Painting as Taoist Cultivation
绘画作为一种修行
Painting is regularly described as a Taoist practice, and as with calligraphy and the guqin the description mixes several distinct things. There is painting made for Taoist religious use, there are ideas from Taoist texts that entered painting theory, and there is the claim that the act of painting is itself a form of cultivation.
This page treats the three separately, because they are supported by very different kinds of evidence.
Religious painting for Taoist use
The most concrete connection is the least discussed in art histories. Taoist temples required images: deities on walls and hanging scrolls, ritual paintings used in ceremonies, portraits of patriarchs, and diagrams. This is a substantial body of work with its own iconography, conventions and workshop traditions.
The outstanding survival is the Yongle Palace in Shanxi, a Yuan dynasty Taoist temple complex whose halls are covered in wall paintings of extraordinary quality. The main hall shows a great assembly of deities in procession, life-size and larger, with figures rendered in confident sweeping line and rich mineral colour. Another hall narrates the life of Lü Dongbin in continuous scenes. The complex was moved in its entirety in the 1950s to make way for a reservoir, which is itself a remarkable operation.
Work of this kind was made by professional painters to commission. It is not literati painting, it was not made as self-expression, and the art-historical tradition largely ignored it because of who made it. It is nonetheless the largest and most direct connection between painting and Taoism that exists.
Taoist subjects and Wudang
A recognisable iconography developed for Taoist figures. Zhenwu, the deity of Wudang, is shown as a powerful figure with loose black hair, bare feet, holding or accompanied by a sword, with a turtle and snake beneath him. The Eight Immortals appear individually and as a group with their identifying attributes. Laozi, the Three Pure Ones, the Jade Emperor and the star deities all have established forms.
At Wudang and other sites this imagery survives in murals, in sculpture and in painted images used in ritual. It is worth knowing the conventions because a visitor will encounter them constantly, and because the images are informative: what a deity holds and how it is dressed encodes its function and its position in a hierarchy.
Pilgrimage sites also produced their own printed images, route maps and illustrated gazetteers. These are functional rather than fine art, and for Wudang specifically they are the best surviving visual record of the site.
Taoist ideas in painting theory
Several concepts from the Taoist texts became central to how painting was discussed, and here the connection is documentary rather than institutional.
The word usually translated as natural or self-so is the highest term of praise in painting criticism. Work that shows effort, calculation or a desire to impress is faulted, and the ideal is something that appears to have come about of itself. This vocabulary is taken directly from the Laozi and Zhuangzi.
A second concept is the reduction of the self before painting. The fifth-century writer Zong Bing, in the earliest surviving essay on landscape painting, describes clarifying the mind in order to savour images, and argues that a painted landscape can serve the same function as travelling to real mountains. His essay blends Taoist and Buddhist vocabulary, which is normal for the period and worth noting when anyone claims it as purely one or the other.
The painter who took off his clothes
One anecdote from the Zhuangzi did more than any other to shape the Chinese image of the artist. A ruler summons painters; they all arrive, bow, and stand respectfully. One arrives late, takes the brush, goes to his quarters, strips off his clothes and sits with his legs sprawled. The ruler says: this one is a real painter.
The story is not about eccentricity for its own sake. Its point is that the genuine practitioner is absorbed to the extent of forgetting the social situation entirely, including the ruler. Painting criticism cited it for two thousand years to justify unconventional behaviour and to argue that the state of the painter matters more than decorum.
It should also be said that the story was extremely convenient for painters who wished to behave badly, and it was used that way. The literature contains a good many accounts of painters drinking heavily and painting in dramatic states, and the reader is entitled to some scepticism about how much of that was cultivation and how much was performance.
The untrammelled class
Chinese criticism ranked paintings into classes, and the standard scheme had three: competent, excellent and divine. In the Tang and Song a fourth term was introduced and, crucially, placed above the others: the untrammelled or unrestrained class.
What this class describes is work that does not follow rules, is not concerned with finish, and achieves its effect by means that cannot be taught. The examples given are painters who worked rapidly, sometimes drunk, sometimes with the hair or with splashed ink rather than a brush.
The promotion of this class above technical excellence is the clearest institutional expression of Taoist values in Chinese art criticism. A category was created for work that succeeds by abandoning method, and it was ranked first. Whether the paintings so classified deserved it is a separate question, and the category was also convenient for excusing carelessness.
Does the act of painting cultivate?
Setting the theory aside, the same practical claims appear here as in calligraphy and tea, and they can be examined.
Painting on absorbent paper is irreversible. It requires sustained attention over the duration of a work. It demands physical control that depends on settled breathing and posture, and it punishes agitation immediately and visibly. It requires holding an entire composition in mind while executing it in a sequence that cannot be reordered — which is exactly what the phrase about having the completed bamboo in one's chest describes.
These are real features and a person can verify them. They amount to a demanding form of concentrated activity with immediate feedback, which is a reasonable thing to call a practice. They do not require any claim about qi, and they are not specific to Taoism.
The recurring problem
Painting runs into the same difficulty as every other art influenced by this vocabulary. The ideal is work that appears unforced and self-arising, but aiming at that appearance produces something that looks contrived, and skilled viewers detect it.
The tradition's answer is the same as elsewhere: acquire method thoroughly enough that it stops requiring attention, and the unforced quality follows. This is why copying old masters was not regarded as opposed to originality. It is also why the untrammelled class is genuinely dangerous as a category: it describes a result that cannot be pursued directly, and a great deal of bad painting has claimed it.
An honest boundary
Two things should be kept apart, and the distinction is the same one that appears throughout this section of the site.
That painting trains sustained attention, requires settled breathing and posture, rewards the abandonment of self-consciousness, and shares a vocabulary with Taoist writing is well supported and testable by anyone who paints.
That a painting transmits the painter's cultivated energy to a viewer, that particular brushwork circulates qi, or that painting produces spiritual attainment are claims of a different kind. They were sincerely held, they belong to a coherent worldview, and they are not established by the observable features of the practice.
Trying it
If you want to approach painting this way, the practical suggestions are modest. Start with ink bamboo or orchid, which need no colour and no drawing skill and consist of a small number of strokes. Grind ink rather than using bottled, for the sake of the interval. Sit upright, breathe out during long strokes, and paint slowly.
Do the same subject repeatedly rather than moving on. Do not evaluate while painting. Accept that most sheets will be bad, since this is a medium in which nothing can be fixed and the discard rate is high even for accomplished painters. The willingness to spoil paper without irritation is itself most of what the practice is said to develop.
Key points
- Taoist religious painting, such as the Yongle Palace murals, is the most concrete connection and was made by professionals whom art history largely ignored.
- Zhenwu, the Eight Immortals and other figures have established iconography that a visitor to Wudang will encounter constantly.
- The Zhuangzi story of the painter who stripped off his clothes shaped the Chinese image of the artist and was also convenient for bad behaviour.
- Criticism created a fourth and highest class for work that succeeds by abandoning method, which is the clearest institutional expression of Taoist values in art.
- The checkable claims are that painting is irreversible, demands sustained attention and settled breathing, and punishes agitation visibly.
- Claims about transmitted energy and spiritual attainment belong to a coherent worldview but are not established by the observable features of painting.