The earliest known example of an enso painting is by the Chinese Zen Master Kyozan (814-890) as recorded in the Keitokudento-roku. The first Zen painting was almost certainly an enso, brushed for a student who needed something concrete to contemplate, a visual expression of enlightenment.
In the Shinjinmei, an early Zen text, the way of buddha is described as “a circle like vast space, lacking nothing, nothing in excess.” In short, an enso defines the Zen state of mind.Įnso can be written in the air, drawn in the dirt, or, most typically, brushed on paper. Right from the beginning of the Buddhist tradition, enlightenment was compared to the “bright full moon” and a “great round mirror.” In the biography of the Prajnaparamita master Nagarjuna, it states that whenever he taught in public, the master would appear as a luminous circle in order to reveal the true form of buddhanature: “Neither large nor small, neither wide nor narrow, neither good nor bad, neither transient nor eternal.” Bodhidharma, the grand patriarch of Zen, was called the “Great Teacher of Circle Enlightenment.” The Sixth Patriarch Huineng was said to have employed the use of ninety-six types of circles in his teachings. Enso, a Japanese word meaning “circular form” and usually translated into English as “Zen circle,” is the symbol supreme of Buddhist enlightenment.
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