Scratch Japan, find Ancient Greece

[imomus]

Well, 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.

Comments

[psychicmongoose.livejournal.com]

In a museum I saw some Native American maps that depicted the shape of the journey instead of the shape of the land. A long stretch of river indicated a long travel period, not a long distance. Lewis and Clark couldn't read them at all.