LANDSCAPE AESTHETICS AND
ENVIRONMENTALISM: SOME
OBSERVATIONS ON THE
REPRESENTATION OF NATURE IN
BUDDHIST AND WESTERN ART

1

Ian Harris

Introductory remarks

The word ‘nature’ is one of the most multi-dimensional terms in the English

language. It seems that the same may also be said in other culture contexts, such
as Japan where the term shizen clearly has the same extensive semantic range
(Asquith and Kalland 1997, 8). This fact poses one of the major difficulties in
examining the environmentalist credentials of Buddhism. But there are others, for
when we turn to that tradition itself we are confronted by an enormously complex
phenomenon, in both the historical, cultural and the geographical senses. These
facts imply that, in order to make any helpful contribution to this investigation, it is
necessary to limit the scope of one’s investigations. To do otherwise would be to
open oneself to immense and vacuous generalization.

The customary approach, one that I have used myself on previous

occasions, is to restrict oneself to a narrow segment of scriptural sources, be
they Therava¯da, Maha¯ya¯na or Vajraya¯na, in an effort to establish or refute the
environmentalist credentials of the Buddhist tradition as a whole.

2

But the

method suffers a number of methodological difficulties, the most obvious of
which is that a great deal of abstraction is inevitable in the way in which specific
literary references are selected. In addition, the passages are often presented with
no real account of the context in which they were produced. Indeed, we often
know too little about this, particularly when dealing with materials from
Buddhism’s formative centuries.

For the purposes of this paper I intend to adopt a slightly different

approach. Let us first deal with the Western term ‘nature’, which I shall define as
‘the totality of all existents’. This most comprehensive of all categories may be
broken down into two reasonably discrete components, namely the animate and

Contemporary Buddhism, Vol. 8, No. 2, November 2007

ISSN 1463-9947 print/1476-7953 online/07/020149-168

q

2007 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/14639940701636125

inanimate realms, which correspond very closely with two key and well-attested
Buddhist categories—sattvaloka, the world of sentient beings; and bha¯janaloka,
the receptacle, physical environment, or landscape in which sentient beings find
themselves as a result of their past actions.

It is my contention that the Buddhist tradition as a whole has a good deal of

very positive things to say about our relations with other beings in sattvaloka and
that much of this is supportive of modern environmentalist ethics. Deleanu’s
(2000) important study of the ethology of the Pa¯li Canon, for example, appears to
bear this out. But when we turn our attention to the Buddhist appreciation of the
structure and significance of the physical stage on which humans, animals and
supernatural beings are located, the evidence is more equivocal. It is for this
reason that I shall now intend to restrict our discussion to bha¯janaloka, and more
specifically to the mountains, forests, rivers that make up our natural landscape.

Accordingly, I propose to take the aesthetic dimensions of selected portions

of the Buddhist tradition, and particularly how far we can talk of an aesthetic
appreciation of the natural world, as the focus of this presentation. The issue has a
major bearing on the way in which we might regard the natural world as having
some sort of intrinsic significance or value quite apart from the ways in which it
can be utilized to the advantage of humankind. I also hope that the approach will
be a modest contribution towards redressing the balance in the customary
approach to Buddhist studies that to my mind has tended to devalue the visual
sense in favour of an emphasis on the intellectual elements. Clearly, if we
appreciate something we tend to accord it importance and are loath to see it
damaged or destroyed. This insight has played an important role in the fashioning
of modern environmentalism, and the emergence of an aesthetic appreciation of
nature in European culture was a major contributory factor in the construction of
our current preoccupation with the deteriorating state of the world.

I will briefly sketch out the main historical arteries of the Western aesthetic

appreciation of nature before examining how far they may be transposed on
specific forms of historical Buddhism. For the purposes of this paper I will contrast
the aesthetics of Indian and Sino-Japanese Buddhism and ask how far their artistic
traditions illuminate the way in which they came to represent the receptacle world
(bha¯janaloka). If we are able to demonstrate that evidence of authentic Buddhist
appreciations of the natural world, then we are in a good position to posit the
tradition’s positive environmentalist credentials. If, on the other hand, this
condition cannot be met, then it may be the case that the forms of Buddhism
under consideration do not meet the criteria often claimed of them by their
supporters both in Asia and in the West, where ‘green orientalism’ (Asquith and
Kalland 1997, 25) has risen to prominence over the past couple of decades.

Nature in Western art

In the beginning, Western aesthetics concerned itself largely with questions

relating to the beauty of human artefacts. With the exception of precious stones

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and other fascinating light-reflecting objects that required some form of human
agency to uncover their attractions, the natural world was not worthy of aesthetic
consideration since it was not thought of as the product of a designing
intelligence. Unlike art, then, the natural realm could not be easily appreciated.
And in any case, Western philosophy was strongly influenced by a Christian
theology that held the structure of nature to reflect man’s fallen state (Coates
1998, 131). When nature was thought of in aesthetic terms at all, the best that
could be said was that its beauty was tainted by mundaneity. As such it manifested
a pale resemblance of the glory invested by God in his original creation (Crawford
2005, 312).

Given this background it is unsurprising that the English poet and politician

Andrew Marvell (1621 – 1678) described mountains as ‘ill-designed excrescences’
since he had been conditioned by his intellectual tradition to view them in
opposition to the smooth fertile plains of creation in its original state. Similarly,
Thomas Burnet in his influential The Sacred Theory of the Earth of 1684 claimed that
the earth was originally as smooth as an egg. Its mountains and wilderness areas
were post-diluvian junk resulting from human sin and deposited on the surface of
the world following mankind’s expulsion from paradise.

In 1757 Edmund Burke published A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of

Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, a book in which he built on the prior
aesthetical ruminations of John Evelyn (1620 – 1706), Joseph Addison (1672 – 1719)
and Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671 – 1713), who had
waxed lyrical over the superiority of natural over artificial beauty. The importance
of Burke’s book is that he argued for the existence of the sublime, an artistic effect
that produced the strongest emotions the human mind was capable of
experiencing. But it was left to Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804) to develop the
implications of this new theory by establishing an explicit distinction between the
merely beautiful and the sublime. In the Critique of Judgement in 1790, Kant noted
that a true experience of the sublime emerges when an observer is confronted
by an overwhelmingly impressive object. A good example would be a mighty
mountain. As one struggles to comprehend such a massive perception the
intellect is led inevitably towards the idea of infinity, and this mental process
in turn makes one conscious of the superiority of one’s rational being over all
sensible limitations. This feeling is intensified when we apprehend a vast and
potentially dangerous natural phenomenon with a disinterested attitude and from
a point of safety, for example through the window of our study. By contemplating
its power to make us fearful and highly vulnerable we are mysteriously elevated
above the purely natural and experience a sense of the sublime.

There are potential Buddhist parallels here, for Pa¯li sources suggest that an

experience of fear (samvega) and other powerful emotions may stimulate a sense of
moral and religious urgency in the religious practitioner. In this connection, Heim
(2003, 546, 549) has argued for some form of semantic overlap with the Kantian
sublime in the sense that, from the Buddhist perspective, our fears and anxieties,

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151

elicited for example by contemplation of the awesome nature of a bodhisattva’s
extraordinary deeds, may prompt us to reach out for ‘something great’.

Kant’s thoughts were, in time, to impact on Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 –

1860), a highly significant figure in the emerging European appreciation of
Buddhism, who built upon the idea of the sublime through his insistence that
aesthetic appreciation (he was primarily interested in our experience of music)
involved an act of will-less, or disinterested, contemplation. Schopenhauer
subsequently recommended the careful consideration of various phenomena
associated with the natural world such as waterfalls, the structure of crystals, and
magnetism. This attitude towards the sublime can be traced in the poetry of
Wordsworth and Coleridge, while in America it became an important stimulus
for the American transcendentalists—especially in the writings of Ralph Waldo
Emerson (1803 – 1882) and Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862), two further figures
in the transmission of knowledge about Buddhism to the West who also both
played seminal roles in the development of modern environmentalist philosophy.

Back in Europe the Romantic movement built on the idea of the sublime to

underpin a new kind of appreciation of natural or scenic beauty in the fine arts,
and most especially in painting. John Ruskin (1819 – 1900), for example, wrote of
how he deplored the manner in which painters of previous epochs had
approached the representation of nature (Coates 1998, 131). While classical and
medieval artists had certainly included elements of the natural world in their work,
they tended to use these either as a frame for human activity or as a means of
expressing human moods. Ruskin also complained that, on the odd occasions
when nature had been more explicitly represented, the dominant character of the
painting was pastoral. This attitude clearly changes in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries, as Philip de Loutherbourg’s An Avalanche in the Alps of
1803 demonstrates. For here the vastness of a natural realm indifferent to and
uncontaminated by human concerns picks up on the newly dominant cultural
notion of the sublime.

It is at this point in Western cultural history that even the most threatening

and traditionally despised of nature’s manifestations, like mountains and the
wilderness, begin to be positively and disinterestedly appreciated without any
negative feelings of anxiety or fear. It is against this background that we should
understand the emergence of a positive landscape aesthetics associated with the
Essay on Prints of 1768 by the Anglican divine William Gilpin (1724 – 1804), who
first introduced the world to the concept of the picturesque, an ‘agreeable’ and
essentially safe aesthetic quality associated with the painted English landscapes
that were becoming fashionable at his time. And somewhat later, Henry David
Thoreau (1817 – 1862) and the naturalist and founder of the influential Sierra Club
John Muir (1838 – 1914), whose writings emphasized both the awesome beauty of
the wilderness and the strong intuition that this realm is under potential threat
from the kinds of human activity initiated by the industrial revolution.

Yet the industrial revolution itself led to the development of entirely novel

forms of mass communication, especially the railways, and these would gradually

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transform the notion of the sublime. In due course the largely solitary and
aristocratic ideal of confronting nature’s grandeur was democratized by modern
tourism. Gilpin’s ideas both anticipated and made possible the transformation. But
nature’s awe-inducing character was somehow domesticated. Its vast canvas was,
so to speak, cut up into a series of ‘prospects’ or blocks of scenery (Carlson 2001,
159f). Under these new conditions the typical Sunday afternoon trip to the country
became a little like a trip around an art gallery looking at a variety of landscape
paintings. In other words, the disinterested attitude that had paved the way for
the emergence of the sublime slowly migrated towards the picturesque.

The term ‘picturesque’ implies an appreciation of nature understood as a

series of ‘picture-like’ compositions influenced by highly subjective and emotional
moods that render its objective reality in a variety of appealing art styles.
It emerged as the result of changing economic circumstances, in particular the
development of cheap travel by railway that in turn democratized access to the
countryside. But in contrast to pre-industrial times when an individual’s existence
was embedded in the rural setting, now one could visit the countryside to
appreciate its beauty, spirituality and health-giving qualities. The picturesque was
to greatly influence the aesthetics of tourism, and it still provides a basis for the
illustrations for contemporary travel brochures, postcards and calendars not just in
Europe and America but in all economically developed regions of the world.

I contend that the picturesque was to become one of the major

contributory factors to the emergence of an environmentalist vision of the world.
But contemporary thinking is also strongly pervaded by the scientific spirit. In the
past, long before the rise of globalization, humans had distinctly limited
opportunities for travel and most never passed beyond the boundaries of their
own locality. As such they tended to regard themselves as part of a local field of
significance and had no real notion of the concept of an environment understood
in the scientific sense. What I mean here is that previous generations had no
conception of the extensive and objective realm determined by general
mechanistic processes known to science as ‘nature’. Such a vision would have
made no sense when subjective attitudes, emotions and imagination played such
an important role in our understanding of the world. But as Cooper (1992, 171) has
observed, ecology is ‘ . . . as much of a leveller as any other physical science’. It has
tended to reinforce a picture of the world governed by uniform laws and devoid
of local colour and significance. Ironically, environmental ethicists have often
complained about the consequences of this worldview, but, for our present
purposes, it is now necessary to evaluate how significantly Buddhist conceptions
of the natural world share the same semantic territory as the sublime, the
picturesque and the scientistic conception of nature.

Indic attitudes towards the natural realm

In 1990 the Dalai Lama was invited to address a conference on the topic of

‘Spirit and Nature’. But he seems to have disappointed his American audience by

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153

admitting that he had nothing of significance to offer on the issue of the
environment, preferring instead to focus his presentation on the Heart Sutra’s
central teaching that ‘Form is emptiness and emptiness is form’ (Eckel 1998, 54). The
incident reveals an obvious mismatch in the respective agendas of audience and
speaker. It may also highlight a more general lack of congruence between the Indic
worldview upon which Vajraya¯na Buddhism is largely based and contemporary
environmentalism. In the spirit of my introductory remarks I now wish to examine
whether this might also apply to the aesthetic appreciation of nature.

At its most fundamental level, Indian Buddhism with its emphasis on

uprooting the factors that contribute to suffering must be suspicious of any
positive conception of beauty. For the appreciation of beauty, or that which is
pleasing ( pa¯sa¯dika), gives rise to clinging (upa¯da¯na) and the endless and futile
search for self-gratification. This seems to suggest that an authentically Buddhist
aesthetics is alien to the tradition.

Aesthetics as a philosophical discipline does appear to have emerged fairly

late in the Sanskritic tradition, and even then its focus was largely on drama and
poetics. In this respect Indian philosophical speculation about the beautiful took a
similar path to that in the West since it also focused on the products of human
creativity and not on the natural world.

3

However, in Dravidian regions the

situation was more favourably oriented to the appreciation of nature. In the Tamil
wandering bardic tradition (cankam), for example, especially in poetry concerned
with the stages of passionate love, these emotional states were linked with five
idealized forms of the region’s landscape (Gittomer 1998, 486).

4

This may be

related to earlier expressions of nature mysticism found, for example, in the songs
of early male and female Buddhist saints recorded in the Pa¯li Therı¯ga¯tha¯ and
Theraga¯tha¯. The detached admiration of Sa¯riputta illuminates the genre:

Forests are delightful, where (ordinary) people find no delight. Those rid of

desire will delight here; they are not seekers after sensual pleasures. (Thag. 992)

The verse reveals a rather complicated set of relationships between humankind
and the natural world, here represented by the forest. The forest is not a place
where the unenlightened will gain any benefit, a concept probably related to fear
and terror of the unknown. In addition, there are no sensual pleasures to be
gained here. However, an individual who has extinguished all striving for pleasure
can experience detached and desire-less delight in such a place. It seems, then,
that the beauty of nature can be appreciated, but only in a spirit of true
detachment in which the desire to control or gain is no longer imposed upon the
object of our perceptions.

That this was a minority position in the Indic tradition is illustrated by the

fact that themes of domination and destruction of the forest play a major role
in the Sanskrit epics. This is hardly surprising given these texts’ strong
aristocratic/warrior (ksatriya) orientation. Furthermore, as Lutgendorf (2000, 274)
eloquently demonstrates, their aesthetic mood of heroism (vı¯rya) is entirely devoid
of any ‘environmental impact statement’. The poems depict the forests not as

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a sanctuary for nature conservation and contemplation, but rather as a locus for
the massive destruction of animal life through hunting, the pre-eminent warrior
pastime. Elsewhere, the texts depict the forest as a place of erotic abandon, or as
sites where nature can be radically transformed into built environments.
The heroes of the epics are often assisted by their tutelary deity, Agni (the god of
fire), and it is Agni’s conflagrations that help to clear the dense growth of the
wilderness so that civilization may emerge (Dove 1992, 236 – 7). In ancient times
the artificial and open environments that emerged as a result of the process of
deforestation were called ja¯ngala (Zimmermann 1987). It is rather revealing that
this term, equivalent to our word jungle, has migrated so dramatically in meaning
that it has come to signify dense and extensive vegetative cover. This may be a
marker of changing aesthetic values, for nowadays man-made environments are
deprecated in comparison with virgin territories

Gonda (1966, 150) has convincingly argued that the original sense of the

word loka was just such a clearing in the wild and intractable forest. The forest
clearing is a tamed, ordered and moral space. This seems to be one of the reasons
why untamed nature is depicted with such startling lack of realism in Indic art, and
why Sanskrit poetry regularly places ‘peacocks, elephants, and huge fig trees on
high Himalayan peaks’ (Lutgendorf 2000, 280).

One might suppose that the sense of irresponsibility towards the natural

realm associated with deforestation would be radically altered in the teachings
of the Buddha. Yet, despite the previously mentioned hints of a softer strand,
the radical transformation and civilizing of the natural environment was to remain
a dominant theme in Indian Buddhism. The Aggan

˜n˜asutta’s story of the

re-emergence of the world after its periodic consumption by a grand conflagration,
for example, clearly recapitulates the same theme. From the ashes of previous
material existence an entirely flat expanse of undifferentiated ground is formed,
which acts as the stage on which an elaborate mythological space begins to unfold.
In another Sutta we hear that four great forests had been cleared but revert to their
former condition of impenetrability and weirdness through the malign influences
of certain wicked sages (M.i.378).

We should also bear in mind that the Buddhist art of India and neighbouring

lands is primarily iconic in character. This means that its primary concerns are with
the extraordinary and the supernatural. That landscape elements may used to
frame and situate such icons is entirely to be expected. But if the landscape is
represented in too naturalist a manner it tends to diminish the iconicity of the
image, for, as Denwood (1970, 173) points out, ‘landscape . . . [is] perhaps the
most potent “de-iconising” force of all’.

In Indian Buddhism the physical realm is ‘ . . . so ordered that it responds to

moral acts’ (Heim 2003, 541). This is the teaching of the Aggan˜n˜asutta, which
describes the progressive degradation of the natural environment as integral to
the structure of ka¯maloka, for as the moral conduct of beings inhabiting this
realm declines the change is mirrored in the constitution of the external world
(Harris 2000a, 122 – 3). Elsewhere we hear that of the eight causes of earthquakes,

LANDSCAPE AESTHETICS AND ENVIRONMENTALISM

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only great winds can plausibly be connected with any concept of scientific
causation (D.ii.108f). The other seven factors that cause the earth to tremble are all
related to events in the life of a great sage. We are also told that the world buckled
under the weight of virtuous acts performed by Vessantara (e.g., J.vi.486). The
message underlying these theories is that the sage is under no obligation to submit
to the laws of nature. On the contrary, he is engaged in a project to transform the
world itself. This attitude seems to lie at the heart of the Buddha’s condemnation of
both the canine ascetic (M.i.387f) and the bovine ascetic (D.iii.6f), two individuals
who falsely believed that submitting themselves to forms of existence firmly
embedded in the natural order, would lead to liberation. By rejecting the so-called
naturalist heresy the Buddha conclusively points to the superiority of culture over
nature.

According to another Pa¯li source, the Cakkavattisı¯hana¯dasutta, at some

point in the distant future when humans will live to an age of 80,000 years, a new
wheel-turning king will arrive in the world. At that time all the towns and cities of
Jambu¯dvı¯pa will have merged into one enormous urban space. Now, Buddhism
has never envisaged the possibility of perfection on earth, it is contrary to its basic
insight into the three marks of existence. But the story is highly suggestive for it
seems to indicate that in early Buddhism priority was given to the built
environment over the nature, a theme that we have also identified in the Sanskrit
epics. This priority is even more obviously to the fore in the Vajraya¯na, a later
development in Buddhist history that places great emphasis on visualization and
geometry. The ‘tantric mode’ places a very high significance on the visual domain
(Gerow 1997, 307) and it would, in time, become responsible for the production of
a formidable quantity of cosmologically oriented art.

In the general Indic scheme of things, each god was believed to occupy his

own bounded space or field (ksetra) (Sua´rez 1999, 24). The Vajraya¯na mandala is a
visual representation of the concept of the ksetra now adapted to Buddhist theory
and practice. As such it is both a visual representation of the world and a direct
reference back to the architecture of the palace of a deity. In a sense, then, from
within his mandala/palace the tantric practitioner acts as one who imaginatively
conquers space and acts as its overlord (ra¯ja¯dhira¯ja) (Davidson 2002, 132).
Through the assumption of sovereignty he demonstrates his capacity to control
and dominate an imaged realm that ‘directly reflects the internalization of the
medieval conceptual and social environment’. This phenomenon has been termed
the ‘imperial metaphor’ (Davidson 2002, 115). The Vajraya¯na mandala, then, may
be regarded as a visual expression of the universal city envisioned by the
Cakkavattisı¯hana¯dasutta.

As an image of the world, the mandala also expresses an Indic preference for

spatial symmetry (Keene 1972, 18) organized around a central world mountain
that cannot be easily reconciled with the forms of realism in representation of the
natural realm we previously discussed in post-enlightenment European art.
The tantric ‘imperial metaphor’ ensures that the world envisioned as mandala is a
city or palace. One of the consequences of this way of conceiving things is that the

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focus of the practitioner is on domination and control of the world, not on
the appreciation of its natural beauty.

In the modern period, traditional Indic cosmology naturally came under

significant attack. Indeed, a defining characteristic of modernist Buddhism is that it
is uncomfortable with archaic worldviews. This was the motivation underlying the
official Thai position expressed in 1913 that the old triple-world cosmology of the
Traibhu¯mi system was no longer entirely correct (Reynolds 1976, 212). Certainly
the dissolution of traditional cosmology has helped to make Buddhism seems
more in tune with the modern scientific worldview. But it would be an
anachronism to apply the modernist interpretation to Buddhist conceptions of
nature from previous ages. This, I believe, was one of the errors of D.T. Suzuki and
those who follow him in using Japanese and Chinese Zen-inspired poetry and
landscape painting to posit an authentically East Asian Buddhist love for the
natural world; a topic to which we will now turn.

Nature in Sino-Japanese Buddhist art

Indic residues, aristocratic spaces

Indian cosmological conceptions had a definite impact on Sino-Japanese

culture. Berthier (2000, 59 n.18) has observed that Chinese and Japanese capital
cities were expected to conform to a five-mountain structure in which sacred and
imperial space was reordered to reflect tantric principles. In the oldest Japanese
world map, the Gotenjiku zu (Map of the Five Indias) thought to have been drawn
by the priest Ju¯kai in 1364, the world depicted as jambu¯dvı¯pa is shaped like an egg
with India (Tenjiku) specifically divided into five geographical regions—N., E., W.,
S., and Central. The map itself seems to be based on an older Chinese mandala, the
original of which was probably brought to Japan from China by Ku¯kai (Unno 1994,
372 – 4).

The imprinting of Indic sacred geography on East Asia’s new Buddhist

landscape has been well described by Grapard in a study of the religious
topography of Japan’s Kunisaki peninsula. He shows the remarkable correspon-
dences between the mountainous terrain of the peninsula and the various
contents of the Lotus Sutra. As a result the landscape became an ‘enmountained
text’ (Grapard 1989, 168, 172 – 3). The Kamakura-period Zen monk Do¯gen
(1200 – 1253) also read Buddhist concepts into the natural environment. In the
Sansuikyo¯ (Mountains and Waters Su¯tra) fascicle of his Sho¯bo¯genzo¯, we hear that
‘these mountains and rivers of the present are the actualization of the word of the
ancient Buddhas’. Of course this is not an unusual occurrence. Similar phenomena
may be found throughout the continent; notably in Tibet (Huber 1999, 39f) and at
Angkor in northwestern Cambodia (Pe´ri 1923; Hawixbrock 1998).

It seems that the Chinese have entertained a longstanding fascination for

rocks (Hay 1985). Petromania in both China and Japan seems to predate the arrival
of Buddhism, but once the new religion had been established rocks were readily

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157

transformed to serve as symbols for mountains envisaged in line with Indic
cosmology. In 657 AD, for example, a model of Mt Sumi (sumeru) was constructed
at Temple of Asuka-dera, Nara prefecture and many overseas visitors were
entertained at a great festival (Unno 1994, 371). Similarly, the so-called ‘Fujito
rock’, one of Japan’s most famous historical focuses of litholatry, seems to have
passed through the hands of several very high-ranking individuals including the
last Ashikaga shogun. Its possession seems to have been provided some kind of
safeguard or palladium (Parkes 2000, 104 – 5).

Just as the Fujito rock passed through the hands of a sequence of

aristocrats, mountains in ancient East Asia also appear to have been regarded as
elite spaces. We hear, for example, of a wealthy Han dynasty merchant with the
temerity to build an enormous artificial mountain ( jiashan), over thirty metres
high, in his garden (Parkes 2000, 95).

5

Since this was regarded as the sole

prerogative of emperors and princes he was executed for his pains. Meanwhile, a
poem by Emperor Jomei (r. 628 – 641)—included in the Man’yo¯shu¯—speaks of the
author ascending Mt Kagu to survey his realm (Higuchi 1983, 172f). Such Imperial
domain viewing (kunimi) certainly associates the mountain peaks with spiritual
uplift.

But an additional and clearly important theme here, as we have already

noted in connection with our brief survey of Indic landscape aesthetics, arises from
a tantric concern with control and dominance. This is brought into even sharper
relief when we realize that mountain summits in East Asia can hardly be regarded
as democratic spaces. Religious prohibitions meant that no women, for example,
were allowed to enter the higher reaches of Japanese mountains until 1872 and
many mountain paths before that time were marked with a sign indicating the
prohibition of women (nyonin kinsei) (Hamilton 1996, 29). We find the same
phenomenon in Buddhist Tibet where, interestingly, one of the indigenous
theories advanced to restrict female access to sacred mountains is that they
represent powerful mandalas easily susceptible to polluting influences (Huber
1999, 123).

The aesthetic background

It requires little formal training to notice immediate and radical differences

between the Indic and Sino-Japanese approach to painting. The former seems to
manifest a horror vacui in which every square inch of the surface is covered with
detail, while the latter reflects a minimalist approach in which large regions of the
canvas are empty of detail. This is especially so when we examine depictions of
the natural realm. One scholar has plausibly suggested that while Indic religious
art expresses a desire for systematicity and exhaustive representation, the Chinese
greatly preferred to stress intensity and implication in their artistic creations
(Saussy 1998, 365).

Chinese landscape painting reached its zenith in the Song and Yuan periods.

Prior to that time, landscape in art had largely been regarded as a backdrop to the

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central scenes of human or divine activity (Li Zehou 1994, 180), much as it had in
pre-modern Europe. It seems that pure landscape painting was often accomplished
in situ. However, its realism was also informed by a strong sense of generalism that
allowed far greater freedom for the imagination than was the case in Western
landscape art (Li Zehou 1994, 186). This meant that when landscape was employed
in the religious, and more specifically Buddhist, domain, it tended to jetison Indic
geometry and orientation towards a centre with a correspondingly greater
emphasis on the rendering of actual topography. This is certainly so if we examine
Japanese Buddhist mandalas, which, according to Mammitzsch, often seem to
evoke actual landscapes (Mammitzsch 1997, 5, 35).

6

It is even more the case in

Zen-inspired art that most radically rejects the Indic inheritance.

Sino-Japanese art traditions have been inclusive in the sense that no

obvious distinctions are made between the realm of the ‘natural’ and the realm of
the ‘artificial’. They are also egalitarian since they tend to eschew the conventional
Western distinction between fine and low arts (Saito 1998, 546 – 7, 552). They are
also very much more concerned with world of everyday life and less bothered with
the depiction of metaphysical, esoteric or iconic realities than was the case for the
Indic tradition. As LaFleur (1983, 93 – 6) has pointed out, this leads to a general
rejection of allegory and a marked affirmation of the phenomenal world.

The artworks themselves are characterized by a preference for irregularity

and lack of symmetry, a marked contrast with India, since uniformity in East Asia
was thought to be undesirable (Keene 1972, 18 – 19). They also tend towards the
monochrome,

7

another contrast with the Indic tradition that has always used

colour in a distinctively flamboyant manner. This is very much the case with two of
the most representative Sino-Japanese art forms, brush ink painting and the
creation of rock gardens. Here the emphasis is on simplicity (wabi) and a
minimalism that emphasizes empty space. The latter may be regarded as being
charged with hidden expressive power, perhaps reflecting the aristocratic ideals of
the artwork’s patrons (Saito 1998, 550). The mystery and depth (yu¯gen) created
through this method, although originally an aesthetic ideal that emerged in the
No¯ theatre, is especially suggestive in landscape painting. As LaFleur (1983, 99)
rightly comments, the most obvious characteristic of a painting’s possession of
yu¯gen is the fact that it evokes certain emotions through the depiction of ‘ . . .
scenes and actions that are faint and thin to the point of being almost without
color or definite character’. From the purely Buddhist perspective such works
convey some definite insight into the perishability and impermanence of the
world around us. This in turn engenders the distinctive aesthetic emotion of
aware, a sorrow-tinged appreciation of the transitory nature of existence.

The Japanese ‘Love of Nature’

One of the distinctive features of modern Buddhism in Japan is the fact that,

following its persecution during the Meiji period (1868 – 1912), it enthusiastically
advocated forms that underlined the unique character of the Japanese people

LANDSCAPE AESTHETICS AND ENVIRONMENTALISM

159

(nihonjinron), in particular by contrasting them positively with the Western
civilization. As Scharf (1995, 124) has observed, nihonjinron thinkers ‘would assert
that the Japanese are racially and/or culturally inclined to experience the world
more directly than are the peoples of other nations’. D.T. Suzuki (1870 – 1966), an
enormously influential figure in the transmission of knowledge of Buddhism to the
West, was an important champion of this attitude. This is very much to the fore in
his influential essay on the ‘Love of Nature’, in which he argues that for the
Japanese the ‘ . . . appreciation of the beautiful is at bottom religious for without
being religious one cannot detect and enjoy what is genuinely beautiful’
(Suzuki 1959, 363). The religion that Suzuki has in mind is clearly Zen Buddhism.
He tells us that there is an essential difference between Western and Japanese
approaches to mountains. The latter with their great interest in mountain climbing
expressed in selfish desires seek to ‘conquer’ them while the Japanese merely
respect mountains, as, indeed, they do the whole of the natural realm (ibid., 334).
This appears to be something of an overstatement.

Suzuki’s views on nature are puzzling given Japan’s rather dismal historical

record on environmental protection (Parkes 1997, 119). One would not wish to
push this point too far for much the same might well be said of the historical West.
However, historical scholarship has been unable to establish any distinctive
Japanese love of nature, except in a very restrictive sense. Saito (1992, 3) regards
the Zen attitude towards nature as being too anthropocentric to afford any real
ecological insights. She also argues that the dominant Japanese view of nature as
marked by a ‘pathos of evanescence’ (mono no aware) is too fatalistic a base for
the emergence of a distinctively environmentalist ethic. Kellert (1991, 305), on the
other hand, is only able to identify a very limited and idealized appreciation of
those areas of the natural world that possess an ‘unusual aesthetic and cultural
appeal in certain highly controlled circumstances’. Indeed, he also claims that the
Japanese actually possess an even stronger desire for mastery and control over
nature that is more pronounced than that found in either Germany or the United
States. Could it be that the debate over the Japanese love of nature is actually part
of a wider rhetorical framework designed to circumvent any real discussion of
environmental issues?

Suzuki’s original readers were largely unaware of his political outlook.

Neither did they know that the term nature (shizen) had become a ‘particularly
Japanese sensibility’ (Thomas 2001, 170) or that the so-called Japanese love of
nature was a part of the warp and weft of the discourse of Japanese nationalism.
Suzuki still has his imitators. Steve Odin’s essay in the collection edited by Tucker
and Williams (1997, 99, 101 – 2) is a good case in point. But Suzuki’s historical
context is now much better understood. However, this has produced a backlash
against the ‘Japanese love of nature’ hypothesis. While uncritical engagement
with the nihonjinron position seemed to elevate the Japanese into the world’s
greatest environmentalists, recent critics have entirely dismissed the notion as a
nationalistic fantasy. As a result they see no obvious differences between the ways
in which East and West have understood the natural realm. It appears most

160

IAN HARRIS

reasonable to assume there must be middle ground between these two extremes
(Parker 1999, 16, 18), and the final part of this paper is an attempt to grapple with
this notion by considering the significance of a variety of Japanese Buddhist
landscape painting in their proper historical context.

The hermit at court

A paradoxical appreciation of nature yet desire for control and mastery is

well illustrated by Japanese dry landscape gardens, such as the late-fifteenth-
century/early-sixteenth-century garden at the Ryo¯anji in Kyoto, a creation
described by Hisamatsu Shin’ichi as a ‘garden of emptiness’ (ku¯tai). We are clearly
in Zen Buddhist territory here, both in terms of location and of philosophy. Similar
gardens are found at other Japanese Zen temples, including Saiho¯ji. The latter’s
creator, the monk Muso¯ Soseki (1275 – 1351), once described the poet Bai Juyi’s
creation of a small pool and garden in his famous Muchu¯ mondo¯ (Dream
dialogues). In effect, those who do likewise and surround themselves with a small
landscape in the form of a garden ‘ . . . experience mountains, rivers, the great
earth, grasses, trees and rocks as the self’s original part ( jiko no hombun), though
they may seem by their love of nature to cling to worldly feelings . . . And when
they do this aright, they exemplify perfectly how true followers of the Way love
landscape’ (quoted in Parkes 2000, 108 – 9).

Two points need to be made in this connection. In the first place the garden

is not nature itself, but a reflection on small scale of a portion of the natural realm.
One might say that it is a part of nature domesticated or tamed. Secondly,
appreciation of the garden leads not to any conventional experience of beauty, for
this would be an indication of clinging and contrary to the spirit of Buddhism.
Contemplated in the proper way, then, the garden reveals something important
about the observer’s true nature. It seems to be acting as a kind of meditational
device associated with the Japanese aesthetic concept of ‘cutting’ (kire). The term
describes the manner in which something with the immediate naturalness of
nature is somehow abstracted from its usual context to underline its inner
qualities that in some mysterious way shed penetrating light on the essential
characteristics of the observer (O

¯ hashi 1998, 553). The technique is also found

in the art of flower arranging (ikebana).

Nishitani Keiji (1995), in a highly perceptive essay on the topic, observes that

the act of cutting a flower from the roots that support it enhances its beauty since
the act of cutting underlines the absolute rootlessness of all things in this world of
radical perishability. Some works of the Chinese Ch’an monk Muqi (c. 1210 – 1269),
who was more admired in Japan than in his native land, particularly his famous Six
Persimmons, may be seen in this light.

As we have already noted, Sino-Japanese landscape painting does not

manifest the horror vacui we associate with the Indian Buddhist art tradition. A lack
of specificity tends to dissolve the distinctive spatial sense of the Indic realm.
The extensive use of empty spaces in the canvas also evokes a feeling that the

LANDSCAPE AESTHETICS AND ENVIRONMENTALISM

161

world being represented exists in no specific place. A feeling of unobstruction
and boundlessness is conveyed. This is clearly related to the aesthetics of yu¯gen.
It is also a visual representation of the Maha¯ya¯na doctrine of emptiness, which
points to a reality in which there are no independent entities, no stopping places,
and no barriers (LaFleur 1983, 100). The act of observing the landscape painting,
then, collapses the distance between observer and observed such that ‘ . . . nature
and mind or object and subject will have become one and the same . . . This is the
unique aspect of this aesthetic experience’ (O

¯ noshi Yoshinori, quoted in LaFleur

1983, 103). It is also, as Nishida Kitaro¯’s essay An Explanation of Beauty (Bi no
Setsumei) of 1900 explains—a work that incidentally draws upon Kant’s concept of
the sublime—a form of disinterested pleasure linked to the concept of nonself
(mujo¯ ¼ anatta¯) (Odin 1987, 212).

In an important work on Buddhist landscape painting, Parker (1999, 155)

has observed that Chinese Zen monk artists modified Indic ontology to
emphasize both the illusory nature of reality and the essential non-difference of
samsa¯ra and nirva¯na. Do¯gen may be in the same semantic territory when he
suggests that ‘only a painted rice cake can satiate hunger’ (Do¯gen, 2001).
Inscriptions on Dream Journey along the Hsiao and Hsiang Rivers painted by
Li Gong-lin for the Chinese Buddhist monk Yun-ku (c. 1140 – 1170) tell us that
Yun-ku, being too old to leave his hut, enjoyed wandering through this landscape
in his imagination. This appears to be a well-established theme, for the Chinese
Buddhist layman Zong Bing (375 – 443), perhaps influenced by meditational
visualization practices, also used landscape painting as a means to ‘travel in his
mind’s eye’ (Bush 1998, 369).

In his reflections on Zen landscape art, Parker observes that ‘the great earth

and the mountains and the rivers are illusion, and painting is an illusion of an
illusion, while this explanation of illusion is another illusion’ (Parker 1999, 178).
The Zen artist is a generator of illusion. As such he rejects formal likeness in favour
of other more spiritual and moral qualities when painting a landscape. Zen
landscape art, then, should not be thought of as formally representational, a fact
underlined by the ability of artists to depict things that do not exist in the
phenomenal realm. A good example here would be the painter’s capacity to
depict ‘banana palm beneath the snow . . . plum blossoms under a fiery sky’
(Parker 1999, 176). Indeed, Taihaku Shingen (1358 – 1415), one of our fundamental
sources for the understanding of Zen aesthetics, ‘ . . . used to praise images that
are possible only in a world defined by the magical illusions of human creativity’
(quoted in Parker 1999, 178).

Japanese Zen monks brought landscape painting to its highest pitch

during the Muromachi period (1333 – 1573). It was then that the social
phenomenon of the ‘hermit at court’ reached its peak and played a major role in
the interpretation of landscape as a primarily cultural phenomenon. Building on
the Chinese Yuan tendency ‘ . . . to associate landscape with the “transcendence
of society and the purity and joy of retreat or exile from government service . . . ”’
(Parker 1999, 42), Muromachi period landscape art became an image of spiritual

162

IAN HARRIS

freedom free from the corrupting influences of life in the capital or other regional
power centres. In this way the monk painter stuck in his paradoxical situation
at court could envisage himself as a recluse out of gear with the values of the
court even when this explicit articulation of this attitude would have been
unacceptable in reality. The unobstructed quality of space conveyed by the
painting enabled both artist and viewer to imagine themselves having access to
the freedom of spatial and temporal movement available to the enlightened
saint. As Kuo Hsiang had commented on a passage in the Chuang-tzu, ‘Although
the sage is in the midst of government his mind seems to be in the mountain
forest’ (quoted in Parker 1999, 144).

The idea is nicely represented in the inscriptions

8

to Shu¯bun’s (active

c. 1423 – 60) Distant Thoughts across Rivers and Skies or to Minshuku Gensei’s
(d. 1420) Blue Mountains and White Clouds, in which the monks express longings
for the transcendent freedom of life beyond the confines of the city, but with one
dissident voice—that of Daigaku Shu¯su¯ (1345 – 1423), who appears content to be
a recluse living contentedly in the city (Parker 1999, 150). The final comment
perhaps holds the key to this particular aesthetic: by seeing landscape as
distinctively illusory, the viewer frees himself from all attachments—particularly
those that, from the more traditional perspective, may have led him to revere the
mountains and rivers of the natural environment.

Shin’ichi Hisamatsu has observed that Japanese Buddhist art subverts the

ordinary distinctions between surface and depth. For him, ‘surface is deep’.
Shinkei, the sixteenth-century Japanese poet, wrote ‘The beginner enters from the
shallow to the deep; and once he has attained the depths, he emerges again into
the shallow: this is the essential rule of all disciplines’ (quoted in LaFleur 1983,
93 – 4). The observation has special relevance to the traditional Zen Ox-herding
pictures, a sequence of ten scenes that depict the spiritual journey of the aspirant
to enlightenment. The first six of these scenes show the gradual stages in the
aspirant’s taming of the ox, but number seven—Forgetting the Ox, the Person
Remains—illustrates the ox-tamer alone living as a recluse in a mountain retreat.
But this is clearly not the end of spiritual training, for the final picture in the
sequence, far from being a depiction of a life of nature freed from the bounds of
society, is a clear return from the mountains and forests back to re-engagement
with the social realm.

Conclusion

We are now in a better position to assess the evidence for an authentically

Buddhist appreciation of the natural world. As we have seen, the manner in which
nature had been rendered in Western Christian art changed dramatically from a
mere background feature with overtones of fear, through the sublime in which the
viewer measured himself against the magnificence of the landscape’s vastness
and won the contest, to the picturesque. Such changes accompanied the move
away from religion towards a secular vision of the world informed by the findings

LANDSCAPE AESTHETICS AND ENVIRONMENTALISM

163

of modern science and the gradual democratization of society. But can we identify
any conceptual overlaps here with Buddhist landscape art?

The answer appears to be both yes and no. It seems likely that both Indian

and Western aesthetics were originally concerned only with art and not with
nature, which was assigned no special value. However, as Buddhist ideas and
practices began their journey eastward to China and beyond, they were forced
to come to terms with more positive indigenous appreciations of nature. To a
certain extent this transformation mirrors the Kantian revolution in which
aesthetics, as it were, spills out of frame to embrace nature. But the mechanism is
somewhat different. From Kant onwards we can detect the beginnings of a move
away from religion towards a more scientific mode of interpreting the visual
realm. This brief study of the Buddhist attitude towards landscape, on the other
hand, simply reveals the transposition of one religio-aesthetic mode with
another.

The Sino-Japanese perception of nature, then, preserved a religious

character, while in the West the positive appreciation of the natural realm
emerged in association with the decline of religion and the rise of science.
Perhaps, then, these forms of Buddhism are more relevant to the current debate
over environmental ethics than Christianity with its strong and enduring emphasis
on man’s dominion over nature. This has been the line taken by nihonjinron
thinkers but it is only a part of the story. By paying attention to the historical
context in which landscape arts flourished it becomes clear that the old Indic and
aristocratic values of dominion and control, Davidson’s so-called ‘imperial
metaphor’, were never entirely extinguished as Buddhism filtered its way through
Chinese and Japanese culture.

The production of landscape art appears to have been employed by

cultured Buddhist literati as a kind of meditation of the illusory aspects of all
existence. As the Ox-herding pictures suggest, an appreciation of nature was both
a means by which recluses living in the relative luxury of aristocratic courts were
able to come to terms with their paradoxical circumstances and a refreshing
interlude prior to further engagement with the social round.

Viewed in this way Sino-Japanese landscape arts share something of the

Western picturesque, but its practitioners remained essentially aristocratic and,
of course, entirely uninfluenced by any appeal to mass democracy. This was to
become a key element only in the contemporary religious environment, as
Reader’s work makes clear. During the Meiji period pilgrimage had been
condemned as superstitious, and declined in consequence. But by the 1920s the
growth of the railways re-energized the practice; Japan Rail launched a series of
campaigns to discover ‘lost Japan’ (ushinawareta Nihon), and the country’s
national broadcasting corporation, NHK, produced a series of highly photogenic
travelogues on the natural beauty of the Shikoku pilgrimage area (Reader 2007,
21, 25 – 26). It seems probable that his has done much to enhance an
environmentalist consciousness in the Japanese psyche. How far this is due to the
activities of the tourism and advertising industries rather than the reflection of an

164

IAN HARRIS

enduring Buddhist-oriented appreciation of the natural world requires further
detailed study.

NOTES

1. This is the revised version of a paper originally presented to the Ecology and

Buddhism in the Knowledge-based Society Conference, Dongguk University,

Seoul, Korea, 25 – 27 May 2006.

2. For a refutation see Harris (1997), for a more positive evaluation, based on

Theravada ritual materials, see Harris (2000b).

3. This need not imply that the Indic tradition had an entirely anthropocentric concept

of the world. It has been observed that in Buddhist cosmographical mapping

‘neither the cosmos nor the terrestrial plane is anthropocentric, since the southern

continent, Jambu¯dvı¯pa, is the only one where humans live’ (Schwartzberg 1994, 619).

4. Expression of emotion appears highly acceptable in Indic aesthetics yet this was

regarded as uncouth in Japan (Saito 1998, 548).

5. In 1160 the Japanese Emperor had a temple (Ima Kumano ¼ now/present

Kumano) built in Kyoto to replicate the sacred and mountainous Kumano region.

The idea of replicating sacred spaces appears to be a recurring theme in Japanese

history (Ian Reader, personal communication, 18 April 2006).

6. For a detailed study of Japanese mandalas, both Buddhist and Shinto¯, see ten

Grotenhuis (1999).

7. Sino-Japanese mandalas, however, have continued to reflect aesthetic norms

associated with Indic tantrism.

8. Attaching poetry to East Asian landscape painting was an extremely common

practice and may be regarded as ‘extending the frame’ of the picture.

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