Asian Calligraphy

In what follows, I'll speak about Chinese calligraphy for both simplicity and a reflection of historical development as Chinese language migrated to both Korea and Japan.  It wasn't until the 5th or 6th century A.D. that important documents in Japan began to be written in Japanese, which is itself a modified from Chinese to reflect Japanese sentence structure and pronunciation.  Continuing, one of my sources added the following details:
"Chinese became the dominant written language form across East Asia from the Tang dynasty (618 - 907) and was practiced in both Korea and Japan, complementing their respective languages. In the case of Japanese language, the Chinese written form, kanji (kan= Chinese, ji = writing), was entirely integrated into the two existing written forms.  Japanese calligraphers will compose their work using purely kanji or sometimes uniting all three forms as in their everyday language.  In Korea, calligraphers will use either Chinese or Koean written forms. " 

In China and Japan calligraphy is the highest of art forms.  I suspect that is also true in Korea, though I don't know that for certain.  One source I consulted speaks of there being four art forms in China that are considered part of a well-lived life: calligraphy, painting, playing a stringed instrument, and the board game Qi.  This is different than what I had recalled, and one knowledgeable friend indicated that the Three Perfections are Calligraphy, Poetry, and Painting.  His comment actually conforms to my understanding.

Chinese painting is all about line in contrast to form.   Calligraphy really forms the basis, the foundation, for Chinese ink and brush painting.  For example, taking the brush's tip and making a line in contrast to lying the brush on it's side to color a larger field.  If you look closely at Chinese landscape painting, while they often will include some field of ink, for the most part they're composed of a multiplicity of line. Skillful use of the brush, learning to control the ink, combined with papers of various qualities, produces a range of painting styles.  Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is sung painting.   Michael Sullivan wrote a wonderful book by the title, the Three Perfections.

Besides these technical matters, calligraphy teaches the body practice that accompanies strong calligraphy.  If you examine some Chinese brush paintings, you will find that the brush strokes contain a strength that's developed from years of calligraphy practice.

Calligraphy is considered the highest art form, even ranking above painting.  For us Westerners, one aspect of calligraphy that's important to grasp is it's about more than writing an alphabet to construct words to write letters.  It's also a form of emotional expression.  In fact, the Chinese characters are not analogous to our alphabet.  In China, the thousands of various characters that it contains are actually pictographs and combinations of pictographs make up a word or phrase.

Typically, you'll come across discussions of there being five different styles of writing Chinese calligraphy: seal script, clerical script, cursive script, semi-cursive script, and regular script.  That is, there are five different ways of writing the same pictographs.  My personal bias is for the cursive script and my cursive script tends to be much looser than that shown in the link for cursive script above.

As for my calligraphy, I've studied with both Japanese an Chinese artists, and I just blend all that together not worrying about separating the Japanese from the Chinese.  One reason I'm not so concerned about mixing them up is because my interest lies in practicing writing the phrases as a way to develop stronger brush strokes as part of a mindfulness practice.  I've often been heard saying that "calligraphy doesn't lie."  What I mean by that is that while I'm pretty skilled at deceiving myself about how I'm doing overall, calligraphy always produces work that is a perfect mirror of how I'm really doing.