In 1661, Manfukuji Temple was established on Mt. Kobari in Uji City, southwest of Kyoto, marking the first time in Japanese history that a Chinese monastery was established on Japanese soil by a Chinese monk. Whether in architecture, rituals, etiquette, monk clothes or customs, Wanfu Temple presents a small world like China's late Ming Dynasty; Most of the materials and materials are imported. The Chinese tradition has been maintained for hundreds of years, and the abbots who succeeded them in China have established this completely Chinese system, which has also attracted a growing number of "China fans". Chinese culture centered on Manfukuji Temple radiated to the entire Japanese society, from the top of the imperial family to the lowest class of the common people. In other words, the emperor and members of the imperial family would discuss Chinese culture with the abbots of the Huang Bai sect; The heirs of each clan would invite the monks of the barberry to their domains and build their own shrines for them; The ancestral tablets of the shogunate will be enshrined in Uji's family temple; Many other Buddhist monasteries receive the Tripitaka engraved by Wanfu Temple; And the common people of this land benefited from a miraculous herbal compound that "the monk of barberry obtained in a dream".
However, even with the great prestige and charm of Manpukuji Temple, and even if the impact of the barberry monks spread to virtually all social classes, the cultural impact of the temple was only temporary, and people only accepted it out of interest, and they were not integrated into the life of the Japanese people.
A clear and sustained cultural shock provided by Manpukuji is its distinctive late Ming cursive and calligraphy style, which has had a significant impact on Japanese calligraphy, especially in the Chinese style of calligraphy, and can be seen in some representative Japanese works, whether by monks or laypeople, in terms of volume, quality, and heaviness.
However, during the rise and development of literati painting in Japan, the complex role played by Manfukuji reveals a specific response to the assimilation of foreign stimuli in Japan, which we will explore more closely.
Under the Tokugawa shogunate's policy of seclusion, the temple was a special case of foreign culture in Japan. Thanks to the patronage and protection of the shogunate, Manpukuji enjoyed the sole privilege of extraterritoriality, and it functioned like a foreign society within the Japanese cultural sphere. The monks of Manpukuji Temple place purchase orders from Uji's headquarters, purchasing raw materials and cultural goods from China and Southeast Asia. In addition to the raw materials, Manfukuji also demanded from the Chinese a large number of monastic staff, not only monks, but also carpenters, carvers, painters, tailors, shoemakers, and, of course, doctors and cooks. Under the Tokugawa shogunate's ban on foreign travel, trade patterns with China turned traditional practices upside down. In the past, Japanese buyers went to China, but instead of Chinese merchants entering Japan from Nagasaki, Chinese merchants now select Chinese goods imported into Japan instead of monks, so they do not always meet Japanese tastes. Indeed, Manfukuji Temple is a special case – designed by the Chinese and manufactured with imported materials, from the architectural architecture to the robes and shoes, not to mention the food and cooking methods, its apparently highly Chinese choices allow the Japanese to maintain an unusual curiosity about foreign cultures without making a significant impact on Japanese culture.
In terms of painting, the newly imported works can be roughly divided into five categories. Contemporary works painted by the monks themselves include ink play, figure paintings with casual plays, formal portraiture with unique pictorial rules called "portrait" in barberry terminology, and much smaller ink landscapes. The last category includes Hokkien-style inputs, as well as ancient paintings that came with the founders, covering a wide variety of styles.
In the casual figure paintings (sic, "in this category of painting"), barberry artists have indeed managed to win the hearts of the Japanese. Regional figure paintings with late Ming tendencies seem to have attracted the attention of the Tokugawa period art circles in particular. In Japan, the artists of the late Ming Dynasty who followed Yu Yinyuan Zen Master included Fan Daosheng, a Fujian engraver who arrived in Japan in 1660, Yi Ran Xingrong, a painter from Hangzhou, and Du Zhan Xingying, a painter from Fujian. Chen Xian, a professional painter specializing in Buddhist themes, has used his works as a model for painters associated with Wanfu Temple. Chen Xian is also from Fujian, but it is unclear whether he actually crossed the sea to Japan, and most evidence suggests that he never came to Japan.
This peculiar style of figure painting usually includes exaggerated perspective and disproportionate size ratios between the main and secondary figures, and the upper and lower areas of the eyes are often stained, with shades ranging from ochre to red to lilac. The works of Du Zhan, Yi Ran, and Chen Xian share certain stylistic characteristics: they generally have egg-shaped faces, coloring around the eyes, and they are shaped with a hint of Western realism. Chen Xian painted a large number of female portraits of Guanyin, usually accompanied by devotees who looked like dwarves.
Chen Xian, Guanyin, album, ink and color, silk, 35.6×53.8 cm, collection of Manfukuji Temple, Uji City.
Chen Xian was a native of Fujian and lived between 1635 and 1675. There is a volume of The Eighteen Arhats in the Freer Museum, dated 1643; The "Eighteen Guanyin Books" hidden in Wanfu Temple, dated 1636; He painted the "Atlas of the Ancestors" of 36 patriarchs, and the inscription is "Jiawu (1654) Spring Painting in Yanfu Temple, Jiuri Mountain", and there is an inscription of the founder of the foundation in the same year, which is very likely just before he left for Japan. It is the latest of Chen Xian's works to be completed in Manfukuji's collection, thus supporting the artist's view that he never came to Japan.
We don't know if Chen Xian painted formal "portraits" like the Fujian artists Yang Daozhen and Zhang Qi, but he seems to have specialized in more casual and less formal figure paintings, with the freedom to depict anecdotes and legends, as seen in his Guanyin paintings. He uses thick, thin, flowing lines, often in a descriptive way that thickens the turns, and applies a soft skin tone that exudes a distinctively feminine appeal. Such images of Guanyin are usually dyed in pink and pale ochre.
In the Atlas of the Ancestors, which was brought to Japan in 1654 by Zen Master Omoto in the collection of Uji Manfukuji Temple, Chen Xian used the flanks to create more angular outlines. His use of round brushes for female figures and straight or sideways brushes for men shows a conscious career choice. Most of his female figures of Guanyin are depicted with soft, rounded brushstrokes on the outline lines, while most of the patriarchal figures are depicted with angular brushwork.
The portraits of two of them, Venerable Fu Na Ye and Master Ma Ming, demonstrate this skill. In the tradition of Luohantu, Chen Xian endows the protagonists with unique and outstanding faces. On the right, the Eleventh Ancestor Fu Ye Hao Venerable is showing an advanced age, his face and monk's robe are full of wrinkles, his body is slender and thin, his teeth are protruding, and a row of ring scars on the top of his skull suggests extraordinary spiritual cultivation; On the left, the 12 Zu Ma Ming is seated on a rock with a water container next to him, and instead of wearing a robe with a hook, he is depicted as an amiable young scholar in a secular environment, his face often shaded in ochre to add convex and concave realism, like in many Fujian figure paintings. The angular oblique lines on the monk's robe may be made with two strokes, overlapping at the intersection to achieve the effect of thickening and aggravating, similar to the "pause" pen effect in regular script, when the turn is first paused at the belly of the pen and then turned, or when the pen is started, press down with the pen.
陈贤《二祖图》,取自《列祖图册》,册页,水墨,纸本,宇治市万福寺藏。
There is a striking portrait of the Bodhidharma Patriarch who uses this side brush to great effect. In this moving work, Chen Xian injects a powerful presence into the characters.
Chen Xian, "Bodhidharma", scroll, ink, paper, size unknown, collection of Nanban Art Museum, Kobe.
It is in works such as Chen Xian that Ito Wakachu (1716-1800), an 18th-century individualist painter and friend of Huang Bai, seems to have found his formula for painting the portrait of the 23rd abbot of Manpukuji Temple, Ugan Joei, a Japanese-born abbot seated upright, dressed in a Japanese monk's robe and holding a sword. Ruochong's brushwork follows Chen Xian's sideways and angular approach, and Pu'an's face is also carefully expressed with light and shade, adding a strong sense of realism to the simple portrait of the elderly and wise abbot. On the futon in these two portraits, the heavy, black, angular brushes also resemble the pine needles on the pine trees of the Yellow Barberry Sect.
Itō Jakubu "Gamoan Zen Statue" (Manfukuji 23rd Generation), 1979, Wheel, Ink, Print, Length Unknown, Manfukuji Temple, Uji City.
Note: It is generally believed that there was a group of Chinese missionary monks who lived in exile in their homeland and went to Japan, but in fact, the Kaiji ancestors were Zen monks who accepted special invitations from the royal family and the shogunate, and they were initially reluctant to leave China, but finally agreed through the persuasion of the Chinese who settled in Nagasaki, and these Chinese had built several Buddhist temples and Mazu temples in Nagasaki in order to prove that they were not Christians during the horror of the Tokugawa shogunate's persecution of Christianity. Since Japanese merchants were forbidden to travel overseas and trade with China had to be controlled by the Dutch and Chinese merchants, the Chinese community in Nagasaki became more active, and grew as Nagasaki summoned more Chinese ships and merchants. There was a real and urgent need for Chinese abbots who could preside over the Chinese Buddhist temples in Nagasaki and emphasize their non-Christian status. The great Huangbari sect master Takaki Omoto hastily took on the mission to Japan because of the death of his disciple Kashimoto, who had been appointed abbot of Nagasaki Sofukuji Temple but drowned in the sea in 1651, so the elderly abbot decided to venture across the sea himself. Arriving in Japan in 1654 with the expectation of returning to China at the end of his three-year term, the construction of a Buddhist temple on the island of Honshu was neither unexpected nor unprecedented. During the years that Omoto lived in Nagasaki, his sublime prestige had spread to Kyoto, coinciding with the growing interest in Sinology and the spirit of reform that was deeply concerned about the moral decay that prevailed in wealthy Kyoto Zen monasteries. In 1661, the shogun Tokugawa Ietsuna invited the elderly abbot to establish Manfukuji Temple in Uji City. For a large number of details on Manpukuji Temple, see Kikiro Otsuki, "Ancient Temple Tour: Kyoto 9: Manfukuji", Tokyo: Tamshosha, 1977.
This article is excerpted from Xu Xiaohu, The Formation of Southern Painting: A Study of the Early Spread of Chinese Literati Painting to Japan, Guangxi Normal University Press, 2017-09