Drawing from their spiritual beliefs

Less is more in elegant display of monks' works

''Two Blind Men Crossing a Log Bridge'' by Hakuin Ekaku (Photos courtesy Museum of Fine Arts)

What is the sound of one hand clapping? Maybe it's the swoosh of a hand wielding an ink-laden brush, dancing over a scroll with broad, impish strokes.

"Zen Mind/Zen Brush: Japanese Ink Paintings From the Gitter-Yelen Collection," a delicious, funny, and surprising exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts, examines the artistry of Hakuin Ekaku, an 18th-century Zen master, and the Japanese monks who followed him.

Zen took hold in Japan in the late 12th century. Early, elegant but fustier Zen calligraphy hangs in the next gallery, in "Brush With Enlightenment: Zen Calligraphy From the Collection of Sylvan Barnet and William Burto." Going from those early Zen works to Hakuin's scrolls is like following up a Japanese tea ceremony with a really good microbrewed beer.

At Zen's height in the 14th and 15th centuries, Zen monasteries were the darlings of the Japanese military aristocracy, which patronized the artist/monks and made them into a cultural elite. But the emphasis on Zen's cultural aspects rather than its spiritual practices ultimately paved the way for a spiritual malaise. A new set of rulers turned to Confucianism for legitimacy, and Zen lost its zing.

Enter Hakuin, the abbot of Shoin-ji, an impoverished rural temple. From curator Anne Nishimura Morse's description in the exhibit's brochure, Hakuin sounds like the archetypal Zen master: tough, provocative, and wry. She quotes Hakuin on the subject of other teachers who were content to teach their students with stories from the past. They were, he said "an incorrigible pack of skin-headed mules." Hakuin coined the koan about one hand clapping.

He was a legendary teacher, and broad-minded. He wanted to make Zen accessible to everyone, and he was more interested in spiritual awakening than cultural cachet.

As a young monk, Hakuin picked up the calligraphy brush and attempted to copy the styles of earlier calligraphers. Then he realized that spiritual attainment was more important than technical expertise, and he burned all his work in a cemetery. He didn't begin making art again until he was in his 50s, and his best work came in his 70s and 80s.

His goal was to express his inner self, or the Buddha within. His brushstrokes are masterful, but not careful; his calligraphy is rakishly uneven. Look at "Virtue," a scroll dominated by the massive character for that quality. He used day-old ink, which imbued his giant strokes with a dark spaciousness; they seem to breathe. Over the dominant character, a homily about virtue reading from right to left seems to shrivel as it moves from its bold beginning to its nearly dribbled end.

Hakuin produced many scrolls, creating pictures that would appeal to a broad audience and lauding students for grasping koans (one here, "Dragon Staff and Fly Whisk," has the two items, rendered in strong, simple strokes, curled around each other). "Two Blind Men Crossing a Log Bridge" looks stunningly contemporary: The bridge is a simple, watery gray stroke across the long scroll. In the distance, Hakuin sketched the bare outlines of a ravine, just enough to locate the scene near his own temple, a way of making the image more relevant to the locals. The two men, sharp-limbed as insects, feel their way across the bridge, with one man on all fours. The work can be seen as a metaphor for the unenlightened groping their way toward understanding.

The virtuosity and spontaneity of Hakuin's gestures recall Abstract Expressionism, as does, in a way, his intention to express his inner self. The works in this show come from the collection of Kurt Gitter and Alice Yelen. Gitter started collecting Zen calligraphy in the 1960s when he was stationed with the Air Force in Japan; it reminded him of the work of de Kooning, Motherwell, and Pollock, Morse says in her brochure. Gitter and Yelen have the largest collection of Zen artwork outside Japan, according to Morse.

The expressive force of much of these works is matched by their playfulness. The monk Sengai Gibon was not a follower of Hakuin's, but he had a similar desire to bring Zen to the people; his early 19th-century ink drawing "Hotei Wakes From a Nap" shows the plump god of happiness stretching, each arm neatly rendered in one or two strokes.

The exhibit continues to the early 20th century and the work of Nakahara Nantenbo, another stern teacher, who represented the sixth generation of Zen masters following Hakuin's spiritual lineage. His name means "staff of nandina wood," and like many Zen masters, Nantenbo was known for striking monks with his staff as they meditated, either to wake them up if they'd drifted off or to facilitate their spiritual awakening.

"Nanten's Staff" is a gorgeous scroll, a single stroke of black ink that starts with a startling splatter at the top and proceeds boldly downward. He took a lighter hand in "Procession of Monks," depicting an undulating line of them, simply drawn in black jackets with dots for eyes and circles for noses, as they go off to collect alms.

One of his disciples, Deiryu Kutsu, produced "Portrait of Nantenbo," rendering the master as a grim, scowling fellow. He's only slightly dourer than Hakuin's depiction of Bodhidharma, the Indian monk who brought Zen to China and is considered the founder of Zen Buddhism - a devout man drawn with a few full, simple strokes. Like all the figures here, drawn with such clean economy, there's nothing heavy about these teachers despite their dark expressions; rather, the portraits convey clarity.

Just outside "Zen Mind/ Zen Brush" and "Brush With Enlightenment" hangs another portrait of Bodhidharma, Takashi Murakami's 2007 painting "In the Heart's Eye, a Universe." It's a stellar coda after the bracing, modern-seeming drawings in "Zen Mind/Zen Brush."

Murakami's Bodhidharma quotes 18th-century Zen styles sparked by Hakuin - strong, full of personality, tart, verging on comic. It also nods to Andy Warhol, with a pale, pastel camouflage pattern in the background, and to digital art, with passages of color dispersing in pixels. Hakuin's tradition of awakening through art continues.