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MARCHIANÒ, What to Learn from Eastern Aesthetics

Jean-Paul RIOPELLE, L'hommage à Rosa Luxemburg, 1992 (détail) [ * ]

What to Learn from Eastern

Aesthetics *
Grazia MARCHIANÒ [ # ]
Siena

In my introduction to East and West in Aesthetics, a collection of writings by

various authors that I have recently edited in the 'The Lotus and Rose' series
(Pisa-Rome, Istituto Editoriali Internazionali, 1997), I attempted to identify not
just the roses that have fostered the enlarging of the aesthetic ecumene in the last
fifty years, but the thorns as well, that is to say the different forms of resistance
put up by the international aesthetic community to acknowledging Asian
aesthetics as an intrinsic part of a shared speculative heritage since its very
beginnings. The period I considered covers the last fifty years from the death in
1947 of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, the Anglo-Sinhalese thinker who opened the
way in the West to a deeper understanding of Indian philosophy and history of art,
to this year, in which two important symposia have taken place: the 35th ICANAS
Conference in Oriental Studies at the University of Budapest - a stocktaking of
the state of the art in 20th century Oriental studies - and the more circumscribed
but richly promising Pacific Rim Conference in Transcultural Aesthetics at the
University of Sydney, which owed its success largely to the efforts and
enthusiasm of Catherine Runcie.

A third event worthy of mention is the forthcoming publication in the

Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, Oxford University Press, of the entry for
'Comparative Aesthetics' contributed by Eliot Deutsch, of the University of
Honolulu, a leading figure in the renaissance of Asian studies in aesthetics in the
second part of this century. These studies, however, as we all know, have their
respective specialist niches in our universities but are not part of the official
aesthetics programmes. To give one small example, the M.A. aesthetics
programme of the Graduate Research Centre in the Humanities of the University
of Sussex offers a core course on the philosophy of art from Plato to Kant, and

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issues in the philosophy of art after Kant. I have no first-hand information about
M.A. and Ph.D. courses at Ottawa, but am all too well acquainted with the Italian
situation, having myself attempted, as yet unsuccessfully, to activate a doctorate
in comparative aesthetics. In the last four years, I have managed to circulate in
Italian academic circles some twelve volumes dealing with Oriental and
comparative aesthetics; but this has not prevented those books from being
regarded somewhat as curiosities by the majority of my colleagues. A recent
publication by an authoritative colleague of mine is entitled Aesthetics of the 20th
Century. Its author seems to take it for granted that the European and Anglo-
American areas that he examines include the whole of twentieth century
aesthetics.

This attitude clearly has historical roots. Martin Heidegger's view that philosophy
was the invention of the Greek mind has deep roots in European consciousness,
and has, to all effects, been universally endorsed. When Japan, at the beginning of
the Meiji era (1868), took the historic decision to set under way the process of
modernization after 150 years of proud isolation, expanding its horizons to
embrace the 'newness' of the West and its cultural models, it was obliged to adapt
its traditional lexis to Western concepts or even to coin new words. But, even as
late as 1873, a suitable word to define philosophy in the European sense had not
yet been found. A first suggestion, in Confucian terms, was "way of Man", a
symmetrical counterpart to "way of Heaven". Philosophy was, in other words, the
doctrine which, thanks to reason, (Jap.ri), opens man's way to Heaven. The
"linkage of the hundred sciences" was also taken into consideration. Finally, the
group of linguists guided by the statesman Nishi Amane, who in his youth had
followed the new habit of studying philosophy in Holland and Germany, came up
with the alternative that seemed most appropriate and most in key with the new
Zeitgeist; and tetsugaku, which is a literal translation of the Greek word
"philosophy", was the term officially adopted in 1874.

In the West, the critical reception of Eastern philosophies and aesthetics has
occurred under the sign of otherness, with all that this term has come to mean in
cultural anthropology. The time presaged by Leibniz when Asian thought would
illuminate the mental horizons of the West has evidently not yet come about to the
point whereby the spirit of an ecumene may be said to have successfully erased
the stigma of otherness. I do, however, believe that comparative studies have
made and can continue to make an important contribution to the ecumenicity of
aesthetic research. Eliot Deutsch himself, in the entry I referred to earlier,
underlines the two fronts on which the specialist in such studies works: "On the
scholarship side...the comparativist is faced with a number of hermeneutic or
interpretative problems, the most important of which is how to engage the
aesthetic thought and art of another culture in ways which do not, on the one
hand, superficially assimilate it to one's own cultural experience and, on the other,
alienate it in such a way as to make it only an exotic curiosity." And "On the
creative side, the comparativist is faced with the task...of appropriating what one
learns from another culture and tradition in such a way as to allow it at once to
deepen one's understanding of human aesthetic experience and extend the ways in
which that experience can be enriched and made intelligible".

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In this survey I shall try to sketch an epistemology of aesthetic experience based

on Indian, Chinese and Japanese sources. By 'sources' I mean not just theories and
perspectives which are specifically aesthetic and presumably subsequent to the
2nd century AD, but any trace or element capable of throwing light on the ways in
which this peculiar human experience has acquired theoretical weight in India,
China and Japan.

Aesthetic emotion may be sparked by any one thing, natural or artificial, and
therefore art cannot be said to be its exclusive source. The Indian, Chinese and
Japanese texts all agree on this point, and this allows an epistemology of aesthetic
experience based on them to accept, with some reserve, the thesis widely
accredited by historians of aesthetics that the emergence of art as a worldwide
phenomenon should be prior to the birth of aesthetic consciousness. If we are
ready to assume that aesthetic consciousness took shape the moment that man
began to consider his inner nature an extension of universal nature and in a
sympathetic relation to the latter (Welch 1957), there is no reason to identify that
moment with the emergence of art. On the contrary, fundamental human feelings
such as dismay and wonder have excellent reason to be conjectured on the basis
of the growth of aesthetic consciousness.

But here we touch on an intriguing point. Whether the Greek mind was inclined to
see wonder as the beginning of philosophy, and philosophy as the most
comprehensive way to explore reality, for the Asiatic mind wonder is the
beginning of a sensitivity to things, and sensitivity to things (Jap. mono no awarè)
is the most comprehensive way to be in the world and to make the world be in
oneself. I shall come back to that presently.

By aesthetic experience Indian rhetoricians, who have been systematically

exploring it since the 7th century, mean a dynamics of subjective consciousness
which does not identify itself with the source of pleasure by which it is triggered,
but becomes a totally absorbing experience. Whoever experiences this process is
absorbed in it to the point of transcending his own limited subjectivity. The
climax reached through the transcendence of pleasure is described as 'selfless
sympathy' (Sanskrit. sahrdayatâ). The concept of selfless sympathy is based on
two poles which the classical Indian mind considers wholly compatible: the first
is 'heart' (hrid), conceived as the root-source of emotion; the other is selflessness,
the dimension where subjectivity and pleasure are transcended. Aesthetic
experience is therefore a process leading from selfish attachment to the source of
pleasure to an unafflicted mental state.

To explain what this consists of, the Indian rhetoricians use a canonic example
taken from the epic poem Râmâyana and its author, the poet-sage Vâlmîki (2nd
century BC). One day when the sage was moving in the garden of his hermitage a
hunter killed a male crane when it was in mating union with the female bird. This
caused great sorrow to the female partner, expressed in its moaning cries, and the
event moved the sage to curse the hunter for his insensitive action. The epic
Râmâyana starts with this curse, composed in a stanza: "Oh hunter, may you
never find peace for everlasting years since you killed one of the mating pair of

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cranes" (I.2.15). The idea is that the sorrow of the sage is unafflicted by any self-
attachment since the stimulant or cause of his emotion, i.e. the death of the male
bird, does not harm the sage personally. It is due to his selfless sympathy
(sahrdayatâ) and it is in such cases that the emotions as mental states attain the
status of pure consciousness1. Therefore, the aesthetic experience in poetry would
basically be the experience of this unafflicted mental state which is otherwise
called rasa(taste, flavour). 'Rasa' in the Rg Veda means juice, sap, essence,
marrow, and in keeping with the general tenor of the Rg Veda it seems that it was
meant in a botanical sense. In the Upanishads, rasa did not yet mean aesthetic
emotion as it came to be called later on, but referred rather to the core or essence
of one's being. It was in Bharata's Nâtya Shâstra (attributed to the I-II century
AD), the first organic treatise on art and drama, that rasawas made the
cornerstone of aesthetic experience.

It is not possible here to go into the technical aspects, logical subtleties and
epistemological implications of Indian aesthetic theory, centred as it is on a
bundle of key concepts such as rasa (taste, flavour), dhvani (poetic resonance),
alamkâra and lakshana (poetic ornaments and marks), sphota (blossoming,
sprouting utterance), or sabda (sound), considered as a bridge between the
physical and the metaphysical2. But for the purposes of this comparative survey it
is enough to bear in mind that in Indian theory emphasis is laid on the subjective
dimension of aesthetic experience, i.e. what is inwardly felt by the experiencer
and thereby transformed into an overwhelming experience of non-duality
(Sanskrit advaita).

If we turn now to the shape taken by aesthetic experience in China from the
beginning of the 7th century (T'ang epoch), and in Japan from the end of the 8th
century (Nara epoch), we see that the emphasis shifts from the human plane to
nature and the cosmos. In the traditional Chinese vision omnipervasive cosmic
energy (Chinese ch'i, Japanese qi) permeates and equalizes Earth-Man-Heaven,
connected as a triad.

The Chinese painter's attuned immersion in the spirit of the landscape he is

painting is made of the same stuff as Indian selfless sympathy. But now sympathy
is felt to flow from living nature, and the painter's inner nature responds to it in a
circularity between an outsideness made insideness and an insideness made
outsideness. Why is it so? Because Chinese and Japanese traditional notions of
nature are comprehensive and yet insubstantial to such an extent as to allow the
creative circle between insideness and outsideness to take place and be poetically
effective.

The Chinese term ziran (Jap. shizen) does not denote anything objective like the
Greek physis, the Latin natura, or the Russian priroda, nor anything created or
produced by any divine entity whatsoever. In its pristine adverbial form which
appears in the Tao-te-ching, ziran expresses the original dynamic spontaneity of
cosmic energy3. The painter's goal is the same: that his brushstroke be filled with
the movement of life.

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The most brilliant period of Chinese landscape painting coincides with the favour
granted to Taoism by the T'angs. Around the end of the 5th century, the Taoist
painter Hsieh-Ho drew up six rules for painting, which have since become
canonical. The first one, chi'-yun shen-tung, in Lawrence Binyon's translation
with Eliot Deutsch's commentary, is as follows: "rhythmic vitality (or spiritual
rhythm) expressed in the movement of life". Deutsch explains: "The canon
demands that the artist identify himself completely with a spiritual vitality or
movement of life that is ubiquitous in nature and that this subtle natural-spiritual
rhythm, by means of a highly disciplined spontaneous mastery of the medium,
resound in his work"4.

The Chinese term for landscape, shan-shui, is actually a synecdoche, the pair of
ideograms literally meaning: "mountains-waters".

The liquid element interacting with the rocky solidity of the mountain conveys the
Chinese and Japanese idea of landscape. Shan-shui is not, I should stress, a 'view'
in the English sense of landscape but the thing itself: a piece of living nature in
which the true spirit of landscape is sealed. Chinese and Japanese aesthetics of
painting embody these principles, painting being aimed not at the imitation of
outer forms but at the painter's being absorbed by tones and atmospheres. At this
point the texts say that the artist should avoid direct observation - looking with the
eyes - in favour of indirect observing - looking, as it were, through the eyes.

Looking through the eyes makes wonder persist in the heart, granting it innocence
and spontaneity. This is what is meant in Chinese by 'natural mind' (Chinese
benxin). Xin, 'mind', is written with the same ideogram as 'heart'. Consequently
'mind-heart' would be a heartfelt mind and at the same time a mindful heart.
Taoism stresses how important it is for the mind-heart to be receptive to the
heavenly principle, and attuned with the cosmic Way (Tao).

In early Taoist texts as well as in the Japanese Records of Ancient Matters

(Kojiki), one meets with a number of terms which will subsequently be at the
centre of aesthetic conceptualizations. These terms regard aspects and natural
phenomena of a primordial world, obscure and chaotic, close to being a cosmos,
that is a whole structured according to laws and measures - which the Greek mind
of classical times saw as preconditions for beauty.

In Kojiki, the cosmogony reaches its acme when the ancestral gods Izanagi and
Izanami, after standing upon the Floating Bridge linking Earth and Heaven, make
an island by stirring with a heavenly jeweled spear the salt in the sea, and a primal
sound like a croaking comes out of that stirring: koworo, koworo. That
onomatopoeic sound was to be the prototype of that of a musical instrument and a
model for composition later on5. Shinto rituals are actually scanned on timbres
and dance movements which seem to evoke and dramatize intercourses between
natural forces. The dynamics of gestures and sounds evolves from absolute
motionlessness and silence.

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A not entirely fortuitous association of ideas bewteen natural sounds and vital
force reminds me of the episode that Kenzaburo Oe recalls in his Nobel Prize
speech given in Stockholm in 19946.

Oe's first child Hikari was born mentally handicapped. 'As a baby,' recounts the
author, 'he responded only to the chirping of wild birds and never to human
voices. One summer, when he was six years old, we were staying at our country
cottage. Hikari heard a pair of water rails calling from the lake beyond a grove,
and with the voice of a commentator on a recording of birdsong he said: « those
are water rails ». These were the first words my son had ever uttered', concluded
Oe, adding that Hikari subsequently became a composer and his faculties
recovered to the point of allowing him to live an almost normal life. The voice of
the birds had passed through the child's wall of silence, endowing him, in a
certain sense, with a new birth.

In the sequel to Oe's speech he compares his idea of beauty as something

ambiguous, ambivalent and vague with the idea expounded by Yasunari Kawabata
twenty-six years earlier on that same platform as a Nobel laureate in the speech
entitled 'Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself'. Oe quotes its concluding remarks in
Edward Seidensticker's translation:
'My works have been described as works of emptiness, but it is not to be taken for the
nihilism of the West. The spiritual foundation would seem to be quite different.
Dogen (the 13th century Soto monk and poet) entitled his poem about the seasons
« Innate Reality », and even as he sang of the beauty of the seasons he was deeply
immersed in Zen'7.

Taking his distance somewhat from Kawabata's position, Oe feels more attuned to
William Butler Yeats's poetic vision, permeated as it is by a sense of vacillating
ambiguity; and in fact 'Vacillation' is the title of the poem from which Oe quotes:
'A tree there is that from its topmost bough
Is half all glittering flame and half all green
Abounding foliage moistened with the dew...'
('Vacillation', II: 1-3)8

The differences between Kawabata's and Oe's aesthetic visions are not as
important for the present purposes as the poetics of both writers pivoted on the
idea of beauty conceived not as an aesthetic ideal of remote perfection but rather
as a lightning-swift leap into identification with things, where we are re-absorbed
and made one with them.

Writing about night as an aesthetic category, Tomonobu Imamichi, the

comparativist philosopher from Tokyo, remarks that the mental situation arising
from an attuned contemplation of moonlight on a starry night is a total experience
of beauty to the degree to which it is bathed in egolessness. The linguistic form in
which that experience is conveyed, says Imamichi, is a proposition without a
subject: « is beautiful », i.e. the linguistic form taken by the inner feeling of a total
experience of beauty. Everything which becomes a subject of this half-

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sentence...will become beautiful because the implicit predicate is 'beautiful'. We

should have in ourselves the moonlight. As Imamichi concludes, 'we must be
unified with night as a productive aesthetic category'9.

The vocabularies of Japanese literary aesthetics such as that compiled in the

Sixties by Hisamatsu Sen'ichi10 provide a wide range of aesthetic stereotypes with
their oscillating meanings through the five periods of Japanese history: Antiquity
(prior to the composition of Kojiki in the 8th century); Middle Antiquity, through
the Nara and Heian eras up to the middle of the 12th century; the Medieval
Period, through the Kamakura, Muromachi and Momoyama eras up to 1603; the
recent past, up to 1868; and the Modern Period, from the beginning of the Meiji
era through this century.

Sincerity, mysterious profundity, pathos, sublime beauty and emotional beauty,

melancholy, loneliness were among the most valued aesthetic ideals through
Middle Antiquity and the Medieval period.

Like Indian rasas, springing from selfless sympathy, those multi-ranged feelings
were considered an expansion of inner sensitivity to things. Norinaga Motoori, a
contemporary of A.G. Baumgarten, was the first scholar in Japan to place the
mono no awarè within the framework of a speculative inquiry, and this is one of
the main reasons for the general consensus among critics in considering him the
founder of modern aesthetics in Japan.

If Baumgarten had no doubts as to the pre-eminence of philosophy over poetry,

Norinaga had no hesitation in declaring the pre-eminence of poetry over
philosophy. In his major work, Isonokami sasamegoto, poetry is praised as the
human chant of the heart and, at the same time, since it is the 'voice' of every
living being, poetry is universal:
'Not only men, but even birds and animals, all beings capable of feeling make poetry
with their voices'11.

Through Norinaga's work one can trace a theorem of aesthetic cognition whose
lineaments would appear to be enantiomorphic compared with those of
Baumgarten: poetry against philosophy; feeling against reason; the centrality of
nature against the centrality of the human sphere.

It is not easy, at this point, to draw to a conclusion, for now would be the moment
to embark on a minute comparative exploration of Asian and Western aesthetic
perspectives. Asian humanism is the result of a philosophical, artistic and
religious koine in which human creativity has reached peaks of excellence. All the
more reason, then, why this common heritage should be safeguarded and
entrusted to the memory of future generations.

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Notes
* The original version of this paper was given to the British Society of Aesthetics at St. Edmund
Hall, Oxford in August 1997.

1. This assumption is stressed by Ananta C. Sukla in his 'Dhvani as a Pivot in Sanskrit Literary
Aesthetics' in Grazia Marchianò (ed.), East and West in Aesthetics, Pisa-Rome, Istituti Editoriali
Internazionali, 1997.

2. For a comprehensive survey of Indian aesthetic theory from an epistemological angle, see Harsha
V. Dehejia, The Advaita of Art, Foreword by K. Vatsyayan, Delhi, Motilal Banarsidass, 1996.

3. For a comparative analysis of the semantics of 'nature' in Greek, Latin, Sanskrit and Chinese
philosophical contexts, may I refer to my work in Italian, Sugli orienti del pensiero. La natura
illuminata e la sua estetica, vols. I,II, Soveria Mannelli, Rubbettino, 1994.

4. Eliot Deutsch, 'Comparative Aesthetics', in Michael Kelly (ed.), Encyclopedia of Aesthetics,

Oxford, OUP, (entry in print).

5. An analysis of the aesthetic implications in this cosmogonical sequence is by Noriko Hashimoto,

'The Semantic Transformation on an Axiological Concept' in Grazia Marchianò (ed.), East and West
in Aesthetics, (see note 1).

6. Kenzaburo Oe, Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself , tr. K. Yanagishita, Tôkyô, Kodansha
International, 1995.

7. Ibid., p.113.

8. Ibid., p.115.

9. Tomonobu Imamichi, 'The night as category. One angle of comparative study in aesthetics' in East
and West in Aesthetics, (see note 1).

10. Sen'ichi Hisamatsu, The Vocabulary of Japanese Literary Aesthetics, Tôkyô, Centre for East
Asian Cultural Studies, 1963.

11. Hino Tatsuo (ed.), Motoori Norinaga Shû, Tôkyô, 1983, p.252. This passage is cited in Nicoletta
Spadavecchia, 'Mottori Norinaga: Il mono no aware' in Il Giappone, vol. XXV, 1985, 1987.

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