"Japanese Zen Buddhism and the Impossible Painting examines the emphasis in Zen Buddhist thought and practice on the illusoriness of the phenomenal world, a mistrust of pictorial representation that raises a quandary for the study Zen art. No work epitomizes this quandary more than The Gourd and the Catfish by the Zen monk-painter Josetsu. Painted around the year 1413 for the warrior-ruler of Japan at the time, the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimochi, it was installed in the shogun's private chapel along with a collection of more than thirty witty poetic responses by Kyoto's leading Zen monks. In this book, Yukio Lippit conducts a subtle investigation of the painting's subject matter, its innovative technique, how it was displayed, and the many literary and artistic responses it inspired. He explores the ways in which this artwork mobilizes new modes of artistic representation to pictorialize the nonsensical nature of Zen koans and, by extension, the relationship of such paintings to the religious, political, and artistic contexts at the center of medieval Japanese culture."--Publisher.