Inaga. Kegon/Huayan 華厳 View and Contemporary East Asian Art

130320kegon.pdf



“Kegon/Huayan 華厳 View and Contemporary East Asian Art: 

A Methodological Proposal,”Cross Sections Vol.5, The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, March 20, 2013, pp.2-25.





SUMMARY :

Huayan thought has played an important role in East Asian cultural history. Remaining relics and cultural properties bear witness to the fact that the Huayan Sutra 華厳経 was mobilized so as to consolidate and protect the foundation of the ancient state system. The Vairocana Buddha of the Fengxiansi 奉先寺 Temple at the Longmen caves 龍門石窟 in Henan Province 河南省 near the city of Luoyang, 洛陽 in China, (675), the temple

Pusokusa 浮石寺 in the Taebaek Mountains 太白山 , founded by Uisang 義湘 (625-702) in Korea in the year of

676, and the Great Buddha at the Tôdaiji 東大寺 Temple in Nara 奈良 , Japan (752), are among the cultural heritages related to Huayan thought designated by UNESCO. Many studies on Buddhist art in connection with Huayan thought have been successfully conducted so far, but the possible impact of Huayan thought on the contemporary art scene has been almost overlooked and neglected. The present paper tries to investigate into this unexplored field. Let me add also that the title of the paper had been initially proposed by the organizer of the Second International Colloquium on Huayan Thought, held in Bélesbat in 2008.

Not only in Japan, but also in East Asia in general, Huayan thought has taken root so deeply in the cultural tradition that it looks at first sight arbitrary to detect its survival (Nachleben in the sense of Aby Warburg) in modernity. However, whenever scholars are obliged to give explanation to things far-eastern, the basic pattern of

Huayan thought suddenly surfaces. Why does it occur so frequently? What kind of interpretation can the

Huayan paradigm tacitly propose so as to shed a new light on the contemporary art scene? And what can be the philosophical and theoretical implications the Huayan grid of reference can offer? These are the questions that the present paper tries to investigate. This methodological proposal aims to critically examine the relevance of a new working hypothesis (as well as its crucial limit) in the field of art criticism in the global and comparative perspective. Indeed, the Huayan paradigm has never been taken into account among the possible theoretical references to elucidate the contemporary art scene. The paper does not, on the contrary, contain any ambition of making additional philological contribution to Buddhism studies. Nor does the author have any pretention of belonging to the Western academic discipline of religious studies.



要旨：

　華厳経は東アジアの文化史において大きな役割を果たしてきた。鎮護国家のために華厳が動員された様は、今に残る遺構からも知られる。中国大陸では洛陽郊外の龍門石窟の奉先寺磨崖仏（675）、韓国では義湘による建立とされる太白山・浮石寺（676）、日本では東大寺の大仏 (752)など。龍門や奈良の毘盧遮那仏の巨像は、華厳経の信仰から生まれた世界遺産として著名だろう。華厳経に由来する仏教美術については、すでに多くの研究がある。だがここでは視点を変えてみたい。

　日本に限らず、東アジアの文化伝統の深い部分に根を下ろしている華厳の思想は、いかに現代美術のうちに発現しているのか。さらに華厳の思想という解読格子に照らしてみると、現代美術と呼ばれる営みに、いかなる解釈を提案できるのだろうか。現代美術に華厳の伝統を見る、といった視点は、日本あるいは東アジア内部では、一見あまりに突飛にみえる。そのためか、現代美術を華厳から解くような試みは、容易には生まれにくい。だが東アジアの文化現象を、外部の視点から捉えなおし、それ以外の文化圏に向けて説明する必要が生じた場合には、伝統と現代との関係が改めて問い直されることになる。本稿では、こうした要請に応じて考察を進め、あわせてその方法論的な問題点を批判的に検討したい。



All for one and one for all!

Tous pour un, un pour tous.

From The Three Musketeers (English film version)

Preliminary Du sublime au ridicule il n'y a qu'un pas. Napoléon

Izutsu Toshihiko 井筒俊彦 (1914-1993) gives one of the most comprehensive interpretations in a Western language, of Huayan philosophy, commonly attributed to Fazang (642-712). Throughout the present essay, the author refers to the definition Izutsu proposes as the guideline for the present investigation. The ontological climax of Huayan philosophy, according to Izutsu, consists in the“ interpenetration of shih and shih” 事事無碍 or“ the mutual ontological penetration of everything into everything else in the empirical dimension of experience.” So as to understand this climax, however, the state o“f interpenetration of li and shih” 理事無碍 must be taken into account, wher“e each of the manifold things in the empirical world embodies the one absolute metaphysical reality.”1 To put it another way and following the formulation by Frédéric Girard“, the world of non-obstruction of the phenomena between them” is understandable only upon the bases o“f the world of non-obstruction between deeds and the absolute.”2

Our purpose resides in the recognition that the Huayan way of thinking is capable of leading us to a better understanding of the crucial problems that the contemporary artistic creation is trying hard to reveal, beyond the limitation of individual endeavour. The apparent lack of coherence as well as the frameless diversity of the contemporary Japanese and some far-eastern contemporary art scenes may reveal its tacit and underlying network in light of the Huayan paradigm. For this purpose, such devices and notion, to be articulated from the Huayan Sutra, as interval, bridge, inside-out, upside-down, filtering, contingency, synchronicity, and constellation etc. will be put into examination. Following the interconnectedness of the Huayan way of thinking, the essay tries to clarify the difficulties artists have to face so as to attain the non-obtrusiveness in reflecting mirrors which Huayan thought substantiates. 3



I.........The International Avant-garde and the Huayan Paradigm
The Conditions for non-obtrusiveness

To what extent is the Huayan thought relevant so as to shed light on the modern and contemporary art bridging the East and the

West? One of the most outspoken or candid affirmation to the question must be the one published by Haga Tôru 芳賀徹 (1931- ) in 1961. So as to explain the avant-garde of the period in an international perspective, Haga refers to the image of Indra's garland. Let us quote from his French text (written at the age of 30):

Une des métaphores lumineuses dont se remplit ce livre sacré nous évoque un immense filet de bijoux qui décore le palais d'Indra, un des gardians importants du Bouddha. Une infinité des bijoux cristallins, fixés chacun à une maille du filet, se réfléchissent et se pénètrent l'un et l'autre, de sorte que chaque bijou, réfléchissant en lui tous les autres, se réfléchit dans tous les autres et ainsi de suite infiniment. (…) Toute la restriction, la distance et l'indifférence entre des choses abolies, et le sens unique de la causalité transcendée, toutes les individualités, restant toujours telles, sont unies en un cosmos limpide qu'embrasse le rayonnement du Bouddha. Et celui-ci est à son tour participé par elles.4

Allowing himself a“ huge logical jump” (un grand saut), Haga asks if this Huayan vision cannot be perceived through the works of contemporary painters like Mark Tobey, Wols or Jackson Pollock“. Chez Pollock ou chez Wols toute la complexité des traits et des touches ne s'empresse, en un rythme essoufflant, qu'à nous enlever du quotidien, de cette assemblage des faits rigides et dispersés pour nous plonger dans un monde de la continuité inépuisable.”5 The passage is printed in an illustrated book in which Michel Tapié included not only Teshigawara Sôfû 勅使河原蒼風, avant-garde master of flower arrangement, Yoshihara Jirô 吉原治良, founding father of the Gutai 具体 group together with Kanayama Akira 金山明, Tanaka Atsuko 田中敦子, Shiraga Kazuo 白髪一雄 among other members of the same group. It also included Japanese contemporary artists staying in France like Imai Toshimitsu 今井俊満, Dômoto Inshô 堂本印象 and Tabuchi Yasukazu 田淵安一 in addition to Kusama Yayoi 草間彌生 and Inokuma Gen'ichirô 猪熊弦一郎 among the residents in New York.





It may be easy to question the relevance of such an approach.6 And yet, it would be fair to point out the fact that the Japanese intellectuals, who made an extensive stays in the West, tended to refer to the Huayan vision so as to overcome the Western challenge they had to face. Let us take just one example. Minakata Kumagusu 南方熊楠 (1867-1941), a legendary folklorist and naturalist in modern Japan, also tried to develop his vision by referring to the Huayan thought during his stay in London. Apparently Kumagusu was not satisfied with the narrow, mechanical logic of the cause-effect chain model that was dominant in modern Western scientific methodology as he perceived in London at the end of the 19th Century. His basic idea consists of the interpenetration of the human heart 心 and the material world 物. The overlapping of the two leads to the recognition of deed 事. This basic relationship between fact and idea is already hardly reducible to the platonic thinking that separates idea/form (eidos) from material (hyle), or that of Descartes' that separates the mind from the body. Kumagusu further develops the idea with the help of the mandalah which he borrowed from the esoteric Buddhism.7 On the relationship between thoughts and deeds, Kumagusu left a famous sketch of a two-dimensional static cross-section showing the inter-connectedness between deeds 事 and logics 理 (fig.1). The inexhaustible mutual associations constitute the dynamism of the cosmic movement.



The traces of this cosmic movement have often been translated by the artists through their kinaesthetic movement. Jackson

Pollock's so-called action painting is no exception and Akira Kanayama's 金山明 (1924-2008) work is often compared with the drippings of Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) as a sign of“ Japan's contemporaneity with the West.”8 However, the superficial



fig.1 Minakata Kumagusu, Schema explaining the non-

obtrusiveness of deeds and law, from Kumagusu's letter to Doki Hôryû



fig.2 Jackson Pollock, The Deep, 1953, Centre Georges

Pompidou, Paris

similarity rather reveals fundamental divergences. The irony is that the Japanese artist used a remote-controlled machine to make the drawing. The loci which appear on the paper are not so much the lines drawn by the will of the artist as the result of the mechanical conditions which the artists has set forth so as to let the machine fulfill somewhat whimsically its own kinetic duty. Although the results are visualy quite similar, there is a huge gap in their making. While Jackson Pollock's dripping is meticulously calculated, Kanayama gives free hand to the material conditions and seems to be nonchalantly irresponsible of the result that his involvement could engender. Japanese aesthetic preference for the unexpected and its

willingness to accept fortuity becomes conspicuous.9
Depth and Surface

One of Pollock's last pieces, the The Deep (1953)(fig.2), bears comparison to Morita Shiryû's 森田子龍 almost contemporary piece, So (Deep Blue)(1954)(fig.3), representing the avant-garde of calligraphy. The reversibility between the background and the traces of painting that both of the pieces are showing, is also suggestive of the relationship between li 理 (logic of connection between matters) and shi 事 (deeds which“ matter” that is, deeds which are recognized as such thanks to the relationships which are established among them). The mutual determination between logics and matters has been investigated at this phase both by the Japanese calligrapher and by the Western painter. Through their work, both of them were searching for non-obtrusiveness between the field (background) and the figure (patterns). The interpenetration had become possible when the Oriental calligraphy was liberated from its routine duty of tracing letters, on the one hand, and when, almost simultaneously, the Western painter was liberated from the aesthetics of mimesis.10 Between the two, to use Haga's expression“, il n'y a pas une touche de pinceau, pas un point d'éclaboussure qui ne résonne pas avec tous les autres, qui ne prend pas conscience d'eux.”11 The mutual resonance between the Western and Eastern artists justifies Haga's approach. By putting side by side these Western and Japanese contemporary avantgarde artists under the sign of the“ ancient Indian philosophy,” Haga also tries to confirm the relevance of the Huayan thought. Clearly the logic of juxtaposition between Eastern and Western practices partakes of non-obtrusiveness.
The World as Mutual illumination

Let us take another piece of work from the same album. Tanaka Atsuko 田中敦子 (1932-2005) was one of the most visionary women members of the Gutai group. Her Gate of Hell (1965-69)(fig.4) is a comprehensible illustration of the state of mind where each of the entities constituting the universe is rendered in its relations with all the others. Itô Jakuchû's 伊藤若冲 (1716-1800), White Plum Blossoms and Moon (1755)(fig.5) already visualized a similar state of mind in a highly obsessive depiction of the plum in full bloom. The image is not so much a minute depiction of reality as a mandala composed of visual signs meticulously inscribed. By showing a similar diagram to the readers, Izutsu Toshihiko explains the mutual illumination of phenomena. In his lecture on the

Huayan philosophy delivered at the Uranos conference in 1981“: The Nexus of Ontological Events: A Buddhist View of Reality,”12

(fig.6) Izutsu makes it clear that the diagram does not“ purport to account for the coming-into-being of a thing, or anything whatsoever, in terms of a cause-effect relationship.”

Causal thinking is basically linear, no matter how meandering the line in effect may be. This type of thinking tries to account for the coming-into-being of a thing, say X, by tracing the chain of its causes (E, D, C, B) back to the first cause (A). (X-E-D-C-B-A)



The yüan ch'i 縁起 (or pratīitya-samutpāda) type of thinking, on the contrary, accounts for the existence of a thing, X, in terms of all the things (A, B, C, D, …) which are related to it and which collaborate together in bringing the X





fig.3 Morita Shiryû, So (DeepBlue), 1954, The National Museum of Art, Osaka.

fig.4 Tanaka Atsuko, Gate of Hell, 1965-69, The National Museum of Art, Osaka

fig.5 Itô Jakuchû, White Plum Blossom and Moon, 1755, Edo Period, Mary and Jackson Burke Foundation, New

York

fig.6 Izutsu Toshihiko, Synchronic schema explaining the non-obtrusiveness between deeds, from The Structure of Oriental Philosophy: Collected Papers of the Eranos Conference vol. I (The Izutsu Library Series

on Oriental Philosophy 4), Keio University Press, 2008 4

6 5

into being and keep it in being. Some of these things stand very close to the X, some remote, and some others still farther away, until our view reaches the ultimate limit of the universe, so that all things in the universe are seen to be related to the X closely or remotely in all degrees of closeness and remoteness. 13

Thus in each existence participates all that exists in the universe, and the world of existence is constantly becoming each moment.

Hence the Huayan sutra says that in each of the motes of dust one sees the entirety of the whole existing world 一一微塵中、見一切法

界. Here we begin to see the splendid world of the Huayan where each aspect of the life is palpitating in accordance with all others in mutual penetrations 融通. When a flower opens its petals, all under the heaven turns out to be in full spring, as Dôgen道元 (1200-53) says in Shôbô Genzô 正法眼蔵.14 While Jakuchû articulates this vision, Tanaka Atsuko renders a 20th Century psychosomatic version through her kinetic practice of execution (行 gyô). We know that precisely the same expression is found in an epigraphy by Peter Altenberg (1859-1919) when talking of the Japanese aesthetics“: Die Japaner malen einen Blütenzweig und es is der ganze Frühling. Bei us malen sie den ganzen Frühling und es ist kaum ein Blütenzweig. Weise Ökonomie is alles.”“( Bei uns” refers to“ Our Western painting” and the East-West dichotomy is what Peter Altenberg is maintaining here. That is“, The painting in our West strives to render the whole spring only to fail to depict even a branch of flower; whereas the Japanese artist only draws a branch of flower, which enables us to feel the whole spring in full bloom”).“ Wise economy is all that counts,”concludes the Wiener writer of the Jahrhundert Wende.15



II............The Logic of Inter-Changeability and The World of Non-Obtrusiveness
Self-Obliteration and the Infinite Thread of Memory

Needless to say this state represents only schematically the“ interpenetration of shih and shih” 事事無碍 or“ the mutual ontological penetration of everything into everything else in the empirical dimension of experience.” Some of the artists come close to this state of mind and it may easily endanger the self of the artist. Kusama Yayoi 草間彌生 (1929- ) is one case in point as she is constantly suffering from such symptoms as being the victim of auditory hallucination, telaesthesia, wiretapping, plagiarism, and other such. Working at



fig.8 Sculpture Vili, XVIIème -début du XIXème siècle, Republique du fig.9 Kusama Yayoi, Fireflies on the Water, 2000, Collection of the artist Congo, Musée du quai Branly, Paris





fig.7 Kusama Yayoi, TravelingLife, 1964, The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto



the fringe of persecution delusion and constantly exposed to priority disputes, she is“ obliterating” the surrounding world by her own sign as if to perform the ritual of exorcism. The furniture of her possession is covered with innumerable phallic-shaped objects (fig.7). The proliferation of the parasites reminds us of the Nkonde sculpture from Central Africa (fig.8). Each of the nails bears witness to each of the events for which the wooden animal has been summoned for the sake of exorcism. In the end, its body is entirely covered with nails, showing how many incidents in the world are connected with the small object so as to replace or substitute the curse. In the same token, Kusama recognizes that the persecution delusion cannot be overcome without covering the entire world with her own signs: hence her obsessive repetition of marking the polka dots which lead her to a state of mind of non-obtrusiveness. In other words, the non-obtrusiveness described in the Huayan Sutra easily threatens normal people to be driven into a state of insanity.

Kusama's quest for the state of non-obtrusiveness spreads her own self to the limit of infinity, which she tries to visualize by way of the interminable multiplication of sinuous tubes marked with what she call“s infinity dots.” The intricate rhizome like structure of the Yellow Trees (1994) accounts for the endless universe of inter-connectedness. The mirror room named Fireflies on the water (2000)(fig.9) also shows her desire to possess the infinity by which she herself is possessed. The artificial lights located in the mirror room realize a limitless space where the flickering of the lights extends itself to the fringe of visibility à perte de vue. In fact the mirror room is still spreading itself at the light velocity of light. The vision is similar to the one clearly described verbally in the Huayan Sutra, which we cited above through Haga's exegesis.

Tanaka Atsuko, as already mentioned, came to a similar idea at the end of the 1950s. She conceived a cocoon-like device equipped with colourful lamps. By lying in the cocoon, one can find oneself covered by the flickering lights with which one communicates. Ultimately one can identify oneself with these lights, as if one were reduced to one of these lamps. The interconnected network of lamps with the codes reminds us of a huge genealogical tree that was to be developed into a metaphor of DNA. Let us recall that it was in 1953 that James Watson and Francis Crick identified the DNA as the vehicle transmitting the genetic information from one generation to another. Tanaka's keen interest in the DNA was succeeded by Kudô Tetsumi 工藤哲巳 (1935-1990) who puts the human head in a cage

(representing Marcel Duchamp fascinated by cat's cradle) and covered the head with tangled threads representing human memory inherited from one's ancestors (fig.10). Needless to say, the notion of ancestral lineage is one aspect of the network, pratiitya-

samutpaada 縁起, which connects each individual to a certain destiny beyond the narrowly defined cause-effect linkage.



10 11

fig.10 Kudô Tetsumi, Marcel Duchamp dans le fil infini Méditation entre futur programmé et mémoire enregistrée, 1977, Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art

fig.11 Shiota Chiharu, During Sleep, 2004

Courtesy of the artist

The interconnectedness of life was further pursued after Kudô's death by Shiota Chiharu 塩田千春. Her Dialog from DNA (2004) connects hundreds of shoes by red threads, and illustrates one aspect of the Huayan vision of interconnectedness of the worldly existence. The bundle of threads constitutes a red canopy, suggesting the common fate that connects each of the shoes with their own individual and particular life. Shiota Chiharu also presents an installation named During Sleep (2004, fig.11). Hospital beds made of white iron pipe are covered with white sheets that wrap living models sleeping there. The beds are connected with each other by a complicated network of black threads as if the totality of them were doomed to share a common but unknown destiny. Once again the scene strongly suggests that each individual is related to each other without the fact fully being noticed. Each person believes him- or herself to be completely detached from each other. It is only by chance and by sure coincidence that they are lying together in a huge common bedroom because similar illness has befallen them. And yet the synchronicity realized by chance makes a special configuration and the constellation is all the more uncanny because it is realized simply by chance. It is the non-obtrusiveness 無碍 of the contingency that creates a strong psychological sense of uneasy obtrusiveness, which Sigmund Freud called“ das Unheimliche.”16
Cosmic Death and Rebirth

Miyajima Tatsuo's 宮島達男 (1957- ) famous installation of blue light emitting diodes (LED) at the Venice Biennale in 1999 may be regarded as a sophisticated combination of Kusama's infinite space and Kudô's thread of memory that Chiharu Shiota further extended (fig.12). The experience is unforgettable“. When you enter the dark room,” states one commentator“, you at first cannot see anything but a complete darkness. After a while, however, with the gradual dilatation of your pupil, you begin to perceive innumerable flickering blue lights on the wall. The palpitation of the light leads you to a simulated experience of the prenatal state of mind in the uterus, similar to the experience of tranquility at the bottom of the ancestral sea, which you can experience in front of deep blue water at a huge public aquarium…”17

With the aid of computer command, Miyajima programmed the palpitation of the unaccountable pieces of diode apparently in a completely random rhythm as if each of the diodes lived its own life without being affected by the others. And yet, the unpredictable flickering of the diodes all of a sudden begins to synchronize in their count-down and they die successively one after another. At a certain point of time, the entire space experiences a complete black out. Thi“s end” or the massiv“e death” of the entire universe comes almost every one hour, without any explicit announcement or presentiment. The artist suggests here the cosmic“ mega death.” After a



12 13

fig.12 Miyajima Tatsuo, Mega-Death, 1999, Venice Biennale

fig.13 Aoki Noe, Water in theSky VIX, 2007

Courtesy of the artist

while, the flickering slowly resumes one by one as if each of the stars started a new life without being aware of, nor influenced by the neighbours' destiny. Miyajima must be conscious of the Buddhist connotation“. Born, born, born, born and dark at the beginning of the birth; Dead, dead, dead, dead, and obscure at the end of death” 生生生生暗生始、死死死死冥死終. The famous incantation of Shingon esoteric Buddhism by Kûkai 空海 (774-835)18 seems to be the guiding mantra of Miyajima's cosmic image. 19

Miyajima could have arranged the blue stars on the hemispheric screen of the cosmic canopy though the Japanese pavilion at the Venice Biennale financially did not allow him to do so. Aoki Noe 青木野枝 (1958- ), in contrast, let her iron pieces form a self-standing canopy (fig.13). The chains of individual destiny take here a constructive and growing configuration. Small iron rings are welded to each other one by one and they constitutes a fragile looking amalgamation of iron threads. These threads grow up vertically and come together at the top to support each other and the convergence forms and sustains a canopy-like structure. Clearly the canopy is not a self-sustaining autonomous structure as it cannot maintain its form unless it is sustained by the mutual dependence of the iron threads of which it is composed. The constituting iron threads, for their turn, are also composed of the accumulated iron rings.

This gives birth to a singular effect: although made of iron, each of the rings gives an ephemeral impression as if the group of air bubbles were freely floating in the water and slowly climbing up to the surface which is located far above our view point. The impression of ethereal ascension stems from the lack of obtrusive rigidity (the huge iron framework structure tends to give such an imposing impression to the viewers) and the scarcity of contact points with the sustaining floor. The irregular ascending lines of the metal threads are free from the heavy massiveness that is common in iron sculptures. The strange mismatch between the materiality of the heavy black metal and the elevating sensation of the successive rings offers a stimulating and“ healthy” assuredness of being protected in the world. Why is the idea of linkage and the feeling of being protected so crucial?
Transparency, Opacity, and Correspondence

This feeling of being protected is probably connected with the form of the canopy that also suggests a vase. Cheoung Kwang-ho's

Pot (1979) reveals in its own way the delicate relationship between the interconnectedness and the resulting form of a container (fig.14). The idea was simple one. The artist replaced with a soldered net of metal threads the configuration of the cracks of the glaze that had covered a Korean white porcelain pot. This simple replacement cleverly visualized what had been hidden underneath the clay surface. Under the convincingly stable form of the container, the intricate interrelatedness of the infinitesimal clay pieces is hidden. The invisible mutual obtrusiveness of the material is reflected in the cracks of the glaze coating. In fact, the cracks translate the difference of the rate of contractility between the clay body and the surface glaze. Therefore, it is the mutual obtrusiveness, of which the cracks are indicators, that materially sustains the clay container in its present form under the condition of gravity. The transparency of the metal wire network duplicating the jar form makes almost palpable the Huayan vision of the mutual aid that has been buried beneath the clay layer of the liquid container. Let us remember that for Oriental amateurs of porcelains - as they often claim by themselves - ceramic vessels must be clearly distinguished from Western ceramic works in that the vase is a recipient that contains a passive cavity. Besides, the cracks are not technical shortcomings but a key to penetrate the secret of the interrelatedness of our worldly existence.

The interplay between the interior and the exterior is a precious metaphor enabling us to think about the ontological structure of a container in the light of Huayan thought. A white porcelain jar of the Joseon Dynasty is famous for the pattern which appeared on its outside. The liquid that was contained inside of the jar slowly penetrated through the clay and offered a chance image on the surface. The inter-penetrability made the jar a rare treasure. The Chinese idea of a jar which contains the heaven inside itself 壺中天 seems to have been transmitted to the West via the Indian Ocean by Arabic merchants, as is suggested by Aladdin's lamp. The socalled Tenmoku tea bowl 天目茶碗 spotted with special iris patterns made by chance in the kiln through chemical reaction creates an unexpected scene of cosmology when the bowl is filled with water. The pattern of the starlit sky canopy is believed to be reflected





fig.14 Cheoung Kwang-ho, The Pot 79, 2007



on the concave surface of a cup of tea bowl. There is a mirror effect that mystically and magically connects the outside and the inside of the container.
Inside-Out between Minimum and Maximum

Akasegawa Genpei 赤瀬川原平 (1937- ) must be one of the most original artists who takes advantage of the interplay between the outside and the inside of a container. Indeed he is the artist who conceptually pushed forward the vision of the heaven-containingvase to the extreme limit. Instead of a clay bowl, he chose a metal can conserving the crab. It was in 1963. By opening the container with a can opener, the artist disposed of the contents and removed the label from the outside so as to reattach it on the inside of the can. The can lid was subsequently soldered back on (fig.15). He then declared that he had successfully locked the entire universe in a tiny can, save a small quantity of air that had escaped and was left“ outside” of the can. Here the Japanese artist“ created” a crab can containing the whole universe. With this device the artist is challenging the spectators:“ Now you can take a walk with‘ a packed can of the universe’ 宇宙の缶詰 in your pocket. Of course you yourself are also enclosed and imprisoned as it wer‘e within’ the can in question, without your noticing it.”

Here is a logical trick of inside-out. The ultimate minimalist work of art is easily accomplished at an extremely low price.

Compared to Akasegawa's astute but petty packing of the whole universe, even Christo's wrapping of the Pont Neuf in Paris or the

Reichstag in Berlin is far smaller in size and far less ambitious in its intention. Christo's wrappings covers only a very small portion of the universe, despite the enormous expenditure of money for their realization. It would not be too difficult to see in Akasegwa's tricky joke a far-off echo of the Huayan idea:“ yi ji duo, duo ji yi” 一即多、多即一, indeed, one thing can include everything and everything can be reduced in one thing.20 The equation of the infinite with the minimum is what the Huayan view has formulated.

Consciously or unconsciously, Akasegawa put the idea into his own creation.
Topological Duplication between the Negative and the Positive

Several years later, in 1968, Sekine Nobuo 関根伸夫 (1942- ) made another step forward in the footsteps of Huayan thinking. Sekine dug into the earth and made a hole of 2.7 meters deep by 2.4 meters in diameter. By recycling the dug out soil, he replicated an earth tower of the identical in size beside the hole (fig.16). Viewers had the impression of a hollowed out soil cylinder reappearing on the field. The work is named Topology Earth. Sekine recalls retrospectively that if he could dig a hole as big as the entire earth, he would have been able to create another planet Earth No.2 by using the whole amount of the earth he had put aside. This anecdote reminds us of the famous story of Saint Augustine who tried to dissuade a child from drawing out the whole sea of water with a tiny pail. The topological replacement also implies duplication whereby the male and female sides of the one and the same moulding play divergent roles. Indeed the inside wall of the hole is identical with the outside surface of the mud tower, and the bottom of the hole is replaced by the top of the tower. Like the möbius strip of a crossed ribbon in the two-dimensional world, where the inside is mysteriously replaced by the outside, Sekine's topological operation simultaneously achieves the inside-out and upside-down in three-dimensions.

The topological reversal may also serve as a metaphor. The dug-out hole can stand for an abandoned local mine just as the sand tower can for the sky scraper of the metropolis. The contrast between the natural resources and the commercial end product shows metonymically the gap between the poverty of the third world and the wealth of the first. This vision reveals the reality of the world at the point of the 1960s: prosperous Western Modernism was realized at the price of the non-Western world that was still searching for its independence under the colonial situation. Sekine's work vividly concretizes the vision of the earth at the end of the 1960s where people were still deeply embedded in the colonizer-colonized dichotomy.21 The positive side of the prosperity of Western



fig.15 Akasegawa Genpei, The Cosmic Can, 1963



fig.16 Sekine Nobuo, Topology Earth, 1968

civilization conceals the negative side of the impoverishment in the Non-Western ex-colonies. As a compensation for this usurpation, the modernization may also be described as the process through which the Western modernity of the towering center (symbol of high culture) is diffused and propagated like a stream of the water to the lower holes in the peripheries. The exportation of industrial products to the un-developed and developing countries, as well as the imitation of the Western culture by the nonWestern cultural spheres are also depicted as a negative flow in Sekine's Topology Earth as an allegorical diagram, although Sekine himself did not intend to such a politicized interpretation.22

In addition, the topological scheme of the piece also accounts for the historical transition in Japanese contemporary art history. The

“anti-art” movement in the 1960s was to be replaced around 1969-70 by the slogan o“f non-art.” The revolt against the institution of the“ modern art” (anti-art) underwent a topological shift into a new phase, as the notion o“f Fine Art” itself had become to seem no longer relevant (non-art). Indeed, in Sekine's case, the notion of a“ piece of art” is under threat. Neither the hole nor the tower constitutes in itself the piece of art in its own right; it is rather the non-substantial relationship and topological contrast between the two (negative vs. positive; absence vs. presence, void vs. substance 23) that is put into focus, and put into question. It would not be an exaggeration to see in this topological shift a radica“l interpenetration of li and shih” 理事無碍 taking place. As Matsuoka Seigô 松岡正剛 (1944- ) remarks, the understanding of the material condition becomes itself a method.24 It may be safely stated, following Matsuoka's understanding, that Sekine translated the Huayan idea into a topological transposition of materiality.
Non-Obtrusiveness needs a Gap

Curiously enough the interplay of inside-out was rarely pursued by Western artists, as they have for the most part been preoccupied only with the exterior form of their creation. This is evident when one thinks of the bronze casting and marble carving (in both cases the invisible interior is not seriously taken into account) in comparison with the fabricating of ceramic containers. In contrast to ordinary Western practice defined as“ sculpture,” potters have been constantly interested in the interplay between the interior and the exterior that their clay work differentiates. As part of the avant-garde in pottery, Yagi Kazuo 八木一夫 (1918-1979) did not hesitate to realize a parody of Sekine's Topology Earth by his own The Ear of Newton (1969).25 In this work Yagi shows the cross-section of a hole (alluding to Sekine's work) in which Newton's apple appears. The apple, cut into halves, incorporates the profile of a human ear (an insinuation to Miki Tomio (1937-1978) and bears the physical signs of Adam and Eve (borrowed from his colleague, Horiuchi Masakazu (1911-2001)). Being a cross-section of the artistic topography of Japan at the end of 1960s, Yagi's work shows by itself a non-obtrusive mirror effect of the contemporary avant-garde.

His Circle (1978, fig.17) shows a curbed tube with two obstructed ends. Although nothing is enigmatic at first sight, the form contains many crucial questions if reflected in the the Huayan context. The exercises in three-dimensional compositions are no less difficult to formulate than to answer by the written word in linear thinking. The following observation must be almost incomprehensible without the help of visual images.

Two extremities of the curbed tube are almost touching with each other. We may ask: which mouth is touching the other or which mouth is touched by the other? When the two ends meet and complete a circle, another hole will be automatically created in



fig.17 Yagi Kazuo, Circle, 1978




the middle of the tube, just like a swimming tube. At that moment, can we say for sure that the empty tube is surrounding the central hole that it now encircles? Or should we rather say that the emergence of the central cavity gave birth to the surrounding wheel-like round cavity? Between the two empty tubes, there is a mutually dependency. Through a subtle dialectics one void gives birth to another. And yet, once the circle is completed, we immediately lose sight of another dialectics: the double holes could not have been achieved were it not for the mutual approaching of the two obstructed ends of the initial tube. Once the circuit is completed, we can no longer see the driving force that connected the two ends. Open mouths disappear when the communication between them is just established.


fig.18 Yagi Kazuo, Large Vase, Shigaraki Ware, 1966 This observation leads us to the following speculation. The gap that separates the two ends was in reality the source of mutual attraction. When the gap is dissolved, the mutual attraction also disappears. In other words, the communication is self-destructive in that it becomes already out of use when it is once completed. The achievement invalidates the initial aim. This paradox points to the central nexus of the Huayan thought. The non-obtrusiveness between the one and the whole easily annihilates the basic condition of non-obtrusiveness itself. To understand this logical chiasm, it would be enough to look at a simple tube, Earth Pipe Shigaraki Ware (1966) which separates the interior from the exterior, in comparison with the Large Vase, Shigaraki Ware (1966) (fig.18), a jar marked by a huge crack through which the inside opens a mouth toward the outside. The inside cannot be perceived if it is not open to an outside (as the tube with open mouths shows). And yet, the openness to the outside violates the ontological definition itself of“ being an inside.” In fact a jar with a huge crack is practically useless as the water leaks though the crack. Here appears a“ side effect”: inter-connected-ness inevitably blurs the distinction between inside and outside and endangers the contours of individuality. It may even annihilate individual entities through mutual interpenetration and amorphous fusing.26

At the same time, we also begin to see another paradox hidden in this interplay between inside and outside. Namely, th“e gap” between the concerned entities (like“ inside” and“ outside”) is indispensable so as to guarantee th“e non-obtrusiveness” in the mutual interplay of the two sides. Indeed, without the initia“l gap” it is simply impossible to establish any distinction between the entities that are aiming to establish the non-obtrusiveness between them. Here is a frustrating chicken and egg problem.

Mizuki Shigeru's 水木しげる (1922- ) story of the communication between this world and another one (Hell) touches upon the problem.27 The secret crystal stone of non-obtrusiveness, called“ T.V. of the world of spirits” 霊界テレビ should be kept out of the access to ordinary people; otherwise the distinction between the hell and this world would be easily lost once for all. Needless to say, this enigmatic crystal reflecting everything within itself is nothing but one of the beads composing Indra’s garland, one of the protecting divinities of Vairocana. The sudden revelation to the truth of non-obtrusiveness can easily make an ordinary person insane, if the person has not yet been prepared for it. In retrospect, we can now understand why Tanaka Atsuko named her work

The Gate of Hell. Her work was literally indicating the gate to the hell of insanity.28

In her neurological approach in search of a new world vision, Barbara Maria Stafford calls a similar device“ echo objects,” without explicitly referring to Buddhism.29 Olafur Eliasson's work, Quasi Brick Wall (2002, fig.19) is chosen for the cover. The choice indicates the American author's affinity with the Huayan vision. The artist presents a honey bees' nest-like wall with each of the hexagonal face of the cave and its six sides are covered by mirrors which reflect with each other like a kaleidoscope. If the mirrors of this work were to be replaced by T.V. screens, we would have returned to the world of Nam June Paik 白南準 (1932-2006). One of his installations has the shape of a turtle. (fig.20) The symbol of longevity, the shape also reminds the Korean public of the turtleshell armoured battle ship 亀甲船 that General Lee Sunshin 李舜臣 (1545-1598) invented so as to defeat the Japanese invaders. Here, the turtle's shell is composed of T.V. monitors. Like the crystal T.V. set of the world of the spirits that Mizuki conceived, each of the screens sends different visions coming from different origins. The turtle shaped electric generated mandala is clearly reflecting Paik's Buddhist background. Not only was Huayan the dominant sect in Korea for the protection of the nation since the era of

Wisan 義湘 (625-702), Korean Founder of the Huayan sect, it was also a mark of cultural resistance in modern times. Invoking to this Korean heritage, the contemporary Korean artist of international renown was trying to bridge the dislocated and scattered world by way of an electric device in search of global visual communicability in his aesthetic endeavour.30



III.........Toward the Cosmic Vortex of Life
“Ma” and “Khôra”

These examinations now lead us to a general discussion in philosophical dimension. Non-obtrusiveness requires a gap, as the gap



fig.19 Olafur Eliasson, Quasi Brick Wall, 2002, NMAC Foundation, Cadiz



fig.20 Nam June Paik, Turtle (Schildkröte), 1993,

Kunsthalle, Bremen

calls for coupling, the moment of connection. Here the architect Isozaki Arata 磯崎新 (1931- ) provides us with useful insights. He calls our attention to the Japanese term“ hashi.” At first sight the English translation for the notion is too divergent to be coherent.

“Hashi” means not only bridge 橋, edge 端, but also chopsticks 箸, veranda 階 and contains various other nuances. Though morphologically incoherent, they all indicate one common function“. Hashi” designate the role of connecting the ends or limits of two different entities.“ Hashi” therefore may be supposed to designate the idea of“ linkage” or the“ coupling.” While it marks a distinction, it also offers a connection. 31 This reflection around 1977 lead the architect to launch a show based on the idea of another Japanese term“: ma.”

The Ma-Espace-Temps (1978) show, first held in Paris in 1978, was an attempt to deconstruct the Cartesian idea of time and space. Even in the modern lexicon of Old-Japanese“, ma” or“ aida” 間 is defined as“ the interval which necessarily exists or remains between concrete entities.” In derivations“, ma” is explained as designating such meanings as“ empty space”“ intermediary void” or a“ room” in a house in spatial construction, whereas in connection with temporality, it also means“ pause” or“ intermittence.” However Isozaki sees in these explanations only an anachronistic and retroactive rationalization. When the Western abstract notions were introduced to modernizing Japan in the second half of the 19th Century, quantities of new vocabularies were coined“. Time” was translated through the combination of two Chinese characters 時間 i.e“. chronos”＋“ ma,” while“ space” was rendered through the combination 空間 i.e.“ emptiness”＋“ ma.” Judging from these circumstances, the lexicological definition is literally preposterous. To translate“ ma” as“ in-between-ness” is synonymous with reducing the idea into terms of Cartesian coordinate axes. Far from being reducible to Western notions (as were formulated by Descartes, Kant and others and criticized by E. Cassierer, E.

Husserl and J. Derrida, among others),“ ma,” according to Isozaki (and to whose idea the present author does not necessarily subscribe), designates the origina“l gap” prior to the articulation o“f time-chronos” and“ space-emptiness.”

Isozaki further tries to bridge Japanese ideas with the Greek homologue. He argues that the notion o“f khôra” (in Plato's Timaeus, to be distinguished from Aristotle's) is worth being compared with the notion of“ ma.”32 Just as the“ ma” indicates that which enables the articulation of space-time, so is“ khôra” designating the“ opening slit” (o“r hiatus” in Latin) from which existences (étant, Seiend, in Heideggerian terminology) are engendered.

From this point, a complicated philosophical discussion is needed. When the cosmos appears, it also endangers what is not cosmos. What is excluded from cosmos is usually named chaos. However thi“s chaos” in binary opposition to“ cosmos” is no longer identical with the origina“l chaos” from which the“ cosmos” was articulated. How can we name this“ ur-chaos”? Izutsu Toshihiko proposes the notion of“ anti-cosmos,” as the opposite of the“ cosmos.” In this terminology,“ cosmos” and“ anti-cosmos” are articulated in differentiation from the initial“ chaos.”33 Maruyama Keizaburô 丸山圭三郎 (1933-1993) for his turn, proposes the term of“ chaosmos,” combining“ chaos” and“ osmos” to designate the initial amorphous state prior to the distinction between

“cosmos” and what is foreclosed from it as“ chaos.”34 Whatever the terminology, it is clear, logically speaking, that one has to suppose a moment/place (by definition prior to time-space articulation) which enabled the initial binary articulation of“ cosmos” from what is not“ cosmos.”“ Ma” as well as“ Khôra” designate that which allowed the initial articulation (neither the term of

“moment” nor“ place” is accurate in this context). At any rate, Plato's note is supportive, if not of much helpful:“ there are existence, Khôra and genesis, the three are different.” (on te kai chôran kai genesin einai, tira trichê, 53d2).35


Inter-connected-ness and Local Resistance

The problem of the initial interval that disappears in the Cartesian coordinate axes is closely related with the problem of synchronicity. Though the Jungian notion of synchronicity has been much debated and criticized as mystical, it is undeniable that a shoal of sardines among fishes or a flock of thrush make synchronized turns so as to shift the direction of the whole group in one moment. Why do the fireflies in the tropics emanate light in synchronicity? Even for the human species, statistical observations of



the mass behaviour reveals patterns of configuration which lie beyond the individual will. The case of curtain call hand clapping at the curtain call is revealing. Why is the handclap synchronized for a moment only to be dissolved inevitably later ?36 Among such questions, we may also take up the case of the internet.

The autogenetic development of the internet connection may be examined in the light of Huayan thought. Despite the fact that the electric internet provides us with the ubiquitous possibility of non-obtrusive connection, limitless access is in reality a matter of impossibility due to the limited time span of each human individual's existence with a limited brain capacity. Nevertheless, the development of the internet modifies people's value judgements. Lee O-young 李御寧 (1934- ), Korea's first minister of culture, is the key person who initiated drastic change in the Korean society by way of information technology.

Possession, Lee says, is no longer equated with capital, and cultural capital cannot be reduced to economic capital. Mobile phones plays the main role here. Previously the possession of a telephone apparatus was a status symbol and represented by itself a cultural capital (propriety). The logic of primitive accumulation in a Marxist economy was still intact. But nowadays, who possesses a mobile phone in which place is no longer essential in the ubiquitous environment. Instead, who is connected with whom has become the capital interest. Here Professor Lee reminds us that the term“ interest” stems from the relationship (inter) of the existence (est). Thus interconnectedness replaces the old notion of capital holding. Ultimately, the universe loses its center. Possession gives way to connection. The individual is important so far as it functions as a nodal point in the global network. The binary alternative between independence and dependence is replaced by interdependence.37 It is clear that Lee O Young's paradigm shift is secretly supported by the Huayan thought.

At the same time, local resistance has become prominent in the global market. Xu Bing 徐冰 (1955- ) is a famous Chinese contemporary artist, who has invented his own idiosyncratic and personal system of Chinese ideograms (fig.21). His popularity in the global international market is carefully counterbalanced by his explicit warning to the Chinese local market. He ostentatiously shows to the Chinese public cultural sphere that his ideograms are fakes and made of a mere nonsense. However, this message of warning is understood only by those who know Chinese characters, and for an“ ordinary” Western public, this conspicuous signal of absurdity becomes instantaneously no less invisible than illegible. In targeting a foreign public who is incapable of understanding the illegibility of his work, the artist transmits his rhetorical strategy. His double register shows clearly that the artist is astutely organizing a systematic resistance against the recuperation by the global market from which he gains profits. The apparent nonobtrusiveness abroad was sustained by the ostensible obtrusiveness in the domestic context.38

The so-called aboriginal artists of the Northern Territory of Australia also deserve our attention here. As a matter of fact, the interplay of obtrusiveness and non-obtrusiveness, which we have observed in the case of the market strategy by Xu Bing, is extended here in terms of the conflict between materiality and spirituality. As is well known, their pictorial plane stems from the dream map of their own territory. Some of the artists make a clear distinction between the material possession of the merchandise and spiritual possession of the mental message. Museums and clients can materially purchase the paintings, but it does not follow that the inscribed message on the canvas is accessible to the non-initiated people. Quite often, it is declared in the business contract that the mental dimension belongs to the artist and not to the owner of the painting.

One of the most famous women aboriginal painters, Emily Kngwarreye (ca.1910-1998), had her nostril horizontally pierced. The horizontal hole that connects her nostril is literally representing the horizontal hole at the sacred rocks of Alhalkere.39 Is it a mere coincidence that in Anthwerke, the geological gap from which the aboriginal believe that the universe engendered, is called Emily

Gap?40 The gap or the abyss, equivalent of the Greek“ chaos” (ouverture béante, abîme etc.) is strongly suggestive of the“ origine du monde,” as Augustin Berque argues by connecting his reflection on Khôra to Australian aboriginal art. As we have discussed elsewhere, Berque's interpretation of Khôra in reference to the“ original gap” can be theoretically linked with the basic idea of the

Huayan view. In fact, at the crucial point of the universe, where the whole world emerges from nothingness, All is represented as





fig.21 Xu Blng, from The Book from the Sky, 2007



equal to One and Not-yet-existing can be interpreted as equivalent to All.41 The logic here is isomorphic to the case of the Cosmic Can conceived by Akasegawa Genpei, which we have already analyzed above.

The creative process of the Australian aboriginals is rhythmical. The cosmic dance was ritually rendered by the respected aboriginals through their gesticulation and movement of the arms. The regular strokes left on the canvas follow an organic flow in which lines stretch out sometimes like capillaries, sometimes like undulations (fig.22). Lifelines are pulsating with a corporal dynamism and some of them remind us of the ripple marks that the wind has left on the desert sands while others remind us of the shadows of the birds migrating in a group (fig.23).42 Dialectics of one and the whole, or the ritual of life and death is repeated in a regular cadence by birds or fishes, forming a living vortex (fig.24).43 Needless to say, many artists come close to this type of archetypal vision in the course of their creative life. The phenomena are so trans-historically universal that it is obviously absurd to try to reduce them into something particular to Huayan thought. On the contrary, the Huayan vision simply epitomizes the universality beyond the East-West dichotomy. Among innumerable examples, let us just mention a similar vortex that appears in Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night (1889). We shall see soon the reason why Van Gogh is chosen here.
Interpenetration of Cosmic Ideas

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), a Dutch painter who also contemplated the whole universe in a tiny branch of weed “( un brin d'herbe”), following the Lesson of Japanese artists, was one of the rare visionary artists who was able to sensitively receive the cosmic message (fig.25). He was often induced to dreams looking at black points on the map indicating cities and towns. In the same way he was seduced by the stars in the sky. He asked why was it not possible for us to go to the stars because we are really able to go to the places indicated on a map? He also made the following striking observation“: If taking the train is the way to go to Tarascon or Rouen, to go to the stars you can take the death. This thinking seems absurd, but what is certain and not wrong is the following fact: so long as you live, you cannot go to the stars, and once you are dead you can no longer take the train. In brief, just as the steamer, the stagecoach or the railway are the locomotives on the earth, so it would not be impossible that cholera, tuberculoses or cancer are the locomotives in the heaven.”44

Miyazawa Kenji 宮沢賢治 (1896-1933) is a poet who developed the same idea in extension of Van Gogh in a most striking way.



23 24



fig.22 Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Utopia Panels, 1996

fig.23 Nandalal Bose, Landscape, March 1962, National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi

fig.24 Arai Kanpô, The Pond of Purity, 1934, Sakura City Museum-Arai Kanpo Memorial

Miyazawa is known as an ardent devotee of Vincent van Gogh as one of his poems was directly inspired by the“ blue of fire” of the cypresses depicted by Van Gogh. Miyazawa is also well known for his fantasy The Night of the Train to the Milky Way 銀河鉄道の夜, in which one of the protagonists, Campanella, together with his friends, takes a train to the Milky Way (in Japanese the Silver River). It turns out that Campanella had been drawn to death when he had tried to save the life of his friend, Zaneri. This self sacrifice for the sake of his friend’s rescue entitled him to get a special train ticket to go to the heaven. And Campanella on his way to the Milky Way comes to know the reason why Antares (Alpha Scorpii) at the heart of Scorpion is so brightly red in the night sky. Having killed so many innocent insects, while it was on earth, the scorpion decided to use his body in his second life in heaven so as to shed light on the darkness.

Redemption through self sacrifice leads to the salvation of the world. The archetypal model following the footsteps of Jesus Christ

(imitatio Christi) finds variations both in Vincent van Gogh and Miyazawa Kenji. The dreams of taking the train to the heaven so as to enjoy the rebirth and the metempsychosis are resonate in a cosmic rhythm and penetrate each other between the imagination of the Dutch painter and the Japanese poet. We also know that Vincent van Gogh wished to become a Japanese monk, while Kenji Miyazawa, spiritual devotee of van Gogh, was a faithful believer in the Lotus Sutra (while scholars recently lay stress on the surviving Huayan vision in his poetical imagination)45. Interpenetration of poetic inspirations between the two may be included among the creative dimensions of which the Huayan thought has provided an illuminating paradigm: a cosmic constellation





fig.25 Vincent van Gogh, Nuit étoilée, Saint-Rémy, June 1889, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York



composed of seemingly unrelated individuals; they are connected with each other by unexpected affinities despite their chronological and geographical distance.

Needless to say, there is no objective base in the perception of a constellation. Stars composing a constellation cannot be perceived as such, were it not for the vantage point of the present earth from which they are observed. Their synchronicity is simply an optical illusion. Their mutual distances are so divergent from each other that some of the stars have already ended their lives millions of years ago. Only the light that they have emanated in a remote past happens now to reach the surface of the earth, so as to figure symbolic images on the human mental map. Human beings, contemplating the night sky, feel - wrongly - as if they were there, of some predestined necessity.
In the Guise of an Epilogue: a Methodological Question

Our approach here may be reproached as an example of hideous extrapolation from a strictly philological mind. The connection that the present paper proposed among the artists is no better than a constellation in the sky. The author is easily blamed for the obvious lack of syllogistic argument. However to accept this accusation will amount to a rejection of Huayan thought as a guiding working hypothesis. Let me propose a parable to avoid such a vicious circle. Talking about the secret of perceiving constellations and the mystery of synchronicity, Kawai Hayao 河合隼雄 (1928-2007) also stresses on the importance of a Freudian idea of“ free floating attention,” an expression in itself contradictory as an oxymoron because“ attention” paid in a certain direction cannot be freely floating. However, Huayan thought does not see any paradox in free floating attention. The flexibility is also vital for the understanding of dreams.

Specialist of dreams, and author of a book on the dream seen by the Buddhist monk Myôe 明恵 (1173-1232),46 Kawai also made a vivid observation concerning the“ miniature garden” mental therapy of which he was one of the earliest promoters. The initial idea was developed in Europe - more precisely in Switzerland - as“ sand play” (Sandspiel 箱庭療法) but Kawai was surprised to see its application in North America where the Americans decided to cast away the sands. They did not recognize the sands as relevant and indispensable elements constituting the therapeutic practice that they wanted to standardize. The program was renamed in the New Continent (ironically enough) as the“ World Test.”47

The sand field seems to be insignificant for the therapy, but in reality nothing is insignificant. On the contrary, the insignificance



of the sands has their own meaning that comes to the fore only when the individuality of the client is understood as something which is being constituted from the sum of the relationships of which he or she is one nodal point (among the infinite others). In this Huayan perspective a grain of sand is no less important than the therapist or the patient. Sweeping the sand garden in every morning is nothing but a ritual, but this ritual has its mental effect. By so doing one can, as it were, comb one's mental hair so as to prepare one's spiritual state. Sands provide the soil for this cultivation of the mind. Removing the sand from the sand play therapy symbolized an American-style Western rationalism (I am speaking of the way a culture is transformed in the process of its migration). However, keeping the sand in the miniature garden does not necessarily mean a stupid participation in the irrational absurdity. Individual existence is nothing but an ephemeral dust in the eternal universe, of which the miniature sand garden is a faithful metaphor (fig.26).

Each of the artists we have sketchily studied so far did know the importance of the each particle of the sand constituting the vast desert of which we are incapable of digging out the entirety of the constituting materials. Let us recall once again the conversation of Saint Augustine (354-430) with a child who was trying to drain away all the waters out of the ocean. It is no less reckless to cast away the sand from the sand garden than to try to drain away all the water from the ocean.“ The World Test” is precisely the modern caricature of the Father of the Church who took the Creator for an ignorant child.48 Let us instead return to our sand



fig.26 A Village near Beijing menaced by desertification photo by Mark Heneley / Panos Pictures from the greeting card of the United Nations University, Tokyo,

2006


garden. As Voltaire say“s il faut cultiver nos jardins.”49

(Kyoto, August 1, 2008. Final revision: Kyoto, September 18, 2012)**



* The paper was first presented at the Second Colloquium Huayan-Kegon, organized by Professor Frédéric Girard at EFEO, and held in Paris-Bélesbat on 7-10 August, 2008. My thanks go to Frédéric Girard who encouraged me to write the paper, and the successfully realized the symposium without which the current essay would not have been written. The paper was also partially presented at the Center for Asia-Pacific Area Studies in Academia Sinica in Taipei on March 6,

2009; at the second research meeting of the MONO-logy Sense-Value Studies, conducted by Professor Kamata Tôji, Kondô Takahiro and Ônishi Hiroshi at the Kyoto University of Arts and Design, on June, 2, 2009; as well as in Korea in Nov. 2009 for the commemoration of Professor Hong Sonpyo's thirty years of career as a distinguished art historian (Though the author could not attend the session). The author thanks all the discussants as well as seven anonymous peer reviewers who gave useful suggestions on these occasions and in the following editorial process. Last but not least, my deepest thanks go to John Breen and Matthew Larking. Without their constant support and assistance the present paper would have never been published.

** This paper has been rejected several times and welcomed by sarcastic reactions by prestigious peer reviewers from 2009 onward for more than 3 years. Critical appraisal is worth doing as it reveals what is at stake here. First of all, it was rejected from the editorial board of the organizer of the colloquium despite the fact that the title was proposed by the organizing committee and the task was commissioned from the present author. Obviously the paper could not have been integrated into the volume where other contributions were strictly based on philological studies on the Huayan Sutra as well as its faithful application to the visual arts. The circumstances also explain why the definition of Huayan is not thoroughly given in the present paper, as it was simply redundant. Secondly, the paper, independently submitted, was also rejected by an international and interdisciplinary journal in Japanese studies in 2009. One reviewer rejected naming Kegon/Huayan as“ philosophy” and remarked that the present paper is lacking in the“ parameters and hermeneutics of the philosophy” it pretends to transmit. The review accuses the author of a“ lack of a definition and interpretative framework” that“ renders it impossible for the reader to comprehend the application of the philosophy to the art works discussed.” The present author believes that the paper questions the very idea o“f applying” prefabricated theoretical frameworks on the visual and plastic arts. Instead the paper proposes a re-reading of visual thinking emanating from the artworks themselves and investigates the ways a certain number of artworks interconnect and communicate with each other beyond the individual will of the creator- just as the Huayan way of thinking induces us to practice.

Another reviewer had the opinion that the paper's approach is“ analogous or metaphysical and neither precisely directed nor empirically validated,” and

“much of the debate is theological rather than academic.” The third peer reviewer had the opinion that this piece“ does not constitute a contribution that is informative or intellectually provocative.” The present author wonders why the forced application of a Lacan, a Foucault or a Derrida as a universal theoretical framework on things Oriental is more relevant than the working hypothesis of testing the (ir-)relevance of the Huayan paradigm in contemporary East Asian artistic creation in contrast to contemporary Western artistic productions. The East-West parallel has been already pointed out by previous scholars of international acclaim, and the present author has difficulty in finding out the reason why it is forbidden to critically examine these parallels so as to test the relevance of a new paradigm (the relevance is by no means presupposed in the present essay, thus the author is perplexed why the paper is judged“ theological”). The Huayan paradigm was used so as to examine“ exemplary artworks” which represent, according to this peer reviewer“, an alarmingly arbitrary grouping. They run a wide gamut, chronologically, geographically, and ideologically.” This is to mean that any discussion crossing-over chronological, geographical and ideological borders is not appropriate for academic papers, so long as it looks“ arbitrary.” In other words, it turns out that the peer review of the“ international, interdisciplinary” journal does not acknowledge any value in an interdisciplinary approach. But for the Huayan paradigm, which consists of negating any idea of“ arbitrariness” (see note 18), such a disciplinary cross-over could not have been realized, and yet the reviewer sees in such a limitless double-mirror only a deplorably“ arbitrary” confusion.“ The author's interpretations of each work perplex, rather than inform.” The reviewer refuses to acknowledge that each piece of artwork can lead to philosophical thinking, by way of its arbitrary neighborhood and unexpected serendipity. The same reviewer, at the same time, manifests a personal conviction that“ information” should be controlled in a strict logic of

syllogism, which the Huayan way of thinking openly questions.

In short, it may be said that the present paper reveals, without intending to do so, the limits on academic writing as is allowed by the social conventions of the present. Two years later, another peer reviewer gave a brilliant insight. The reviewer simply states tha“t the manuscript is an essay in the strict sense of the word, not an academic piece.” The author is more than delighted, for he has never thought of being able to write an“ essay” whatsoever in a foreign tongue! The reviewer also judiciously remarks that“ its main way of proceeding is by loose association, less by logical syllogism.” In other words, an academic paper must be strictly controlled by syllogism, and“ association” or“ free floating attention,” to use Freud's term, still remain to be rejected as an inadmissible tool for thinking. The reviewer also stresses the fact that“ the style and way of arguing is quite familiar to me from the genre of exhibition catalogues on contemporary Japanese art.” The present author wonders if the tendency is limited particularly to Japan. On the one hand, contemporary art means that the scene still lacks in unified perspective to grasp the whole map; once the master-narrative is established, the field is no longe“r contemporary.” And it is also doubtful if such a monocular perspective is even possible in the post-modern, post-colonial present, or post-contemporary art scene in the future. On the other hand, curatorial work consists of collecting and neighboring the otherwise unconnected works in such a way that a new message emanates from the particular gathering. Famous philosophers or thinkers, such as J. Starobinski, Hubert Damisch, Julia Kristeva, Jean Clay, and Georges Didi-Huberman to mention just a few, have been summoned to propose their own original“ collection” for the sake of an“ exposition imaginaire” (to paraphrase André Malraux) which was eventually realized materially, so that the mutual stimuli can emanate unprecedented messages. The present author has no pretention of being able to compete with such Western intellectual giants in the monde savant (cf. Inaga 2010-c), but still wonders if a humble and tentative manner of presenting one's own vision in a virtual version, by way of text in printed matter, is strictly forbidden in the name of academic rigueur. Interestingly enough, while one previous reviewer called the paper“ not intellectually provocative” the third reviewer“ find(s) the text in itself interesting and thought provoking, if not entirely persuasive,” in the sense that the essay is“ connecting things seemingly entirely unconnected.” This seems to the present author to be the highest eulogy possible that this troublesome paper is worth receiving.

The forth review is worth quoting at length“: The author purports to interpret 20th century art in terms of hua-yan philosophy. He goes to great length to quote certain passages of Avatamska texts, and intersperses these with ostensible analyses of art̶almost all by persons who never have heard of the ideas in question. The article is so arbitrary, so-un-based in historical contextualization, so unaware of any art historical theory, it is risible. One just might as well proclaim that Kamakura period art is motivated by the Avesta or Egyptian art by Revelations. Nonsense, nonsense. It does not belong in a scholarly journal of any kind.” As the paper is going to be printed in the Bulletin of the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, the minimum of justification must be requested so as to defend, not the present paper, but the“ scholarly” standard of the journal. The term“ motivated” here is used in a positivist sense, according to the mechanical model of linear cause-effect, while in the current paper, the author never maintained that Huayan thinking“ motivated” the artists, who have scarcely read through the Sutra. The discussion brings us back to the pre-structuralism, pre-Positivismus Streit (known as the German Debate on Positivism), pre-phenomenological state of hermeneutics. Suffice to ask a question: if an artist had never heard of the unconscious, would it be forbidden to use psychoanalysis as a tool to analyze his or her work?

The reviewer also reveals his/her distinguished knowledge on anachronism in the mechanism of historiography, put forward by Michel de Certeau and many others. Revelations can bring us to a new re-interpretation of Egyptian art retroactively (as is well known in theology as antiquesanastasia), and it is only by the successive chronologic reversal that history has ever been written. And more fundamentally, Egyptians were not practicing their“ art” in such a way that their pyramid is to be treated in the framework of“ Art History” which was invented only later by the posterities that they could never have envisaged. These remarks certainly reveal the present author's“ ignorance” in“ art historical or historical theory (cf. Inaga 2007).” Let me add one positive or excessively positivistic remark: a new interpretation of the famous“ Portrait of Myô-e” in meditation on a trunk has been put forward by a leading specialist of the art of the Kamakura period, as a unique visualization of the Huayan Sutra (Itoh 2012). And the author acknowledges his indebtedness to the very essay under scrutiny here, which the present author had distributed by way of a hand-made copy and through tentative Japanese translation in limited circulation (as the English original has never been printed in the circumstances I have explained so far).

Last, but not least, the present author thanks the peer reviewer of CROSS SECTIONS for invaluable commentaries. Without this positive evaluation, with reasonable reserves (regettably not to be quoted from, here), written on Aug. 25, 2012, the present paper would have literally never been printed in English at all.


NOTES

1. Sawai 2008, pp. 219-220.

2. Girard 2003, p. 69.

3. The present paper will not attempt to analyse works of art that explicitly try to illustrate the idea of Huayan philosophy in plastic thinking. Many specialists have already conducted research on the ways Huayan thought was applied to visual and plastic fields. And several papers faithful to this view have been read in the colloquium where this paper was originally requested by the organizer. Instead of repeating the same approach, the paper rather attempts to elucidate the“ obstructions（”碍） that the artistic creations have to encounter in their effort to reach the Huayan illumination. The application of the philosophical idea of Buddhism to visual or plastic art does not interest us here so long as it implies the idea that the visual imago is only a secondary articulation of the scriptural, and that visual images should be subordinated to the pre-existing scriptures. Instead we search for the possibility that the

Huayan thought emerges from the act of making forms (in-for-mation). At the same time, limiting our focus within a narrowly defined Buddhist art is not our intention either (nor the wish of the organizer of the colloquium). Instead, the paper will focus on some of the most crucial aspects of modern and contemporary art in which artists remain unconscious of their implicit reference to Huayan ways of thinking (the author avoids using the term

“philosophy” for fear of uselessly offending the susceptibilities of readers with strict Western terminology in mind (See Inaga 2011). As we shall see, Huayan thinking is so deeply imbedded in“ the East-Asian psyche” that the agents of actions remain quite often unaware of their indebtedness to it in their way of visualizing images and making forms (Inaga 2010-b).

It is a matter of course that for each of the Western artists treated in this paper for the sake of comparison, there already exists a number of important studies. However to mention and assess each of these precedent studies would not help in making the present study more relevant (insofar as Huayan thought has never been recognized until now as a possible paradigm for the research). Instead the present paper puts more emphasis on the studies made in Japan which have been heretofore practically ignored in the Western art criticism. The author believes that requiring all the precedent studies in English be mentioned in the footnotes and references while rejecting the entry of any study conducted in non-Western languages is a form of cultural protectionism, which lacks in bilateral balance what a sound interdisciplinary scholarship has to try to establish. This is also to criticize the no less unhealthy tendency of parochialism in Japanese scholarship on things Japanese. The Japanese domestic academic markets, treating Japan as their subject matter, do not pay enough attention to non-Japanese scholarly contributions conducted abroad. Or in non-Japanese foreign tongues (including the present paper), they courteously refuse any substantial international communication and more often than not, repel inter-disciplinary approaches within the Japanese archipelago.

4. Haga 1961, s.p. English translation in Michel Tapié et Haga Tôru 1962“. One of the luminous metaphors which abound in the sacred book refers to an immense gem-studded netting which decorates the palace of Indra, one of the important guardians of Buddha. An infinite number of crystalline gems, each attached to a mesh of the netting, reflect and penetrate one another, so that every gem, reflecting all the others, is reflected by all others and so on ad infinitum. (...) All isolation, distance, and indifference to things are abolished, one way causality is transcended. All things, while preserving their individualities. are united in a limpid cosmos encompassed by the radiance of Buddha, and all things share in Buddha.” (slightly modified, no pagination).

5. Haga 1961. English translation, Haga 1962“: In Pollock or in Wols, the complex lines and brushstrokes seek to take us away from everyday reality, from this assemblage of rigid and scattered facts, in order to plunge us headlong into a world of inexhaustible continuity.” (without pagination).

6. Accordingly the interest of the author in the present paper does not reside in using the Huayan paradigm as an“ external hermeneutic frame to be applied to the material.” Nor does the paper try, as happens quite often, to use the Huayan paradigm a“s an over-arching meta-concept” to integrate all the pieces of art work under discussion. Rather the intention resides in an effort of providing one possible cross-reading (among infinite numbers of others) encompassing the diversity of pieces of works through the metaphorical guidance of Huayan thinking. If the attempt is judged aimless, this is simply because the possible reading searches for the frontiers lying beyond the limit of syllogistic thinking within which academic research has been strictly demarcated so as to define the notion o“f empirical validation” and“ aetiological connections.” 7. Tsurumi 1995, pp. 1-14; Tsurumi 1996, pp. 167-170.

8. Tomii 2009, pp. 134-140.

9. At the same time one should be aware of the fact that quite an opposite interpretation can also be easily formulated. Kanayama's dependency on the remote-control machine may be regarded as the Japanese artist's enthusiasm for Western mechanics whereas Pollock's dripping suggests his affinities to Oriental ink manipulation. Yet nothing prohibits the Oriental artist relying upon Western technology and the American artist's implicit interest in Oriental aesthetics as being no more incongruous than Japanese Westernization. The chiasm simply suggests the mutual crossing of the Eastern and Western currents that Ernest F. Fenollosa has already remarked as a historical fact in his obituary to James McNeil Whistler (Fenollosa 1903, p.15).

10. The discussion here is based on a time span of one hundred years, following the initial proposal by Imamichi Tomonobu 1961. To be more meticulous, it goes without saying that Western painting generally came to be liberated from mimesis in the late 19th century and more properly in the early years of the 20th century while Hidai Nankoku 比田井南谷 is said to be the first to abandon word forms from calligraphy in a 1945 work called Work 1: Variation on“ Den”. See Bert Winther-Tamaki 2001:75.

11. Haga 1962. English translation, Haga 1962“: there is not a brush stroke, not a splash, that does not echo all the others, that is not aware of them.”

12. Izutsu 1980; 2008, pp. 151-186. The illustration is from p. 180.

13. Izutsu 1980; 2008, p.179. To find out a similar idea in Western philosophy, we have to go back to the neo-Plato thinker, Plotin (Plotinus). See Nakamura Hajime, 1965, pp. 220-231. Although Izutsu does not identify the source, he clearly refers to this paper by Nakamura when he wrote the

English paper we mentioned, supra., in the previous note 12. It must also be mentioned that Izutsu started his study in Western philosophy with Plotin before becoming a specialist of Islamic thought.

14. Izutsu 1989, p. 49.

15. Bahr 1980, pp. 334-335.

16. One may ask here why these Japanese artists are so deeply interested in the idea of connections at the risk of scarifying the creation of an autonomous and self-standing piece of artwork which are usually requested in the Western art market. One theoretical and practical answer is proposed by Koshimizu Susumu 小清水漸 through his series o“f Operational Table” (1976-) questioning the notion of parelgon (Immanuel Kant) in obvious precedence to the deconstructive reflections by Jacques Derrida. See Inaga 2010-d.

17. Inaga 1999.

18. Kûkai subdivides the teaching of the Huayan sutra into 10 sections faithfully following Fazang : 1. liberated from chronological order. 2. overcoming the distinction between pure and mixed. 3. identification of multiple and unique. 4. merging of the heterogeneous and homogeneous. 5. free interchangeability of the exoteric and esoteric. 6. harmony between order and disorder. 7. Mutual mirroring reflectivity (the metaphor of Indra's net). 8. Revelation of the Buddha-hood in the relationship of things. 9. Circular solution of the past and the present. 10. Fulfillment through the dissolution of the distinction between Subject and Object. See Matsuoka 2005, pp.339-340. As these are at best“ metaphorical and analogous” by nature, it is quite natural that as a“ theory” they are“ not very well abstracted as a model for application and requires further clarification” as one peer reviewer judiciously indicates. It is a matter of course that these systematic negations of the common-sense value judgment are“ neither precisely directed nor empirically validated” for the usual state of consciousness. If such a doctrine cannot serve as a“ theory,” this is up to the definition o“f theoria” itself.

19. It is an open question if Miyajima's deep concern with the mega-death of the universe and his ecological tendency can be related with profit to Buddhism in general, and to Kegon thinking in particular. Generally speaking, it is obviously not easy to detect the traces of Buddhist influence in the creation of contemporary Japanese artists. For a certain age, artists tend to negate any Oriental background in their efforts to be integrated into the

international art scene, and from a certain point, when their status is consolidated in the Western market, they tend to begin to reveal their oriental cultural background. Yet the observer must be careful of the creators' will to fabricate and propagate their personal myth in accordance with their marketing strategy. Just take the case of Takashi Murakami. While having negated any traces of Japanese classical culture when he was young, personifying the popular culture of manga characters, Murakami began to refer to“ Zen” culture as if converted, when he reached middle age. Oral archives concerning the artists will help reveal the mechanism of autobiography as a practice of rediscovery of one's cultural roots in retrospect. See www.oralarthistory.org.

20. Here is by the way the ultimate paradox of the collection making. So as to include the whole world, one has to choose the smallest container; otherwise many things would drop out of the container. See Inaga 2001, pp. 75-101.

21. Clearly this vision at the end of the 1960s is no longer relevant at the end of the first decade of the 21st Century. For example, it is now Australian mining and natural resources which provide China and India, two main superpowers of the 21st Century, with many of their resources for modernization. On this paradigm shift see Inaga 2012.

22. These new interpretations were first published in the author's review of the CIHA 2008 in Melbourne, Crossing Cultures: Conflicts/Migration/ Convergence, International Conference of Art History, 13-18 January, 2008. See Inaga 2008-b.

23. On the necessary distinctions between“ vacuity,“” nothingness,”“ non-being” etc, see Bernard Stevans and the commentary on Stevans' paper by Frédéric Girard, in Bernard Stevans 2000, pp. 291-337.

24. Matsuoka Seigô, 1984; 2004. Also see Matsuoka's commentary on the Korean poet, Ko-un's novel, Hwanmungyong (Ko-un, 1991). http//www.isis.

ne.jp/mnn/senya0681.html

25. On Yagi Kazuo, see Inaga 2006, pp. 133-159.

26. Although Yagi did not explicitly refer to Huayan thought or the Kegon Sutra in his numerous essays, it may be speculated that the idea was part of his common knowledge as an intellectual living in the city of Kyoto. In fact, Nakai Sôtarô (1879-1966), spiritual leader of the Kokuga Sôsaku Kyôkai (Society for the Creation of New National Painting) in the 1920s, and later President of the Kyoto Municipal University of Art, is known to have developed his interpretation of Paul Cézanne in reference to Huayan-Kegon thought, which was quite popular in the 20s through 40s when Yagi was a young student. Yagi later taught at the same Municipal University of Art, which was the Mecca of avant-garde artists up until his own death. On Nakai's Huayan interpretation of Cézanne, see Inaga 2010. On Yagi Kazuo also see Hida & Inaga 2008-c.

27. Mizuki 1988, p.73.

28. It may be worth mentioning here that Tanaka, in her mental difficulty following the death of the founding father of the Gutai group, Yoshihara Jirô, organized exhibitions in Buddhist temples. Testimony was given to the author by Yoshimura Yoshio, art journalist for the Journal Asahi. Interview on 16 Sep. 2012 at the Shiga Prefectural Museum of Modern Art. As for Shiraga Kazuo, another member of the Gutai group, it is by now well known that he had been a monk at the Enryakuji Temple of Esoteric Buddhism. His oil painting executed by foot while balancing his body by grasping a rope with his arms were directly inspired from his practice in the temple as a practitioner-disciple. The Huayan Sutra is one of the sutras treated in the doctrinal dispute in Esoteric Buddhism and serves as a base to be overcome in a later stage of exercise. This fact however does not mean that the ideas included in the Huayan

Sutra are rejected by the Tendai Sect. See Shiraga's commentary on“ Buddhism” in an interview in 2007 by Katô Mizuho with Ikegami Hiroko, in Tomii, 2009, pp.69-73.

29. Stafford 2007.

30. Here the author refrains from mentioning the huge range of literature on Nam June Paik, simply because the author could not find anything relevant to the present discussion. To the best of our knowledge, Paik's connection with Huayan thinking has not been seriously discussed, at least in the Paik studies published in Western languages, if not in Korean. In a larger context of Namjun Paik's Buddhism and contemporary art, refer to Munroe 2009, pp. 20203, Winther-Tamaki 2010, pp.326-29. Particularly, Saihanboaliga 2011 develops reflections on Paik's Buddhist thought in his Video Art. In this paper, the Japanese version of Inaga's present paper is referred to as the starting point of the discussion.

31. Isozaki Arata 2006, p. 97.

32. Ibid. p. 31.3 note 69. This proposal was made public in 1991, which was to be followed by Jacques Derrida's publication of Khôra (1993). Also see Sakai Naoki 1999, pp. 97-8., note 4 and p. 208, note 21. And also Augustin Berque 1999, ch. 1 which discusses“ Khôra” in distincation from“ chôra” and criticizes Derrida's interpretation.

33. Izutsu Toshihiko, 1989, p. 189 sq. (No English translation is known for this public lecture by Izutsu).

34. Maruyama 1991. See also Inaga 1994.

35. Quoted in A. Berque 1999, Japanese translation, Berque, 2002, p. 37. For our attempt at elucidating the problem of“ Khôra” by way of embryology and the ontological structure of the foetus in the womb, see Inaga 2009 .

36. Ball 2004, pp. 586-589. Strogatz 2003.

37. Lee O Young (Lee Eo-yeong) 2006, pp. 243-246. Also see Kamata Shigeo 1988, p. 29. Kamata supposes that Lee's best seller, The Shrinking Oriented

Japanese (Lee 1984) obviously has the Huayan thought as a background. This hypothesis allows us to infer where Lee's astonishing idea of letting only one child run in the huge gymnasium at the opening of the Seoul Olympic Games (1988) came from. Lee maintained that according to the truth in semiotics,

“all equals one” and“ one equals all.” Hence, a single child can attract as much attention of the whole public as the North Korean mass game mobilization of more than ten thousand of people. Despite Lee's euphemism, it is already obvious for us that the first Korean Minister of Culture here mischievously applies Huayan thought to the opening ceremony.

38. This tactic of a double resister is indispensable in the global market. For the case of“ World Literature”, see Inaga 2008-a. pp.115-116.

39. Emily Kame Kngwarreye 2008.

40. Bruce Chatwin 2000, p. 21, note 8.

41. Inaga 2009.

42. The theoretical implications of this gesticulation in the painting practices and the coordination of breathing by the Indian and Japanese painters illustrated here, has been analyzed by Inaga 2009-b.

43. See Miki 1985. Inaga 2009 thoroughly investigates the possibilities of Miki's writing.

44. Letter to his brother, Théodore, 506, July, 1888, Van Gogh 1960; 1990, p. 195. The translation is mine.

45. Recent philological studies have revealed that Miyazawa Kenji could have known the passage in question in Van Gogh's letter. His beloved sister, Toshi, was a faithful student of Abe Jirô at the Nippon Women's College and Abe was busy at that period translating Van Gogh's letters from German. Although it still remains a simple hypothesis, the probability of Kenji's access to the very passage in Van Gogh's correspondence has been independently suggested by several scholars, including myself. See Inaga 2012-b.

46. Kawai Hayao 1984, pp. 431-454. Curiously enough, Myôe was the monk who also cut off his (right) ear as Vincent Van Gogh had cut off his (left) ear. In his book on Myôe (Kawai 1995) written in Japanese, Kawai tries to elucidate Myôe's thought in reference to the Huayan thought as it was analyzed by Izutsu Toshihiko in his paper“: The Nexus of Ontological Events,” (Izutsu 1980). See above note 12.

47. Kawai Hayao and Mogi Ken'ichirô 2008, pp. 17-18; 55, 177. Needless to say the child was sent by God so as to show Saint Augustine what the infinity was all about.

48. The fact that the Huayan Sutra is full of metaphors of the sea suggests that the idea was transmitted from India to China through the South East Sea. Still the Chinese translation as it exists now was made in the desert city of Hotan. Thus the waves of the sea and the flux of the sand in the desert resonate in the scripture. These circumstances somehow support our association of the sea of Saint Augustine and the anecdote of the Sandspiel. See Kamata Shigeo 1985; 1988, p. 24, 120.

49. The 2nd International Colloquium on Huayan Thought, organized by Frédéric Girard, was held at the Château de Bélesbat that Voltaire is known to have frequented.


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Inaga 2010-d : Shigemi Inaga“, What are those rocks, sitting on the working table, saying,” translated and annotated by Olivier Krischer, Exhibition

Susumu Koshimizu, Tokyo Gallery、2010(Jan.23-Feb.20)（. 稲賀繁美「作業台に座る石たちは、なにを語るか」『小清水漸展覧会「雪のひま」』冊子、東京画廊、 2010 年）

Inaga 2011 : Shigemi Inaga “, Philosophy, Ethics and Aesthetics in the Far-Eastern Cultural Sphere: Receptions of the Western Ideas and Reactions to the Western Cultural Hegemony,” Inaga Shigemi ed., Questioning the Oriental Aesthetics and Thinking Conflicting Vision o‘f Asia’ under the Colonial Empires, International Research Center for Japanese Stuides, 2011, pp.31-45.

Inaga 2012-a : Shigemi Inaga“, Bricolage, Toward a Scrapture: A Proposal of a New Concept- El Anatsui Show in Japan,” Critical Interventions, No.9/10, pp.49-62, 2012.

Inaga 2012-b : Inaga Shigemi,“ Miyazawa Kenji and Van Gogh,” Proceedings of an International Conference on Van Gogh and Japan, The Center of Comparative Japanese Studies, No.8, Ochanomizu University, 2012, pp. 89-99（. 稲賀繁美「宮澤賢治とファン・ゴッホ」お茶の水女子大学比較日本学教育研究センター『比較日本学教育研究センター研究年報』第 8 号、2012 年、88-99 頁）

Isozaki 2006 : Isozaki Arata, Kenchiku ni okeru‘ nihonteki’ na mono, Tokyo: Shinchôsha, 2006（. 磯崎新『建築における〈日本的〉なもの』新潮社、2006 年）

(English translation) Isozaki Arata, Japan-ness in Architecture, translated by Sabu Kohso, ed. by David B. Stewart, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2006.

Itoh 2012 : Itoh Daisuke, The Age of Portraiture: Deep structure in the conceiving of Paintings during the formative years of Medieval Age, Nagoya: The

University of Nagoya Press, 2012（. 伊藤大輔『 肖像画の時代：中世形成期絵画における思想的深層』名古屋大学出版会、2012 年）

Izutsu 1980 : Toshihiko Izutsu“, The Nexus of Ontological Events : A Buddhist View of Reality,” Eranos Jahrbuch, 49 (1980), reprinted in Izutsu 2008.

Izutsu 1989 : Izutsu Toshihiko, «Jijimuge, Rijimuge» in Kosumosu to anchi-kosumosu (Cosmos and Anti-Cosmos), Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1989, pp.

3-102（. 井筒俊彦「事事無碍、理事無碍」『コスモスとアンチコスモス』岩波書店、1989 年、3-102 頁）

Izutsu 2008 : Toshiko Izutsu, The Structure of Oriental Philosophy, Collected Papers of the Eranos Conference, Vol. II, Tokyo: Keio University Press, 2008.

Kamata 1983; 1988 : Kamata Shigeo, Kegon no Shisô (Huayan Thought), Tokyo: Kôdansha Gakujutsu Bunko, 1983 (1988)（. 鎌田茂雄『華厳の思想』講談社学術文庫、1983 (1988)年）

Kawai 1984 : Hayao Kawai“, Bodies in the Dream of Myôe,” Eranos Jahrbuch, Eranos Foundation, Vol. 53,1984.

Kawai 1995 : Kawai Hayao, Myôe Yume wo ikiri (Monk Myôe, Living in Dreams), Tokyo: Kôdansha, 1995（. 河合隼雄『明恵夢を生きる』講談社、1995 年）

Kawai and Mogi 2008 : Kawai Hayao and Mogi Ken'ichirô, Kokoro to Nô no Taiwa (Conversation between the Heart and the Brain), Tokyo: Ushio

Shuppan, 2008（. 河合隼雄、茂木健一郎『心と脳の対話』潮出版、2008 年）

Kngwarreye 2008 : Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Utopia: The Genius of E.K. Kngwarreye, exh.cat., The National Museum of Art, Osaka, and The National Art Center, Tokyo, 2008.

Ko-un, 1999 : Ko-un, Hwanmungyon, translated into Japanese as Kegonkyô華厳経, translated into Japanese by Saigusa Toshikatsu, Tokyo: Ochanomizu

Shobô, 1995（. 高銀『華厳経』三枝壽勝訳、お茶の水書房、1995 年）

Lee 1984 : Lee O Young, Chijimi Shikô no Nihonjin (The Shrinking Oriented Japanese), revised ed., Tokyo: Gakuseisha, 1984（. 李御寧『縮み志向の日本人』学生社、1984 年）

Lee 2005 : Lee O Young (Lee Eo-yeong), Janken Bunmei Ron (Reflections on the civilization based on the triangle of paper, scissors, rock), Tokyo:

Shinchô-sha, 2005（. 李御寧『ジャンケン文明論』新潮社、2005 年）

Maruyama 1991 : Maruyama Keizaburô, Kaosumosu no Undô (Le Movement du Caosmos), Kôdansha Gakujutsu Bunko, 1991（. 丸山圭三郎『カオスモスの運動』講談社学術文庫、1991 年）

Matsuoka 1984; 2004 : Matsuoka Seigow, Kûkai no Yume (The Dream of Kûkai), Tokyo: Shunjû-sha, 1984 (2004)（. 松岡正剛『空海の夢』春秋社、1984 (2004) 年）

Miki 1985 : Miki Shigeo, Taiji no Sekai (The World of the Foetus), Tokyo: Chûkô Shinsho, 1985.（ 三木成夫『胎児の世界』中公新書、1985 年）

Mizuki 1988 : Mizuki Shigeru“, Jigoku Nagashi (Swept to Hell),” ［ 1965］, Ge Ge Ge no Kitarô, Vol.1, Tokyo: Chûôkôron-sha, 1988, p.73（. 水木しげる「地獄流し」［1965 年］『ゲゲゲの鬼太郎』第 1 巻、中央公論社、1988 年、73 頁）

Nakamura 1965 : Nakamura Hajime“, Kegonkyô no Shisôshiteki Igi (The Significance of the Huayan Thought in the History of Thought),” Tôzai Bunka no Kôuryû (Exchanges between Eastern and Western Cultures), Tokyo: Shunjû-sha, 1965, pp. 220-231.（ 中村元「華厳経の思想史的意義」『東西文化の交流』春秋社、1965 年、220-231 頁）

Sakai 1999 : Noaki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Sawai 2008 : Sawai Yoshikazu“, Editor's Essay,” in Toshihiko Izutsu, The Structure of Oriental Philosophy, Vol. II, Tokyo: Keio University Press, 2008.

Strogatz 2003 : Steven Strogatz, SYNC, The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order, New York: Hyperion, 2003（. スティーヴン・ストロガッツ『SYNC』藤本由紀・長尾力訳、早川書房、2005 年）

Stafford 2007 : Barbara Maria Stafford, Echo Objects-The Cognitive Work of Images, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007.

Stevans 2000 : Bernard Stevans“, La thématique du nihilisme chez Heidegger et Nishitani,” in Augustin Berque 2000: pp. 291-337.

Tomii 2009 : Reiko Tomii,“ ‘International Contemporaneity’ in the 1960s: Discoursing on Art in Japan and Beyond,” paper read at the International Association of Art History in Melbourne, Jan., 2009, Japan Review, No. 21, pp. 123-148.

Tsurumi 1995 : Kazuko Tsurumi,“ Minakata Mandala: A Paradigm Change for the Future,” IIR, Institute of International Relations, Sophia University, Research paper Series, A-65, 1995, pp.1-14.

Tsurumi 1996 : Kazuko Tsurumi,“ Kumagusu Minakata: des myxomnycètes au mandala,” in Michel Random (présentation), Colloque de Tokyo, La Mutation du Future, Paris: Albin Michel, 1996, pp. 157-170.

Winther-Tamaki 2001 : Bert Winther-Tamaki, Art in the Encounter with Nations, Japanese and American Artists in the Early Postwar Years, Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2001.


Reference of illustrations

fig.1 Matsui, Ryûgo and Iwasaki, Hitoshi (eds.), Minakata, Kumagusu no Mori (Forest of Minakata, Kumagusu), Hōjōdō Shuppan, 2005, p. 146（. 松居竜五、岩崎仁編『南方熊楠の森』方丈堂出版、2005 年、146 頁） fig.2 Kirk Varnedoe with Pepe Karmel (eds.), Jackson Pollock, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1998, No.219.

fig.3, 4 The National Museum of Art, Osaka, The National Museum of Art, Osaka, 2004, p. 59, 65（.『国立国際美術館』国立国際美術館、2004 年）

fig.5 Enduring Legacy of Japanese Art: The Mary Griggs Burke Collection, exh.cat., The Museum of Fine Arts, Gifu, 2005, No.99（.『日本の美 三千年の輝き ニューヨーク・バーク・コレクション展』図録、岐阜県美術館ほか、日本経済新聞社、2005 年）

fig.6 The Structure of Oriental Philosophy: Collected Papers of the Eranos Conference vol. II (The Izutsu Library Series on Oriental Philosophy 4), Keio University Press, 2008.

fig.7, 9 Yayoi Kusama: Eternity-Modernity, exh.cat., The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, 2004, No.60, 146（.『草間彌生 永遠の現在』展図録、東京国立近代美術館ほか、2004 年）





fig.8 Bulletin of the National Museum of Ethnology, vol. 32, no. 2, 2008（.『国立民族学博物館研究報告』32 巻 2 号、国立民族学博物館、2008 年） fig.11 Shiota Chiharu‘, Breathing of the Spirit’, brochure of exhibition, The National Museum of Art, Osaka、2008（.『塩田千春 精神の呼吸』展パンフレット、国立国際美術館、2008 年） fig.13 Aoki Noe‘, Water in the Sky XIV’, exh.cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, 2007. fig.14 Void in Korean Art, exh.cat., Samsung Museum of Art, Leeum, Seoul, 2007, No. 2-22.



fig.15 Retrospective of Akasegawa Genpei, exh.cat., Nagoya Municipal Museum of Art, 2001（.『赤瀬川原平の冒険－脳内リゾート開発大作戦』展図録、名古屋市立美術館、2001 年）

fig.16 http://tokyoartbeeat.com

fig.17 Yagi Kazuo: A Retrospective, exh.cat., The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, 2005, No. 271（.『没後 25 年、八木一夫回顧展』図録、京都国立近代美術館ほか、日本経済新聞社、2005 年）

fig.18 Kazuo Yagi, exh.cat., The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto,1981, No. 57（.『八木一夫回顧展』図録、京都国立近代美術館、1981 年） fig.19 Cover rapper, Barbara M. Stafford, Echo Objects, 2007.

fig.20 Thomas Wegner, TW-Stiftung, Bremen, 1999. (Foto: Jürgen Nogai, Ed. Kunsthalle Bremen) fig.21 http://teachartwiki.wikispaces.com/Book + from + the + Sky -- Xu + Bing

fig.22 Utopia: The Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, exh.cat., The National Museum of Art, Osaka, 2008, No. B-14（.『エミリー・ウングワレー展：アボリジニが生んだ天才画家』展図録、国立国際美術館ほか、読売新聞社、 2008 年） fig.23 Quintanella, Sonnya Rhie, Rhythms of India, The Art of Nandalal Bose, San Diego Museum of Art, 2008, No. 88.

fig.24 The works of Arai Kanpô, Sakura City Museum-Arai Kanpo Memorial, 2007, No. 96（.『荒井寛方作品集』さくら市ミュージアム・荒井寛方記念館、2007年） fig.25 Vincent van Gogh, Nuit étoilée, Saint-Rémy, June 1889, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

fig.26 A Village near Beijing menaced by desertification, photo by Mark Heneley / Panos Pictures. from the greeting card of the United Nations University, Tokyo. 2006.