Catching a catfish with a gourd
Image:Hyônen zu by Josetsu.jpg|thumb|300px|Catching a catfish with a gourd by Josetsu
Catching a catfish with a gourd is a hanging scroll painting by the 15th-century artist Josetsu. The painting was executed in c. 1415 and is held by Taizō-in, a sub-temple of the Myōshin-ji complex of Zen Buddhist temples in Kyoto. It is one of the earliest suiboku paintings in Japan and was designated as a National Treasure of Japan in 1951. The painting is accompanied by many inscriptions, and may be considered an example of shigajiku.
Josetsu was born and trained as an artist in China but settled in Japan. He was one of the first suiboku painters working in Japan in the Muromachi period.
Description
This painting in ink on paper depicts an old man in ragged clothes holding out a bottle gourd beside a narrow winding stream, with a stand of bamboo in the foreground to the left and mountains rising through mist in the background to the right. The man is apparently attempting to catch a catfish that is swimming past.The work was inspired by a riddle set by Ashikaga Yoshimochi, the fourth shōgun of the Ashikaga shogunate: "How do you catch a catfish with a gourd?" The full scroll measures, with long inscription above the painting recording the shōgun's rhetorical question and also that Josetsu drew an answer, and naming 31 leading Zen monks who each provide a written response to the shōgun's question. The work may have been commissioned for the tangen, the shōgun's private Zen chapel at his new.
Catching a slippery catfish fish with an unsuitable utensil such as a smooth and rounded gourd would be so difficult as to be almost impossible, but illustrates the impossibility of using logical rationalisation to understand Zen. It can be viewed as Zen humour, or as a kōan in an unusual visual form designed to provoke the viewer into new ways of thinking or seeing. It may allude to a Chinese saying, "a catfish climbing a bamboo pole", or a similar Japanese phrase hyōtan de namazu wo osaeru. It may also recall traditional Japanese beliefs that both the gourd and the catfish have magic powers, according to which the gourd is said to be able to control snakes, and the catfish to predict earthquakes.