Zen Culture

by Thomas Hoover

For this reason, Japanese ceramics were deliberately kept at a technically primitive stage until the early part of the thirteenth century while the Chinese were making considerable advances in the art. During the years from the ninth to the thirteenth century, while the Japanese isolated themselves from the mainland, the Sung Chinese were learning of new glazes far more subtle and refined than those employed during the T'ang. In the early years of the thirteenth century, when Japanese monks journeyed to China to study the new faith of Zen, they were dazzled by the sophisticated new Chinese wares they encountered. Through the offices of Zen a second revolution in Japanese ceramics occurred.

The instrument for this second revolution (according to tradition) was the priest Dogen, founder of Japanese Soto Zen, who on one of his trips to China was accompanied by a Japanese potter known as Toshiro. Toshiro stayed in China for six years, studying the Sung techniques of glazing, and on his return he opened a kiln at Seto, where he began copying Sung glazed wares. Although he has been called the father of modem Japanese ceramics, his attempts to duplicate the highly praised Sung products were not entirely successful. Furthermore, the wares he did produce, decorative and thick-glazed, found no acceptance except among the aristocracy and priesthood, both of whom favored Seto wares for the new pastime of drinking Chinese tea. But while the Zen aesthetes and tea drinkers amused themselves with Seto's fake Sung celadons, the commoners continued to use unglazed stoneware.

All this changed dramatically around the middle of the sixteenth century with the rise of an urban middle class and the sudden popularity of the Zen tea ceremony among this new bourgeoisie. Zen, which had brought Chinese glazes to Japan in the thirteenth century, sparked the emergence of a brilliant era of glazed ceramic art in the sixteenth. No longer content with primitive stoneware or reproductions of Chinese vessels, the potters of Japan finally developed native styles at once uniquely Japanese and as sophisticated as any the world has seen. It was another triumph for Zen culture. Rural kilns with long traditions of stoneware water vessels converted to the production of tea-ceremony wares, and throughout the land the search was on for colored glazes. The craze reached such heights that the shogun generals Nobunaga and Hideyoshi rewarded their successful military commanders not with decorations but with some particularly coveted tea-ceremony utensils.

Although ceramic tea caddies and water jars were required for the ceremony, the real emphasis was on the drinking bowl, for this was the piece that was handled and admired at close range. A proper bowl, in addition to being beautiful, had to be large enough and deep enough to allow sufficient tea for three or four drinkers to be whisked; it had no handle and consequently had to be of a light, porous, nonconducting clay with a thick, rough glaze to act as a further insulator and to permit safe handling between drinkers; the rim had to be thick and tilted slightly inward, to provide the participants with a pleasant sensation while drinking and to minimize dripping. In other words, these bowls were as functionally specialized in their own way as a brandy snifter or a champagne glass of today.

A number of styles of tea bowl developed during the sixteenth century, reflecting the artistic visions of various regional potters and the different clays available. What these bowls had in common, beyond their essential functional characteristics, was an adherence to the specialized dictates of Zen aesthetic theory. Equally important, they were a tribute to the historic Japanese reverence for natural clay. Even though they were glazed, portions of the underlying clay texture were often allowed to show through, and the overall impression was that the glaze was used to emphasize the texture of the underlying clay, not disguise it. The colors of the glazes were natural and organic, not hard and artificial.

The social unrest preceding the rise of Nobunaga caused a number of potters to leave the Seto area, site of the fake Sung production, and resettle in the province of Mino, where three basic styles of tea bowl eventually came to prominence. First there was the Chinese-style tea vessel, which had been the mainstay of the older Seto kilns. Yellow glazes, once the monopoly of Seto, were also used at Mino, but different clays, combined with advancing technical competence and a new willingness to experiment, produced a new "Seto" ware that was a rich yellow and considerably more Japanese than Chinese. Second there was a new, thoroughly Zen-style bowl developed by the Mino potters. It was broader-based than the Chinese style, with virtually straight sides, and it was covered with a thick, creamy off-white glaze. Warm and endearing in appearance, with a flowing sensuous texture inviting to the touch, it became known as Shino.

Some say Shino bowls were named after a celebrated master of the tea ceremony, while others maintain the term was taken from the Japanese word for white, shiro. Whatever the case, this was the first glazed ware of truly native origins; and it marked the beginning of a new Japanese attitude toward pottery. No longer inhibited by reverence for Chinese prototypes, the makers of Shino let their spontaneity run wild. The new white glaze was deliberately applied in a haphazard manner, often covering only part of the bowl or being allowed to drip and run. Sometimes part of the glaze was wiped off after it had been applied, leaving thin spots where the brown under-clay could show through after the firing. Or bubbles, bums, and soot were allowed to remain in the glaze as it was fired. Sometimes the white glaze was bathed in a darker coating in which incisions were made to allow the white to show through. At other times, sketchy designs, seemingly thrown down with a half-dry brush, were scribbled on the white bowls so that they appeared to be covered with Zen graffiti. Throughout all these innovations, the potters seemed to want to produce works as rough, coarse, and unsophisticated as possible. Before long they had a gray glaze as well, and finally they produced a shiny black glaze whose precise formulation remains one of the unsolved mysteries of Momoyama art.

The next color to enter the Mino repertory, after yellow, white, gray, and black, was a stunning green. This was the third style of Mino tea bowl, and it was invented by a disciple of Rikyu whose name, Oribe, has been given to an incredible variety of wares—tea bowls, tea caddies, water jars, incense burners, and a host of dishes for serving food. Sometimes the wares were solid green, but Oribe also had a habit of splashing the green over one section of a piece, or allowing it to run into one corner of a plate and freeze there in a limpid puddle. The portions of Oribe wares not covered with the splash of green were dull shades, ranging from gray to reddish brown, and on this background artists began to paint decorative designs- flowers, geometrical figures, even small sketches or still-lifes—something new and revolutionary for Japanese ceramics, but the forerunner of the profusion of decorative wares that appeared after the Momoyama. Shino had broken the bonds of the centuries of unglazed stoneware and proper copies of Chinese pots by introducing a native style of glazing and a new aesthetic freedom; Oribe led the way into a new world of anything-goes pottery, with half-glazes, painted decorative motifs, and experimentation in new, hitherto unknown shapes and types of vessels.

While the native Japanese potters at Mino were expanding their craft, another important development with far-reaching consequences for the Zen arts was taking place in the far south of the Japanese archipelago near the Korean peninsula. The ceramic arts of Korea were quite advanced at the beginning of the sixteenth century, with high-fired glazed wares as heavy and sturdy as the peasant stock from which they sprang. But the pots were made by building up coils of clay and beating them into a solid walled vessel rather than throwing them on a wheel. This combination of high and low seems to have appealed to the Japanese clans living near the Korean mainland, for they brought a number of Korean potters to the southern city of Karatsu and started an industry.

The staple product of the Korean craftsman was a crude medium-sized bowl with sloping sides, used in their homeland for individual servings of rice. The primitive quality of these bowls perfectly suited the growing inverse snobbery of the tea ceremony, and soon Japanese aesthetes were drinking tea and admiring the Zen beauty in the Korean rice bowl. While the Mino potters were deliberately making the Sung tea bowl rougher and rougher (that is, adding wabi), those in Karatsu found themselves with a foreign bowl ready-made for tea.