T'ang period, was once journeying and decided to spend the night in a temple. The monks received him without enthusiasm and grudgingly supplied a small bare room. Wu Tao-tzu retired. The following morning he was up early, intending to leave his unfriendly hosts in a hurry. From the doorstep he cast a glance back at his somber lodging. And then with one sweeping motion of his brush the master painted a donkey on the wall of the cell. He had hardly left when the donkey stepped out of the wall, kicking right and left until the cell was a shambles. When the monks came running, the donkey quickly jumped back into the picture. But the monks understood how this was Wu's revenge for their unkindness.
The following story has been ascribed to several early masters, and we pick the version linked with the name of the great Ku K'ai-chih. Ku one day decided to paint a dragon on the wall of his house. He guided his brush with full confidence, and after a while the dragon was finished except for its eyes. Suddenly the master's courage failed him. He simply did not dare to paint those eyes. When, many months later, he at last felt brave enough, he groped for his brush and with swift strokes dashed in eye and pupil. Within an instant the dragon broke into loud roaring and flew away, leaving a trace of fire and smoke.
Another legend attributed to the same painter tells of a girl he loved but who did not return this emotion. Ku K'ai-chih painted a picture of the disobliging young woman, hung it in his room, and stuck a thorn into it. From that moment the girl became sick and faded away. She did not recover until she had responded to the painter's feelings and he eventually pulled the thorn out of her portrait.
The most revealing of these legends about Chinese painters is the one which deals with the end of Wu Tao-tzu. The emperor had asked Master Wu to paint a landscape on the palace wall. Wu set to work and was soon able to lead the emperor to a magnificent painting in whose center he had drawn a gaping cave. The emperor was still expressing his admiration when Wu Tao-tzu directed firm steps toward the cave and vanished inside it. After the shape of his body had melted into the shadow of the cave, the entire painting disappeared into the palace wall.
Diverse as these stories may be, they all have one common trait: the assumption of an extraordinarily close relationship between painting and magic, and of the resulting conclusion that a great painter is also a great magician—the greater the painter the more powerful his magical capacities. It seems that a demonstration of magic was proof of a painter's genius.
The fact that such legends were still taken seriously as late as the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries suggests the persistence of the Chinese belief in the supernatural. In a world dominated by the supernatural, people could not possibly conceive of the brush stroke and the idea as being two distinct things, nor as existing on different levels, nor as representing the opposite poles of material and spiritual. In fact, this dichotomy has rarely existed in Asia. It is an expression of the Western mind and is most probably linked with the death of the world of magic. This is not the place to investigate the reasons for the overthrow of the belief in magic throughout the West. But surely we can surmise that is was partly due to the influence of Christianity, which turned its face against magic. There was never any similar development in the East, because the Eastern religions did not divorce themselves from magic and philosophy.
Of course, in early times magic visions were known in the West too. Most scholars today believe the great neolithic cave paintings of Altamira in Spain or Lascaux in France to be magic paintings done in those dark, cold caves during the interglacial period by tribal witch doctors to appease the dangerous world and the wild animals that surrounded them and to charm the game they hoped to feed on. A distinction between technique and painting was then probably nonexistent. In an age of magic, technique is completely identified with the power to make magic. The greatest technician is also the greatest magician. The strength of the spell grows with the ability to paint. The equation may be put in another way: the magician of those bygone times was indeed the painter, but his artistic skill was only regarded as the measure of his power to make magic. The more authentically he could reproduce the appearances of the world around him—and his power was directed at these appearances—the stronger was the spell. He felt no artistic urge as such, for he was only a magician, and his painting craft proved itself by its effect.
Though we have no knowledge of Chinese counterparts of Altamira and Lascaux, it seems most likely that the Chinese also went through this most primitive stage of art and magic. And the earliest Chinese paintings which have come down to us lend additional weight to the belief that the magic tradition in China followed much the same pattern as did that of the West. At the time of these earliest paintings, however, magic as such was already but a general background from which the artist had emerged as the dominant personality, though possessing magical powers—a complete reversal of the situation that we must presume to have existed in the prehistoric period. The Chinese painter was by now first and foremost an artist. If he was a great artist, he acquired magical power, and he was able to cast spells even though this was not any more the primary purpose of his art. Note that in China supernatural legends concerning artists are linked only with the names of great masters. As explained, magic was a proof of great genius. But genius was the essential factor, and magic no more than a manifestation of it, whereas in prehistoric times the opposite had been true: magic was then the essence, and artistic excellence merely a means of proving it.
It may be argued that at the time when legends about the great masters began to be told, the belief in magic was already dead, and those legends were nothing more than an attempt to interpret the present in terms of the past. As a matter of fact, however, in the Asiatic world, belief in the supernatural power of the artist remained alive over greatly prolonged periods. In evidence of this, more recent examples can be supplied from Japan, a country which may be called the immediate artistic extension of China.
There is, for instance, the story translated into English by Lafcadio Hearn under the title "The Boy Who Drew Cats" and charmingly illustrated in Japanese Fairy Tales, published at Tokyo by T. Hasegawa and Son in the late nineteenth century. Although it seems likely that the story goes back to more ancient Chinese sources, it still has a well-established tradition in Japan, and one is justified in believing that the Japanese accepted it as a matter of historical fact. The boy of the tale, from an early age, showed unusual talent in drawing cats. He drew cats on every slip of paper within his reach and also on the walls and sliding panels of his parents' house. At long last he was apprenticed to a very severe master in the hope that he would be dissuaded from ruining walls. Alas, the urge to paint triumphed over discipline, and the disgusted master dismissed his apprentice as a hopeless case. On his subsequent wanderings the boy one night entered an abandoned temple. Before lying down to sleep in one of the lonely rooms, he swiftly sketched a few cats on an old discarded screen (Fig. 1). During the night he was harassed by the sound of terrible yowling and screeching, and when he finally awoke in the morning, he found a huge ghost rat dead on the floor (Fig. 2). The cats on the screen had blood smeared all over their claws and fangs—and very pleased looks on their faces.
Another legend concerning a Japanese master painter dates from the sixteenth century, extracting its essence from within our own historical period. It is the story of young Sesshū, who was made a Zen acolyte in boyhood but displeased his abbot by a constant unruly preference for drawing over prescribed religious duties. As punishment the abbot one day bound the boy to a tree. Sesshū at first cried and wailed, but then after a while, with his toe, he began drawing pictures in the tear-wet sand. It was mice that he drew, and so lifelike were they that when he had completed a good number of them they sprang to life and gnawed through the ropes that bound him (Fig. 3).
Dated even later than Sesshū's magic is that of Maruyama Ōkyo (1733-95), who is credited with originating the ghost-picture genre in a painting commissioned by a leading daimyo. Incidentally, one delightfully ironical feature of the story consists in the detail that he used his aunt as model for the ghost. This much only by the way. The important part of the tale lies in its relation of what happened after the master had completed his last brush stroke. The master, it is said, had hardly stepped back from his picture with a satisfied grunt when the painted ghost detached itself with a gliding motion and disappeared from the room.
