The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination Read Online Free Page B

“intercalary” reign—a kind of leap year—of the fluid agent water. For centuries, debates over dynastic legitimacy were translated into the language of the five elements.
    Eternal harmony, with everything properly proceeding from its procreating
ch’i
of material forces, made novelty seem alien. The idea of the creation of something
ex nihilo
(from nothing) had no place in a universe of the yin and yang and the five elements, always in order, always in proper series. Unlike the Western world of a surprising Creation, of man at war with nature, the world of Confucius transformed by Taoist and Buddhist currents saw man at home among transformations, procreations, and re-creations.
    A vivid symptom of this contrast between West and East is the difference between two ways of thinking about man’s place in the landscape. Landscapepainting is a late arrival in Western art. Ancient writers tell us of Greek murals that were landscapes, including some scenes from the
Odyssey
. Roman villas were decorated with idealized landscapes, and we can still see some in Pompeii. The frescoes (c.1338) of Ambrogio Lorenzetti (c.1300?–1348) in the Palazzo Publico in Siena are the earliest surviving Western paintings showing us a scene painted direct from nature. A series called
Good and Bad Government
, they reveal the emphasis of the West, for here it is the human figure of statesman or lover, hunter or soldier, saint or savior that dominates. Leonardo’s familiar
Mona Lisa
(c.1503–1505) offers the landscape as a background. Albrecht Altdorfer (1480–1538) in the early sixteenth century begins experimenting with landscapes of the Danube. The outdoor settings for the Brueghels’ paintings in the seventeenth century are not raw nature but a countryside where man plays, carouses, and hunts, and where the Blind lead the Blind. Not until the Dutch and Flemish painters of the seventeenth century—Rembrandt, Jacob van Ruisdael, Meindert Hobbema—does landscape become a subject all its own. Finally in the nineteenth century landscape becomes the painters’ grand laboratory.
    But in China, by the fourth century the landscape had already become an endlessly fertile subject. There nature is no mere setting for the human drama. In the earliest Western depictions of landscape, the viewer stands outside looking at the spectacle of man’s work, his battles, his follies, or his worship. Man is the foreground. But the Chinese landscape was a scene of harmony and rhythmic life, where man fits inconspicuously, even obscurely.
    In the Chinese landscapes we must seek out man. When we do find him he is a speck, whether a fisherman, a hermit, or a sage in contemplation. Even “empty” space is not the vacuum that the West so abhorred but an untapped resource of the universal
ch’i
, one with mountains and streams, as they said, “because there is a principle of organization connecting all things.” A philosopher of the Yuan era, T’ang Hou (flourished 1320–1330), observed the incorporation of man in nature and nature in man:
    Landscape painting is the essence of the shaping powers of Nature. Thus through the vicissitudes of yin and yang—weather, time, and climate—the charm of inexhaustible transformation is unfailingly visible. If you yourself do not possess that grand wavelike vastness of mountain and valley within your heart and mind, you will be unable to capture it with ease in your painting.

3
The Silence of the Buddha
    T HE Buddha had no answer to the riddle of creation. Much of his appeal to millions around the world for twenty-five hundred years came from his commonsense refusal to try to answer unanswerable questions. “Is the universe eternal or not eternal, or both?” “Is the universe infinite in space or not infinite, or both or neither?” The Buddha listed these among the fourteen questions to which he allowed no reply.
    “Have I ever said to you,” the Buddha asked, “come, be my disciple and I will reveal to you the