Text-Image Relationships in Song and Yuan Dynasty Depictions of ‘Reading Sutras by Moonlight and Mending Clothes in the Morning Sun’

Presented by Dr Malcolm McNeill, this lecture explores an understudied subject in 13-14th century Chan (Japanese: Zen) painting and calligraphy: depictions of monks mending clothes in the morning sun and reading sutras by moonlight (Chinese: 朝陽穿破衲，對月了殘經). These paintings were produced as diptychs, or pairs. They are all inscribed with original verses by abbots of Chan monasteries. Each inscription provides a commentary on the activity being undertaken by the monk in the painting below. Today a handful of works depicting this theme survive from the Song and Yuan periods, dispersed between North America and Japan. However, written records of abbots’ recorded sayings (語錄) attest that a plethora of such images were produced in Song and Yuan monastic contexts.

In these paintings we see monks engaged in two activities that formed a regular part of monastic life. In images of Reading Sutras by Moonlight we typically see a solitary elderly monk hunched over a roll of paper or silk in an outdoor space.

Their eyes squint and strain as they peer at the text of a sutra. Accompanying inscriptions speak of near-fatal frustration, losing patience with themselves as they fail to grasp the import of the words of the Buddha. In depictions of ‘Mending Clothes in the Morning Sun’ we see a quotidian moment in the monastic routine as monks tend to the rips and tears in their well-worn robes.

We sometimes find the monk gazing at a needle raised between thumb and forefinger, or see him with a thread clasped between clenched teeth. The verses accompanying Mending Clothes in the Morning Sun speak to moments of sudden illumination, of rupture, and of focused, productive attention.

These inscribed paintings will be considered as sites of Chan teaching. We will examine how the combination and inter-relation of image and text communicated an understanding of what it means not to rely on words in a search for sudden awakening.

Organised as part of the East Asia Research Seminar series.

Image: Anonymous Mending Clothes by Daylight Inscribed by Chijue Daochong 癡絕道冲 (1169-1250), with one seal Before 1244 Hanging scroll, ink on paper, 65 × 28.5 cm Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 2022.97