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Have you watched a Zen painting closely?

There are a few things you will be surprised to see. Human figures are very small, so small that if you don’t look minutely you will miss them.

Trees are big, mountains are big, the sun and moon, rivers and waterfalls are big, but human beings are very small. In the Western painting the human being is very big; he covers the whole canvas.

Now this is not right, this is not proportionate, this is not true. The human being covering the whole canvas is very egoistic – but the painter is egoistic.

The Zen master is right: man is only a tiny part in this great universe. The mountains are big and the waterfalls are big and the trees are big and the stars and the moon and the sun – and where is man?

Just the other day I was looking at a Zen painting. The men were so small, two small figures crossing a bridge, that I would have missed them because tall mountains and trees were covering the whole painting.

But there was a note underneath the painting saying, “Please don’t miss, there are two human figures on the bridge.” Then I had to look very closely – yes, they were there, two human figures, very small, walking hand in hand, passing over the bridge.

This is the right proportion, this is a non-egoistic painting.

In Western paintings you will find the whole canvas covered. In the Zen painting only a small part of the canvas is covered, and the remaining part is empty. It looks like a wastage; if you are going to make such a small painting, why not use a small canvas? Why use such a big canvas which covers the whole wall, and just in the corner make a small painting?

But the Zen people say that’s how things are: “Emptiness is so much all around. The whole sky is empty – how can we leave out the sky? If we leave out the sky the painting will be untrue.”

Now no Western painting has that vision, that we are surrounded by emptiness.

The earth is very small, humanity a very small part of the earth, and infinite emptiness all around. To be true, to be existentially true, the emptiness cannot be left outside; it has to be there. This is a different vision, from a different side. Zen painting is not done in the Western way.

In the Western painting you will find that the painter goes on improving; on one coat of paint there will be another coat of paint and still another coat of paint, and he goes on improving and touching up and doing things.

Zen painters cannot do that, that is impossible. They use a certain kind of paper, rice-paper, on which you can make only one stroke. You cannot correct it, you have to leave it as it is. The paper is so thin that if you try to correct it the whole thing will be lost.

Why is rice-paper being used? So that the mind has nothing to do – the mind is constantly trying to improve, to make things better. It has to be from the heart, a single stroke. If your heart is full of it, it will come right.

But you cannot correct it, correction comes from the mind.

Zen painting is never corrected; if you correct it your correction will always show that you are not a master. It has to come out of your meditativeness, your silence. Your feeling of the moment is spread on the rice-paper.