As a boy, Sesshu loved to paint more than anything else. According to a legend, one day his teacher became angry at Sesshu’s lack of concentration on his schoolwork and tied him to a tree as punishment. Sesshu wept bitterly – and as his tears fell to the ground his big toe quietly started rearranging them, brushing them around with a few careful strokes. With his tears, Sesshu’s toe painted rats in the dirt. How lifelike they look, the boy thought, and he smiled. But wait – did something move? Suddenly the rats were alive, and they hurried to gnaw through the ropes that held Sesshu prisoner. He was free!
Many legends such as this one have grown up around Sesshu, a master of the Japanese ink painting known as sumi-e, where sumi means ink, and e means picture...
Published
in Learning Through History,
March/April 2006
Note
to Magazine Editors: A PDF file of the complete article is available on
request.
All text and
images on this site are
Copyright © 2007 by Julie
Falkner, unless
otherwise noted.
All rights reserved. Unauthorized
duplication prohibited.
Last updated in March 2007.