Francios Cheng's wonderful study of Chinese painting marks the final book in my Taoist phase. While Cheng doesn't explicitly argue that all Chinese painting is necessarily Taoist, it's clear that his conception of the art form is dominated by the interchangeability of opposites we already associate with that school of thought. Hence the title. He argues that Emptiness is not different than Fullness. While this may suggest that they are "two sides of the same coin", that way of putting it misses the crucial point that the two are asymmetrical. In fact, a fractal multilevel emptiness is the necessary precursor to the appearance of fullness. In a sense then, this makes emptiness the deeper of the two concepts, or at least the one that applies to itself as an ongoing process rather than a product. I think this may be the crucial insight into the paradoxes of non-duality -- it's not that supposed opposites are really identical, it's that they are not dual, not negations of one another, not balanced or equilibrated as conflicting poles, but yoked together in a productive symbiosis. What I mean by this asymmetry may seem a little obscure now, but the beauty of this book is that it develops these highly abstract ideas by reference to the concrete techniques of Chinese landscape painting. At the end of the book, Cheng even carries the analysis down to the level of the particularity of a single painter, Shih T'ao, a Qing dynasty master famous not only for his art but his theoretical writings as well. Since I really enjoyed this book for the way it deepened my understanding of emptiness (perhaps analogously to the way Deleuze's cinema books deepened my understanding of time) I'll try to go through it in some detail.
1 -- Emptiness in Chinese Philosophy
After a short introduction to the history of Chinese painting, Cheng's first task is to clear away the notion that emptiness refers to something vague or non-existent. Emptiness is not lack. Non-being is not the being of the negative. Instead, emptiness is an animating principle that allows things to flow, transform, and act. Cheng sketches out this theory of active emptiness by quoting extensively from Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, and Huai-nan-tzu. While I'm still glad I read the originals, his short gloss on these texts probably taught me more about Taoism than all of them combined. As I'm discovering, many of these older texts were really designed as compressed mnemonic devices for the student. Philosophically, they depend on a teacher or commentator to flesh out the context and expand on their poetry.
One of Cheng's main contentions is that in Taoism, emptiness is both before and between things. It serves not just as a point of ultimate origin, but also as a wellspring or reservoir of potential that constantly intervenes in the functioning of the world by allowing opposites to circulate. Crucially, this gives it a kind of fractal quality. The 'big' emptiness of the origin is reiterated at multiple levels by the 'little' emptinesses present throughout each level. Later Cheng will elaborate this idea by reference to the way that emptiness is present at every level of a great painting -- from the brustroke, to the composition, to the meditative intention behind it. For now, he's content to take this paradoxical self-similar structure on its most philosophical level. Because emptiness itself is empty, or there's emptiness within emptiness itself, or something else of the sort, emptiness turns out to be within all things as the animating principle that allows them to achieve fullness. In other words, emptiness and fullness are non-dual.
In more concrete terms, he shows how the Taoists represent emptiness as the valley or ravine. This gap in the mountains is the fertile ground from which the fullness of the "ten thousand things" spring up. Though he doesn't mention the buddhist connection, the idea fits perfectly with the etymology of the Sanskrit term śūnyatā, which links emptiness to the hollowness of a pregnant belly. I don't know if mahayana (or perhaps vajrayana) buddhists have a parallel framework that links emptiness to phenomenon via some process of mediation, but Cheng outlines a theory of this sort of Taoism. For the Taoists, the primordial 0 of emptiness gives rise to the 1 breath, which divides into the 2 vital breaths of yin and yang, active and passive (presumably these are modeled on inhaling and exhaling). In a final step, a "median emptiness" (the "little" emptiness between things) relates yin and yang and prevents them from becoming static and unproductive opposites. Thus, the ten thousand things are modeled on, and produced by, the 3 part relationship of yin, yang, and median emptiness. Cheng summarize this mediating scheme as:
A binary system that can be ternary and a ternary system that can be unitary: two equals three; three equals one. This is the seemingly paradoxical but constant mainspring of Chinese thought. (pg. 51)
[And here I can't resist quoting the footnote (from Granet: La Pensée chinoise) that accompanies this passage because it is so close to Deleuze's description of Lacan's object a or the empty square of structuralism.
One is never anything other than the whole, and two is nothing but the pair. Two is the pair characterized by the alternation of yin and yang. The one, the whole, is the pivot that is neither the yin nor the yang but by which the alternation between yin and yang is coordinated. It is the central square that does not count (like the hub, which the Taoist authors say is able to make the wheel turn because of its emptiness) ... Both together, unity and pair, the whole, if we want to give it numerical expression, is found in odd numbers, and first of all in the three (the one plus the two). Three, as we shall see, amounts to a hardly attenuated expression of unanimity.
The Western translation of the concept of emptiness would go in this direction I think. It is the "paradoxical object" that is always missing from its place, always circulating through a series of transformations. This ceaseless movement though, this constituent lack, is what allows it to stand in for the whole and create a symbolic order.]
The final theme Cheng tackles in his philosophical exposition of emptiness is also the most difficult to understand. What is the role of emptiness in human life? The idea is that it's only through our own emptiness that we can become the model or mirror for the world. It's only by a long process of emptying our self that we become capable of painting the emptiness/fullness of the natural world. Though Cheng chooses terms like "mirror", "model", and "microcosm" here, it seems to me that this could easily convey the impression that the goal is an accurate representation of the world in the form of some sort of miniature recreation of it. In fact, the goal of cultivating our internal emptiness is to stop representing the world, and start becoming it. Since the universe is already empty, re-creating it in painted form is less a matter of capturing a particular scene than it is of continuing the process of unfolding emptiness that gave rise to it. Human creation "mirrors' this process only by being swept up in it so that our little or median emptiness resonates with and develops the larger emptiness. If, despite Rorty's objection, we want to stick with the mirror metaphor, we need to emphasize the surface of the mirror itself rather than the images that appear in it. The mirror really adds nothing to the world. Similarly, the surface of the mirror remains unchanged no matter what contents it happens to reflect. So in a sense the mirror is nothing in itself but the simple passive act of reflection. The mirror metaphor changes if you focus on the emptiness and superficiality of the 'act' of mirroring instead of the objects pictured in the depths.
Cheng adds a final twist to this now familiar mystical breeze-blowing-right-through-you moment by linking it to a transformation of time into space. He observes that humans, after all, are finite, mortal, creatures. How could we possibly expect to re-create the whole with our limited means? Our only chance is to re-create a sort of infinite fractal depth within ourselves, to make each of our finite moments communicate with the whole. Citing Lao-Tzu -- "... it flows on pushing ever further, and having gone far in its going, it ends up effecting the return" (25) -- Cheng interprets the concept of the return as something that doesn't happen at the end of time, but between any moment and its successor. It's as if the whole universal sweep of the tao is reinserted into every gap within it. But making each instant recapitulate the whole (which is composed of instants recapitulating the whole ...) has the effect of converting time into space. An endless process of temporal unfolding is converted into a single space that can be apprehended at once. Obviously, this idea is crucial if you want to capture the universe in a painting. Later Cheng will analyze various concrete techniques for adding a temporal depth to the painted surface, all of which will depend on a lived emptiness on the part of the painter.
Thus, with regard to the manner in which man should live space-time, Confucius and Lao-Tzu both proposed emptiness of heart, which makes humans capable of interiorizing the entire process of qualitative change that I have been discussing. Emptiness implies interiorization and totalization. (pg. 58)
2 -- Emptiness in Chinese Painting
After outlining his philosophical theory of emptiness, Cheng proceeds to apply all the concepts described above to Chinese painting. By quoting extensively from various painters he shows us how they conceive of their discipline as the fruit of a long meditation, the flowering of a spiritual process that makes painting into a sort of "philosophy in action" designed to mirror the creative process of the cosmos. In fact, many of them describe the ultimate goal of painting as the ability to create an image as real as the nature that inspired it. Of course, this doesn't mean they want to produce a perfect objective representation of nature, but to capture its li, its inner pattern or principle. Our Western temptation to call this the essence of things is misplaced but instructive -- the whole point is that there aren't any essential things to begin with, but that everything is wrapped up in a process of becoming and creation that only reaches totalization with the (empty) act of painting itself.
Cheng outlines four nested levels that structure Chinese painting, each of which is composed of a duality whose terms are held together by emptiness. Brush-Ink refers to the way the properly executed brustroke can create form, texture, and even dimension in painted objects. Emptiness holds brush and ink together both through the way many specific types of stroke introduce un-inked areas within the stroke, but also in the rhythmic separation of one stroke from another can be made to produce the sense of volume. Manipulation of the Brightness-Darkness (Yin-Yang) duality is responsible for the creation of color in both the literal and atmospheric sense. The relationship to emptiness becomes clearer here when you know that most of Chinese painting has only black ink on a white page. Any coloring is an illusion created by a variety of washes and other brush techniques. Since most of these are landscape paintings, Mountain-Water is the most obvious dualistic pair. When we observe mountains which pile up like waves and a roiling sea that has its peaks and valleys, it becomes clear that these opposites are often painted so as to unite them. In between, holding them together, we find the emptiness of the clouds. Finally, at the level of the overall composition, we immediately notice the heavy use of negative space. Cheng identifies the opposition of painted and unpainted space with the Heaven-Earth duality. These two are united by the emptiness in the painter himself as he tries to include the very process of making the painting within it. It reminds me of Cezanne's description: "man absent from but entirely within the landscape". The painter appears in his landscape in the way it expresses a mood, in its a-realistic use of perspective, and, in many later paintings, in the form of an original poem inscribed in the black space. All of these techniques serve to transform a lived process of painting into a living space, one that reflects a spiritual journey that inherently involves time. The end result is another non-dual paradox: a visual music.
3 -- The painting of Shih T'ao
The final section of the book doesn't really offer any new ideas, but simply particularizes what has been said to the case of Shih T'ao. Cheng quotes extensively from his Enlightening Remarks on Painting and reproduces several of his paintings in the glossy plates section to bring all the abstractions down to concrete images. Here is a nature that lives and breathes as we do, an emptiness mirroring emptiness.
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