Scratch Japan, find Ancient Greece
Aug. 20th, 2004 12:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusWell, colour me gobsmacked. Apparently there's a connection between Greece and Japan, and it's not the 13 medals Japanese athletes have so far won at the Olympics. No, it's Greco-Buddhism. Now, I must admit that until yesterday I had never heard of Greco-Buddhism. If I'd noticed any links between Greece and Japan, they'd been fairly random and nebulous observations; a weird sense that Tokyo and Athens resembled each other when I arrived here for the first of my long stays in 2001, or watching clips of torture from a Japanese TV show called Endurance on Clive James's show back in the 80s and learning to think of the Japanese as Stoical, or noticing Mishima's attraction to Greek images of male virility.
But apparently, thanks to Alexander the Great and the traders of the Silk Road, Mahayana Buddhism was influenced by Greek culture in its early days. And so it is that the realistic depictions of the Buddha we see in Japan today were first made by the Greeks; before Greeks made sculptures of the Buddha wearing Grecian robes, with a Grecian topknot hairstyle, he was shown in Asia only as a set of abstract symbols; an empty throne, the Bodhi tree, a set of footprints, a prayer wheel.
'Many of the stylislic elements in the representations of the Buddha point to Greek influence,' says Encyclozine: 'the Greco-Roman toga-like wavy robe covering both shoulders, the contrapposto stance of the upright figures and the measured quality of the faces, all rendered with strong artistic realism.' What's more, the fierce guardians and attendants often seen flanking the Buddha in Japanese temples are said to be based on Hercules.
These rather mind-boggling visions of a cultural syncretism pre-dating Shibuya-kei by twenty five centuries were rattling around in my head today as I looked at an exhibition called 'Treasures of Buddhism' at the Osaka City Art Museum. But the stuff that struck me as gorgeous in this show -- and a lot did -- was stuff that departed furthest from Western art, prompting the question 'Why didn't we draw that way?' ('That way' being, for instance, an impossible landscape containing the same man in different stages of his life, or an Emperor floating in a magnificent robe resembling a piece of squashed origami.) And the answer is, we did draw like this in the West, but only before we invented the rules of perspective. In the same way, we had music that sounded as fresh and strange (to my ears) as Japanese music does, but only before we standardised on the 'well-tempered' scale. These things seem transparent to us now, we call them 'Realism', we think of ourselves as having 'got things right' when we settled on them. But in fact they're just conventions and rules, no better or worse than any other. And they become worse when, like Christianity or Microsoft, they squeeze out other scales, other systems and become unchallenged orthodoxies.
Looking at an image of the Emperor Godaigo spread in his robes like a big flat origami duck, or a scroll that packs a lifetime of narrative detail into a single frame, I find a hidden reproach to the 'realism' of western art, which still dominates today in the form, for instance, of Hollywood films (have you ever heard a Hollywood film with a microtonal score?). Only the western avant garde, or lunatic maverick outsiders like Harry Partch and Henry Darger, have challenged the dominance of western norms like the well-tempered scale or the rules of perspective. It's ironic that what Buddhist scrolls and hangings achieve through formula and a perceived absence of individualism we've achieved in the west by pushing individualism to zany extremes.
Here's Preston Wright's description of the moment Harry Partch got interested in non-tempered, non-Western scales:
'The public library became his best friend. One day he finds a big German book full of numbers and diagrams. Herman Helmholtz had written all about the history of tuning systems, harmony, and consonance/dissonance. The 12 equal steps of the piano were but a momentary aberration in the scale of things: intervals are better described by numbers (string lengths or frequency ratios) rather than letter names; the Greeks, Arabs, Chinese, Indians, and Europeans had all proposed different kinds of tunings and temperaments, and music had evolved along with them. Then one day it stopped. No one had mentioned Pythagoras or Rameau during music classes; indeed no one had mentioned there was ever a problem. The keyboard was simply a God-given fact.
'Now Harry had a mission: set the world right for the speech-music connection, even if it meant making instruments differently. Even if it meant going back to the time when music history went off the rails. Even if it meant taking a closer look at music from non-European backgrounds. Even if it meant seeing what else the Euro-centric, religion-obsessed establishment was hiding from him: the wondrous human body, his sexuality, the artificial separation of music, dance, and drama.'
(From Harry Partch's World)
That's an exciting passage, because it shows how questioning something as arcane as a musical scale can lead to questions about the body, sex, everything. If there's no end to the things we take for granted, so there's no end to the dizzying alternatives that open up when we ask 'Why the hell does it have to be done this way? Who says they got it right? Why stop here just because everybody else did?'
And if you say that I came away from that Buddhism show with little more than my post-Protestant radicalism sharpened, I can tell you that you're quite wrong. I also strengthened my view that patterned robes are the clothes of the future as well as the past. And I've decided at some point to recruit two cutely fierce red-faced attendants who will flank me at all times, evoking distant memories of Hercules.
But apparently, thanks to Alexander the Great and the traders of the Silk Road, Mahayana Buddhism was influenced by Greek culture in its early days. And so it is that the realistic depictions of the Buddha we see in Japan today were first made by the Greeks; before Greeks made sculptures of the Buddha wearing Grecian robes, with a Grecian topknot hairstyle, he was shown in Asia only as a set of abstract symbols; an empty throne, the Bodhi tree, a set of footprints, a prayer wheel.
'Many of the stylislic elements in the representations of the Buddha point to Greek influence,' says Encyclozine: 'the Greco-Roman toga-like wavy robe covering both shoulders, the contrapposto stance of the upright figures and the measured quality of the faces, all rendered with strong artistic realism.' What's more, the fierce guardians and attendants often seen flanking the Buddha in Japanese temples are said to be based on Hercules.
These rather mind-boggling visions of a cultural syncretism pre-dating Shibuya-kei by twenty five centuries were rattling around in my head today as I looked at an exhibition called 'Treasures of Buddhism' at the Osaka City Art Museum. But the stuff that struck me as gorgeous in this show -- and a lot did -- was stuff that departed furthest from Western art, prompting the question 'Why didn't we draw that way?' ('That way' being, for instance, an impossible landscape containing the same man in different stages of his life, or an Emperor floating in a magnificent robe resembling a piece of squashed origami.) And the answer is, we did draw like this in the West, but only before we invented the rules of perspective. In the same way, we had music that sounded as fresh and strange (to my ears) as Japanese music does, but only before we standardised on the 'well-tempered' scale. These things seem transparent to us now, we call them 'Realism', we think of ourselves as having 'got things right' when we settled on them. But in fact they're just conventions and rules, no better or worse than any other. And they become worse when, like Christianity or Microsoft, they squeeze out other scales, other systems and become unchallenged orthodoxies.
Looking at an image of the Emperor Godaigo spread in his robes like a big flat origami duck, or a scroll that packs a lifetime of narrative detail into a single frame, I find a hidden reproach to the 'realism' of western art, which still dominates today in the form, for instance, of Hollywood films (have you ever heard a Hollywood film with a microtonal score?). Only the western avant garde, or lunatic maverick outsiders like Harry Partch and Henry Darger, have challenged the dominance of western norms like the well-tempered scale or the rules of perspective. It's ironic that what Buddhist scrolls and hangings achieve through formula and a perceived absence of individualism we've achieved in the west by pushing individualism to zany extremes.
Here's Preston Wright's description of the moment Harry Partch got interested in non-tempered, non-Western scales:
'The public library became his best friend. One day he finds a big German book full of numbers and diagrams. Herman Helmholtz had written all about the history of tuning systems, harmony, and consonance/dissonance. The 12 equal steps of the piano were but a momentary aberration in the scale of things: intervals are better described by numbers (string lengths or frequency ratios) rather than letter names; the Greeks, Arabs, Chinese, Indians, and Europeans had all proposed different kinds of tunings and temperaments, and music had evolved along with them. Then one day it stopped. No one had mentioned Pythagoras or Rameau during music classes; indeed no one had mentioned there was ever a problem. The keyboard was simply a God-given fact.
'Now Harry had a mission: set the world right for the speech-music connection, even if it meant making instruments differently. Even if it meant going back to the time when music history went off the rails. Even if it meant taking a closer look at music from non-European backgrounds. Even if it meant seeing what else the Euro-centric, religion-obsessed establishment was hiding from him: the wondrous human body, his sexuality, the artificial separation of music, dance, and drama.'
(From Harry Partch's World)
That's an exciting passage, because it shows how questioning something as arcane as a musical scale can lead to questions about the body, sex, everything. If there's no end to the things we take for granted, so there's no end to the dizzying alternatives that open up when we ask 'Why the hell does it have to be done this way? Who says they got it right? Why stop here just because everybody else did?'
And if you say that I came away from that Buddhism show with little more than my post-Protestant radicalism sharpened, I can tell you that you're quite wrong. I also strengthened my view that patterned robes are the clothes of the future as well as the past. And I've decided at some point to recruit two cutely fierce red-faced attendants who will flank me at all times, evoking distant memories of Hercules.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-19 04:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-19 04:28 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-19 04:41 am (UTC)The information pamphlet at Shin-Yakushiji (built 757) temple in Nara (close to the photography museum) claims architectural similarities to the Parthenon. Not to be confused with the older, Yakushiji temple, which is also worth a visit.
Gandharan Buddhist sculpture (http://www.himalayanart.org/search/set.cfm?setID=284) is the point of connection between Greek and later Buddhist sculpture. There are several significant private Japanese collections and I've seen a couple of exhibitions in Japan in the last couple of years. I prefer the Indian, Chinese, and Japanese stuff, or straight classical Greek sculpture. I haven't quite figured out why yet, but very few Gandharan pieces do it for me. I've read somewhere that Buddhism got as far west as Hungary.
More importantly there are clearly links between Buddhist and Greek thought, most clearly the idea of balance.
Another interesting link: some writers have stated that Noh drama, with its masks and chorus, gives us the closest approximation of what it may have been like to attend classical Greek theatre. But it seems unlikely that there can be much more than a very indirect influence in this case, Noh is relatively new compared with the examples given above.
Chinese and Japanese music both use Just Intonation scales. The circle of fifths was known in China millenia before the time of Pythagoras.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-19 07:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-19 04:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-19 04:59 am (UTC)That's a gorgeous idea, the Buddha represented only by the signs of his absence...I expect now I'll be wistfully entertaining thoughts of alternate histories where the Greek influence never happened, and such a wonderfully evocative approach to sculptural depiction was allowed to play out its own history. (Rather like imagining possible alternative developments to Western arts if the musical scale or the rules or perspective hadn't become the standard, I suppose...)
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-19 06:09 am (UTC)It's also with the Greeks, and the Byzantine and Eastern churches, that you can find traditions of music and representation that disregard these Western rules of perspective and temperance. I played a piano in Tbilisi last year that had been built by a Georgian musicologist to work in their traditional tunings. He'd never heard of Harry Partch.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-19 06:18 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-19 08:12 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-19 08:51 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-19 08:59 am (UTC)man if you start wearing greek robes i'll follow your example (i'm not going to start it i have enough of a clownish reputation everywhere already, i don't want to provoke just set me private parts free)
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-19 09:35 am (UTC)Greek letter Psi:
Weapon Sai:
Coincidence? Or something more sinister?
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-20 01:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-19 09:36 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-19 09:52 am (UTC)It has been speculated by anthropologists that the Ainu people of northern Japan may have constituted one of the several waves of migration to the Americas during the Pleistocene. Paleontologists have been finding 10,000 year-old skulls (eg: Kennewick Man) lacking Mongoloid features as far as South America.
And then there's that series of explorations in the early 15th century by the Chinese admiral Zheng He and his fleet of hundreds that sailed from China to South-East Asia, India, East Africa and Egypt:
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Zheng-He
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-19 10:34 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-19 11:15 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-19 11:18 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-19 12:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-19 02:28 pm (UTC)Would that make Yoko Mary Magdalene? (Oooaaahhooaaahhh...)
Date: 2004-08-19 02:50 pm (UTC)Calling Elaine Pagels,
W
Re: Would that make Yoko Mary Magdalene? (Oooaaahhooaaahhh...)
Date: 2004-08-19 10:19 pm (UTC)Re: Would that make Yoko Mary Magdalene? (Oooaaahhooaaahhh...)
Date: 2004-08-20 04:53 am (UTC)I love eggs, you see.
Atuk alunda lana,
W
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-19 04:11 pm (UTC)Thank you for this thought. I often forget what man is capable of.
Also, is a return to form regression or finding value in the past? Is it important to know a good thing when we see it, even if we are not its founders? Innovation leads to the future's consideration of the past's value.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-19 05:37 pm (UTC)Perhaps my musings on the distinction between Continuity and Nostalgia might be of meager service to your questions:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/lord_whimsy/14404.html#cutid1
Respectfully,
W
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-19 08:01 pm (UTC)Greek heritage of Japanese culture?
Date: 2004-08-19 08:30 pm (UTC)Off topic but I read in the newspaper the other day that much of the pageantry and iconography, including the five circles logo and the torch race, of the present day Olympics was initiated at the 1936 Olympics, hosted by Adolf Hitler.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-19 09:29 pm (UTC)I secretly love the theremin - the first electrical instrument based on radio waves. It has the ability to create the strangest music, completely void of Italy's Pythagoranesque scales. However, if you have only used one a few times such as myself, it is far easier to create non-sensical tones that sound rather unpleasant, whether your ear is western or not. I think I'm trying to say in a round-a-bout way that artistic orthodoxy isn't entirely bad as long as there is a willingness to explore outside of it if necessary. but that's just me.
hello by the way. my friend kevin (http://www.astroblastro.com) introduced me to your journal and I added you a week or so ago unbeknownst to yourself - or so I thought until i discovered that you added me back. now i feel guilty for never having introduced myself, so i shall do it now: my name is matt, i live in montana. i enjoy reading your journal and i hope you don't mind if i leave incoherent comments for you occasionally.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-19 11:59 pm (UTC)Olympian press
Date: 2004-08-20 01:56 am (UTC)There are few musicians I feel spiritually closer to than the devilishly saintly Harry Partch, whose "Petals Fell in Petaluma" I discovered as a tenderly cynical youth. You could pursue Harry Smith (with his Pythagorean charts), Lou Harrison, Henry Cowell, John Cage, or even Alan Hovhaness, and find Mr. Partch around every bend, a sort of benign Minotaur awaiting tribute or sacrifice.
Has anyone else here ever read Stephen Mitchell's "The Gospel According to Jesus," which is still the best book on Christianity I've ever come across? Not surprisingly, Mr. Mitchell is also an expert on Zen Buddhism.
I was born on the Buddha's birthday (April 8th), so I don't mind quoting him when I can. Here is my parable for the day: When the Buddha was approached by foreigners (possibly Greeks!), they asked him, "Are you a prophet? A god? A madman?"
"I am awake," he answered.
Re: Olympian press
Date: 2004-08-20 02:27 am (UTC)I often imagine finding myself at a cocktail party attended by Jesus, Mohammed and Siddartha Gotama, having to choose whose circle to gravitate towards. It's Siddharta every time. Although he's the closest to what we'd today call a yuppie, he's also the least inclined to be bragging about his dad and his trust fund.
Boku wa girishajin desu.
Date: 2004-08-20 06:47 am (UTC)The similarities between Athenean and Japanese suburbs have struck me as well. The climate is similar, the streets are canopied by a web of overhead eletrical and telephone wires, and the design of houses blurs the distinctions between indoor and outdoor life. There are distinct diferences in the comportment of the the people, however.
Incidentally, the microtonal motifs of Byzantine music, with Islamic influences, survive still in many forms of popular traditional folk Greek music. Looking to the past as a means of breaking free of orthodoxy (as opposed to doing it in search of relevance by association, as in postmodernism) is an interesting method, but keep in mind that beyond the mainstream there exist subcultures with established orthodoxies of their own.
amusing and telling annimation
Date: 2004-08-20 08:07 am (UTC)http://b3ta.com/board/3617422
Tim
http://travelersdiagram.com/
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-20 09:54 pm (UTC)I'm about to take the Hanshin Expressway to Kyoto and Omi Hachiman, and it's interesting to know that my movements will be controlled from a traffic centre laid out, quite deliberately, in the form of a mandala. The Hanshin Expressway is, in a way, a Buddhist freeway; elevated (detached if not enlightened), soundproofed with big barriers, designed for minimal impact on the life around it, as you can read here (http://www.hepc.go.jp/english/pdf/HEPC.pdf).
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-23 08:09 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-21 01:20 pm (UTC)Toss in something like this (http://www.revisedhistory.org/greeks.htm) as well and the thoughts simmer.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-22 05:39 am (UTC)Partch's tuning ideas are very straightforward. There is going to be a nasty compromise no matter what road you take.
Your standard western piano key equal temparament is heavily detuned (a minus) and impure so you can play scales equally bad in any key (actually a plus) and you only deal with 12 notes in a scale (a plus).
You have your ethnic tunings that tend to be very pure interval-wise (+), you can't change to any key, or else it goes more sour than equal tuning (-), you generally only deal with 5 to 7 notes, (+)
Partch did the outside the box option. He had the pure intervals (+), he had the ability to change key and sound good (+), but you have much harder to deal with 43 notes to the octave scqale (-)
-nicholas d. kent
who's parents partied with Partch in the 60s
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-22 07:39 pm (UTC)Re: Partch, I'm listening to this right now:
http://musicmavericks.publicradio.org/features/rafiles/interviews/interview_blackburn_on_partch.rm