Duli Xingyi's 獨立性易 Calligraphy at Worcester Art Museum

I have been to Worcester Art Museum before but never noticed they have a piece of calligraphy by the Obaku monk Duli Xingyi (1596-1672). Duli was the contemporary of Yinyuan Longqi 隱元隆琦 but never received Yinyuan's Dharma Transmission. The painting was done by Unkoku Toeki 雲谷等益 (1591-1644).

http://www.worcesterart.org/collection/Japanese/1983.32.html

OBAKU DOKURYU (Calligrapher)

Japanese, 1596-1672

Painting traditionally attributed to Unkoku Toeki, 1591-1644

Daruma

Signature: Shoeki Dokuryu shi Haidai

Seals: (upper) Dokuryu, (lower) Tengai Ichikanjin

Alexander H. Bullock Fund

1983.32

Copyright Notice

This painting of Daruma (Bodhidharma), the Indian monk who traveled from India to China in the sixth century and founded Zen Buddhism, has a traditional attribution to Unkoku Toeki on the basis of interpolated seals. The calligraphy is of greater interest than the portrait, with which it shares a highly simplified style.

Dokuryu (Chinese: Tai Li) was a Chinese scholar and calligrapher who fled the Manchu conquest of his homeland and arrived in Japan in 1653. He took the name Dokuryu when he became a monk under Ingen, the Chinese founder of Mampukuji, the Obaku Zen temple near Kyoto. The Obaku sect was influential in the spread of contemporary Chinese culture in Japan during the Edo period (1600-1868).

Dokuryu's cursive script shares characteristics with his Chinese contemporaries in the late Ming period and has a freedom and rhythm entirely its own, distinct from the calligraphic style of other Obaku Zen monk-calligraphers. The fluid brushwork seen here, with its contrast of wet and dry, light and dark ink, captures the typically irreverent Zen spirit of the inscription, which calls the subject (Daruma) "the old clot."