The image of rhetoric I have in mind is as the above.

One day, a nun named Wujinchang asked the Sixth Zen Patriarch Huineng: “I’ve been studying the Nirvana Sutra for years and years, and there are still some passages that I don’t quite understand. Do you think you could explain them to me?” Patriarch Huineng replied: “I am sorry, but I can’t read. If you can read the passages out for me, I’ll see if I can help you understand them.” Wujinchang surprisingly said: “If you can’t even read the words, how can you understand the truth behind them? Patriarch Huineng replied: “The truth and words are not the same things. The truth can be compared to the moon. And words can be compared to a finger. I can use my finger to point out the moon, but my finger is not the moon.” Language is merely a tool for pointing out the truth, one way to help us attain enlightenment. To mistake words for the truth is almost as ridiculous as mistaking a finger for the moon.***

Rhetoric is a way to approach the truth. It is like using a finger to point at the moon. A person who wants to see the moon should not only focus on the finger. The moon is not the finger. He has to follow the direction of the finger in order to see the moon. Rhetoric is not the truth. A person could approach the truth by the favor of rhetoric. A finger is the bridge between the moon and the person who wants to watch the moon. Rhetoric is the tool in a text or in a language for the author to point out the truth for the audience.

The way for pointing out the truth makes rhetoric contain communication between the author and the audience. The forms of communication can be verbal or non-verbal. Verbal communication involves speaking with languages. Non-verbal communication involves gestures, written words, and others which are not included in languages.

Just as a person uses a finger to point at the moon from different angles in different ways to proof what and where and moon is, an author communicates with his audience in terms of conveying information and persuasion in various ways. Jan Steen’s paintings provide us the angle of how the painter sees rhetoricians communicate with their audiences.

Jan Steen.Rhetoricians at a Window.c.1662-1666.Oil on canvas, 74 x 59 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, USA.

In Rhetoricians at a Window, the rhetoricians are not in an enclosed environment, but out in the open. The viewer is at street level, and the rhetoricians are leaning out toward the viewer. During the 1660s in the Netherlands, the rhetoricians played a large part in popular entertainment. They were members of amateur dramatic and literary societies. In this painting, six figures are near the window. Among them, there is a robust man closely attending to a text, as if he needed light to make out the dark characters. Some people in a darkened background are representative of the sinister side of rhetoric. Someone with a gesture of delight is smiling. The figures are framed inside the window, where opens out on to something larger. The painter exhibits the social nature of rhetoric. There are rhetoricians at a window. A solitary rhetorician would be an oddity. In the many paintings of rhetoricians that Steen produced, rhetoricians are all in group. Like in The Rhetoricians – In liefde vrij (free in love), he depicts chambers of rhetoric, the lively societies where artisans, traders, academics and artists met to organize various literary and theatrical activities. The painter portrays himself in the painting as a highly amused spectator among the audience. The speaker of the society is reading a text. In the mid-seventeenth century, it was fashionable amongst a certain social class to dismiss rhetoricians as literary dimwits, bickerers and incorrigible revelers. The blazon, the traditional diamond-shaped shield hanging on the wall is the same as the one in Rhetoricians at a Window hanging from the window. It displays an emblem of a particular rederijker group. It carries the motto “In liefde vrij (Free in love)”. As Albert Heppner explains, “The Rederijkers were organized throughout the Netherlands in kamers or chambers, which were in touch with one another and gave joint performances, such as dramatic competitions.” By nature and by occupation in this case, rhetoricians are social creatures.****

Jan Steen.The Rhetoricians–In liefde vrij 1665.Oil Painting.24 by 36 in

*The source of the picture is from Chih-Chung Tsai, translated by Brian Bruya,Zen Speaks(Anchor, 1994), p.21.
**Rhetoricians at a Window and The Rhetoricians-In liefde vrij were painted by Jan Steen(1626-1679)
***Commodities Seven Chance, The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, 19.
****Bruce Krajewski, Traveling with Hermes: Hermeneutics and Rhetoric, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992, p.3.