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The Ram Buddha: acting Dauntlessly in Wai Pongyu’s work

Paul Serfaty, Spring, 2015

Wai Pongyu is not one to exploit the commercial success of a formula. No sooner have his
collectors learned their way into his works than he finds new ways to express his artistic
instincts and the growth of his cultural experience.

Considering Wai’s work has been substantially non-representational, it initially comes as a

surprise to see images of the Buddha emerge as part of his artistic language.

The earliest of these new works

present images in which Wai’s line,
slight though it is, seems to carve
from stone the form and substance
of an aged Buddha, bitten by
experience and carrying within
himself the psychology of the
worlds he has traversed. Even the
spiritual violence expressed
through physical aggression and the
destruction of the Bamiyan
standing Buddhas – carved from
the living rock in what is now
Afghanistan and blown up by the
Taliban - seems to find expression
in the jagged surface of Wai’s line
and the rhythmic but discontinuous
form of the robes of the Buddha.

If the outer forms seem chiselled

and damaged by time, the clouded
outlook of the features of the
Buddha in this and many of the
succeeding images seems to
express the countervailing
emotions the Buddha has gone
through in attaining Nirvana. The
lips lose their rhythmic perfection.
The eyes are clouded with pain or doubt – or hardened in a heroic resolve. The very form of
the cheeks is twisted by adversity.

Yet the message that endurance, search for truth and faith are in fact transcendent, remains.

So though these new works are on the surface representational, if seen from a different
perspective – that of the Song painting tradition for example - they are not about
representation of the object, nor about portraying Buddha or Buddhist iconography, so much
as about expression of the spirit behind the object.

Wars and conflict have recently intensified globally. The throwing down and destruction by
hand and hammer of 9thcentury BC Assyrian statues in Mosul, Iraq by ISIL reinforces the
sense of art and creativity under fundamental attack. As Chinese literati in ancient times
retreated into the landscape, physically and metaphorically, so now thoughtful artists may
find solace in things spiritual and metaphysical. For an artist such as Wai Pongyu, whose past
work has successfully expressed both natural order and harmonious chaos, and whose
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previous ‘Line’ drawings have included transformations in Chinese calligraphy of Buddhist

sutras, a Buddhist vehicle particularly well suits his search for understanding and truth-telling.

The image that attracted him as the

foundation of his latest work is a sculpture
of a standing Gandharan Buddha, in schist,
dating from the 1st to 2nd century CE,
currently in the Tokyo National Museum.

Hailing as it does from a relatively early

stage in the development of Buddhism,
created at the confluence of Greek
influence exerted by the heirs of Alexander
the Great and the impetus of early Indian
Buddhism, it possesses a vigour and
directness - as well as combining aspects
of Eastern and Western cultures in its form
and iconography - that align it with the
situation of a Hong Kong artist; and Hong
Kong, like Gandhara, sits athwart a major
trade route between East and West.

A number of triggers may have crystallised

this sense of alignment, caught by the
artist’s instinct: visits to Japan and
exposure to the serenity of its temples; the
contrasting power of the Japanese temple
guardians; the political energies flowing
through Hong Kong in late 2014’s Occupy
Central movement and the questioning of
material versus spiritual values thrown into
sharp relief by the highly charged public protests; as well as continued global tensions
between peoples, religions and classes that resulted, in Paris recently and elsewhere, in the
assassination of creative spirits.

All these threads and tensions are brought together through the spiritual expressiveness of this
carved image. This two thousand year old work conveys serenity and power. Experience and
renunciation. Order and reserved strength. Virility and godliness. Its external appearance calls
to mind the rhythmic lines of Wai Pongyu’s early work: the folds of the robe, the waves in the
hair and usnisa, convey a sense of order, rhythm and of a natural peaceful presence. Its
internal, metaphysical qualities correspond to the unification within one space of all the
experiences that Sakymuni needed to have seen and passed through in order to become
Buddha. The ability to discern harmony even in contradiction would find its clearest
expression in Zen Buddhism in China and Japan from the 6th century onwards: awareness of
the world necessitates awareness of its contradictions. Wai’s act of incorporating a Buddha’s
previous experiences into an artwork based on a traditional Buddha image is consistent with
the early view of Buddhist thinkers that:

“Buddha’s experience of awakening allowed him to attain ‘threefold knowledge’

(trividya): the ability to remember his own previous lives, the ability to see others
throughout the Universe dying and being reborn according to their karma, and the
certain knowledge that he had succeeded in bringing rebirth to an end.”1

1 Jan Nattier, in Buddhist Eschatology, p.161, The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology Jerry L. Walls (Ed.) Oxford
University Press, December 2007
2 Charlie Hebdo, a Paris-based satirical magazine, suffered the assassination of various cartoonists and staff in

early 2015 as a result of religious frictions with Muslim extremists; the magazine was and is primarily noted for its
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The Buddha is not just one who has escaped from attachment to the world, but one who also
carries within himself the memory of his own history, of the knowledge and experience of
cruelty, suffering, cheating, exploitation, and all the mud that clings to man in his progress.
And yet, as Zen Buddhism teaches in the Chinese and Japanese tradition, the lotus emerges
from the mud. The Buddha cannot but carry within him the transcended realities of his own
experience. What the Alexandrian Greek poet CP Cavafy would have called his many Ithacas
– the ports one called at on the journey to Ithaca that made one what one ultimately becomes.

This journey is what makes it legitimate to portray the Buddha in company with the darker
side of life. Classical sculptural images of the Buddha from Thailand to Sri Lanka and from
Vietnam to Japan and Korea emphasise the purity, the harmony, the cleanness that reflects the
detachment from earthly pain that the Buddha attains. But that pain was real, for though the
underlying principle of Buddhism is to abandon worldly attachment, in order to be freed of a
sense of loss that leads to pain, the cycle of rebirth must still be traversed to attain Nirvana.

So, in Wai Pongyu’s vision of the

Buddha (which is not that of a
Buddhist, nor conceived with a view to
gain merit by its contemplation),
realities intrude and histories recur and
are unashamedly expressed: in the
strength and stoniness of Wai’s line,
ragged and superficially disconnected
as it may be; in the distortions and
imbalances sullying the face of the
Buddha, as if the bitter experiences
traversed in attaining Nirvana having
themselves been embraced, remained
real; and in the intrusion into the
iconography of the mudras of various
physical and symbolical realities drawn
from the modern world.

These realities and symbols include the

cruelties of attacks across faiths, to
which Wai Pongyu responds by
adorning the Buddha’s hands with
instruments that reflect modern ways.
Especially the pencil or brush, which
serves as a modern equivalent to the
medicine jar (which Japanese Buddhism
places in Yakushi’s left hand), to cure
the ills of ignorance (depicted in the blood-dripping ‘Charlie’ text in the Buddha’s right hand)
and to help raise understanding. In his Dauntlessly - Charlie Buddha 1, many conflicting
threads of life are drawn together. In particular, the artist seems to ask, how should a society
that seeks progress through dialectical exchange and truth through the willingness to be
questioned, deal with a violent response to this process? Such a response to dialectics sets up
pride, righteousness and a conviction of one’s own closeness to God as the basis for
converting a small wickedness - the cruelty of satirical language and drawing – into a far a
greater wickedness - the destruction of families and lives, and an attack on creative
expression. It is the opposite of the ‘letting go’ called for by the Buddha. Wai’s answer seems
to be, one fights ignorance by dauntlessly seeking truth, honestly questioning, and looking
full-face at one’s false attachments through art and creative expression, in whatever way may
be necessary.
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True, one cannot say ‘Charlie Hebdo’2 represents

the search for Buddhist enlightenment – the idea of
satire is scarcely Buddhist being arguably steeped
in one of Buddhism’s ‘three poisons’, that of
aversion -– but one can see, in the image created by
Wai Pongyu, an heroic quality of resistance to
sadness and hatred that is inspiring. That all these
hatreds remain part of the earth reinforces the need
to absorb and pass through them, to experience and
to let go, to acknowledge but not to despair. In the
Buddhist worldview of the cycle of life, the world
experiences destruction by fire, water and wind that
destroy different levels, even of heaven. That this
recurs demonstrates that there always remains a
residue of evil despite the Buddha’s achievement of
Nirvana; also it implies the perpetual existence of
both good and bad acts and thoughts. So the
Buddha embraces them all, absorbs them through
understanding, passes through; can hold the good
and bad in his hands and transform himself despite
them. That is his strength and example.

Wai includes in this sphere of inspiration Dauntlessly - Chalk Girl, (detail above). This
drawing references the detention of a 14 year-old Hong Kong girl accused of drawing a chalk
flower on the ‘Lennon Wall’ during the Occupy Central protests, and reflects his admiration
for the innocent pursuit of truth, expressed in the child’s natural inclination to draw a flower,
and her dauntlessness in the face of a very heavy-handed police response to this act, which
was essentially trivial at the level of physical damage, but symbolically highly charged to the
forces of order, drawing a battery of 14 police and an attempt to lock the girl up for weeks.

The young girl may have been innocent, but that is not true of man and the natural world.
Temptations remain. One non-
traditional feature of Dauntlessly:
Charlie Buddha 2, are Bhudda’s
horns (see detail drawing of the
head at left), for all the world like
Pan or even the devil in certain
incarnations. This reminds us of the
fight between Apollo and Dionysus
in classical Greek thinking, and the
dangerous passions that flow from
each of them – passions of the
senses from Dionysos and of the
mind from Apollo. This does not
detract from so much as reinforce
the core message: to truly draw
together and harmonise our world, all parts must be recognised, even the intellectually
captivating parts (a potentially dangerous attachment), or the wicked parts or those which
induce wickedness if left uncontrolled. These horns, with their natural, sensual even sexual
connotations reflect the world of temptations that faced the Buddha.

2 Charlie Hebdo, a Paris-based satirical magazine, suffered the assassination of various cartoonists and staff in
early 2015 as a result of religious frictions with Muslim extremists; the magazine was and is primarily noted for its
strong anti-clericalism and opposition to the Catholic Church.
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And indeed Dauntlessly - Charlie Buddha 3 builds out those characteristics of the real world
so far that the presentation of the idea of a Buddha is almost overridden by the physical and
sensual reality of the body of this particular ‘Buddha’. Choosing to draw it not just in pen but
with charcoal on silk enabled (or encouraged) the artist to convey a greater sense of drama, of
physical reality. Diverging further from the broadly frontal treatment of his previous
depictions of the Buddha - which tended to give weight to the intellectual and spiritual
qualities of the subject, he adds an affecting sense of combined power and anguish, achieved
through a striking contrapposto. This is emphasised by the line of the abdominal muscles and
the turn of the head, not merely twisted away from the frontal perspective, but turned up as if
simultaneously searching for and avoiding contact and besmirchment by the underlying
violent emotions that led to the assassinations at Charlie Hebdo. Not just the posture, nor only
the muscles, but even the distortion of the face, which portrays on its two two sides different
aspects of the Buddha’s experience convey this.

The moon and star motifs carry into the Charlie Hebdo carved slab that rests in the figure’s
right hand. These reference the religious frictions that led to the assassination of various
creative spirits at the Paris-based satirical magazine, especially the bullet hole in the middle of
the Islamic star - perhaps implying an act of intellectual and religious self-mutilation, and
certainly that of a mentality that refuses to ‘let go’ anger at ‘the other’; while the pencil in the
left hand asserts the solidarity of the artist with creative expression and against evil, though in
no wise absolving the cartoonists themselves from the karma that goes with cruelty to others.
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This treatment may jar for those looking for more traditional ways of presenting themes
developed from a Buddhist worldview. But it’s worth remembering, despite our great comfort
with the smooth surfaces, symmetrical features and limited ornament that reinforce the
transhuman aspects of the Buddha in classical bronzes, especially from South Asia, that the
sense of strength and physical, sensual power is fully a part of Buddhist iconography, dating
to even before Gandharan times. As Tanabe sets it out:

"The origin of the image of [the Bhodisattva] Vajrapani should be explained. This
deity is the protector and guide of the Buddha Sakyamuni. His image was modelled
after that of Hercules. (...) The Gandharan Vajrapani was transformed in Central Asia
and China and afterwards transmitted to Japan, where it exerted stylistic influences on
the wrestler-like statues of the Guardian Deities [of Japanese Buddhism] (Nio)."3

We can see this progression in a montage of works from a Greek Hercules, through
Gandharan imagery to Japanese guardian deities.

Wai thus incorporates into his work aspects of the Buddha’s existence that extend beyond the
Buddha’s memories, to include the influence of the protective deities that surround him: for
example, Manjushri who manifests his wisdom, Avalokitsvara his compassion and Vajrapani
his power; or, in the Northern Buddhist tradition, the Four Kings who protect him. Handsome
images of Avalokitsvara from Sri Lanka or of Manjushri from Nepal do not shy away from
similarly direct expressions of human physicality, though they are considerably more elegant
and less muscular in style than Hercules/Kongorikishi (one of the Japanese guardians).

With this approach, Wai carries into the detail of his Buddha works his all-embracing attitude
to the universe that marks his Moment of Truth works, and honours an exchange Huntington
commented on, referencing LR Lancaster’s review of Chinese texts from c. AD222:

“Bodhisattva Sadaprarudita said: ‘It is because of this Nirvana of the Buddha that one
makes an image?’ Dharmodgata replied: ‘It is just as you say, the constitution of the
perfect Buddha’s body is thus, you do not use one thing or even two, but rather tens
of thousands of things, including the practice of the Bodhisattva, and his original
seeking for the Buddha …’” 4

So this artist’s manifestation of Buddha’s ‘tens of thousands’ of different aspects includes his
simultaneous recognition of and imperviousness to evil, reflects the sensual temptations
which Buddha learnt also to resist, of which the penile horns of the Ram speak clearly; and

3Katsumi Tanabe, "Alexander the Great, East-West cultural contacts from Greece to Japan", p23
4Huntington, Origin of the Buddha Image, in Studies in Buddhist Art of South Asia (ed. Narain), Kanak
Publications, Dehli, 1985, p.47, at
http://huntingtonarchive.osu.edu/resources/downloads/jchArticles/5_14%20Origin%20of%20the%20Buddha%20I
mage.pdf, last accessed 27-Feb-15
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his universe includes the stars, one of which shines from within the left horn of Charlie
Buddha 3, a crescent moon hovering nearby. Around the figure’s head, wild hair, no longer
smooth, controlled and orderly, brings to mind more the wildness and menace of the Gorgon,
hinting at an element of snake now apparent in the horns. And the figure’s firm lips are
obscured by a dark blotch, while his eyes, set in strong, firm proud arches retain their half-
closed composure in the contemplation of a disturbing reality.

Wai Pongyu’s previous works have partly traversed this ground between order and chaos. His
exploration of the life of lines, of their orderly, unplanned, natural development through time
and space corresponds to the search for truth through harmony and pattern, reprised in
Dauntlessly – Chalk Girl, though there the lines fold themselves not according to pure nature,
but according to the flower as drawn by the girl, imprinted in Wai’s mind. The folds of the
Gandharan Buddha’s robes provide a similar sense of pattern, order, comfort and natural
growth. The rhythms of the sutras explored in Wai’s Heart Sutra drawings - or rather his
transformations of Chinese ideographic texts of the sutras - project a similar sense of calm.

In his Moments of Truth works, Wai harmonised widely disparate aspects of the physical
universe - large, small; human, mineral; material, immaterial, a harmony fully compatible
with the understanding under Buddhism that each of these forms part of the world. And
through Zen Buddhism we know that opposites require each other - that even good requires
its opposite – if it is to have a comprehensible meaning in the world. In addition to
harmonisation in three physical dimensions, Moments of Truth consciously looked across the
fourth dimension, time, incorporating starlight, galaxies and ancient rocks into the images.

In his Gandharan Buddha and Charlie Buddha works, he similarly harmonises seeming
opposites, but now he incorporates the metaphysical world more expressly into this process,
through Buddhist imagery. Good and evil and the acts and attributes that reflect them are
brought together under the umbrella of the only being who can unite them without being
tarnished by the evil – the Buddha. And by refusing to fix on the Buddha’s post-
enlightenment nature and treat it as perfectly formed in vacuo, but insisting that its history is
part of its reality, Wai maintains this awareness of time.

By stretching his Buddha-based works beyond the narrowly faith-based iconography of

classical Buddhist art, he shows us the world as it is and the difficulty of achieving
Buddhahood. We realise it calls for the utmost care and strength to resist the temptations of
attachment to self, or tribe, or cult, and instead to let go and find Nirvana. Though his form
breaches convention, it does not deny but elucidates the faith and commitment needed to
follow the right path. In viewing these works, we too must abandon something: our
attachment to convention in the presentation of the Buddha – normally a ‘snapshot’ taken
close to the point of his enlightenment,5 but which tells us nothing of the route he traversed to
get there. Nor do the conventional images express the awareness gained by the Buddha
through trividya of the sufferings, death and rebirth of those who have been reborn. In Wai’s
works, we see this awareness clearly.

We might ask whether Wai’s representations may offend a proper treatment of the Buddha’s
image. Then we’d note early Buddhism was likely aniconic and did not use Buddha images as
icons for ritual. Thus to insist that only one style of depiction in bronze or wood, cast or
carved in the Buddha’s presumed likeness can be permitted, while insisting the Buddha’s
experiences may not be portrayed, contradicts the need to abandon attachment, including to
images of Buddha himself, except as an example or teaching aid. As an old text6 clarifies:

5 True, the Jatakas do look at the Buddha’s previous lives, before he became Gotama/ Sakyamuni, but their tales
and associated images do not pretend to portray the Buddha’s post-enlightenment self
6 inscribed pedestal of Buddha Amitābha, dated 746. Grey limestone, Berlin, Museum fur Asiatische Kunst, noted

by Claudia Wenzel in Icons and Aniconic Traditions in India and China, http://journals.ub.uni-
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“As a matter of general principle, while highest truth is devoid of any image, without
images there would be nothing to make visible its [being the] truth; and while highest
principle is devoid of all words, how, without words, would its [being the] principle
be made known?”
Wai agrees and himself sees an elasticity between image and imagination: the closer the
approach to perfection, the less the specific image matters and the ability to imagine or
conceive meaning comes to the fore. It is the role of art to assist this imaginative process. So
Wai would answer ‘No’ to Coomaraswamy’s question: “If we [Westerners] are disturbed by
what we call the “vacancy” of a Buddha's expression, ought we not to bear in mind … it
would have been impertinent to have given him features molded by human curiosity or
passion?” We cannot be elastic, in order to bring people closer to truth, if we are afraid of
impertinence. Instead, he would agree with Thomas Aquinas, quoted by Coomaraswamy in
the same debate, that “the ray of divine revelation is not extinguished by the sensible imagery
wherewith it is veiled.”7 The artist cannot hurt by stretching tradition with his imagination; he
can only assist understanding, provided he is true.

Wai’s Buddha-inspired works truly remind us of the need continually to strive to find
harmony in the Universe, and of the importance of paying as much attention, with individual
responsibility, to the inner as to the outer world in so doing. This effort is important for, as the
Buddha declared to Maitreya in the Larger Sutra of Amida Buddha:

“But after I have departed from this world, my teaching will gradually decline and
people will fall prey to flattery and deceit and commit various evils, resulting in the
recurrence of the five sufferings and the five burnings. As time goes on, their
sufferings will intensify.”8

We must never be complacent, nor believe that the struggle for truth can be permanently won.
If an artist’s aim should be to provoke our thinking and lead our understanding forward, Wai
Pongyu’s latest work helps that effort. For he reminds us the way to Enlightenment is hard
and long and only few will achieve it. So we must cultivate a willingness to be dauntless in
the face of many hard experiences. Many ages and many rebirths are needed to attain
enlightenment. Without dauntlessness, neither the Buddha nor Maitreya would succeed.

All of us - citizens seeking justice, artists seeking truth or Buddhists seeking enlightenment –
should realise that behind the perfection of a Buddha image the journey to success remains
unending. Each of us must remain determined to follow a path suitable to our natures.
Coomaraswamy said of success, justice and perfection in relation to the maths of GH Hardy:

“…he succeeded because he did "what it was his to do, by nature," which is Plato's
type of "justice" and in the Bhagavad Gita [it] is the way that leads to perfection.”9

It should also be said of Wai Pongyu: he expresses his own nature as he searches for
harmony, understanding, justice and perfection; by so doing he brings them closer to us, and
by opening ourselves to the experience of his works, we ourselves may get closer to those
desirable objectives.

heidelberg.de/index.php/transcultural/article/view/1938 , last accessed 24-Feb-15

7 From The Christian and Oriental, or True, Philosophy of Art, lecture at Boston College, 1939; see
http://mx1.philosophiaperennis.com/documents/acoomaraswamy/thechristianandoriental.pdf , last accessed 23-
Feb-15
8 see, e.g. at http://web.mit.edu/stclair/www/shinuglyblog/larger_sutra_2.htm , last accessed 24-Feb-15
9 Coomaraswamy, The Beauty of Mathematics. A review ; Art Bulletin, Vol. XXIII, New York, 1941,

https://archive.org/stream/christianori00coom/christianori00coom_djvu.txt, last accessed 24-Feb-15