traced back to episodic details on 
the border of an early Chinese paint- 
ing, but as an independent subject 
China does not seem to have produced 
any rendering so illustrative of single- 
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455 
hearted faith as do the Japanese repre- 
sentations. 
In any discussion of Japanese art 
as a whole it would be impossible to 
omit the influence of the Zen religion. 
This was known especially in certain 
parts of South China. In Japan its 
influence extended through much of 
the aristocratic and samurai classes 
for centuries. This religion discards 
reason entirely in favor of intuition. 
Meditation, concentration, immediate 
apprehension, the acceptance of this 
world as it is, dominate any logical 
interpretation of life. The religious 
art of Japan furnishes another indica- 
tion of the importance of emotion in 
the arts which seem particularly to 
express Japanese character. 
The painting in ink monochrome 
attributed to Geiami (detail in pl. 3, 
fig. 1) is a type which can be fully 
traced back to China, but whereas 
the tradition was localized and short- 
lived in China, it evoked some pro- 
found trait of the Japanese soul and 
became for centuries an influencing 
factor in the official schools of painting. 
Such a painting reflects the thought 
of complete religious understanding 
in the body of a humble attendant. 
Most of the arts of this Renaissance 
period can be described as idealistic. 
The themes of the painters treat of 
Chinese scenes, of compositions in 
terms of Chinese philosophy, and of 
modes of rendering which have been 
stimulated by the study of ancient 
Chinese originals in collections which 
had only recently been formed. 
If this appraisal of the major arts 
is true, then the same characteristics 
should be found in the minor arts, 
too. 
The Ashikaga period (1392-1568) 
saw the rise and development of the 
No dances and as part of their equip- 
ment the creation of a new type of 
mask. For these, in direct contra- 
diction to most of the arts, there is no 
counterpart in China. The taste of 
the Japanese, unhampered by conti- 
nental influence, can here be traced. 
