REPRESENTATION OF NATURE IN buddhist and western art.pdf

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 Therav ¯ da, Mah ¯ y ¯ na or Vajray ¯ 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

150 IAN HARRIS

inanimate realms, which correspond very closely with two key and well-attested

Buddhist categories—sattvaloka, the world of sentient beings; and bh¯ 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 P¯ 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 bh¯ 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

(bh¯ 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

LANDSCAPE AESTHETICS AND ENVIRONMENTALISM 151

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 P ¯ 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,

152 IAN HARRIS

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

LANDSCAPE AESTHETICS AND ENVIRONMENTALISM 153

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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