4. The Human Organism Through the Incarnations

At this point, I would like to draw your attention to snapshots of people walking on the street you can find in any illustrated magazine. Snapshots reproduce the immediate outer reality; they show the person as he or she is—most of the time, that isn't very pretty. A snapshot of a bird will look very different from a painting. Now the strange thing is, when you look at a Japanese drawing of birds, you'll see it resembles a snapshot. That is a fact. There is a certain resemblance between Japanese drawings of birds in flight and a snapshot of birds. This resemblance applies even to Japanese drawings of people, because Japanese artists, more so than others, paint what a snapshot reveals—of course, we have to limit our observation to the representation of people walking.