Is there room for emotional expression?: when a talented artist becomes a monk in Buddhist China

Conventional views present Chinese Buddhist monastic life as a disciplined site of subdued emotions. This paper examines the experience of a very famous visual artist-musician who became a monk at mid-life in early twentieth-century China and thus joined a new “emotional community.” How, in his case, was his daily practice of the expressive arts reconciled in this environment?

The abundance of primary sources from late-imperial times and the Republican era (extending from the late-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century) makes it possible for historians to gain nuanced access to a range of dimensions of the lives of certain individuals, including well-known religious figures. In some cases these materials allow us to see many-faceted elements of individual emotional life. Even taking into account both hagiographic deformations and the possibilities of what Natalie Zemon Davis memorably termed “fiction in the archive,” we can learn much about the complex lives of these individuals through careful study of gathered materials. Making use of one such massive cache of primary sources (associated with the eminent monk Hongyi, 1880-1942), I consider what happens when an accomplished visual artist and musician joins the monastic Order in Buddhist China. (While there are other prominent monk-painters of that era, such as Xugu [1823-1896], the depth and breadth of the Hongyi sources is unparalleled.) Is that individual expected to turn away entirely from previous vocations as he adopts this new one, or are there mechanisms established so that a creative drive and developed skills may continue to find expression? What might happen to that individual’s emotional life, deeply embedded within artistic practices, in this new community of emotions?

Poetry is one sanctioned arena for the expression of emotion within Chinese cultural spheres. Concerns in Chinese Buddhist environments about poetic expression have been well-documented and critically examined, most recently by such scholars as Jason Protass, Tom Mazanec, and Beata Grant. In addition to the many Buddhist monk-poets (male and female) known across history, there have been notable visual artists. However, surviving paintings of such artist-monks largely have been studied within constraints of traditional art-historical approaches, which do not extend to how these works, their production, and their producers might fit within monastic settings. As to the experiences of musicians who join the monastic Order, Chinese sources (as best we might know them) tend to lean toward silence.

A remarkably rich array of primary sources related to Hongyi, the notable Republican-period artist-monk, has been gathered since his 1942 death. In addition to the publication of a ten-volume “complete writings,” new documents have continued to appear. These materials make it possible to consider a wide variety of questions about him.

Extravagantly talented in numerous domains of the expressive arts, Li Shutong (Hongyi’s principal lay name) went to Japan for some five years (between 1905-1911) for advanced formal institutional training in both western painting (including oil-painting, studio drawing of nude models, and rapid plein air oil sketches) and music. It was part of his deliberate embrace of “modernity.” Surviving oil-paintings such as a 1911 self-portrait (coupled with related documentary evidence) show the distinct influence on his work and thought of late nineteenth-century French and France-associated “post-impressionist” painters such as Vincent van Gogh, Georges Seurat, and Paul Signac, as well as some of that era’s academic painters (such as Raphael Collin), all learned through the mediation of his Paris-trained teacher Kuroda Seiki and publications about these painting traditions then beginning to appear in Japan. Figures such as van Gogh and Signac wrote at length about the expression of emotion through painting and proceeded to demonstrate this in their actual work. In addition to engagement with these western artistic modes, Li Shutong also worked vigorously in the more traditional Chinese calligraphic brush arts, with its own practices of emotional expression; consistent with other areas of his life, here too he was in an avant-garde. He also was a deft and skillful song-writer. Some of his pre-Buddhist works, such as Songbie (or Farewell), have enjoyed lasting popularity with Chinese audiences.

In 1918 at age thirty-eight, Li Shutong left his position as a teacher of music and art at a modern teacher-training institute in Hangzhou to become a Buddhist monk. He was at that time a mature man with a burgeoning career in the arts, a man of immense cultural capital and thus in no way an ordinary or typical case. How did such a man fit into a monastic environment? Was there room for him as a man of talent, or did he have to change dramatically to fit expectations? Did he find that he needed to abandon these modes of creative expression, which provided him with long-standing emotional outlets? Indeed, given his stated concerns about his emotional complexities, was he looking for ways to resolve them through the disciplines of a new community of emotions? 

Exploration within the corpus of available primary sources associated with Hongyi provides us with some straightforward answers, rather than a patchwork of suppositions. This presentation examines three intersecting elements to consider complex issues related to emotions, discipline, and creative activities: (1) in response to questions posed by Hongyi at the earliest stage of his monastic career, beginning in 1920 the eminent monk Yinguang composed a series of five letters with teachings about calligraphy (including blood writing) and the integration of calligraphic procedures within monastic contexts; (2) the witness of Hongyi’s sustained body of visual work created in this new context, including what he actually created (and why), as well as the practices and forms that he abandoned; and (3) after he came to maturity as a Vinaya master, Hongyi’s cautionary yet encouraging statements and teachings regarding the role of artistic expression within a monastic vocation.

References

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida (NY: Hill and Wang, 1981).

Brose, Benjamin, ed. Buddhist Masters of Modern China (Boulder: Shambhala, forthcoming May 2025).

Rosenwein, Barbara H. Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 2006).