I was walking along with kindergarten pupils who were, I supposed, heading to the Ten’noji Zoo. They were lively and were full of expectation, the expectation for something fun. By the overpass to the zoo, they turned left toward the zoo, and I turned right into the Osaka Municipal Museum of Art, where arts related to Taoism were exhibited.
Taoism is a religion that arose in China. The religion explains the road, “tao”, and assumes the perpetual youth and longevity to be an ultimate ideal. It has worshiped Laozi, a philosopher of ancient China, as its founder, and has developed itself by incorporating the ancient Chinese thoughts, beliefs, myths, even the Buddhism, and spinoffed Feng Shui, Horoscope, divination lore, and so on. It still is said to be the basis of the philosophy and the outlook on the world of Chinese people. This exhibition is trying to show that Taoism is deeply rooted in the culture of Japan as well.
I went into the exhibition room, and turned right after seeing three pictures of the three highest-ranked gods of Taoism, to find two strange pictures. The right side picture was a horse. The horse had markings on its back. An ancient Chinese saint saw the markings, and found a pattern in them:
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The left side picture was a turtle. The turtle had markings on its back. Another ancient Chinese sage saw the markings, and found another pattern in them:
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The saint and the sage foresaw a flood or something, and those were the start of the Chinese fortune-telling which employs certain kinds of marks.
Those stories reminded me of the words in the film “The Beautiful Mind.” The movie was about John Nash, who was a genius mathematician who developed paranoid schizophrenia. He later recovered from the illness, and won a Nobel prize. In the recovery process of the disease, he tried to avoid “reading patterns.” If he had been born in ancient China, he might have been able to start his religion. Anyway, some genius people might have an ability to read patterns in something natural.
One scripture, Yusui-Zehnjing, of Feng Shui suggested the importance of pattern reading too. Today, Feng Shui tells you the best place and the best direction to build your house, for example. The first founders of Feng Shui started with collecting pieces of information on the graves of great men, and tried to read patterns in the mountains and rivers around the graves. If the graves had made those men great, you could become great by building your grave after the pattern.
The development of Taoism seems to have been the repeat of pattern reading and “pattern applying.” If you want to export Taoism to a different culture, say Japanese culture, you have to apply your prototype pattern on the different nature and culture, and, it means, you have to read a new pattern there as far as you want to be successful with the new situation. In the later exhibition, you can find so many items with Taoism influence from all over Japan, from temples, from shrines, and even from modern arts. It seems virtually anything in Japan has had Taoism influence somewhat without our noticing that. I just wonder, however, without our noticing it, whether we can say we have Taoism in Japan.
I went out of the museum, and walked through the Ten’noji Park. Mild Autumn sunshine was pouring on the trees there. As some of the leaves have already started changing their colors, the majority of greens were designed with the minorities of reds and yellows. Unluckily, I could read no pattern in them.
