Ego and Self: A Question for Painting
A saint raises a cross against an enormous apparition. Elsewhere, a robed figure sleeps against a tiger. These images bring me to a question I keep returning to: must we fight what troubles us, or can our relationship to it change?
I use ego here in an everyday sense: the part of us that needs to be important, recognised or right, and feels threatened when its position is challenged. This is a personal inquiry through paintings, rather than an application of Sigmund Freud’s technical model of the mind. Daoism and Zen offer different ways of approaching the question; neither fits neatly into a single Western pair of terms.
The other essays in this series are collected under Daoist Talks.
Our Ego
Some years ago I heard a psychotherapist say in a radio interview that many of the people he met struggled to love themselves. A coach had recently told me something similar. The resemblance made me listen. I took it as a question about our need for reassurance, rather than a diagnosis that could explain everyone’s life.
Consider John, an imagined manager who cannot bear to see a more expensive car than his in the company car park. His car has become a measure of his standing. Or imagine someone trying to answer hurt and humiliation with another expensive purchase. The object promises relief, but the comparison that made it necessary is still waiting outside.
This is what interests me about the ego: the next possession may briefly soothe it without changing the demand. Whole industries know how to appeal to that demand. Beauty standards can work in much the same way, making a person feel inadequate before offering something to buy. I do not think that accumulating more can, by itself, settle the underlying unease.
The Temptation of Saint Anthony
Two European paintings give this question a dramatic form. Dalí’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony dates from 1946. The little figure at the lower left confronts a procession whose scale is almost absurd: a rearing horse and elephants carrying bodies, an obelisk and buildings on impossibly thin legs.[1]
Salvator Rosa treated the same subject in the seventeenth century. His saint lies on the ground and holds up a cross against a towering, skeletal creature. The threat is close and physical. Looking from one painting to the other, I am interested in how temptation acquires a body. The shared subject does not, by itself, establish that Dalí based his painting on Rosa’s.
Salvador Dalí
In Dalí, I read the procession as a display of desire: splendour, possession, sensual attraction and power. Its fragile legs make all that weight seem precarious. The saint is almost naked and tiny beside what approaches him. The more imposing the procession becomes, the less secure it looks.
For the purpose of this essay, those apparitions can stand for pressures we carry within us. That is my way into the picture. What I see first is the posture of resistance: the solitary figure holding something back.
The Painting Attributed to Shi Ke
The ink painting below offers me another posture. A figure rests against a tiger. Robe, body and animal settle into one compact arrangement; the bold brushwork seems to gather them together. The tiger is still a tiger, but no battle is taking place.
The work needs a more careful label than “Shi Ke, tenth century”. Tokyo National Museum catalogues the pair to which it belongs as traditionally attributed to Shi Ke, while dating the surviving paintings to the thirteenth-century Southern Song. Shi Ke himself was a tenth-century painter. The traditional title refers to the second patriarch, but the identity of the depicted figures has also been questioned.[2]
In my reading, the tiger can stand for the ego. What moves me is the possibility of resting beside its strength without either feeding it or trying to destroy it. I am using the animal as a metaphor here, rather than claiming that “tiger equals ego” is the painting’s established historical meaning. Its calm gives the question a different shape from the raised cross.
Daoism
A useful starting point is the Daodejing’s language of simplicity and reduced desire. Chapter 19 joins the image of the uncarved block with a call to lessen self-interest and craving.[3] For me, this suggests loosening a demand imposed on life: that everything should confirm the importance of “me”.
The uncarved block, pu (樸), is an image of simplicity and potential. It does not establish a universal Daoist doctrine of a pure, permanently unchanging self hidden behind a false ego. Daoist texts and later interpreters approach self-cultivation in different ways. I find the movement away from rigid self-assertion more useful here than a fixed division into two inner beings.
Zen requires care too. Its language of Buddha-nature can invite a comparison with a “true self”, but it should not simply be turned into an eternal personal essence. In Dōgen’s discussion of Buddha-nature, impermanence itself is central.[4] That gives me a more open question: what remains possible when I stop insisting that my familiar image of myself must stay intact?
Reflections from the Texts
In the Zhuangzi’s chapter Qiwulun, heaven and earth arise together with “me”, and the myriad things and “I” are spoken of as one.[5] I read this as a challenge to the certainty that I stand apart from everything I encounter. It is a difficult passage, not a short definition of a larger, permanent self.
The image of waves and sea helps me think about this: a wave has a particular form, but it cannot be separated from the water around it. I use that as an analogy, without claiming that every Daoist or Buddhist text makes the same argument.
Constant comparison pulls me in the other direction. Someone will always have more money, more skill or a more admired appearance. When those comparisons decide what I am worth, there is no obvious point at which enough becomes enough. Chang Chung-yuan’s discussion of subject and object has helped me reflect on that habit of standing apart and measuring.[6]
I remain sceptical that ever more regulations can resolve a problem rooted in this demand for status. Rules alone cannot do the inner work for us. Nor do I want to spend a life pursuing goals simply because other people have decided that they matter. That is the practical concern behind these images and readings.
When I return to the ink painting, it is the relaxed weight of the figure that stays with me. The animal has not disappeared. What would it mean to stop making every encounter with it into a fight?
Footnotes
[1] The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium catalogue Dalí’s painting as 1946, oil on canvas. For Rosa’s Florentine context and the Temptations in the Galleria Palatina, see the Uffizi’s account of his work. The comparisons made here are my readings of the pictures. ↩
[2] See Tokyo National Museum’s collection entry and the e-Museum record. The latter discusses possible Buddhist and Daoist figures, including Bukan (Fenggan), rather than treating the traditional patriarch identification as certain. ↩
[3] Daodejing, chapter 19: 見素抱樸，少私寡欲. The passage connects simplicity and the uncarved block with reduced self-interest and desire. The English discussion above is a paraphrase. ↩
[4] See Dōgen’s Buddha Nature discussion in the Soto Zen journal Dharma Eye, no. 25. A contemporary comparative proposal is The Taiji Model of Self II; it is a particular model, rather than a single definition binding on Daoism and Buddhism. ↩
[5] Zhuangzi, Qiwulun (The Adjustment of Controversies): 天地與我並生，而萬物與我為一. The surrounding discussion also questions what it means to call things “one”. ↩
[6] Chang Chung-yuan: Tao, Zen und schöpferische Kraft, Diederichs Gelbe Reihe, Düsseldorf, 1975, p. 71, the edition cited in the original article. The earlier meditation analogy is useful to me as an image of not feeding a thought; it is not a promise that thoughts can simply be made to disappear. ↩
Related articles: Daoist Talks (VI): Principles of Dao in Painting · From Daoism to Zen in Chinese Painting · Dao in Chinese Poetry: Li Bai and the Wild Geese
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