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literati calligraphy criticism was dominated, first in the Six Dynasties and Tang periods, by Daoistic nature similes used to capture the artist’s creativity (e.g.,“like a rock falling from a high peak, bounding but about to crumble”), then in the Song dynasty was complicated by the rise of a competing Confucian paradigm of morality (“seeing the man in his writing”). The Song-dynasty contests between the Daoist and Confucian camps over the critical reputations of such great calligraphers as Wang Xizhi (303–361) and Yan Zhenqing (709–785) are well known.1 Rarely have we seen calligraphy criticism from a Buddhist perspective, though, either in China or the West. A study of the critical reception of the work of the Southern Song calligrapher Zhang Jizhi (1186–1266) reveals tensions between Confucian and Buddhist interpretations —even di¤ering Buddhist interpretations—of this artist’s achievement in the Yuan and Ming dynasties.2 His critics included Confucian instructors, literary Buddhist monks, and lay-Buddhist literati, and their diverse reactions to this Buddhist artist’s calligraphy illuminate an intriguing case of socially and religiously based conflicts in perception. Zhang Jizhi was a devout Buddhist householder and a friend of disciples of the Chan master Wuzhun Shifan (1177–1249) at Tiantong Monastery in the Tiantai Mountains, south of modern-day Ningbo.3 He was also a scholar-o◊cial whose family had filled high positions in government for several generations.4 In modern scholarship, Zhang Jizhi is considered the last great calligrapher of the Southern Song. He has long been appreciated in Japan, where one sign of his popularity in Zen circles is his well-known inscription reading fangzhang, “abbot’s quarters,” now in the Tofuku-ji, Kyoto.5 Copies of this inscription hang at other Zen establishments, such as Daitoku-ji. By contrast, the critical reception of his work in China was contested, apparently in accord with each critic’s own particular social, philosophical, and religious concerns. Zhang Jizhi’s extant calligraphy may be divided into three categories. One consists of large characters, in a horizontal format, written in the so-called Song kai, or Song-dynasty regular script, an informal regular script that incorporates elements of running script (xingshu). Zhang wrote these characters with dark, thick, rough brushstrokes that incorporate the use of “flying white” (feibai), a dry brush technique that spares out the white ground in streaks. The composition of these characters tends toward squareness, with the occasional eccentric stroke. 73 3 Buddhist Literati and Literary Monks: Social and Religious Elements in the Critical Reception of Zhang Jizhi’s Calligraphy Amy McNair Examples are the fangzhang inscription and transcriptions of poems by the Tang-dynasty poet Du Fu, now in the Liaoning Provincial Museum (fig. 3.1) and the Chishaku-in and Enkaku-ji, in Kyoto.6 Zhang’s medium-sized regular script forms another category. It is found in formal documents such as his sutra transcriptions (fig. 3.2) and in the Epitaph for Li Kan, now in the Fujii Yurinkan, Kyoto.7 The regular script Zhang Jizhi used in writing sutras is more delicate and fluid than that of the Du Fu poem scrolls, but it has the same unusual and distinctive style. Most remarkable is the extraordinary variety of thick and thin strokes, which creates a wonderful visual drama as the thickly drawn, dark characters give way to finely drawn, light ones, creating a nearly three-dimensional e¤ect. In addition, Zhang often emphasized the initial strokes of his characters, so that many characters are darker and heavier on the left-hand side. Examples in fig. 3.2 are the characters du (in the third column, the sixth character from the top) and ju (fourth column, ninth character), where the left-hand semantic element is written in thick black strokes, with the phonetic element to the right written in a much finer line. A third type of writing is seen in personal documents written in a running-cursive hand. In a personal letter written to the Chan monk Daxie (fig. 3.3), again we see the dramatic alteration between thick and fine strokes, but with less weight on the left side of the characters. Instead, character compositions angle upward on the right side, so that right-hand elements appear to float slightly above elements on the left. The delicate ligatures between strokes, the smooth swelling of individual strokes, and the great variety in shapes of dots, along with the rake to the upper right, are all...

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