Muqi, Six Persimmons, 13th C., 14 x 15”
Among the world’s greatest artistic paintings, one stands out as supremely ineffable in the sense of offering only a simple, bare recognition of seemingly trivial objects: the 13th century Ch’an Buddhist painting of Muqi known as 6 Persimmons. In the following I’ll offer an account of this incomparable work that aims to show in what senses the work is ineffable. My claim will be that the work’s meaning is both ineffable and that the work is about ineffability. The account will be in three parts: first, I’ll attempt to analyze the work formally, that is, to describe its composition and handling of materials; second, I’ll sketch the cultural and philosophical background of the work as an artistic expression of aspects of Ch’an Buddhism, as well as of its roots in Mahayanist philosophy; third, I’ll introduce recent philosophical work on ineffability, in particular significant contributions by Graham Priest, A. W. Moore, and Silvia Jonas, with the aim of showing how Muqi’s manner of composing the picture and handling the ink express core concepts of Buddhism and generate the picture’s heightened effect of ineffability. ... John Rapko
Does the following image also “stand out as supremely ineffable in the sense of offering only a simple, bare recognition of seemingly trivial objects”
My shoe in the dark (probably need to buy a new pair)
If not - please explain why.
Because it’s not famous as “one of the world’s great artistic paintings”?
Because it’s on my floor instead of the treasury of a Zen temple in Kyoto?
Because it’s not “passion congealed into a stupendous calm ” (Arthur Waley)
Because it’s not “kick ass beautiful” (Chris Miller)
My shoe is ineffable - but nobody cares.
Rapko’s query on “ineffability” is a non-starter because, like mainstream academics, he refuses (or cannot) render aesthetic judgment.
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But we can still talk about the painting - and I’d much rather read about one painting than a group of them - especially if I like it .
As usual on this blog , I will write my reaction to the painting before reading the author’s
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The persimmon has meaning in Chinese iconography because it’s a phonetic match with a word for business or personal activity. A bunch of them augurs happy outcomes, prosperity, and success. The number six sounds like the word meaning “flow” - so the wish for everything good is amplified.
That’s the interpretation anyone connected to the internet will immediately discover.
Looking more into the piece, it does feel especially auspicious if we think of these six pieces of fruit as six people. Five of them are lined up like ball players sitting on a bench, and the small fellow beneath is eager to join the team. Currently his way is blocked by a lumbering big guy, but something about the design gives hope that the gap will open further.
Without that eager small guy , the fruits begin to sink, and the piece becomes sad, heavy, unbalanced.
The empty space above now feels ominous, less inviting, while the weight of the big, central dark persimmon is pulling everything down. And note that only its left edge is exactly at the center.
If they make enough room for the little guy to join them, they will become even more unbalanced and further changes will be necessary. But that’s how life is —- always in transition. The only constant is change. Welcome to the Tao.
And welcome to that distinctly Chinese view of success as a collective rather than personal construct.
In this variation, I’ve partially inked in the persimmon on the far left.
How does that change the design?
The un-inked persimmons on each end do seem to uplift the whole group. They are the perfect ones who hold the line together and give it a sense of purpose. Without them, the group has just been gathered at random.
I’ve tried to ink the one on the left in the most un-obtrusive way - but still - the overall piece suffers from the absence of perfection at both ends.
Spiritual perfection is part of this success story.
Here’s I’ve shaved off the top - removing the sense of empty nothingness that invites things to happen.
The little guy will always be an outsider.
So emptiness is not just important,
It’s absolutely necessary.
Hara Zaichu (1750-1837)
This later variation is similar - yet so different.
When everything powerful is gone.
all that remains is the cute and charming.
Really makes me appreciate what Muqi did.
There is so much spirit in the brush strokes of his stems
and so much condensing energy in the shapes of his fruit.
But then Muqi was a Chan Buddhist monk - Zsichu was a professional artist.
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Muqi
Muqi
I’m guessing that the Six Persimmons did not become famous in his lifetime, so Muqi went on to do quite different things.
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The enso (circle) is a more typical visual expression of Chan/Zen practice.
Bsnkei Yotaku, 1622-1693
This is the oldest one I could find..
A fine sense of a buoyant kind of emptiness.
And some great calligraphy.
Furyu Roran, 1724-1805
Here, it’s the heavy circumference rather than the inner hole that gives it so much life.
With the adjoining calligraphy, it’s happy/sad.
Thich Nhat Hanh, 1926-2022
A kind of perfection that annoys me.
Thoth Adan, b. 1969
More perfunctory- as made by a skilled artist rather than a monk
An AI program produced this one for me today.
Do machines have consciousness?
I don’t think so
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It’s hard to find quiet work in recent times unless it’s the minimalism that is perfectly still.
Modern life is way over stimulated.
Here’s a few exceptions:
Mary Hellmann, 1983-86
Has a sense of impending change
that’s being thwarted by that black fence.
Giorgio Morandi, 1956
A mellow puzzle waiting to be solved.
I guess the subject is stillness - or balance - or
the enjoyable mood of satisfaction.
Definitely not about change - like the 6 persimmons
But just as delicious in irs casual perfection.
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Six persimmons maximizes a a certain indomitable energy
while minimizing sensory stimulation.
Kinda like certain pieces of ancient American pottery:
Kayenta, Arizona, 750-950Field Museum, Chicago
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Here's what John Rapko had to say:
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In his first essay, Rapko gives a physical description of the painting: it’s overall dimensions and the arrangement of objects depicted.
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He notes that none of them occludes another except that
there does seem to be some sort of occlusion at the ends between #1 and #2 and between #5 and #6. But the ‘ghosts’ lack of surface color largely dissipates what would other be the firm spatial relation established by occlusion; one cannot straight off tell whether a blank solid is in front of or behind a colored solid when their areas seem to overlap. On the left the sense that the ‘ghost’ is slightly behind #2 is cued by the relatively backward placement of its bottom edge, stem, and especially its sepals. Yet on the right, where the cues and so the placement of the ghostly #6 are similar to the left’s, Muqi has #6’s sepals in front of the colored body of #5! This is the single instance in the painting of occlusion that unambiguously cues the spatial relation between persimmons.
If #6 represents a persimmon, it cannot be in front of #5 because persimmons are not transparent - unless there’s something radically unnatural happening here. Rapko calls #6 “ghostly”. But if there is some kind of supernatural or psychic phenomena , perhaps we should consider this painting as metaphorical or dream-like, where the laws of vision in a three dimensional world do not apply.
In that’s the case, it makes no sense to carefully determine whether the stem of #6 ever so slightly reaches in front of its neighbor. That’s more like a distraction than an insight - and making such distinctions is what looking at paintings - or anything really - is all about.
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Cezanne, Trees, 1885, 12 x 18”
Rapko chose this Cezanne watercolor (from the Barnes Collection) to compare with the Six Persimmons.
As usual, I will discuss it myself before reading his take. Whether we agree about much or not - I am so grateful that he picked such a beautiful example of similar size and materials. And small works on paper like this reproduce so well on computer screens.
The sheet has been divided into three views - each with a very different handling of pictorial space
To the left, the picture plane is held firm by lines radiating out from the lower left corner.
To the right, three verticals step space deep into the distance as they create the receding plane of the earth’s surface.
In the center, a kind of strange, jumbled tunnel is crested by verticals, angles , colors, tones and spirals. It’s quite exciting, even ecstatic.
There’s the thrill of a moment spent being in the woods on a cool, sunny, Spring day. But there’s also the thrill of being in a painting that locks that feeling as hard and tight as the facets of a diamond. There were many different kinds of great landscape painting in 19th C. France. This kind is about how it can feel to be somewhere - rather than replicating a possible retinal image of the place itself.
The wind is blowing, the branches are rustling, the sun is changing - but this moment has yet to vanish.
The fluttering thrill of being alive.
As the rare and deep embodiment of one of the world's great spiritual traditions, the Muki painting is way more important. There is nothing else quite like it.
And unlike the Cezanne, it gives u: emptiness.
Not just the partially empty- the complete empty that is already summoning something to fill it.
Cezanne is already immersed in the modern world of overstimulation that we live in today.
But what is that tradition for if not to enable practitioners to experience the intense awareness of being that’s presented by the Cezanne painting.
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Cezanne, Undergrowth,, 1894, 45 x 32
This piece came to Chicago for a special exhibit in 2022
Note that it also divides the surface into three vertical sections.
It’s even more intense than the piece shown earlier.
That man was on fire.
In my previous post I introduced the difficult thought that Muqi’s painting 6 Persimmons is about ineffability, that is, our pervasive inability—in our perceptions, thoughts, abilities, and orientations—to put something that matters to us into words. I then offered a formal analysis of the painting centered upon the compositional arrangement of the persimmons and their puzzling spatial distribution. Striking features include Muqi’s particularization of each of the persimmons (except for the two ‘ghostly’ ones on either end), his care to avoid occlusion and with it ready indications of the precise spatial relations between and among the fruits, and the astonishingly precise and eventful placement of the sepals on the forward persimmon (#3), a micro-stroke that induces a major re-orientation of the viewer’s implied position. In this post I’ll sketch some of the religious and intellectual background to the painting, and then try to get it into sharper focus with a comparison with Cézanne, a comparison guided by two of Rainer Maria Rilke’s characterization of the seeming metaphysical implications of Cézanne’s later works.
Rapko’s focus on ineffability here does seem to exemplify the parable of the blind men and the elephant. The main thing this philosopher experiences with this painting is that he can’t find words to explain it.
As Badt suggests, it’s easiest to see Cézanne’s procedures and artistic ideologies at work in his watercolors. Consider a minor and incomplete work, ‘Trees’ (1985) at the Barnes Foundation. What carries the sense of ‘obstinate presence’ and of a thing ‘becoming’ a thing? Typically Cézanne began with a light sketch of outlines, then began working from the darkest areas. A stark instance of this is the rendering of the largest and most prominent tree. The major work is in rendering the patches of shadow line the tree’s right edge. Badt, like other writers on Cézanne including Philip Rawson and Patrick Maynard, refer to this basic compositional technique as the creation of ‘shadow path’. This foundational use of the path carries two major senses. First, the path provides a basic order that does not respect the depicted contours of things. The shadowing combines what are both shadows on the objects and shadows cast by objects, and the line between the two is perceptually indiscernible. Further, the shadows will tend to link with other shadows, whether through contiguity or through separated rhyming or resonance. Second, the paths introduce a sense of the temporality of making with the perceptual distinction between relatively dark shadows and areas and relatively light ones. The chronology might be unrecoverable, but the sense of some temporality, some before-and-after is certain. Color is likewise applied sequentially, with blending largely avoided. Highlights are given through unworked areas; hence the overall subdued quality of the work, and one reason for the sense in Cézanne of an unusually close and intimate association of the nearest parts of the things and the material support.
Rather than considering what he can see - Rapko speculates on how the painting was made, as based on an authoritative text. But how can temporality be important if sequence is unknown ? BTW1 - “shadow paths” are found in every painting that has shadows. BTW2v- in watercolor painting, the untouched paper are always the highlights - and the overall results are not always this subdued. They can be quite flashy and spectacular:
Ann Hart, 2026 American Watercolor Society annual exhibition
Now Rilke’s remarks say nothing of the shadow paths, despite their centrality to Cézanne’s poetics, but perhaps we can explicate something of how they contribute to the formation of the sense of his objects’ ‘obstinate presence’ and of the exhibition of ‘things becoming things’ as follows: Cézanne’s use of shadow paths foregrounds the sense of the process of painting as temporal and constructive. Everything in the process seems to unfold so as to dramatize the sense of objects emerging from a broader, as it were trans-particular structuring force. The visibility of the individual marks and the quality of slow progressive build-up simultaneously self-dramatizes the act of making. What is made and what is seen are one, and each occurs through the other. As has been noted countless times, an effect of this is that the world of Cézanne’s paintings and drawings, the made-and-depicted world, seems to exclude the viewer. Cézanne’s world is other. This quality of otherness perhaps is part of what Rilke means by the objects’ ‘obstinate presence’: they seem to subsist through and beyond the limited act of viewing them. The sense of fused drama and self-dramatization likewise could plausibly be part of what Rilke meant with the sense of seeing things becoming things: an object is a product of broader forces, though locked in place by a web of compositional, inter-related forces.
It’s great to experience a “web of compositional, inter-related forces”
. But that is the essential feature of all good paintings.
He still is telling us nothing peculiar or special about Cezanne.
Muqi’s six persimmons are shadowless, which together with the avoidance of occlusion analyzed in my previous post gives them their placelessness, largely unmoored quality even in relation to each other. One might apply Badt’s paraphrase of Rilke to them in one respect: they do seem to exhibit ‘perfect transcendence’ in the sense that they seem to be beyond all webs of physical causality and spatial placement. Muqi limits self-shadowing to the edges of the two ghost persimmons and the lower edge of the most forward piece of fruit, and in all three cases he permits the delimiting stroke to stand revealed, so as to subordinate shadow to brushstroke and translate and subsume the spatial implications of shadow into the determination of contour.
Yes to all of the above.
The six persimmons inhabit a world of spiritual rather than physical casualty.
The Cezanne transports the one into the other.
Cezanne was a nature lover, not a monk.
The comparison with Cézanne can now focus the question: What in Muqi’s piece is the compositional equivalent of Cézanne’s shadow paths? What holds the six persimmons together? Recalling Nāgārjuna’s claims, and Garfield’s explication of them as requiring the recognition of the conventional qua conventional, that is, the conventional in its very conventionality, one is led to the thought it is a convention, namely the classification of, and the habitual act of classifying, persimmons as persimmons that holds the fruits together. The function in Muqi of Cézanne’s procedures is carried not by seeing and shadow paths but by projecting and isolating.
Yikes!
Rapko probably needs to make paintings himself before he will be able to understand how the Six Persimmons holds together visually and not just conceptually.
I don’t doubt that this account seems to explicate the difficult with the irredeemably obscure. In my final blog post, I’ll try to clarify this sense of conventionality in Muqi and then show how it leads readily to the explication of the claim that 6 Persimmons is about ineffability.
Self deprecating humor is so rare in art history texts and it is much appreciated.
Many will probably find my attempts at explanation to be hopelessly obscure as well.
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As it turns out, Part 3 cannot be found online (even though Google AI offers a précis).
Apparently, that essay is all about the philosophy of ineffability.
Personally, I have no problem with saying something about any work of art - even if only to say “I can’t relate” — which is actually an important piece of information if my choices interest you. And unlike anything else I might say - it is unquestionably true.
No art is ineffable as far as I am concerned.
A true, useful, or interesting interpretation, however, is another matter.
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I do agree with the following comment published in the Times:
They (the Six Persimmons) reminded me that the point of all the simplicity, or minimalism, associated with Zen isn’t really to make anything simple. It’s to cut away distractions and reveal just how complex and unfathomable reality actually is….Will Heinrich
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