Painting the Void: Chan Buddhism in Guanxiu’s Eighteen Luohan (Arhats)

Abstract

Throughout history, painters have turned to the major world religions for artistic inspiration, reifying the likenesses of deities and spiritual masters alike in an effort to capture significant historical moments or focus prayer and meditation. However, the strictly anti-logical, anti-verbal nature of Chan Buddhist religious practice seems to defy conventional approaches to painting; after all, the painstaking attention to physical appearance that characterizes so many historical artistic masterpieces is antithetical to the deeply incorporeal, spiritual transcendence to which Chan Buddhists aspire. Perhaps this seeming disconnect between the metaphysical nature of Buddhism and the necessarily physical constraints of artistic practice is the cause of the paucity of literature specifically addressing the creative translation of abstract Chan Buddhist ideals into concrete art objects. In this paper, I attempt to patch a hole in the canvas of religious art history through a close examination of the interplay of faith and ink in Chinese painter and Chan master Guanxiu’s “Eighteen Luohan (Arhats).” I begin by compiling a brief summary of the diverse and largely informal conventions of Chan Buddhist artistic production, contextualizing Guanxiu’s work not only as an aesthetic masterpiece formally befitting its cultural tradition but also as a groundbreaking meditative project. By introducing an interpretation of the titular luohan derived from dreams rather than human models and by defying the contemporary urge to portray spiritual mastery through secular notions of beauty, Guanxiu audaciously opens a pathway of communication between the spiritual and the mundane and creates a new artistic canon, that of the eighteen arhats. Finally, I argue that Guanxiu’s work, situated as it is in the elusive liminal space between spirituality and artistic practice, facilitates communion between the artist, the Buddha, the viewer, and the pictured arhats, assembling all parties in what might be imagined as a simultaneously earthly and divine correspondence between the physical world and the void.