Zen Master / Bodhidharma Painting

Chân Như (Zen artist Le Manh Hung) came to Zen painting as a predestined relationship. Graduating from University of Industrial Fine Art, Hanoi, Vietnam, he became a lecturer in fine arts at the Fine Arts School (Ministry of Construction of Vietnam). Incidentally, he was assigned to develop teaching curriculum on Vietnamese Buddha statues. The young man Le Manh Hung explored to go to big and small temples and pagodas in Hanoi whenever he could. He began to study to gain knowledge on Buddhism, practice qigong, meditation and he found himself “falling in love” with meditation ever since. Practicing meditation, the artist not only saw his mind becoming calm, still and comfortable, but also had been able to sense changes of life in such a subtle and marvelous way that he had not been able to "enlighten" before. Suddenly, he found that the realistic art that he had been pursuing for 20 years to convey vivid images of his Vietnam's homeland like sunshine, wind, summer showers, yellow rice fields has been no longer satisfying his passion. Taking the still mind to listen and feel the slightest touches of life, he began to explore and develop his own line of Buddhism Zen painting. Initially, he also tried using brush to paint, but gradually, the Zen artist realized that those tools could not convey his feelings on to canvases while he’s being in the status of meditation. Only the feeling of flesh could really catch up with the feelings then. He uses his ten fingers to color to paint, to let images be able to be one with his feelings in meditation status.