Sweetcake Enso

Painted Rice Cakes and the Absolute

2011-10-12T04:40:00.000-07:00

Gretchen Targee, Enso, 2011

By Myozan Dennis Keegan

I recently came across an Internet exchange between Zen teachers and students regarding ethics in which the terms of “the Absolute” and “the Relative” figured prominently, with an emphasis placed on the difference between those two apparent realms. I found the exchange interesting in several respects, not least of all for the appearance of these terms themselves. The terms certainly appeared frequently in conjunction with Zen's introduction into American culture in the 50s and 60s. I think their use owed much to the decision by D.T. Suzuki and other popularizers of the period to present a great deal of their understanding about Zen within a framework of ideas and terms borrowed from German Idealism, Romanticism and American Transcendentalism. In any case, over the last thirty years, this language has been used less and less frequently. I think part of the reason for the twilighting of these terms is simply the increased grounding of Zen understanding in concrete Zen practice. The growth in academic circles of a critical stance toward the early popularizers’ ahistorical presentation of Zen has also been a major factor. And certainly the recent increased focus by westerners on the work of Eihei Dogen, founder of the Soto Zen Buddhist tradition, has played a role in furthering this shift in language and understanding. (The influence of this last item is somewhat muddied by the continued influence of German idealism in the interpretation of Dogen’s thought by philosophers of the Kyoto School.)

Perhaps there is no better example of Dogen's thought countering the notion of two distinct realms of reality – Absolute and Relative -- than his talk entitled “Gabyo,” or “Picture of a Rice Cake.” This talk which Dogen gave to his students in 1242 is preserved as a fascicle in his masterwork “Shobogenzo.” In the fascicle, Dogen takes a phrase from a Zen story and -- in a manner typical of his approach -- turns the usual interpretation of the phrase on its head. The phrase, “A painting of a rice cake does not satisfy hunger,” is one that Zen students frequently come across and is usually presented as a caution that the teachings should not be taken for the reality to which they point. It is the same spirit as the counsel not to take the finger pointing to the moon for the moon itself. Dogen himself notes this common understanding in his comments before stating that “this is not the correct transmission of the ancestors teaching." Indeed he says, "There are few who have seen this painting of a rice cake and none of them has thoroughly understood it."

Gretchen Targee, 2011

In Dogen's understanding any apparent gap between a painted rice cake and our idea of a “real” rice cake needs to be closed. As Hee-Jin Kim points out, Dogen's presentation in this fascicle, "is traditionally interpreted primarily from the standpoint of non-duality and equality. It has thus been understood that all beings and things as painted pictures are equal in spiritual status."*

Know that a painted rice-cake is your face after your parents were born, your face before your parents were born... All rice-cakes actualized right now are nothing but a painted rice-cake. If you look for some other kind of painted rice- cake, you will never find it, you will never grasp it.

This understanding speaks directly to such conversations as the Internet exchange among Zen teachers and students mentioned above. Given the Western philosophical resources that were used by the early popularizers of Zen, it's not surprising that a thread (the tathagatagarbha teaching) within the Zen tradition became highlighted in such a way that in many current presentations of Zen the world of things and social relations appear as less real or valuable than some imputed underlying essence or nature, e.g., the so-called absolute is privileged over the so-called relative and the Teaching of the Two Truths (ultimate truth and conventional truth) becomes a “Teaching of the One Truth and the One Falsehood”. This is precisely the kind of thinking that Dogen attempts to correct by helping us see how we “paint” both elements in each of those pairs of dualities.

This traditional interpretation of Dogen’s intent deserves a place in any discussion of ethics in Zen. But I think that an even more radical interpretation of his understanding is possible. What makes Dogen's thinking so much more radical is his focus on the specific, the particular. Each painted rice cake is different, and it is in the very differences among them that they find their similarity and in the fact that they are all painted; they are all the results of this painting activity. I think it is hard to find in the Zen tradition as poetic and as clear a presentation of Nagarjuna's isomorphic rendering of samsara and nirvana. To my mind, Dogen here seems to be moving the relationship of emptiness and form -- and the Two Truths (ultimate and conventional) -- from the realm of metaphysics to the realm of semantics, i.e., from a discussion about the “real” to one about the “true.” Here things are real in their specificity, their particularity, and emptiness is no more real than the form of those things. The “ultimate” does not hide behind or below the “conventional.” It is not some real rice cake devoid of any painting.

Gretchen Targee, 2011

There is not a single activity, just as it is, that is not a picture. Our present endeavor is made possible solely by virtue of a picture.

The ultimate is no less painted than the conventional forms that are immediately available to our experience. Dogen here poetically presents Nagarjuna’s “emptiness of emptiness.”

Life and death, their comings and goings, are all painted pictures painting pictures; supreme enlightenment is indeed a painted picture painting a picture. All the Dharma world and the empty sky there is nothing whatsoever that is not painting a picture a painted picture.

This emptiness does not render things unimportant or without merit or nonexistent, nor is this emptiness some ineffable reality about which we can point but never describe. I believe one can read Dogen here as entertaining the possibility that the ultimate truth is that there is no “ultimate” truth, as rejecting the idea that the truth of a statement must hang on some ultimate nature of reality, on some unpainted rice cake. This is a deeply radical teaching that I believe can be read in Dogen's treatment of painting a rice cake.

Perhaps what I'm suggesting is an overly naturalistic reading of Dogen. But I believe that the intense attention to the particular that Dogen in this fascicle encourages us to undertake constitutes a much-needed corrective to what has appeared too often in Zen as a primary focus on an experience or insight of oneness or a privileging of some absolute. It sometimes seems that every scandal in the Zen world comes with the accessory of some such privileging, some retreat into the “one body” of non-differentiation.

As Dogen says repeatedly, “Nothing is hidden.” The “sweetcake” enso is painted; the “empty” enso is painted. We would all benefit from our attending to our painting and not be distracted by a craving for the unpainted. As he says, "There is no remedy for satisfying hunger other than a painted rice cake.”

* Hee-Jin Kim, Dogen on Meditation and Thinking, p.116.

Gretchen Targee, 2011

Sweetcake Enso Exhibit at the Rochester Zen Center, Friday and Saturday October 14th and 15th

2011-10-11T19:27:00.000-07:00

Terryn Maybeck

The Rochester Zen Center is pleased to present the eighth Sweetcake Enso exhibit, adding five sangha artists. Terryn Maybeck's felted wool ensos bond interlocking fibers in all directions, Gretchen Targee's one-stroke brush painting expands the moment in movement and stillness, Amaury Cruz pays a Zen tribute to Andy Warhol, and James Hatley's and Rosette Schureman's photographs dwell on the passing moments of daily life.

In honor of the teacher student relationship all sales will benefit the Rochester Zen Center.

Please join us for the opening on Friday the 14th from 5:00-9:00, and for viewing on Saturday, October 15th from 1:00-5:00.

Artists in the current Sweetcake Enso exhibit are: Miya Ando, Ross Bleckner, Alison Shin’ei Brown, Nonin Chowaney, Amaury Cruz, Noah Fischer, Todd Gilens, Max Gimblett, James Hatley, Gregg Hill, Theresa Lahaie, Genine Lentine, Ki-chung Eiko Liz Lizee, Terryn Maybeck, Karen Schiff, Tina Soen Schrager, Rosette Schureman, Fran Shalom, Bridget Spaeth, Gretchen Targee, Maria Wallace, Alison Watkins, Timothy Wicks, and Michael Wenger.

Map and Directions

Rosette Schureman

Ungraspable Mind, Deep Time, and the Bodhisattva Precepts

2011-07-29T09:28:00.000-07:00

Kojip Richard Herman, Flowers Bloom, 36x60", 2007

by Taigen Dan Leighton

In his essay “Ungraspable Mind” written in 1241 in his epic Shōbōgenzō “True Dharma Eye Treasury,” the Japanese Sōtō Zen founder Eihei Dōgen (1200-1253) relates an old teaching story about the classic master Deshan (780-865; Jpn.: Tokusan). Deshan had been a self-described expert scholar on the Diamond Sutra, an important Mahayana Buddhist wisdom text. When Deshan heard about Chan/ Zen teachers claiming to point directly at awakened mind beyond words and letters, he marched off to challenge them to debate. Nearing the temple of one such Chan master, Deshan encountered one of those Zen grannies who lived near the temples, and who was selling rice cakes. She asked Deshan about the backpack full of books he carried, and Deshan boasted about his knowledge of the Diamond Sutra. Then the old woman told Deshan that she had heard that the Diamond Sutra said that past mind cannot be grasped, present mind cannot be grasped, and future mind cannot be grasped. She said she would sell Deshan a rice cake if he could say what mind he would take it with. Poor Deshan was speechless. So the old lady left without Deshan getting any rice cakes.*

Kojip Richard Herman, Looking Northwest (Bright Patch of Snow), 72x72", 2011

There are many aspects of this story. Dōgen comments on it in two Shōbōgenzō essays, and is critical of both Deshan and the old lady, suggesting more helpful, illuminating responses they might each have given. The story goes on that after this encounter, when Deshan was struck speechless, Deshan went to the nearby Chan temple and burned all the commentaries he had come to see as worthless, setting an example for anti-intellectual branches of Zen. Dōgen, on the other hand, recommends a non-dualistic, expressive approach to studying scriptures and traditional Zen stories, not based on the boastful approach of accomplishment that Deshan demonstrated. Dōgen sees sutra and koan study not as part of some program of stages of attainment, but as a form of expression and ritual enactment for re-minding of omnipresent Buddha nature, much like Dōgen’s view of zazen itself.

But the main point in this story about Deshan for the purposes of this article is simply the notion of past, future, and present mind as all ungraspable. The past is already gone, no longer here for us; the future is not here yet, merely a potential somewhere out there; and the present is passing by and away very quickly with each word—we cannot get a hold of it. This is all a basic fact of reality. Nevertheless, in our sitting we can experience the fullness of time’s movements, being present here as we witness and enact all passing by in many directions.

Kojip Richard Herman, Untitled, 2008

Mind and reality are both truly inconceivable. Our human perceptions and powers of conceptualization cannot possibly capture the complexity of reality. The inclusive Tendai school of Buddhism, focusing on the Lotus Sutra but also the whole range of skillful bodhisattva practices and teachings, and in which Dōgen was ordained initially before he founded Sōtō Zen, proclaims that in each thought moment there are actually three thousand realms. Our reality is that complex and rich, far beyond definition or explanation. And time itself is illusive, ever fleeting. In the Chinese Huayan school, based on the visionary Avatamsaka Sutra, or Flower Ornament scripture, ten times are depicted, the past, present, and future of the past, of the future, and of the present itself, along with the combination of all nine of those as a tenth. But each of these ten times is also as ungraspable as the Zen granny’s rice cakes were for Deshan.

Kojip Richard Herman, Seven Trees, 48x60",nd.

Some times people have a strong tendency to regret the past, or fear the future, and then seek escape into some imaginary, static, narrow “Be here now.” But time continuously moves, and is fundamentally not confined to some objective, external container where we can find some fixed point in which to settle. Among Dōgen’s various teachings about temporality is his celebrated essay on “Being Time,” in which he encourages study of the complexity and multidimensional aspect of time. But also Dōgen strongly affirms that time is not merely external, but is exactly our existence, including our awareness, activity, and physical presence and posture. Time is our fluid experience itself, as we can see from our sense of some meditation periods whizzing by, while others seem interminable, even though the clock may indicate they are equal.

To fully appreciate Dōgen’s teaching of being time, we must now also incorporate what the contemporary Buddhist scholar and activist Joanna Macy calls Deep Time. To fully engage the presence of all time, or of being time, requires a deeper awareness of the interconnectedness of time. Our sense of the present is deeply informed by the stories we tell about the past, often called “history.” And this awareness also includes the images we may have about the so-called future, including our hopes, fears, and various imaginations, both our own and those in our culture around us. Just as we may look back with gratitude to ancient masters in the past, we may develop respect and relationship with beings of the future. To fully be time, we must reinhabit the fullness of time, all ten times and beyond. So true practice of the reality of temporality is not a matter of some theoretical timelessness, but of time-fullness.

Kojip Richard Herman, Open Space with Distant Escarpment, 60x60", 2011.

Such practice of timefullness and reinhabiting time enriches our present and presence. We can see how our being time is deeply interconnected with all times, just as we are interconnected with all beings in space. Indeed, these considerations of the complexity and richness of deep time enhance the meaning and possibilities of our lives. We can re-member and meet the past and future beings of our selves, and of other beings, right now, and befriend them.

These days this deep time may also be a source of deep sadness. We must face the dire threat to the future of the planet from the irrevocable changes and damage already created to our planet itself in the last twenty and forty years, created through climate disruption and other environmental devastation due to corporate pollution for personal profit, and also from our own reckless human consumption.**

Kojip Richard Herman, After Bruegel, 2007

Consideration of temporality is not just some theoretical, abstract philosophical discussion. Our engagement with being time in deep time has many practical implications for our meditation, and for expressions of meditative awareness in our everyday activities. Because of our interconnectedness through the ten times, we need the guidelines of the bodhisattva precepts. These precepts encourage turning toward Buddha, or awakening; not causing harm, but supporting life and vitality; including in our caring and kindness All being, not just those we like, or with whom we have special familial or tribal links. These precepts are how we acknowledge and respond to the reality and complexity and interactivity of time.

We must not ignore our karma, both our personal and our collective societal karma. We must recognize cause and effect, in all times, and how we are related to those times. Recognizing our particular limitations, including our abilities as well as shortcomings, is how we face reality. Everything in our world is an expression of this web of deep time. Like being time itself, karma is not just some external objective container that we can observe at a distance. We have the ability to respond, and response-ability for being together with all time. This responsibility is the Buddha work we engage when we take on awakening practice. Everything that happens around us is the product of innumerable causes and conditions in the ten times. And everything we do or say has effects in the future, and elsewhere in time. The future is not set, so our activities and awareness always can make a huge difference to the future and the present. With all the difficulties, our engagement of time also allows possibilities. We can recognize the possibility of wholeness, and see how that may be integrated with the particular patterns and difficulties of the times in which we practice. If Deshan was open to his responsibility to all time, he could have refreshed himself with the old woman’s rice cakes in any of those times.

Kojip Richard Herman, Tree in Soft Light, 2009

***

* See Dōgen’s two essays, “Ungraspable Mind,” in Kazuaki Tanahashi, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dogen’s Shobo Genzo (Shambhala, 2010), pp. 191-204.

** See the important book, Bill McKibben, Earth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2010).

Taigen Dan Leighton is a Soto Zen priest and Dharma successor in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki. He was priest ordained and received Dharma transmission from Tenshin Reb Anderson. Taigen is now resident Dharma Teacher for Ancient Dragon Zen Gate in Chicago. He teaches online at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, from where he has a Ph.D., and also teaches at universities in Chicago. Taigen’s forthcoming book is Zen Questions: Zazen, Dogen, and the Spirit of Creative Inquiry, and he is author of Faces of Compassion: Classic Bodhisattva Archetypes and Their Modern Expression and Visions of Awakening Space and Time: Dogen and the Lotus Sutra. He is co-translator and editor of several Zen texts including: Dogen’s Extensive Record; Cultivating the Empty Field: The Silent Illumination of Zen Master Hongzhi; and Dogen’s Pure Standards for the Zen Community; and he has also contributed articles to many other books and journals.

Unsullied and idealized, Kojip Richard Herman's landscape paintings are imbued with pastoral nostalgia that very few contemporary painters are willing to approach. This is largely because as a genre landscape painting has never occupied a time before nationalism, colonialism, and the territorial conflicts over resources that we now understand to have devastated planet Earth. Yet in Kojip's paintings the conventions of landscape painting are dramatically driven towards the sublime, as though our viewing of grasses and leaves, rocks and clouds, could be swept towards the summit of Mount Meru. Where for earlier generations manifest divinity determined a right, contemporary nostalgia is in Kojip Richard Herman's paintings also an expression of care and sublime aspiration for what has been left to us. To view more of Kojip's paintings and to read about his work, please visit his website here.

Kojip Richard Herman, Niagara Escarpment at Georgian Bay, 2007

Sweetcake Enso at Dharma Rain, July 7th-9th!

2011-07-06T05:38:00.000-07:00

Mi, Mystery, acrylic on canvas, 20"x20", 2010

The seventh Sweetcake Enso exhibit opens tomorrow at Dharma Rain in Portland Oregon! Above is Mystery, by Mi. The artist writes:

Purple. It’s a basic and familiar color, yet naturally rare, occurring only in the occasional flower or in the deepening shadows of twilight. I used it in this painting as a jumping off point to examine the way in which our minds identify objects — such as colors — and can be lulled into a sense of complacency when it comes to apparent knowledge. Each square represents a purple, but which one is the true color, the one we mean when we use the word to designate it in the generic sense? A “square” way of thinking — the one favored by the analytical mind — is all sharp edges, certain corners, and clear differences. Yet it leaves the question unanswered — multiple purples proliferate in response. A more subtle approach, that characterized by “circular” thinking, allows for sinuous realities and unity through blending, thus coherency (here represented by the color white) can emerge. This is the zen mind!

Artists in this exhibit are Sanford Biggers, Shin'ei Alison Brown, Noah Fischer, Todd Gilens, Max Gimblett, Howard Kohen Houseknecht, Gregg Hill, Chris Hoge, Sybil Shinju Kavan, Bren Kleinfelder, Theresa Lahaie, Geri P'Arang Larkin, Genine Lentine, Kichung Eiko Liz Lizee, Richard Koken Macken, Mi, Karen Schiff, Tina Soen Schrager, Fran Shalom, Bridget Spaeth, Lesley Strother, Karen Swallow, Maria Wallace, Allison Watkins, and Timothy Wicks.

The exhibit will be held in the Zendo at the corner of SE 25th and Madison, Thursday from 7:00-9:00 pm, Friday from 7:00-9:00 pm, and Saturday from 10:00-4:00.

Endangered Species: An Interview with Todd Gilens

2011-06-10T10:29:00.000-07:00

Todd Gilens, data points for Butterflybus, January through March, 2011, with thanks to Eric Fischer.

Since mid-January four city buses dedicated to threatened wildlife in the San Francisco Bay Area have been making their rounds. The following interview is with Todd Gilens, the artist who made possible the Endangered Species mass transit project. Todd exhibited in the fourth Sweetcake Enso exhibit, at the San Francisco Zen Center.

Catherine Spaeth: You have an ear for making a strong pitch that is taken up with interest, a design sensibility that is much more drawn to community discourses. In your own writings there is an expression of your interest to step outside of the white walls of an art context and out into the context of community. The skill of negotiating with administrations and being able to convey to them the possibilities of something that has not been realized, this is a pretty explicit skill to have. At MTA here in New York it is just not easy to get your voice into those projects.

Todd Gilens: The process of selling an idea is definitely part of the work, to bring people into the idea. They wouldn’t normally encounter this idea in the course of their day, so I am noticing something, some potential, and I’m coming to them and saying, well what would it be like if we look at it this way? I’m giving them that opportunity to really turn their perspective around on something that is a part of their everyday life.

CS: The realization of the project itself is really quite shortlived, I understand there are five buswraps, the San Francisco Garter Snake, the Brown Pelican, the Coho Salmon, the Mission Butterfly, and the Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse, and they have been moving about since mid-January and will be removed soon?

Todd Gilens, Snakebus (photomontage)

TG: Actually four buses were done. The snake bus didn’t get wrapped, it was part of the original plan but there was a funding shortfall and I had to decide, what are the four strongest images? the problem of designing for buses is that they are a very long rectangles and with all of the images but for the pelicans a part of the animal image would be cut off. The snake had this wonderful snaky line that went along the bottom of the bus and up to the top of the windows.If you take a chunk out of the snake it really impedes the sense of animal motion but you can take a chunk out of another animal and your eye completes the image. I was disappointed in some ways because the San Francisco Garter Snake is really beautiful and it also presented the most challenging image.

CS: From the picture on the snake bus it was quite visually dynamic, it wasn’t only the snake it was the sharp spiky grass that was cruising down the street, not softened by the colors of wildflowers or the blue of the ocean, and it had a texture that sprang out from the telephone poles and the whatnots of an urban environment in a really interesting way. I too am now disappointed that the snake didn’t make it.

This is the vulnerability of projects such as this to things such as funding and politics.

Found here.

In New York City the shuttle from Grand Central to Times Square is a huge bit of mass transportation, and the advertising skins are both inside and outside. They have a very short life, because the advertising is so high profile, so massive. Recently this was only to advertise Lady Gaga’s album. It was to arrive in only a few days, the date was planted all over the bus. (It is interesting to note as an aside that this was the same week that the world was to end according to God’s plan, and pamphlets were being handed out only a few feet away.) The life span of those advertising wraps is incredibly short, you are surrounded inside and outside by an outrageous consumerism. In reading the language around it, I discovered they call it “Upmarket graffiti,” that kind of bus wrapping, have you heard that before?

TG: No, there’s another one here though, advertising contractors call it wild wrap, not the conventional wrap placement but pasted here or there. I actually haven’t seen it done, perhaps between the design houses’ profit margins and the transit authority’s review process there is just too much uncertainty. Advertising is a transit subsidy and transit all over the country is running huge deficits, so it’s quite a pickle if you want to take public transit space back from the corporate interests. The question for me is: how do these images contribute to how we imagine ourselves into the world – and what kinds of relationships are then nourished on that.

CS: What is amazing about the term “upmarket graffiti” is the seizing upon street cred, and certainly this notion of the wild comes back full swing – your own work really starts with graffiti, I was looking at your birds in the Philadelphia brewery, the Four Stories Man, the bird shadows in the ground, there is a definite sense of the mark in public space that appears to be a beginning not the beginning, but the departure that brings you to this place, to a stronger interest in engaging with public spaces in order to frame a kind of discourse. These have been, some of them, really quite temporary. The self-portrait deck of cards is another expression of impermanence.

Todd Gilens, Prototype, for more information please visit the artist's website, here.

With regard to the buses it strikes me that the amount of time that it takes to generate the idea and realize it and the amount of time that is actually out there in the world are quite different senses of time.

You make a comment in the article (available here) on the Endangered Species project that you wrote for Antenna: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture about not allowing the buses to become prescriptive, there is something about the temporary nature of these buswraps that you enjoy. This is very much involved with the notion of beauty that you describe as something that holds contradictions but that is also a generative transformer. You write:

Beauty is a powerful force, directed toward stilling, openness and ambiguity. These qualities also describe a relationship to nature at its most essential: wonder, awe, an unsettling, diffident attraction, a feeling that the things in the world exceed our capacity for understanding, knowledge and cognition. Such beauty is able to contain contradictions, to delicately hold together contrarieties without resolution. Beauty is a method that both art and nature wield. It is a generative transformer. Image, symbol, can change minds but not determine them.

What beauty does is not have any claim to an idea but to disperse itself into the world as a variety of provisional experiences, taking in that beauty without any one claim on it. Beauty can’t change minds or determine them, but people will soak it up with all their provisional views and are nonetheless transformed by it.

There is in this project a lovely movement from your own private research towards a pitch moving through a bureaucracy, and then letting loose these beautiful things upon the city with no prescriptive intention but for how they affect people in myriad ways, always from their different perspectives turning to face the environment they are in. That’s a very lovely movement, lovely passages through all these different moments - idea – pitch – letting loose the realization, aspects of an action in the course of its effects.

TG: Yeah it’s a complex process, layered. I also notice and think about a fractal or nested structure in the work, meaning that a relationship at one scale manifests, transformed at another. For example, the images look realistic from a distance but up close are very grainy. At another level there are personal and collective needs; the collective picture is made of all the personal ones but forms it’s own sense and pattern, yet they are the same thing.

Photo courtesy of the artist.

CS: Did it feel rather fluid to you that from these buses you then were able to move to the next project, which is the aquarium?

TG: The aquarium is a new project, I don’t have too much to say at this point because I’m still working out the framework for it, administratively, but from my point of view an urban space is a busy noisy environment; the aquarium is sort of turning that upside down, it’s an underwater world of tunnels, where the fish swim over you, you’re really dealing with the fishes’ world.

Todd Gilens, interior view of the Aquarium of the Bay.

CS: So the opposite of the buswrap, the same tube feeling but…

TG: The bus wraps are reintroducing the species to the people and their habitats that displaced them. This is a borrowing from restoration ecology, bringing things back. The aquarium is a hybrid situation because it is an aquarium, it’s not like people are going into a tunnel into the bay. The fish and their water are brought onto land where people can meet them. I suppose it’s a bit like what the animal-buses are doing: bringing animal experiences, which we have pushed to the margins, closer to ourselves.

CS: Is there overlap between these two projects or was it in the course of doing business that these two different projects occurred simultaneously?

TG: Well once you have a contact of some kind, even if it is only visual or through photography, something more can happen. One of the pivots between the two projects is to look a bit at things from the animals’ points of view. As far as the project origins, there is a member organization called SPUR - the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, and I’m a member, and they do advocacy and research work around urban development issues. They came out in the late ‘50s as housing advocates, but now have a much broader purview. At lunchtime forums they discuss different issues around the city and in 2007 they were discussing transportation, which is where the bus wrap idea got going for me. They organized a visit to the aquarium last fall, a behind the scenes tour. I had never been before and I thought the institution of an aquarium of rather dull-looking but amazing fish – our neighbors - and especially the feeling of being transported to an underwater world, was very potent. I grew up keeping fish in an aquarium and at one point I thought I would become an oceanographer, so that’s how that started, I was in a position to learn these things about the city – not just what humans are doing but the whole bundle.

Todd Gilens, Human Beans, for more information visit the artist's website, here.

CS: In thinking of your work in relation to Buddhist practice I notice that on your website you describe a primordial place before evolution where species and stages haven’t yet arrived, where “language ate at the table of landscape.” For someone who meditates this is not at all difficult to understand as a place without distinction, accessible in that sitting practice. Do you make the connection yourself in your work, the connection with the environment around you and the social spaces that have already sort of fit themselves in and through to the extent of having an underwater tunnel where we can join the fish, is that at all something that you would want to say is supplemented – not generated by but somehow informed by – another part of your life which is your practice as a Buddhist?

TG: Yes, definitely. I think of meditation practice and Buddhist studies and whatever might define a Buddhist lifestyle if you like, and my art practice, as being complementary, almost in the sense of a relationship, as in the other kind of compliment: , “Oh, you’re doing so well!”. My art practice really is about testing out the dynamics of experience. How do things seem real? How do they relate to each other? How do they change? Buddhism has a lot to say on these themes; my work is where I can explore them in my own way, through my own history and opportunities.

CS: Is there anything that you want to say or to add to what we’ve already said?

TG: Yes there are some things I’d like to go back to - one is the timing of the buses. Something that interests me in working outside the studio, out in the social spaces, is the interaction of the work with the environment. But saying it that way is a little misleading because the intervention and the environment together are the work. And so in relation to the end of the project what is meaningful there is that the animals will be let’s say extincted, as a demand for advertising increases. And so I think we can all understand that relationship of commerce overriding environmental concerns as a microcosm of a familiar process.

Todd Gilens, Four Stories Man, for more information visit the artist's website, here.

CS: This is also something that happened with the Four Stories Man, it was your intention that the demolition of the building is being framed by the work and so what you’re saying here is well, it’s nice to wish that we can always have them but the fact is that we can’t and it becomes an almost more political statement to face the end of the work as an important event.

TG: It’s a recognition of transitoriness, but also what that does to our relationship in the unstable present, it provokes a certain kind of attention. And then there are the records, the photographs, which for me have been very important. They are the magical rear-view mirrors, through which we both access, and sense our separation from, what is gone. It’s a remarkable contradiction to consider and the photographs, because they are stable moments, allow us to return again and again to that separation.

Another thing I’d like to expand on is the idea between the work and public space. In the late 70’s I began putting things around and letting everyday life act on them, doing things like transplanting other people’s garbage from one city to another, in gestures they weren’t visible, as invisible as one can imagine, secret tiny shifts in the relationships of humans and landscape. My work goes back and forth between the studio and the rest of the world. I came to understand this poverty of my own process. Working in a derelict, abandoned brewery, which was also being used for the adventures of neighborhood kids, using that as a canvas, was so much richer than anything I had experienced in the isolation of the studio. I began to recognize my own limitations and that I needed this dialogue with the process that is going on around me.

Todd Gilens, Urban Birds, for more information visit the artist's website, here.

CS: It’s a huge jump from working in the private spaces, still, of an abandoned brewery and negotiating with a city transit system. The step you are describing while it felt big at the time has incrementally expanded to the nth degree. I was speaking with another artist recently who was able to address large historical situations as somehow corresponding with his own developmental maturity in time, responding to history in terms of a similar kind of growing expansiveness. You’ve always been interested in nature and the environment, but have you seen some kind of a connection to systemic changes in the world that you felt the need to respond to and there was a happy marriage of skills in accord with these changes?

TG: Like what systemic changes?

CS: For example, in our own lifetime responses to the environment as an issue have changed considerably. I don’t think that mass transportation was considered to be a response to the environment so much as an economic social need, the practical matter of getting workers from one place to another who couldn’t afford cars, in an economy that was dependent on them. The new interest in mass transit as a way to protect the environment would be an example of a shift that is historically finding itself outside of your own agency but nonetheless your skills bleed into that change and interest. That’s one example that I can think of, might there be another instance, where there was a readiness in the world and your skills showed up in that readiness?

Photo courtesy of the artist.

TG: Yes, certainly the problem is to match what one has, one’s abilities and predilections, with the historical conditions. And hopefully also to grow together. This is always a struggle and perhaps at the center for most creative work. The world and my practice is one of bonding, of noticing and responding. And so in Philadelphia in the 1980’s I was noticing the quality of the abandoned factory buildings, which was also the space I was living and working in. I wondered how did we get to this urban landscape full of empty manufacturing places, what is the meaning of these buildings? And couldn’t that meaning be shown at some depth? And so “Urban Birds” came through that process., There was a period of research, a search for an appropriate site, and tracking down the owners – which can be difficult on derelict property. “Urban Birds” also turned out to be a four-year project. Working with the owners on the one building that it finally happened in became a warm up for the San Francisco Transit Authority. When I moved to the Bay Area in 2002, the natural environment was clearly a dominant aspect of the culture, just as the post-manufacturing landscape of Philadelphia had been twenty years before.

CS: One of the things at stake in the difference between the studio practice that you describe as having left behind and what you do now, is that there’s a kind of readiness and responsiveness that inspires you in your environmental situation and that’s what compels your work.

TG: My model or my framework of the process is a dialogue with what’s happening. It’s much more interesting and gratifying to work on the canvas of a municipal transit system than a sheet of fine paper, though paper does have its advantages. Also maybe I’m a bit of a literal person: if I want to say something about buses, I need actual buses to say it with. But I think there’s also a risk of making work that becomes too topical. One of the things I try to reach in the opportunity of art-making is for the work to settle down at a primordial or fundamental level, that a hundred or two hundred years from now, five hundred years from now, will still have resonance. It matters less that the work lasts that long, as that it speaks to those parts of us, the parts that are durable to that degree.

CS: One of the things that prevents the buses from feeling topical though is how they are moving about in lived space, people are looking for them as they go by, there is a twitter feed, “I just saw the Coho Salmon!,” so there is a mobility in actually lived life that is preventing them from hitting you on the head with a political statement, which would be the fear of an overdetermined topical work.

TG: There are other things too that I think of more as the refinements of the project. There’s layers in the projects that have to do with color, for each of the buses there is a dominant color and each of the buses corresponds with each of the four elements; the representation of five classes of animals; and the subtle ways they function in relation to the openings of the bus doors and windows. At this point the project may be too fresh for me to understand any claim to timelessness or timeless beauty, but my intention is to refine it as best I can. And there is this process to notice and to look at layer after layer after layer. Maybe that’s where the public interactions you are speaking of come in. The project is open; it’s mine, but it doesn’t belong to me. It’s made by the people who see it or know of it.

CS: From the beginning of the project to now has there been a new insight that has changed the import of this for you? Your understanding of what it is?

TG: What I can say about that is that it is astonishingly complex to have the buses out there and to realize the difficulties of every day life on the street in terms of our attention. In terms of what we let in and what we keep outside.

A part of the fun is that bus riders and pedestrians are connected to this project by a twitter feed, and photographs are being submitted to the website. Here is a photograph of the Mission Butterfly taken by Anthony Brown, found here.

CS: So the complexity isn’t only a thickening up of meaning it’s equally a loss of meaning, a missing?

TG: I’m not sure where meaning goes. I think resistance, if that’s part of what is going on, is still a patterned process, a meaningful one. A lot of people have worked hard to unpack the experience of every day life, urban life in particular, the complexities of ‘What is public space and how does it function?” That is one of the limits this project is hitting, in the way that a geologist can strike a rock with a hammer to understand it’s qualities.

CS: Using the buses then as a measure of what makes public space, what is public space, is not ascertainable.

TG: There’s much we can’t answer, but we can still get a lot of information. Hitting a wall means we can’t go any further. But that collision provides information and does allow us to go further, or perhaps to transform the question entirely. The problem is to keep both: knowing and not knowing. We are so intent always on utility and solving problems, but there are other possibilities. What is a tiny butterfly or rare mouse to an ecosystem? It seems, almost nothing; but there they are!

Photograph courtesy of the artist.

Sweetcake Enso at Butsugenji, Eugene Oregon, this Saturday June 4th

2011-05-30T10:27:00.000-07:00

Tina Soen Schrager, Impermanence, mixed media: ink, papers, red bark dogwood, copper wire, 26x20"

Coming down from the walls of the San Francisco Zen Center and up on the walls of Butsugenji this Saturday, June 4th, Sweetcake Enso continues its pilgrimage. As the show moves from place to place the intersangha dialogue is also becoming more expansive and clear. From Butsugenji here are two works, each of them drawing upon the sutra as the ground for practice. Above is a mixed media piece by the Butsugenji coordinator of the exhibit, Tina Soen Schrager - the Heart Sutra seems to end at the point of consciousness, making space for a sliver of clear orange color in accord with the divining rod beside it. Chris Hoge's Gardens and Groves, Palaces and Pavilions, refers to Chapter Sixteen of The Lotus Sutra, "The Life Span of the Thus Come One." Expedient means are qualified by impermanence and loss, yet even so the Three Jewels live on.

Come join us for ensos and fresh, home-made donuts at 2190 Garfield from 5:30 to 9:00! Proceeds of sales will benefit the Butsugenji Zendo. At 6:00 local artists will begin to talk about their work on view as an expression of their Buddhist practice.

Chris Hoge, Gardens and Groves, Palaces and Pavilions, photograph on washi paper, 16x20"

Sweetcake Enso at the Garrison Institute

2011-05-14T04:48:00.000-07:00

These works of art are available for purchase and can be seen at the Garrison Institute through August 1st. For more information please contact Catherine Spaeth at catherine.spaeth[at]gmail.com. All proceeds will benefit the artist, the Garrison Institute, and to help to cover the fixed expenses of Sweetcake Enso so that it can continue. If you like this project please consider a donation, known as offering dana, to the right.

Max Gimblett, Moon Enso, sumi ink on Thai Garden smooth paper, 30x22", 2010/11

Across religious traditions the circle has often served as a symbol of unity and spiritual wholeness. Indeed today for some in the spiritual community there is an idealization of evolutionary consciousness, to the extent that absolutely everything from the smallest particle to the furthest reaches of the universe might become as though a single living mind. And yet the circle also serves symbolically as zero, providing a fundamental counterpoint to any such idealized notions of fullness and wholeness. How might the circle continue to be an adequate expression of spiritual life?

Without arriving upon any one answer, Sweetcake Enso is an exhibit that shows the work of Buddhist practitioners who are drawn to the circle as a form. It is in the diversity of expressions and the timeliness of provisional views that the circle reveals aspects of our spiritual conditions.

Sweetcake Enso is named for the tradition of one-stroke brush painting in monastic Japanese Zen Buddhism, in which the Enso symbolizes the meeting of form and formlessness. The spontaneity of one brush stroke is palpably sensed in time. It is both the expression of an individual, to the extent that connoisseurs are able to tell one artist’s Enso from another, and the sense of that individual as composed of fleeting moments, however solid in presentness at each stroke of the brush.

Max Gimblett’s Moon Enso is in this sense a traditional Enso painting. The title, Moon Enso, stems from the practice of categorizing Enso with regard to meaning, and the quality of absorption that the artist would like one to become involved in. Painter and Zen Master Shibiyama explained that an Enso without an accompanying text was like a flat beer, to view it as a pure abstraction was then to miss its true effervescence. Accompanied by words these circles are not as abstract as they appear, and the category of the Sweetcake Enso, of which one might take a bite, is particularly related to everyday life.

Noah Fischer, Untitled Coin, vacuum-formed plastic, copper leaf, 20", 2011

Some of the artists in this exhibit reach for the content of daily life more than others. Noah Fischer’s vacuformed coin enso reflects upon the coin as a sign for sheer emptiness in exchange value, and for a self draped in its purchase, always compounded at once by desire and obsolescence. The word LIBERTY is declarative, but in this form it appears as though hovering in the present from a bygone era.

Gregg Hill, Enso for Thay, paint on steel, 22" diameter x 4", 2010

Gregg Hill’s Enso for Thay is a smashed oil drum. Industrial 55 gallon drums are visible everywhere on the planet, rusty reminders of the global dependence on oil. In Gregg Hill’s work this heavy object is transformed in the shift from the horizontal field of distribution and conflict to the vertical field of painting, losing its uniform weight in gravity to become a lighter erotic object imbued with a sense of loss.

Karen Schiff, Grate Weight, graphite on paper, 80x42", 2006-2011

Karen Schiff’s Grate Weight is a rubbing from a tree grate in the sidewalk – the tree has died and been removed, leaving blank paper encircled at the center. The artist explains that Grate Weight expresses the weight of love, of respectfully tending to the world in its varying conditions.

Arlene Shechet, Site Circling, hand made Abaca paper, 34x34 framed, 1997

Arlene Shechet’s Site Circling is a stencil print – paper is pressed to paper as skin to skin. In Tibetan Buddhism votive stupas are often made to be placed nearby a pilgrimage stupa, a large round structure housing a sacred relic. Clay is pressed into a mold, and this tsa tsa is then pressed to the earth. Stupas are believed to generate a cosmic energy radiating from their centers, like a stone thrown into water. Here the architectural footprint is oriented vertically, depicting the iris of an eye as much as a blueprint plan.

Suzy Sureck, Chance Operation, sumi ink and dye on mylar, 18x18" framed, 2010

Suzy Sureck’s Chance Operations are characterized by a slower openness towards her medium than the traditional Enso painting. The viewer’s absorption in her work is not directed by gesture so much as how pigment takes hold in the process of alchemy. Paper holds the ring of water which in turn receives colored ink, and the artist’s hand leaves the picture, now a field of delicate local incidents that exceed human will.

Ross Bleckner, Four Locations, from the Meditation series, Color spitbite aquatint with chine colle, Somerset white paper, Image size 30" x 22", Paper size 39" x 30", Edition of 50.

Finally, Ross Bleckner’s Four Locations is a print from his Meditation Series. At the center is the trunk of the Bodhi tree, surrounded by radiating leaves. In the ‘80s Ross Bleckner’s work was understood to be ironic, an expression of postmodern simulacra – the copy of a copy for which there is no origin. But painter and critic Peter Halley, who most strongly advocated for this understanding of Bleckner’s work, could in the same breath also write that Bleckner’s paintings are an uplifting response to nuclear energy as the superhuman code to knowledge. Referring to the light in Bleckner’s paintings, Halley wrote: “His work conveys a mood of questioning in the wake of this troubled history, and a realization, relatively novel in Western civilization, that knowledge may be doubt and that doubt may be light – that the reality of disillusionment may also offer the possibility of transcendence.”*

***

* Peter Halley, “Ross Bleckner: Painting at the End of History,” Arts Magazine, Volume 56, No. 9, May, 1982.

Man 0, Fish 1

2011-05-03T10:26:00.000-07:00

By Patricia Mushim Y. Ikeda

Suzy Sureck, Chance Operations: Drawing Series 2010

15"x15", ink, dye and mylar on paper.

“Man zero, fish one,” I said jokingly to my cousin, who is a Zen Buddhist priest. When I called, she had said she couldn’t stay on the phone because she was on her way to the hospital to see a Japanese man who had come to Hawai’i for a vacation. He went deep sea fishing, and had a heart attack while fighting a large fish. I assumed he was resting, or in the intensive care unit.

“That’s right,” she sighed. “His family is in a state of shock. They’re just grateful that he died while doing something he enjoyed."

“What?” I said. “You mean it really was man zero, fish one?”

“I’m going to see him in the hospital morgue in a few minutes,” my cousin said. “I’ve got to get my robes and I’ll chant the Heart Sutra.”

The Bodhisattva of Great Compassion when practicing deeply the prajnaparamita…

“OK,” I said. I thought I too should chant the Heart Sutra, to make sure my bases were covered. Here, heart means “heart of wisdom.” For Zen Buddhists, it’s a succinct one-size-fits-all teaching, though hard to accept until you’ve touched a human corpse and know, as one meditation practitioner said of her father at his funeral, “As he is, so shall we be.”

Perceived the emptiness of all five skandhas, and delivered all beings from their suffering…

In other words, human zero. From the ultimate point of view, fish zero also. Everything else, zero as well. Zero is perfect roundness, emptiness, completion, peace without sharp angles. The great Om, the alpha and omega, the cosmic belly button, the Big Mu, and as the kids in Oakland say, the shit. Complete equality, and everything equally precious, from the Dalai Lama to a Spanish speaking hot dog street vendor in San Francisco’s Mission District to the Hubble Telescope to a dog turd on the sidewalk next to a flattened soda can. Ultimate inclusion – the end of all discrimination suits.

Man one, fish zero. It is a winter evening in Ohio and I am seven or so. In these memories, the lights inside are always dim and very yellow, and the darkness presses in from outside, improbably blue as arctic ice. I am sitting in the kitchen of the house trailer, watching my father clean some tiny bluegills he’d caught, ice fishing. It must have been a Saturday evening, therefore, since on Sundays we’d have an early dinner, often Swanson’s frozen chicken potpies, and sit and watch Bonanza on TV. It was the one day of the week that we were allowed to eat dinner in front of the television.

O Sariputra, form is no other than emptiness…

Fishing was important to my father, combining the instinct to hunt one’s own food with meditation and connection to the divine. My brother, who is not Buddhist, when I asked him what form he thought Dad might take next if reincarnation existed said, without hesitation, “A fish.”

This may be true, for all I know. My father might have been reborn hundreds of times since 1996, as a guppy in a kid’s aquarium, a catfish in a fish farm pond, a shark, a trout, or the very large salmon that was served at a dinner party I attended last night, on a mirepoix of vegetables, poached in white wine. “Dad?” I thought, contemplating the food on my plate. There is a Buddhist practice in which we look at all beings as having been our mothers and fathers, our children, friends, and enemies in previous cycles of existence. A friend swears that after her uncle’s death her family acquired a bassett hound that looked remarkably like her long-eared uncle, and she would sometimes come upon her mother and the dog staring soulfully at one another in the kitchen.

“Uncle, is that you?” her mother would say softly.

Emptiness no other than form…

Fishing was important to my father in any season and fishing required bait. I was never any good because I couldn’t bear to shove the barbed hook through the earthworm, its twisting body and many small hearts. Someone else always had to bait the hook for me, and then I’d keep fishing with the same worm until it disintegrated to a shred of flesh, dragged through the water for something to do. The boredom of not catching a fish was counterposed to the excitement and horror of catching one, successfully reeling it in, and seeing the hook embedded in its jaw or, much, much worse, swallowed so that pulling out the hook resulted in dragging its guts out through its mouth, killing it immediately. Otherwise a fish could be unhooked, thrown back, and would swim away without discernible fear or haste.

For winter ice fishing the bait was sleepy inch-long, pale grubs, purchased in round petri-dish-sized white cardboard containers filled with sawdust. Sometimes Dad was inspired to collect galls from oak trees and split them open to find the little worms inside, or to attack rotting downed trees like an old bear looking for plump larvae.

In late spring and summer, after a thunderstorm when the earth was warm as a soaked dish sponge, Dad would take a special metal rod on an extension cord, run it out onto the lawn next to the house trailer and stick the rod, which I remember as looking like a chef’s sharpening wand, into the earth, then plug it into an electrical outlet. By the next morning the area around the rod would be filled with large earthworms, whose quiet and essential activity of munching their way through the wet soil had been interrupted by an unnatural current of low electrical shock. They had swum sightlessly up through the soil, seeking relief, and lay on top of the wet grass in tangled skeins of cold flesh. It was easy to pick them up and toss them into Dad’s bait bucket.

The same is true of feelings, thoughts, impulses and consciousness…

Man one, worm zero. The sum remains the same, I notice. But it must have been a winter night, our lawn long frozen, that I sat in the yellow light of the trailer’s kitchen, looking upward at my father. He’d been ice fishing that day and had caught a mess of tiny bluegills. Normally he would have thrown them all back, but had decided this day to clean and fry them up, each fish’s tablespoonful of flesh winter pure and sweet as the most delicate ocean fish or snow crab claw when painstakingly separated from the needle-fine bones.

I didn’t like cleaning fish, either, and Dad didn’t ask me to scale the bluegills after he’d chopped off their heads and tails with his sharpened buck knife, slit their bellies and gutted them. Their scales were tiny and slimy and required some delicate manipulation of the fish scaler, a gray metal tool that one rubbed against the lay of the scales, scraping them off into glittering piles like sequins fallen from a tap dancer’s outfit.

O Sariputra, all dharmas are marked with emptiness. They are not born nor annihilated, they are not tainted nor pure… They do not increase nor decrease….

Wesson oil heats in wavy patterns on the bottom of the cast iron skillet that had come with Dad’s family all the way from Minturn, Colorado to the family farm in Indiana when Dad was one year old. My father dredges the cleaned fish in white flour mixed with Morton’s salt and Durkee’s black pepper from a red and white can. There is an image on the dark blue salt canister of a girl in a yellow frock. With one arm she hoists over her an opened umbrella, white lines representing rain slanting down. In the crook of her other arm she holds a canister of Morton’s salt, angled downward, the salt sprinkling out behind her like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs. It’s an illustration of their marketing brag, which was that Morton’s salt would not clump in humid weather, or when it was raining. Their motto was, “When it rains it pours.”

About the author:

Poet, essayist and fiction writer Patricia Mushim Y. Ikeda has studied Zen in North America and Asia as a monastic and layperson. She is a former member of the boards of San Francisco Zen Center and Buddhist Peace Fellowship, and currently teaches classes and retreats at East Bay Meditation Center, Vallecitos Mountain Refuge, Insight Community of Washington D.C. and Flowering Lotus Meditation Center. “Man 0, Fish 1” is a chapter from a collection of autobiographical fiction, Elegy with Blue Shirt, Tie and Gun and Other Stories that she has been working on with fellowship support from the Ragdale Foundation for a writing project designed to bring awareness to a contemporary issue having to do with peace, social justice, or the environment.

About the artist:

Suzy Sureck's sculptural installations, drawings, videos and photographs involve the physical and metaphoric qualities of wind, water, light and shadow, with attention to the environmental. Her works have been exhibited in the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, Korea, Australia and India. The pieces here are available for purchase and are on exhibit in the Sweetcake Enso installation at the Garrison Institute. For more information about the artist visit her website, here. Of Chance Operations she writes:

I lay the ground of a wet circle, then let the inks go where they may, removing my hand as much as possible for probabilities to occur. Made with water, this barely visible, highly impermanent gesture lies beneath the image.

Within it inks and dyes run, collide, drip, dry, don’t dry, merge, separate. This I see as the texture of our lives in flux within the greater non visible circle of being.

Each image is a surprise to me, and I look forward to seeing what appears on the watermark.

The Artful Teachings of Fukushima Keido Roshi (1933-2011) - A Dharma Talk by Grace Schireson, Saturday April 30th

2011-04-27T21:37:00.000-07:00

Fukushima Keido, Every Day is a Good Day, nd., found here.

On Saturday April 30^th at the San Francisco Zen Center Grace Schireson will be giving a Dharma talk on the writings and paintings of her teacher Fukushima Keido Roshi. This Dharma talk is open to the public, beginning at 10:15 and followed by discussion and tea. Anyone anywhere can listen - it will also be live streamed, 1:15 EDT, available here. What follows is some background as to why Fukushima Keido is so very relevant to these Sweetcake Enso exhibits, a value that Grace Schireson understood immediately.

Japanese Zen teachers who came to the United States often described their experience of being here as an opening of their own practice in a quite personal way. As Grace Schireson explains it, “Fukushima Roshi loved teaching Westerners; I think because we connected with him directly without realizing just what an icon he was in Japan.” And Fukushima himself said that upon visiting the United States “Unconsciously I became more open.” * This sense of connection in practice was felt as well by Fukushima’s teacher, Shibayama. D.T. Suzuki convinced Shibayama to come to the United States, and he first did so in 1965 – this was followed by seven more trips. In America Shibayama found enthusiastic students of Zen, at one point leading a rigorous three week long sesshin for a group of 25 Hamilton College students. It was this experience that led him to write Zen Comments on the Mumonkan.

Fukushima Keido, left, with Shibayama, right, California c. 1970, found here.

Fukushima Keido first visited the United States in 1969 at the age of 36 upon completion of his koan training, and as an assistant to Shibayama, his teacher. Audrey Yoshiko Seo cites Fukushima describing an exchange:

When I got out of the car I was surrounded by [hippies]. I was wearing a black robe and shaved head. “You must be a hippie too, where are you from?” one of them asked. “I am the patriarch of hippies,” I said. One of them said, “Oh, you must be a Japanese monk.” Of course, I said it as a joke, but the fact that he knew from that statement shows a connection. That is how American Zen first appeared to the public… **

He returned to the United States in 1973 to teach for a year at Claremont College in California. Things had already changed since 1969, and his job was to teach meditation. This was a turning point for him, he learned at this time how to correctly pitch the dharma to American students, developing a repertoire specifically for that audience, knowing that he would eventually return. But he was sorely needed in Japan as well, and returned to become the abbott of Tofuku-ji, which at the time had no monks at all. By 1987 he had been able to build a community of 25 monks and could consider his return to the United States.

View from the window of Tofukuji, taken October 15th, 2006, found here.

Ishwar C. Harris cites Fukushima, “When I left Claremont in 1974, I had made myself a promise to return as a Zen master and do something for the American people. I am trying to fulfill that promise now.” *** When Fukushima finally returned in 1989 he visited roughly 20 colleges and universities every year.

A large part of Fukushima’s Zen practice was painting – as the abbott of the monastery he would set aside an entire week of each month in order to paint, fulfilling a large number of requests for subjects. A statement for a 2003 exhibition in the United States writes “Internationally renowned for his calligraphic work, Fukushima Keido Roshi is considered a national treasure in Japan, revered to the degree that an artist of the stature of Monet or Picasso would be in the West.” As a youth, a monk at Hofuku-ji since the age of fourteen, he was present for rare showings of the temple collection of 15th century paintings of Sesshu Toyo, his first greatest influence. He would care for the brushes and paint alongside of his first master there, Okada, before being taken under Shibayama’s wing.

Enso painting by Shibayama, found here.

It was in 1989 that Fukushima received his first invitation to do a calligraphy workshop. This was for the Spencer Museum of the University of Kansas, for the exhibition The Art of Zen: Paintings and Calligraphy by Zen Masters, 1600-1925. The Art of Zen was curated by Stephen Addiss, whose scholarship and exhibitions have laid the ground for an understanding of Zen art by an American audience. For the time of the exhibit the Spencer Museum invited Shibayama to be an artist in residence - up until this point painting had been a strictly monastic affair. Fukushima explains:

Until I received this request, I had never thought of giving a demonstration of calligraphy. If I were to give a lecture I would only need my notes, but to give a calligraphy demonstration I need a great deal of preparation. Because 1989 was my first demonstration, I bought a very large inkstone. In Japan at the airport I had to pay for overweight luggage. At that time I thought this would be my first and last calligraphy demonstration. When I stayed in Kansas for ten days, there were fourteen events, among which were four calligraphy demonstrations. During the question and answer period there many good questions about Japanese culture, so I realized the meaning of the demonstration; instead of static calligraphy it is a living, dynamic, moving art. ****

Zen Master Fukushima Keido Roshi, right, demonstrates calligraphy art at Kansas University's Spencer Museum of Art. The Zen master, head abbott of the Tofuku-Ji Zen Buddhism sect in Kyoto, Japan, also conducted a lecture and meditation at KU. Found here.

Todd Gilens, one of the exhibiting artists in the Sweetcake Enso exhibit at the San Francisco Zen Center opening this weekend, had the opportunity to see Fukushima Keido Roshi give such a public demonstration. He describes what he saw:

His demonstration took place in the rotunda of the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Anthropology, a quiet, darkish space under a dome. He had a funny tick, a way of squinching his jaw that seemed utterly convincing. As he went from one calligraphy to the next and each one was set aside to dry, at one point he painted something like an American flag or the Liberty Bell. It was amusing and odd, and reminded me how, years earlier I had heard Ali Akbar Kahn insert a phrase of Mozart into a raga, flipping the tension of the moment on its head. Otherwise, Fukushima’s activity seemed very like I would expect of a painter: tools at hand, with gentle concentration, his intention gradually appearing through the brushwork. *****

***

For more information please visit the description of Grace Schireson's talk on the San Francisco Zen Center Website.

* Audrey Yoshiko Seo with Stephen Addiss, The Art of Twentieth Century Zen: Paintings and Calliigraphy by Japanese Masters, Shambala, c. 2000, p. p. 185.

** Seo and Addiss, op. cit., p.178.

*** Ishwar C. Harris, The Laughing Buddha of Tofukuji: the Life of Zen Master Keido Fukushima, World Wisdom Inc., p. 24.

**** Seo and Addiss, op cit., p.288.

***** Todd Gilens, email interview with Catherine Spaeth, April 26th, 2011.

Sweetcake Enso at the San Francisco Zen Center, April 29th-May 29th

2011-04-23T07:59:00.000-07:00

Allison Watkins, Solace, machine embroidery, needle, light, 10x10", 2011.

From scrappy bits of paper and string to a city bus route, the San Francisco Zen Center’s Sweetcake Enso exhibition is together in its variety. With ten new artists on board, the fourth Sweetcake Enso is on exhibit from April 29^th through May 29^th. Sweetcake Enso draws attention to the abstract circle as a symbol of presentness in daily life, and opens out the traditional calligraphy of the Enso to include the work, unlimited by media or training, of contemporary artists involved in strong Buddhist practice. Without motivation to define “Zen Art,” the interest here is in a shift from the monastic practice of Japan to a stronger emphasis upon lay practice in American Zen, and what this means for understanding contemporary art as Zen practice.

Colleen Corocoran, Star Cluster, photograph, 16x20", 2010

In the very specific task of working with the circle as an expression of their practice, the singularity of each artist’s expression stands out. This is of course visible in the traditional painting of Enso as well, and where it finds its value. The difference is that once content and a broad diversity of media are invited in, experience is no longer bracketed in the spontaneity of one stroke brush painting, and it seems pertinent to say at this point that what emerges strongly in much of this work is that we dwell, and how we dwell.

Todd Gilens, data points for Butterflybus, January through March, 2011, with thanks to Eric Fischer

Artists in the current exhibit are Margaret Bertrand, Sanford Biggers, Ross Bleckner, Colleen Corcoran, Bob Dodge, Ruth Doodson, Noah Fischer, Todd Gilens, Max Gimblett, Gregg Hill, Kichung-Eiko Lee Lizee, Doug Miller, Karen Schiff, Fran Shalom, Bridget Spaeth, Trevor Tubelle , Leslie Wagner, Maria Wallace, Allison Watkins, Susan Weisberg and Michael Wenger.

Please join us for a reception on Friday April 29^th, from 7:00-9:00 pm. An artist’s walk-through of the exhibit will begin at 8:00.

Trevor Tubelle, Exhume #5 (Hole Earth and Childhood Dreams), ink on paper, 30x22", 2009

Verandah

2011-03-14T14:08:00.000-07:00

By Hirokazu Kosaka

On the bullet train. 12:57:24 I arrive at the Kyoto train station on time. On my left stands an 8th century five-story Buddhist pagoda and on my right a cab with an automatic door and a five-inch Sony TV on the dash board, waiting for me to enter.

I arrive at my family's 800 year old home where my father greets me from his gravel garden. He points to the upper corner of the eaves of the house. There I perceive the spider, which I have known from my childhood. My great-grandfather told me once that this spider hails from a line of spiders that can be traced to a 17th century ancestor.

This image is from a collaboration between Hirokazu Kosaka and the Butoh performer Oguri in a dance performance of the story by William Faulkner, Caddy! Caddy! Caddy!, Redcat Theater in Los Angeles, March 2007. Holding threads in his mouth from the spools visible behind him, Oguri steps from the stage and out onto the backs of the audience chairs, leaning into his face and balancing as he pulls from the spools behind him.

The word Verandah originates from an old Sanskrit term that means to “meet.” In Japanese the word is “engawa” (縁側）which is written with two Chinese characters, en (relation, fate) and gawa (side, edge).

The verandah space plays a dual role, belonging at once to both exterior and interior, a space in-between. The verandah is a space between spaces where man encounters nature - Verandah is neither a color of black or white but one of infinite shades of grey. Verandah is not a Yes or a No, but infinite maybes. The verandah is a kinesthetic space in which there is reciprocal exchange for multiple sensory perceptions of phenomena, and homogeneous in the sense that there is neither more nor less. The verandah is here understood as a reference to a whole, which can be grasped through certain parts and aspects, requiring both at once this presence and absence.

It is often suggested that Verandah space is for one who is prepared to awaken and in confounding the self and garden is capable of gesture, of expression and finally , spiritual experience.

In The Hidden Dimension anthropologist Edward T. Hall writes:

The difference between the West and Japan is not limited to moving around the point vs. coming to the point, or the stressing of lines as contrasted with intersections. The entire experience of space in the most essential respects is different from that of Western culture. When Westerners think and talk about space, they mean the distance between objects. In the West, we are taught to perceive and to react to the arrangements of objects and to think of space as”empty.” The meaning of this becomes clear only when it is contrasted with the Japanese, who are trained to give meaning to spaces to perceive the shape and arrangement of space; for this they have a word,ma. The ma, or interval, is a basic building block in all Japanese spatial experience.*

Conjuring up concepts of time and space, the Japanese word for this is jikankukan (時間空間), four separated Chinese characters and yet inseparable and ever conjoined. Ji 時(time) kan間 (space)ku 空(sky)kan 間 (space) coexist without a conjunction "and” between two entities to separate them. It is a concept familiar to many scholars of the Japanese arts and it is a major element in the formation of the Japanese space. Space is one of most talked about high branches of Japanese art and vastly reveals the intimacy of the cultural life of Japanese people.

This long verandah is at Rengeo-in Temple in Japan - there are 1,000 statues of Kanzeon lined up inside that can viewed from the verandah, and archers shoot their arrows the entire length of it.

My mother serves us wonderful meals of miso soup in beautiful lacquerware with a cap on it. When we remove the cap to admire the reflection of steam gathering on the underside of the cap, my mother always gasps and says, “How wonderful the verandah looks today!”. She is expressing that it is similar to the verandah after the Spring rain where portions of the verandah are covered with a sheen of water and where the garden is reflected as though the garden is floating on it.

Tanizaki Junichiro in his lovely book In’ei raisan 陰翳礼讃　(In praise of Shadows) writes about the in-between of the spaces of the Yokan (sweet bean cake):

And when yokan is served in a black lacquer tray within whose dark recesses its color is scarcely distinguishable, then it is most certainly an object for meditation. You take its cool, smooth substance into your mouth, and it is as if the very darkness of the room were melting on your tongue; even undistinguished yokan can then take on a mysteriously intriguing flavor”. And Tanizaki continues to praise the shadowing; “A degree of dimness, absolute cleanness, and quite so complete one can hear the hum of a mosquito. I love to listen from such a toilet to the sound of softly falling rain, especially if it is a toilet of the Kanto region, with its long, narrow windows at floor level; there one can listen with such a sense of intimacy to the raindrops falling from the eaves and the trees, seeping into the earth as they wash over the base of a stone lantern and freshen the moss about the stepping stones.**

According to the Saijiki (歳事記）, a commentary of seventeen-syllable verses, the four seasons are divided in to many as seventy- two sub-seasons.The saijiki venerates sensitivity toward the seasons through the expressions and inhabits ones different sensory inspirations. In terms like , spring rain, Spring mist, hazy vernal moon, rainy season, dew, breeze in the pine tree, Summer doyo, harvest moon, chirping autumn insect, red maples leaves, autumn showers, snowy view, etc. Thus the Verandah does not end with the wooden platform but enhances the seventy-two seasons for our human senses.

In Frolicking Monkeys and Frogs, 2010, Hirokazu recreates from memory the frolicking animals from what is believed to be the oldest manga, the 12th century Chojyu-Jinbutsu-Giga (Animal Person Caricature) painted by Toba Sojo. In a telephone interview he explains: "I make my own ink with charcoal, and you can get different tones, ...rice burning soot is lighter, soy bean is dark. About twenty years ago my grandfather died and I asked for the soot and made ink from it. When I write I use my grandfather's soot, and for the last twenty years I've been making my own ink from charcoal, from all kinds of things." While he was still alive Hirokazu's grandfather explained to him that sumi paintings are fire and water paintings.

The notion of verandah has much in common with the aesthetic of traditional masters of Japanese ink paintings who understood that which is left out is equally, if not more important, than that which is included. The monochrome shades of carbon ink painting are interrelated observation platforms like the verandah that inhabits different sensory psyche, which participates in molding the unconscious mind.

Traditional ink paintings do not exist to tell you who they are but do invite the telling of who I am. The ink that is used for these paintings is created from charcoal, which is a byproduct of fire, and the mixture of fire and water that creates the ink coexists in the painting. In our monastic home, we use charcoal not just for painting and fuel but to de-humidify the space, to purify the space from unwanted bad spirits and disease. Charcoal thus becomes a filter of light, sounds and spirits.

Although the traditional garden has many angles of the visual perspectives in general, the ink paintings share the same spiritual perspective contemplations.

Hirokazu Kosaka is here performing for the New Years Eve celebration Kotohajime at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center of Los Angeles. Hatsuya is the purification ritual of shooting the first arrow of the New Year. Hirokazu Kosaka is a master of kyudo, and you can read about this here. Before any performance when the curtain raises he will stand offstage and shoot eight to ten arrows across the stage with the thought that in the viewers subconscious he has attenuated their vision, drawing a line on the back of their retina, to prepare the viewer for the experience of the remaining performance.

The most interesting usage of this verandah space is the Kyudo dojo (Japanese archery hall) which consists of sha-jo (shooting hall), a large verandah in position beside a twenty eight meter long flat garden space, and a mato-ba (target space) at the arrow receiving area. The target is called appropriately kasumi -mato (hazy target). The Kasumi mato is fifteen inches in diameter and consists of three black concentric circles of varied width. The target is made of paper, which is tightly stretched on to a wooden frame so as to form of a paper drum. When the piercing arrow strikes the target the sound is ingenuity, impressive in reflecting deep sensitivities to the music of nature. At this moment the sound of the target serves to resonate the archers mind and spirits. From the archers shooting area, the kasumi mato looks as though the dimness of the full moon has been covered by a passing veil of clouds. Perceptions and sensitivities of appreciation are directed toward the smallest detail, as in a carefully manicured archer’s target.

I cannot go further without remarking on the major contribution to this art of archery in a lovely little book Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel. In the introduction to the book Daisetsu T. Suzuki the suggests:

One has to transcend technique so that the art becomes an “artless art” growing out of unconscious.

In the case of archery, the hitter and the hit are no longer two opposing objects, but are one reality. The archer ceases to be conscious of himself as the one who is engaged in hitting the bull’s eye which confronts him. This state of unconscious is realized only when, completely empty and rid of self, he becomes one with the perfecting of his technical skill, though there is in it something of quite different order which cannot be attained by any progressive study of art. ***

An American contemporary music composer, John Cage, talks about these kinds of in-between sounds in his compositions. He writes:

It was through study of Buddhism (Through study with D.T.Suzuki) that I became, it seemed to me, less confused. I saw art not as something that consisted of a communication from the artist to an audience but rather as an activity of sounds in which the artist found a way to let the sounds be themselves. And in their being themselves to open the minds of the people who made them or listened to them to other possibilities than they had previously considered. To widen their experience; particularly to undermine the making of value judgments….

I am also involved now in a kind of music I call music of contingency..
An instance is filling a conch shell with water and then tipping it so that it will gurgle and then amplifying that gurgle as I do in a piece called “Inlet.” One can’t see inside it, as those chamber within the shell are producing these gurgles while the water moves from one chamber to another. I can’t see inside it, so though I can tip it one way and get a gurgle, I don’t necessarily get one when I repeat my action. The shell gurgle when it is ready to do so. I find that situation very interesting where the person is both necessary and out of control. ****

There are also brief quotations from the Japanese composer, Takemitsu Toru talking about this in-between space:

In the ma (pause, interval) rhythm of Japanese music, the intermittent spelling of sound is perfect completion in itself. The event of sound heard by our ears are harmoniously linked by ma. Ma undergoes dynamic changes depending on the accidents of performance, and the sound is constantly being reborn in new harmonies. The role of the performer then is not only to playthe music but also to listen to it. The performer always tries to hear the ma. Hearing a note is as practical an act as sounding one, and eventually it becomes impossible to distinguish between the two……Because of the perfection and complexity of the sound of a note, it can create ma, a metaphysical continuance of dynamically tense silence. As seen on a melody of No music, an organic relationship is not found in ma (pause) between sound and silence, but rather an intense antagonism founded on intangible balance grows between the two. In other words, the Japanese sensitivity which grasped the complexity of a sound, the perfection of polished note, created the original concept of ma. The soundless silent ma is recognized as a balance against a complex note , and is filled with immeasurable sounds.

Hirokazu Kosaka: "I accumulated five tons of construction debris and brought it to Mexico to be turned into charcoal, less than a ton, and made a huge stage with a dancer and a trumpet player, and a Butoh dancer danced on that. I also had a ceramic artist creating tea bowls for me and he made a hundred tea bowls with a crackling glaze and just before the performance, about five minutes before, he brought all the cups from the kiln, red hot, and put them in the center of the stage with a microphone on them, and as they were cooling these hundred cups made a symphony in high and low keys of this crackling. It was about one hour."

The most important garden I encountered was in 1958, when I was eight years old. My father took me to a monastery for training and discipline. This 17^th Century Buddhist monastery was in Wakayama prefecture and belonged to the Shingon sect. During the training, I was shown a large screen monochrome painting of a rainbow. I was asked to view it for few weeks and soon it disappeared into the closet. I was never to see it again until my visit to the monastery in 1980. I was given the training again and the rainbow screen reappeared after twenty years hiatus and one day, later in the afternoon, as the sun was about to go down behind the mountain, the head priest called me to have tea with him by this rainbow painting. I sat near the painting in an ear-splitting silence, overlooking the garden and suddenly this monochrome rainbow started to change with chromatic shades of warm reds. I had solved the riddle of the missing colors in the rainbow. The color was coming from the maple leaves that surrounded the temple. At that time of the year all the leaves turn brilliant shades of red, and at certain time of the day everything is illuminated by them.

A brief word is in order about the art of landscape gardening, where beauty is so hidden as to be found and appreciated only by those who look deeply for it. It’s delightful in concealing something so secret in the garden to be discovered by a keen observer many hundreds years later.

Another garden which I observed was in Wakayama prefecture of Kii peninsula where I was invited in the course of doing research on old gardens of the Edo period. It was an old dilapidated Buddhist edifice of the Shingon sect built in the late 18^th Century.

This temple was built on a promontory which over looked the great Pacific Ocean. The building was in fact suffering from the great Kansai earthquake in the late forties and was in a large construction stage. The foundation of the tea hut (Cha-shitsu) and tea garden (Cha-seki) was still visible and a few of the roji and stepping-stones were available for our academic appetite. The surface of the composition had significantly weathered in time, but some glimpses of the period design remained visible. The water basin was carefully measured and cleaned. One of the observers caught a glimpse of a fallen stone near the water basin and meticulously started to measure the stone. Hundreds of drawings were soon gathered and became the subject of study.

The garden appears to have been planned with two viewpoints regarding this central stone, that of the water basin and that of the newly found vertical stone at front of the water basin. The measurement of the square cubicle in both the water basin stone and the vertical stone were precisely the same size. One cut square contains water and the other one sees through. When one stands to wash his hands in the water basin he also is introduced to another source of greater water, the Pacific Ocean seen through the window of the vertical stone. Immediately one is awakened to another plane of consciousness and transcends this natural scale to microcosm and macrocosmic world within one's universe. Perhaps this is a notion of non-ego where one is to get rid of even his own shadow, the last element of his individual personality is totally submerged. Then he is able to leave behind the vista of the garden and enter the tea chamber.

A significant amount of traditional secret gardens survive today and if permission is granted by the owner you are to be congratulated due to very high order of secrecy. Many years ago I was fortunate to be granted a permission to view this unusual garden titled August 15^th: 8:30pm. I arrived at this garden on August 15^th around 7pm and sat by the verandah which over looks the garden in the dimness of Summer night. Around 8pm, the sky became lighter and unceremoniously a full moon appeared at the crevice of geosynclining mountain just outside of the garden. The sea of gravel and protruding rocks increased visibility and intensified as the moon ascended atop of the garden. And around 8:30pm, I was over joyed by the appearance of the acute angles of the shadowing from the rock formations. The sea of sun breached white-pebbles, the textured stones, the chiaroscuro of moonlight and shadows. The shadow was writing the Chinese ideogram of mind or kokoro. The circularity of this performance had poetry to it but also a slightly absurdist sense of humor.

The Chinese ideogram or kanji is essentially a picture symbol and there is much visual appreciation of it. The Chinese ideogram has been used by traditional calligraphers and it is usually usually quite impossible to appreciat the works unless you directly see the character written on paper with myriad of sumi ink.

In this case the ideogram was writing poignantly on a sea of white gravel with the help of the moon light and shadow of the ancient stones.

Many years ago I was given a Japanese architectural teaching by one of the traditional carpenters in our household. I was taken to substructure of our ancient building and was introduced to thirty large wooden columns sitting on a large stone buttress.

The carpenter gestured for me to look carefully at the bottom of these columns to see an indentation of marks created by our ancestral carpenters. All the identical scratched marks on the stone and the wooden column were not aligned but were a few inches apart from each other. He explained that when these columns were cut in the forest they were marked in for the cardinal polarity of directions and all were placed to face the eastern directions. In time all thirty columns and supporting substratum had turned almost two inches to the south-western direction, and continue to turn as eternal meditation.

Hirokazu describes this piece: "Four Ming Dynasty jars were made for me, I designed the motif and asked for the original copy, these are three feet high and two feet wide, a musician made a sound piece with the sound of the crushing charcoal from the dancer above. When was a kid I cleaned the stage of the Noh theater and sometimes the Noh people would ask me to clean underneath, underneath the stage they have 25 jars embedded into the ground so the sound of the voice or the sound of the foot on the stage echoes inside." Also relevant might be that beneath his family temple is a room of sand from the four significant locations of Buddha's life, where he was born, where he became enlightened, where he taught and where he passed into Nirvana. Visitors to the temple circumambulate here. Hirokazu explains as well that when you enter the monastery for three months and three times a day you must eat charcoal to cleanse your body, and that the temple itself is built on a bed of charcoal.

***

* Edward T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension, NY: Anchor, c. 1966, p. 153.
** Tanizaki Junichiro, In Praise of Shadows, Harper and Seidstecker, trans., ME: Leete's Island Books, c.1977.
*** Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery, NY: Pantheon Books c. 1953, introduction by D.T. Suzuki.
**** John Cage, Zero, p. 73
***** Takemitsu Toru, Ma c. 1978.

In In Between the Heartbeat the background is a curtain of electric blankets sewn together, and there are IBM copy machines made heavy enough to have one person standing on each. The glass is an inch thick to support the Butoh dancers standing on top of the machines. The light beam from the copy machines coursed across the stage and up-lit the bodies of the dancers above them. Two huge searchlights would then beam onto the stage, turning the bodies of the dancers a sheer white.

About the artist: Hirokazu Kosaka was born in Wakayama Japan in 1948, into a family of Shingon priests, for which he began training at an early age. Hagyuji Temple belongs to his family and is in the mountains of Shikoku Island. Kosaka has divided his life between Los Angeles and Japan, and is known in the states as both an artist and as a priest. He is the Artistic Director of the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center in Los Angeles. This coming fall he will be performing at the Getty Museum as a part of the exhibit Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950–1970.

Hirokazu Kosaka at Haguyji Temple in Japan.

You've Got to Serve Somebody

2011-03-05T09:39:00.000-08:00

Bankei Yotaku (1622-1693), Sakyamuni and Maitreya, ink on paper, 11 1/4x221/4", private collection. Image courtesy of Stephen Addiss and Audrey Yoshiko Seo.

By Hozan Alan Senauke

Zen Master Bankei’s enso is completely his own. So graceful and strong. Usually the enso is one circular stroke, perfectly imperfect, expressing the wholeness of existence, which is peace. Emptiness is encircled by action. Although enso is beyond words, the Zen poet often includes a verse as commentary. In this case Bankei writes: “Sakyamuni and Maitreya are both servants.”

In The Art of Zen Stephen Addiss writes about this particular enso:

Bankei, ever the individualist, used two strokes, each strongly and quickly articulated. The effect is to give an entirely new meaning to the form; the strokes enclose each other like an embrace yet still suggest both emptiness and completeness.*

Addiss explains that Bankei’s commentary — “Sakyamuni and Maitreya are both servants.” — refers to case 45 of the classic koan collection, the Mumonkan which says: “Even Sakyamuni and Maitreya are servants of someone else. I ask you: whom?”

Whom? I cannot answer, but there is power in the two embracing strokes that create this circle, with emptiness at its heart. Two lines, two actions, each with its own energy and boundary, come together as one circle. This, for me is the image of peace, not a false merging like peoples fighting for domination, or nations created by the stroke of a pen at gunpoint, but a dynamic mutual relationship. Rev. Martin Luther King called this relationship “the beloved community.” There will naturally be conflicts in the beloved community. Conflict is human. In the beloved community, however, conflict is not resolved by threats or violence, but by persistently turning toward each other. Many ensos have a small gap at the end of a single brush stroke. The gap embodies beginning and end. Conflict is implicit, but it is just part of the story. Here Bankei uses two strokes in two directions, interlocking like yin and yang, reaching out for completion.

Coming back to the koan, Sakyamuni is the embodied Buddha of our age and place. The time is this present eon. The place is the Saha world we inhabit. Saha means the world that is to be endured. When he woke up under the bodhi tree Sakayamuni declared: “Now I am enlightened together with all beings.” All beings were his servant and he is servant to all beings. The power of this koan, and of Bankei’s enso is that this is undeniably true for us…each of us. We are servant and we are served. All life is a circle of giving.

As for Maitreya Buddha, she is currently teaching in Tusita Heaven, a pure Buddhaland beyond our comprehension. She is destined to be the future Buddha of our world. Something like a messiah. When will she arrive? Are we ready? Do we deserve her presence? Will it be a new millennium? Driving into Oakland from Berkeley the other day, I saw a billboard: Judgment Day — May 21^st, 2011. Guess I had better get prepared.

Maybe Maitreya is already here. Maybe Maitreya is you. Or me. Servant and the served, host and guest are not separate. They co-create each other in the circular activity of giving. This is a fine idea. But if it is just an idea, the circle is broken. Keep it real. Who is serving you? Who are you serving? Such questions…this is the work of peace.

Alan Senauke is here standing beside a painting by Max Gimblett, at the time on view in the Sweetcake Enso exhibit at the Brooklyn Zen Center, and which later sold to raise money for the Village Zendo.** Alan Senauke is the author of the beautifully written book The Bodhisattva's Embrace: Dispatches from Engaged Buddhism's Front Lines. Recently he became a Buddhist blogger - currently travelling in India, you can read of Hozan Alan Senauke's wanderings at the

Clear View Blog.

***

* Stephen Addiss, The Art of Zen, NY: Abrams, 1989. See also Audrey Yoshiko Seo, Enso: Zen Circles of Enlightenment, Boston and London: Weatherhill Press, c. 2007.
** Photo by Ian Case of the Brooklyn Zen Center.

Peace, the Perpetual Problem

2011-02-07T08:56:00.000-08:00

By Jeanna Annen Moyer

Editor's note: The above photograph is of one of the Perpetual Peace Project installations at the New Museum, in the context of their now past exhibit Free. The Perpetual Peace Project is "predicated on the belief that no one institution or individual can clearly claim or guarantee a mastery of the concept of peace," and aims at understanding peace beyond its being merely the absence of war. With the blue circle as the design platform, scattered throughout the New Museum were kiosks featuring interviews with scholars such as Helene Cixous and Saskia Sassen in response to Immanuel Kant's 1795 essay "Perpetual Peace." There are a downloadable copy of the essay and video clips on the Perpetual Peace Project website link above. With the premise that the Perpetual Peace Project has now entered the public commons, what follows is a short essay by Jeanna Annen Moyer, a member of the Dharma Rain Zen Center.

***

I consider myself to be a recovering academic. Part of the move to Zen practice for me has been about moving away from intellectualizing my experience and moving toward engaging it directly, without a complicated array of concepts and analysis between me and it. I’ve wanted to put the conceptual apparatus down, and inhabit my life with both body and mind, with fresh eyes. Consequently, I was conflicted when asked if I’d be interested in commenting on Kant’s essay on Perpetual Peace from a Zen perspective. I’ve resisted the scholarly study of Zen in favor of embodied practices like zazen, walking mediation, and work practice. I’ve felt that the last thing that would support balance in my life was more scholarly study. So, the following is a departure for me: writing on a scholarly topic from the personal perspective of my Zen practice.

Re-reading Kant’s essay on Perpetual Peace felt like going home to a family gathering filled with old, dysfunctional dynamics. The veneration of reason over emotion, the insistence on duty over all other considerations, the idea that humans must in some sense be coerced in order to act morally-- an old, familiar song. And yet, given Kant’s rather dim view of human nature, the upshot of this essay is quite hopeful: That perpetual peace among people is both logically and practically possible. This is partly based on well-worn social contract theory arguments that we are all better off if we band together to better serve our selfish interests. Just as individuals are better off banding together and agreeing to respect each others’ rights, the same is true of nations. And so a federation of nations should be formed, to ensure that each nation respects the rights of others. Kant says that nature has purposively designed the world so that humans can and should live everywhere in it, and thus made war the natural means of resolving the inevitable conflicts that arise. It is in people’s mutual interest to unite against war (refer to the First Supplement, "Of the Guarantee of Perpetual Peace," pp. 25-34, found in the document available here by clicking on the title of Kant's essay.).

Although Kant was writing to show that lasting peace among nations was at least theoretically possible, it’s interesting how much of his essay foreshadows actual developments in world politics. For instance, Kant wrote of the desirability of forming of an international federation of nations aimed at preserving the rights of all. He wrote of the dangers of time-honored political tactics that are still with us today : “…if it be a question about other States, then exciting of suspicion and disagreement among them, is a pretty safe means of subjecting them to yourself, one after the other, under the pretence of assisting the weaker." (p. 44 of the online version.). And writing during the time of Frederick the Great, Kant described the benefits of federalism, now the mode of government in what was Prussia.

Despite Kant’s lofty statements on the power of human reason, he seems to have a fairly pithy perception of politics, shown in a statement that could be used to describe some current situations: “…[men in politics] allow all proper honor to this conception [of public right], although they may have to devise a hundred evasions and palliations in order to escape from it in practice...” (p. 45 of the online version.) In addition to a realistic grasp of the machinations of politics, Kant also seems to have been gifted with some foresight about developments to come.

If Kant was right about some other things, what about lasting international peace? Many nations have developed federalist or federalist-type governments; international organizations aimed (at least in theory) at the common good have been formed; and at least the concept of international right is widely accepted. Why hasn’t lasting peace followed? To get a sense of the number of armed conflicts currently occurring, try an internet search on: How many wars in the world today? Or see this link. War seems to be a constant, rather than peace. Is there anything in Kant’s essay that can help us understand why?

From a Zen perspective, there was one section of Kant’s essay that caught my attention.

Now it is admitted that the voluntary determination of all individual men to live under a legal constitution according to principles of liberty, when viewed as a distributive unity made up of the wills of all, is not sufficient to attain [Perpetual Peace], but all must will the realization of this condition through the collective unity of their united wills, in order that the solution of so difficult a problem may be attained, for such a collective unity is required in order that civil society may take form as a whole. Further, a uniting cause must supervene upon this diversity in the particular wills of all, in order to educe such a common will from them, as they could not individually attain. Hence, in the realization of that idea in practice, no other beginning of a social state of right can be reckoned upon, than one that is brought about by force; and upon such compulsion, Public Right is afterwards founded. (italics added, from p. 38 of the online version.).

The idea that public right, a necessary precondition for international right, can only be established through coercion is, from my perspective, a fatal flaw in a system intended to yield lasting peace. Coercion, whether by reason, fellow citizens, or politicians, is a kind of violence, and can only breed further coercion. This is true of federalist, communist, or any other kind of political system. If we start with coercion, we should not be surprised when further coercion, conflict, and war results.

So, what is the Zen answer to achieving perpetual peace between nations? Kant would be disgusted, but this is a point on which I can’t contribute a theory, only my experience. In my opinion, international peace can only sprout from peace among individuals. Peace for me has arisen from turning toward my experience and learning to accept it unconditionally, with an open heart. As my practice in this regard has deepened, an abiding compassion for others has naturally arisen—a compassion that encompasses regard for others, a concern for their well-being, and a growing recognition that my well-being cannot be separated from theirs.

The delusion that we are disconnected from others, that our well-being is separate from theirs—in my opinion that is the true root of war. And so, an approach that presupposes this cannot be a foundation for lasting peace. It is not reason, still less coercion, that provides a sustainable way out of war. It is awakening compassion, and coming to understand that others’ well-being is inseparable from our own. This might seem to be a variation on the theme of avoiding war because it is in our own self-interest. But the deeper point here is that it is not for simply for ourselves, but out of authentic compassion for others that war becomes unacceptable. To put this in other, famous words, “Hatred never ceases by hatred, but by love alone is healed. This is an ancient and eternal law.” 

Dermot Mac Cormack: Untitled #11

2011-01-31T16:46:00.000-08:00

Dermot Mac Cormack, Untitled #11, 2011, audio Priests, Monks and Pilgrims of Kyoto, reissued by lyrichord discs. Dermot Mac Cormack is an associate Professor at the Tyler School of Art, the creative director of 21xdesign, and a student of Shuzen Sensei at the Soji Zen Center.

Women's Lineage Papers

2011-01-26T09:51:00.000-08:00

By Peter Levitt

As part of a concerted effort undertaken by certain North American Zen communities to redress a significant historical wrong, this was among the first lineage papers in Buddhist history that acknowledges and honours Buddhist women ancestors. Relying on years of research, performed mostly by women scholars in the academic world, it was created on behalf of the Salt Spring Zen Circle in British Columbia through the efforts of Zen teachers Zoketsu Norman Fischer of Everyday Zen and Eihei Peter Levitt of the Salt Spring Zen Circle. It was designed by Barbara Cooper from Los Angeles. In November 2007, on Salt Spring Island, male and female students of these two teachers were given this women’s lineage paper as part of their lay ordination ceremony, thus helping to end an overwhelming historical silence regarding women ancestors in Zen. The women’s lineage paper was bundled together with the male lineage paper traditionally given at this ceremony, and the two papers were received by the ordainees together.

The wheel of women ancestor names begins with the name of Shakyamuni Buddha’s mother, Mahapajapati, at the bottom, just to the right of the space at what would be the six o’clock position. The names then ascend in a counterclockwise direction. Names of women ancestors from India, are followed by ancestor names from China, Japan, and North America. Of note is that at the top of the enso, in what would be the twelve o’clock position, the words “unknown women” appear. This is to acknowledge the countless women whose sincere practice helped to nourish Zen and Buddhism throughout history but whose names, for a variety of reasons, were forgotten, suppressed, or left unsaid.

At the bottom of the wheel a blank space was left so that each new ordainee could have their name written in, and thereby be embraced by the ancestors.

***

Alongside his work as a Zen teacher, Peter Levitt is an accomplished poet, and most recently published Within Within. You can visit his website here, and you can contact Peter Levitt directly at his email address, levgram[at]gmail.com.

Sweetcake Enso opens at the Village Zendo this Saturday, January 15th!

2011-01-10T07:05:00.000-08:00

Maria Wallace, Supercell, oil on canvas, 18x14", 2010

With ten new artists on board, Sweetcake Enso is on exhibit for one day at the Village Zendo this coming Saturday. Sweetcake Enso draws attention to the abstract circle as a symbol of presentness in daily life, and opens out the traditional calligraphy of the Enso to include the work, unlimited by media or training, of contemporary artists involved in strong Buddhist practice. Without motivation to define “Zen Art,” the interest here is in a shift from the monastic practice of Japan to a stronger emphasis upon lay practice in American Zen, and what this means for understanding contemporary art as Zen practice. From cyclone to stillness, these works are individual offerings to the teachers that are with us now and who have come before. In this exhibit sales will benefit the Village Zendo, and be met by a matching grant in honor of their 25th anniversary.

Emma Tapley, Water Reflection/Landscape Inversion, C-print, edition of 5

The third Sweetcake Enso exhibit opens Saturday, January 15^th at the Village Zendo, 588 Broadway, suite 1108. Viewing is from 11:00-7:00, followed by a panel discussion from 7:00-900 pm. Artists in the exhibit are:

Miya Ando, Sanford Biggers, Ross Bleckner, Sam Clayton, Robyn Ellenbogen, Noah Fischer, Carolyn Fuchs, Max Gimblett, Rodney Alan Greenblat, Gregg Hill, Anne Humanfeld, Phyllis Joyner, Erin Koch, Liz LaBella, Peter Levitt, Timothy Reynolds, Karen Schiff, Fran Shalom, Bridget Spaeth, Emma Tapley, Leslie Wagner, Maria Wallace, Maggie Wells and Michael Wenger.

Please join us at 7:00 pm for a lively discussion of how Buddhist practice inspires and informs contemporary art. Panelists include:

Max Gimblett, artist teacher and lecturer

Emma Tapley, artist

Rodney Greenblat, artist

Robyn Ellenbogen, artist and art editor of Zen Monster

Catherine Spaeth, art historian and curator

Ross Bleckner, Four Locations, color spitbyte aquatint with chine colle, 39x30" 2007

Carolyn Fuchs: This and That

2010-12-27T13:01:00.000-08:00

By Caroline Reddy

The Sweetcake Enso exhibit presently visiting Zendos across the country displays a variety of Ensos that play in the dance of form and emptiness. In the pieces that were submitted for this exhilarating exhibition, form reflects the myriad conditions of everyday life—elements that equate daily existence are respected and celebrated.

Inside some of these circles of enlightenment, composed by contemporary Zen practitioners and artists, viewers discover an array of phenomena: gliding red snakes, crows, skulls, fragmented neon stickers, layers of colorful shapes resembling staircases, gritty metallic scraps and morsels, cosmic bubbles, and orbiting squares—all impressions that exemplify and illustrate life in its entirety. Alongside many elegant ensos constructed out of ink, metal leaf, mixed media, homemade paper, and found objects, an interactive sculpture entitled This and That, created by local Empty Hand Sangha member, Carolyn Fuchs, absorbs the participant in the process of creating a black-and-white enso in space the moment that a handle is spun. A mirror, hung serenely on the wall, reflects the genesis of an enso.

This and That, a peculiar sculpture devised from cast, iron, wood, metal and acrylic paint is based on the phenakistascope: an early animation device that used the persistence of motion principle to create an illusion of motion.* The breadth between the artist, her creation, and the participant vanishes as a black-and-white enso surfaces.

“I was trying to decide what to do,” Carolyn—who also goes by Carrie in our Sangha—explains as she shares her impressions on the labor of the phenakistascope. “Originally I wanted to create a painting or a drawing but nothing seemed to inspire me. I felt like I was forcing it too much, so I took a step back and thought about other ways to express an enso.” In order to emphasize the spontaneity of an enso, Carrie decided to design a three-dimensional one; this format would allow participants to work with her to create the circle of enlightenment—accenting the energetic, and spontaneous, liveliness that ensos evoke. “I started to think about a sculpture with an element that someone had to physically actualize. Each person would create the circle in space, activating a series of images that would be reflected in a mirror - their movement initiating the story. I wanted to give to the viewer, as my partner in the process, the moment of spontaneity expressed in painting an enso or experienced through a single brush stroke in calligraphy.” Without the participation of a viewer the images would remain static.

The enso in Zen represents emptiness. In an animated brush stroke a spontaneous moment emerges freely creating a circle of enlightenment; thus an aesthetic union occurs. There is no artist and there is no creator—just an energetic force that emanates and electrifies the space. Ensos also “evoke power, dynamism, charm, humor, drama and stillness.” Traditional ensos emerge from the monastery custom, where students spend years with their teacher, mindfully practicing calligraphy and creating countless circles of enlightenment. Audrey Yoshiko Seo observes that “only a person who is mentally and spiritually complete can draw a true one. Some artists practice drawing an enso daily as a spiritual practice.” Forgoing the spontaneity of one stroke painting, Carrie spent a length of time with This and That. “It was an open process; the animated content kept changing and I had to make a concerted effort not to fight that until I absolutely had to make a decision.”

The animation is intentionally ambiguous. Carrie explains the symbolic allusion ingrained in the enso: “The animation features birds, an iconic and powerfully symbolic image. In this particular flight, a tangled ball of string is tethered to the bird’s feet. Carrying the string could have different implications: a burden, unidentified/unfocused energy, or anxiety. At a certain point in the animation the string snaps, unravels, and falls into radiating space; one can interpret this as a catharsis. And as it dissolves - as the tangle falls away from the bird - it disappears, only to reappear to start the process again. This mirrors the symbolic cyclical nature of an enso.”

The cyclical nature of the animation emulates the paradigm of creation. In Zen Circles of Enlightenment, Seo links our hominal relationship to the circle. “Our connection to the circle is in some ways obvious. We are embedded in the circularity of the horizon. We live on a sphere that, with other spheres, circles around the sun, in the vast celestial dome. We are enamored with the moon. In art, we highlight an abstract circle’s many natural forms—the ring, the sphere, the wheel. We create halos that float above Saints’ heads, and perform ritual circle dances.”

Traditional enso calligraphies are often brushed in black ink; likewise, Carrie designed her enso by omitting color from her palette. “I chose to paint the image in black-and-white to simplify the image; it makes the animation more crisp. If it was done in color, the images would be muddled on the disc and hard to discern. I wanted the whole piece to be monochromatic and calming to the eye; simple and a little mysterious.” It is the elusive nature of this sculpture that had many Sangha members, including the writer of this segment, spinning the handle before the phenakistascope was unveiled to the public eye during New Rochelle’s Art Festival on Saturday October 2^nd and 3rd.

“Enso is considered to be one of the most profound subjects in Zenga (Zen-inspired paintings), and it is believed that the character of the artist is fully-exposed in how she or he draws an enso.” Aware of this vital principle of an enso, Carrie also commented on what makes the circle of enlightenment so alluring. “Ensos come from those who have forgotten about the bird and the tangle—the painter fades and the enso surfaces.”

The interplay of flight and entanglement also implies the relationship between the relative (conditional life) and the absolute (infinite); hence, Carrie envisioned her sculpture to invoke interdependence. “Flight is the activity. The entanglement and the release become a natural result of flight.” Linking emptiness and the shavings of daily life, This and That expresses non-duality differently and alongside of the many other pieces submitted for the Sweetcake Enso exhibition.

The phenakistascope allows many visitors a chance to play leading them to approach the whimsical instrument with an eager eye. “I wanted this piece,” Carrie explained, “to invoke a sense of wonder and magic, to invite curiosity and playfulness.”

In The Way of the Peaceful Warrior, by Dan Millman, Socrates, the protagonist’s mentor and spiritual teacher, associates child-like wonder to the Garden of Eden. “Every infant lives in a bright garden where everything is sensed directly, without the veils of thought—free of beliefs, interpretations, and judgments.” Perhaps, spinning the handle of this enduring sculpture echoes the famous koan: what did your face look like before your parents were born?

“When someone reaches out to turn the handle they are open to the unknown and momentarily forget themselves in the activity of watching and spinning. Then the image truly comes to life,” Carrie affirmed. This child-like innocence is precisely the reason why This and That has been aptly-nicknamed, by a few Sangha members, “the spinny-thingy.”

***

Millman, Dan. The Way of the Peaceful Warrior. California: New World Library.

Seo, Audrey Yoshiko. Enso: Zen Circles of Enlightenment. Massachusetts: Weatherhill.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/455469/phenakistoscope

Painting a Needle With a Pointed Life

2010-11-12T08:17:00.000-08:00

By Dosho Port

Twenty years ago I spent most of a year at Bukkokuji, a Zen monastery in Obama, Japan. The teacher, Harada Tangen (Unfathomable Mystery), was the only surviving successor of Harada Daiun (Great Cloud) Roshi (1871 – 1961) the Zen monk who reintroduced koan introspection to Soto Zen and launched the Harada-Yasutani lineage with the Maezumi, Kapleau, Yamada and Aitken branches now so influential in the West.

The most striking feature of Roshi Sama, as Tangen’s students called him, was his powerful hara-based, joyful energy. His dharma talks and dokusan, in their unfathomable mysteriousness, almost always included his most important two words of Zen – “Ichi tantei!” Or “One doing!”

Dokusan with him was unpredictable in many ways, including whether Roshi Sama, who had studied English more than 50 years previously in high school, would have access to his mind’s English language file or not. But it didn’t matter much. Whatever I said to him, presenting the Mu koan, or cold, tired, hungry, clear, confused, or lonely – all might be met with him a hearty “One doing!” Or, depending on the day, it might also be the Japanese, “Ichi tantei!”

And despite his koan Zen orientation, his “one-doing” was exactly right from my previous training in Dogen Zen. In what follows, I will explore Tangen’s “One doing!” from the perspective of Dogen’s Zen, starting with a passage from Actualizing the Fundamental Point and follow with a fragment from the Healing Point of Sitting Zen poem.

The question that I want to explore is how to live life to the full. What I’ve learned from thirty-some years of Zen practice is that in order to live life to the full, it is critical to be clear about one point – where am I standing? Am I outside looking in or inside looking out? Put another way, is Zen about the business of being free within this life of suffering, living fully in it, or being free from this life of suffering, transcending the world?

Kimsooja, A Needle Woman, Tokyo, 1999, video still.

In order to investigate these questions, let’s dip into how Dogen’s thinking is translated and how the translations, perhaps due to constraints of English, lean to the transcendent or the immanent, sometimes of the same passage.

For example, in Actualizing the Fundamental Point, Dogen says, “Since the Buddha way by nature goes beyond abundance and deficiency, there is arising and perishing, delusion and realization, living beings and buddhas” (Shohaku Okumura translation).

From this translation it sounds like the Buddha way is transcendent – going beyond fullness and lack and all the other this and thats of this life. Other translations seem to support this. Tanahashi and Wenger have “leaping clear of” and Nishijima and Cross say “transcendent over.” However, other translators see the Buddha way as immanent: Cleary has the Buddha way “springing forth from” abundance and deficiency. Kim prefers “leaps out of.”

Looking at the original exacerbates the issue. Dogen used these characters: 豊倹より跳出 (hoken yori choshutu suru). The phrase at issue here can be read “go beyond” or “leap out from.” Perhaps there is a third place option, something that isn’t fully encompassed by either side of the freedom-from-suffering or freedom-within-suffering teeter totter. What would that be?

In another work by Dogen, Healing Point of Zazen, Dogen quotes a poem by an earlier Soto Zen master, Hongzhi. The most relevant part for our inquiry is this:

Essential function of buddha after buddha,
Functioning essence of ancestor after ancestor –
It knows without touching things;
It illumines without facing objects.
Knowing without touching things,
Its knowing is inherently subtle…

Remember, we’re exploring the question of how to live life to the full and what the Buddha and Zen masters suggest in terms of where we stand in relation to our life. In other words, is the Buddha Way transcendent or immanent?

The first point of this poem fragment is that the essential function and the essential functioning are marked by a kind of knowing that doesn’t touch or face the things of the world. It appears to be transcendent, yet it is “knowing.”
“Knowing without touching things/Its knowing is inherently subtle.” What kind of knowing is this? In his commentary on this poem, Dogen cautions us that “‘…Knowing’ does not mean perception; for perception is of little measure.”

Kimsooja, A Needle Woman, Delhi, 1999, video still.

Our ordinary perception is small. Habitual unawakened perception can stand apart form the world, but this is different than the kind of knowing that doesn’t touch or face things of the world. Perception is also dependently arising – eye, eye consciousness, and red maple leaf interact. I (subject) see (sense organ transfers information to the mind that recognizes) the red maple leaf. As such, ordinary perception is a mental image, a shadow of the world and so is divided, and what is divided is suffering.

While perception is not Hongzhi’s knowing, it is also not understanding, because, Dogen says, “…understanding is artificially constructed.” For example, look at an enso, any enso. What do you see? Black color and zero form – and then the mind projects a meaning (including lack of meaning) based on some understanding. According to Wikipedia, the enso “… symbolizes the Absolute enlightenment, strength, elegance, the Universe, and the void.”

However, maybe for you (like me), it just looks like a zero. Maybe you like zeros and maybe you don’t (I do). Maybe you see a corporate logo (like ZenCorp.org) and all the associations and understanding that arise with that.

I suspect that in understanding the enso, you are not much more free or big happy than before you went to all the trouble to artificially construct something. Me either. However we artificially construct an understanding of the enso before us, there seems to be only a limited measure of essential functioning there. If so, then we know that we’re not sitting in the bull’s eye of Buddha’s essential functioning. In other words, given that the process of understanding involves a constructed meaning, understanding is not the knowing of which Hongzhi speaks.

Then what is right? Dogen says, “Therefore, this ‘knowing’ is ‘not touching things’ and ‘not touching things’ is ‘knowing.’

Knowing is not perception or understanding because it does not touch things and because it does not touch things, it is knowing. This begs the question, where can we go, how can we position ourselves, such that we are not outside, touching things? How about if we position ourselves “inside” and perceive and understand from there? However, this won’t do either because it falls into the same limitations of perception and understanding.

Kimsooja, A Needle Woman, Shanghai 1999, video still.

If the knowing of the Buddha’s isn’t realized from either outside looking in or inside looking out, then where do we optimally stand in our practice? Indeed, before breaking through the separation of subject and object, it seems impossible, like stopping the sound of the far-off temple bell. But it is not. It is very simple and close, now.

Glowing appellations of the simple-and-close don’t reach it. This is not some ga-ga bliss trip. Dogen continues, “Such ‘knowing’ should not be called universal knowledge; it should not be categorized as ‘self-knowledge.’”

It should not be called self-knowledge if that implies setting the self apart from other. That would be to transcend the things of the world.

What is the knowing that is the essential function of Buddhas? How can we do it? Dogen gives us two more clues. First, “…this ‘not touching things’ means ‘When light comes, hit the lightness. When darkness comes, hit the darkness.’”

This admonition is attributed to a wild-and-whacky monk who was close to Rinzai, Puhua. He is known for wandering from town to town, ringing his bell and singing, "When brightness comes, hit the brightness. When darkness comes, hit the darkness.”

“Hit” in this context suggests the nuance of “hit” that is “…to come in contact with” and not in a violent way. In other words, in whatever circumstance arises, meet it directly. If it is light, become light. If it is dark, become dark – with no space between, like a ball meeting a window. That is where to stand. But Puhua meant more, I suspect, than “become” – vigorously express light, vigorously express dark. Just one doing!

Dogen concludes with the second clue. “This ‘not touching things’ means … ‘sitting and breaking the skin born of mother.’”

The essential function of the buddhas and ancestors, then, is hitting light when light comes, hitting dark when dark comes. In so doing, we break the hardening of all the categories, even the notions of the origins of this body from the body of our mother. Not that we didn’t come from there. Just that sitting means we break the skin, just like the baby’s head crowns in the birth process. Interestingly, the line doesn’t say whether we break in or break out, through or down – because that would suggest a separation.

So where does this leave us standing? On my first day at Bukkokuji, after morning zazen and service, everyone shot to their cleaning assignments. The work leader, Kodo, grabbed a broom and danced along the main side-walk in front of the Buddha Hall, furiously brushing away the dirt and leaves. Zen temples are usually rather constrained and sober so I couldn’t help myself but to stand and stare at his dynamic presentation. Seeing me by the side of the passage watching him, Kodo continued his work but came directly at me, vigorously sweeping as he went. Stopping abruptly a foot away from where I stood, he said in rough English, “Me Mohammad Ali and I float like butterfly, sting like bee.”

And away he went showing me just one doing.

Kimsooja, A Needle Woman, Tokyo, 1991, video still.

Dosho Port teaches from Minnesota for local sanghas as well as on line at his award-winning blog Wild Fox Zen. Dosho wrote the book Keep Me in Your Heart A While: The Haunting Zen of Dainin Katagiri, in honor of his teacher, and is currently working on a book describing his experience with Dogen. From New York I was very fortunate to have been in an ango with Dosho Port, a small community living and dreaming Dogen's Zen with capping phrases and video dokusan. From around the world students poked their heads up before the camera to meet face to face in the forceful teachings of Genjokoan. Since then Dosho has made the leap and as a Soto priest formally taken up koan study with James Ford, David Rynick and Melissa Blacker. Knowing that Dosho is involved with koan study as he writes his book on Dogen adds to the savoriness of his own one doing.

I first saw Kimsooja's A Needle Woman in the "Street Art Street Life" 2009 exhibit at the Bronx Museum of Art. What you see here are stills excerpted from a video installation. Kimsooja stands absolutely still in a standing meditation pose. A video camera is installed behind her, registering her own body and pedestrian reactions to her stillness from a variety of places around the globe. Sewing and the needle are a strong motif in her body of work, and here we might say that in her one doing she breaks through the skin born of mother on each spot she stands. You can see and read more of her work here.

Catherine Seigen Spaeth

Sweetcake Enso opens at Brooklyn Zen Center November 20th!

2010-11-12T05:43:00.000-08:00

Noah Breuer Eagle/Tomcat Pinwheel, 15x15" Pigment Print, Collage, Resin and Mixed Media, 2009

On Saturday, November 20th, the No Eyes Viewing Wall at Brooklyn Zen Center will be hosting Sweetcake Enso. The Brooklyn Zen Center exhibition is co-curated by Noah Fischer and Catherine Seigen Spaeth and is the second stop in a series of exhibitions that will be traveling to various Zen Centers across the country over the next several months. The opening celebration will take place on the evening of the 20th, from 6:00 – 8:00pm following a one-day sit. Tea and cookies will be served, and there will be a discussion of Zen practice and contemporary art.

The Brooklyn Zen Center is between 3rd and 4th Avenues in Gowanus/Park Slope. To come by train, take the R train to the Union Street stop or the F train to the Carroll Street stop. For more information visit the Brooklyn Zen Center website, here.

Noah Fischer, Endless Circulation, wood, wax, metal leaf, 20" diameter, 2010.

Uroborus

2010-10-17T13:18:00.000-07:00

Christina Fernandez, Lavandaria #8, 2002, Copyright Christina Fernandez, courtesy of Gallery Luisotti.

By Gillian Cummings

Starkness: in the dogwood a robin’s nest

the bottom of which has become unwoven from the top

so that, looking up, you saw a frayed O

and through it the dusk color of sky

before a night when it would snow. It made you think

of the shadowed ceiling of a church and white

candles burning and what it feels like when the body

is trying to teach the mind stillness. There is an O

in Buddhist calligraphy that has the quality of being

finished and unfinished, as if endings and beginnings

only brush each other lightly, or as if a break

runs through perfection making it more

luminous. The dragon swallowing its tail

in alchemical texts is similar but not the same.

Seeing the nest, you paused, then walked down the path

to the laundry room where your clothes had stopped

tumbling in rough circles. You wanted to remember

how your life had come to this point, but you couldn’t

so you folded. The brief heat of dried cloth.

The solace taken, in winter, from something worn,

warmed, freshened. The open space at the center.

The gesture. The open space that surrounds.

***

Gillian Cummings is a member of the Empty Hand Zen Center, and would like to thank the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Foundation for their generosity in providing her a grant, with which she was able to write this poem.

Tremendous gratitude is expressed towards Christina Fernandez, whose photograph accompanies Gillian's poem. An exhibition of her work, "residue/residuo," is currently on view at Gallery Luisotti in Los Angeles.

Sweetcake Enso: Works in the First Exhibition at the Empty Hand Zen Center

2010-10-07T08:34:00.000-07:00

These works at the Empty Hand Zen Center in New Rochelle, NY are in the first of the series of Sweetcake Enso exhibitions. They are all available for purchase and to benefit the participating zendo. For more information about these Ensos please contact Catherine Seigen Spaeth at catherine.spaeth@gmail.com.

Miya Ando, okyoo [sutra 108], 16.5" x 88', liquid graphite on paper, 2010
Photo courtesy of Ivory Serra. Proceeds to benefit the Empty Hand Zen Center.

Miya Ando, okyoo [sutra 108], detail. Photo courtesy of Ivory Serra.

Sanford Biggers, B-Bodhisattva Slipmats, silkscreened polyester felt slipmats, 15x28", 2001.
Proceeds to benefit the Empty Hand Zen Center.

Nonin Chowaney, No Birth, No Death, brush calligraphy written on handmade meadow grass paper, 31x25", 2004
Proceeds to benefit the Empty Hand Zen Center.

Noah Fischer, Endless Circulation, wood, wax, metal leaf, 20" diameter, 2010.
Proceeds to benefit the Empty Hand Zen Center.

Carolyn Fuchs, This and That, cast iron, wood, metal, acrylic paint, 2010.
Proceeds to benefit the Empty Hand Zen Center.

Max Gimblett, Sweet Cake, sumi ink, Thai Garden embossed handmade paper, 22 1/4x30 1/2", 2001.
Proceeds to benefit the San Francisco Zen Center.

Gonkar Gyatso, Buddha in Modern Times, silkscreen print, 22x19", 2009.
Proceeds to benefit the Empty Hand Zen Center.

Gregg Hill, Enso for Thay, paint on steel, 22" diameter x 4", 2010.
Proceeds to benefit the Empty Hand Zen Center.

Anne Humanfeld, 100 Different China, acrylic transfer, 30x24", 2010.
Proceeds to benefit the Empty Hand Zen Center.

Anne Humanfeld, Eggs and Babies, acrylic transfer, 30x35", 2010.
Proceeds to benefit the Empty Hand Zen Center.

Anne Humanfeld, Eiger Enso, acrylic transfer, 35x30", 2010.
Proceeds to benefit the Empty Hand Zen Center.

Liz LaBella, Enso Dawn, mixed media, 2010.
Proceeds to benefit the Empty Hand Zen Center.

Jeff Schlanger, Lens, acrylic on Whatman paper, 30x22", 2010.
Proceeds to benefit the Empty Hand Zen Center.

Jeff Schlanger, Maija Wheel, acrylic on Whatman paper, 30x22", 2010.
Proceeds to benefit the Empty Hand Zen Center.

Jeff Schlanger, Planet, acrylic on Whatman paper, 30x22", 2010.
Proceeds to benefit the Empty Hand Zen Center.

Jeff Schlanger, Ring, acrylic on Whatman paper, 30x22", 2010.
Proceeds to benefit the Empty Hand Zen Center.

Fran Shalom, Untitled, oil on wood on panel, 11x14", 2010.
Proceeds to benefit the Empty Hand Zen Center.

Fran Shalom, Untitled, oil on wood on panel, 12x12", 2010.
Proceeds to benefit the Empty Hand Zen Center.

Fran Shalom, Untitled, oil on wood on panel, 11x14", 2010.
Proceeds to benefit the Empty Hand Zen Center.

Karen Schiff, Pointing at the Moon (all through the night), gesso on paper bags, 20x16", 2010.
Proceeds to benefit the Empty Hand Zen Center.

Karen Schiff, Pointing at the Moon (under a mackerel sky), gesso on paper bags, 20x16", 2010.
Proceeds to benefit the Empty Hand Zen Center.

Bridget Spaeth, Pull, gouache, graphite on spliced paper, 12x16", 2005.
Proceeds to benefit the Empty Hand Zen Center.

Michael Wenger, Untitled 1, 2, 3, 4, sumi ink on paper, 2010.
Proceeds to benefit the Empty Hand Zen Center.

When a Buddha Meets a Buddha: Zen Art and Sweetcake Ensos

2010-09-27T12:39:00.000-07:00

Michael Wenger, 1, 2010, sumi ink on paper, a percentage of the proceeds have been designated to the Empty Hand Zen Center.

By Catherine Seigen Spaeth

The exhibition of Hakuin’s work in the United States together with the series of Sweetcake Enso exhibits provide an opportunity to revisit the notion of a Zen Art. That there is a Zen Art is a notion that has earned its place, but at the same time there is no insurance of its security. The interest here is in a shift from the monastic practice of Japan to a stronger emphasis upon lay practice in American Zen, and what this means for understanding contemporary art as Zen practice. Michael Wenger’s paintings, and his sense of the value of trust and permission in contemporary American student-teacher relationship are an opening towards such a discussion.

Many scholars of the relation of Zen and art have identified specific principles between them. Of interest in the context of Sweetcake Enso is that in the history of Zen practice painting has been a vehicle of dharma expression between teacher and student. Helmut Brinker explains that in broader Chinese aesthetic theory it was already the case that the signature of an artist was considered to be a “mind seal,” bringing the artist, the work and the viewer together simultaneously in absorptive aesthetic experience. This became particularly important in the Zen tradition, where the brushwork of a Zen Master is an unbroken continuity of embodied dharma expression across generations. Contemporary American practitioners will flock to the Hakuin exhibition at the Japan Society, becoming absorbed in the authentic gestures of Hakuin’s eighteenth century teachings.

Audrey Seo, who together with Steve Addiss curated the Hakuin show, has done considerable research to understand this phenomenon in the context of Japanese monastic practice. A Zen Master will teach his painting practice to his disciples as yet another way of carrying the dharma forward mind to mind. These simple and direct works meet well a practice of art historical scholarship in which the connoisseurship of various hands supports what is understood of the artists personalities and their varied expressions of the dharma, from teacher to student. This includes their relationship to one another: Seo explains that where Deiryu portrays his Zen Master Nantenbo with awe and slight apprehension, Nantenbo portrays himself as a weathered old man, “But the strong force of the Master’s brushwork is still felt in the dramatic splash of the ink surrounding him.”**

Michael Wenger, 2, 2010, sumi ink on paper, a percentage of the proceeds have been designated to the Empty Hand Zen Center.

Japanese Zen painting is not always as lineal as this, however, and it is Hakuin who is the most well known for painting for the laity. There is no question that Hakuin is understood to be a Zen master of considerable force, “a sea of vital energy,” but the manner of this energy was as much in his fondness of humorous characters in popular folklore, and his own humor in the visual pun as it was in anything else. Hakuin was not terribly interested in the Enso, there are only four known such paintings of his. But an ox is staring at a round and gated window from a distance, and Hotei fits in his own round sack.

Hakuin Ekaku, Hotei Watching Mouse Sumo. Ink on paper, 14 5/8 x 20 5/8 in. Ginshu Collection. Photo: Maggie Nimkin. Found here.

In contemporary American Zen circles the Enso is more likely to be seen without words or punning tendency. In postwar American Zen direct experience and the absolute present occupied the space of high culture at the expense of meaning and the figurative, and today there are numerous Zen painting workshops that work abstractly with the Enso in an attempt to fuse art and life as unmediated experience.

But among those with an appreciation of the Enso tradition, the circle is rarely an isolated abstract form. Audrey Seo explains that in 1969 when Shibayama wrote his book Zenga no enso:

His only request was that the book should not merely reproduce the enso but also provide the calligraphic commentary accompanying each enso. He believed that the teachings given by Zen Masters in their inscriptions was of the utmost importance, and that therefore the image of the circle should not be indiscriminately introduced without the text. To this end he also said that an enso without an inscription was like “flat beer.” ***

Michael Wenger, 3, 2010, sumi ink on paper, a percentage of the proceeds have been designated to the Empty Hand Zen Center.

Not unlike Hakuin in his popular approach, contemporary artist and Zen teacher Michael Wenger of the San Francisco Zen Center was perhaps first well known for his book 33 Fingers: A Collection of Modern American Koans. Drawing upon a variety of teachers as well as popular figures such as Yogi Bera and Woody Allen, vending machines, candy, patience and ruinous hyphens recast the traditional koan meanings of clay tiles, a man up a tree, and the sound of a pebble hitting bamboo.

About eight years ago, Wenger began painting as a regular practice, something he had only done occasionally before. He describes this practice in the subtitle of his blog, inklings:

My work runs the gamut from primitive cave paintings to the post modern; it is influenced by traditional Asian brushwork, modern painters and new yorker cartoonists, from doodles to bizarro. Its subject matter is meditation, sports, politics, social conventions…in short, everything that crosses my brush/mind I call them inklings…creations brought to life by ink, brush and the air the secret of the work is in each stroke of the brush.

Important to Michael Wenger is that “it’s easy to do freestroke painting, but it’s not so easy to tie it back into the mind. That’s a different step.”

Michael Wenger, 4, 2010, sumi ink on paper, a percentage of the proceeds have been designated to the Empty Hand Zen Center.

It was eight years ago that the painter Max Gimblett came to the San Francisco Zen Center and met Michael Wenger. Across the distance from the east coast to the west, a Buddha met a Buddha. Gimblett was already a painter of some renown, and encouraged Wenger to paint his inklings, noticing Wenger’s inclination to write on his finished drawings and encouraging this. And Max Gimblett accepted the Precepts from Michael Wenger in 2006, exhibiting in The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, in 2009. The permission and trust between them has amplified what they each can do:

When two Buddhas shine
Teacher and student
Become Wisdom *****

What exists between Michael Wenger and Max Gimblett is rare in that very few teacher-student relationships in America today are grounded to this extent in the shared practice of painting – I know of no others like this one. What their relationship does show is how generously the dharma unfolds in the acceptance, permission, and trust between a Zen teacher and a lay practitioner.

Of course these existed equally and well in the Japanese monastic relations of teacher and student. But it does seem to me that if there is such a thing as a Zen Art today, without the narrower parameters of monastic life proscribed forms and previously understood principles are loosening and shifting to make room for what acceptance, permission and trust will allow in a culture of lay practice.

Exhibitions such as Third Mind have done much to show how much room there has been, but in the context of “contemplating Asia.” Sweetcake Enso does want to narrow the parameters from such a broad contemplation, but only in order to understand how open the contemporary lay practice of Zen is to contemporary artists. This is the acceptance, permission and trust of these shows.

Below is the painting Free at Last, painted by Michael Wenger in 2009. He explains that he was providing a workshop and made the statement that religion and art belong to no one. It was at this time, when painting Free at Last, that he most understood what it was that his student Max Gimblett had given him the permission to do.

Michael Wenger, Free at Last, 2009

* Helmut Brinker, Hiroshi Kanazawa, Andreas Leisinger, “Zen Masters of Meditation in Images and Writings,” Artibus Asiae Supplementum, V. 40, c. 1996, pp. 3-384, p. 37.

** Audrey Seo, The Art of Twentieth Century Zen: Paintings and Calligraphy by Japanese Masters, Shambala Press, c. 2000, p. 37.

*** ibid., p. 187.

**** Telephone interview, September 16th, 2010.

*****Michael Wenger, 33 Fingers: A Collection of Modern American Koans, San Francisco, Clear Glass Publishing, c. 1994, Verse from Case Number 13, "She is my Teacher," p. 33.

Rafe and Ariya Martin: On "Gabyo," Zen Master Dogen's "Painting of a Rice Cake."

2010-09-12T14:35:00.000-07:00

Ariya Martin, Teeny Tower #1, archival pigment print, 34x22", 2010

By Rafe Martin

If you say a painting is not real, then the material phenomenal world is not real. Unsurpassed enlightenment is a painting. The entire phenomenal universe and the empty sky are nothing but a painting. Since this is so, there is no remedy for satisfying hunger other than a painted rice cake. Without painted hunger you never become a true person. - Zen Master Dogen, "Painting of a Rice Cake," (Trans., Gary Snyder, Mountains and Rivers Without End.)

When [the Dharma] ...is internalized it is most naturally taught in the form of folk stories: the jataka tales in classical Buddhism, the koans in Zen. - Robert Aitken Roshi.

Painted rice cakes, it’s said, can’t satisfy hunger. How could they? It would be like reading a menu and expecting that to nourish us – this is how one traditional Zen view puts it. To be satisfied, we’re told, we have to sit down and eat. To satisfy our real existential hunger, we have to sit down and actually practice. We’ve got to eat a real meal, bite into, chew and swallow a real rice cake. But Dogen brilliantly states, “There is no remedy for satisfying our hunger other than a painted rice cake.”

No remedy for satisfying our deep hunger other than a painted rice cake? A painting of a rice cake is going to do the job – is actually the only thing that can?

Hmmm. So, is it that without illusion, imagination, dreams we can’t be whole, can’t fulfill the potential of our realization of this very moment? Without stories of previous exertions, without temples, teachers, thangkas, painted and carved Buddhas, altars, Centers, Shakespeare, zendos, Beethoven, Blake, Gandhi, Dogen, Mary Oliver, Gary Snyder, Martin Luther King, Tarzan, Ryokan, Rembrandt, Rothko, Hakuin, Hamlet, Gandalf, Frodo, mothers, fathers – who would we be? How would we proceed?

Dogen goes on to say in “Gabyo” that the idea of ourselves as either unenlightened or enlightened is itself a painting built of the five skandhas. Likewise the rooted idea of self and other is such a painting. Buddhas themselves are paintings created with clay shrines, a blade of grass, limitless aspiration, the thirty-two marks, and countless kalpas of assiduous practice effort.

If this is so, then what kind of truth would we seek, what kind of truth could we actualize that is not a painting?

How would we become whole, that is, be satisfied, without a painting of a rice cake?

For it is out of the imagination that we create our real lives. Athletes know this better than scholars. If you want to swim better, visualize yourself in the pool, the water flowing smoothly past, the chiming, churning sound of that flow, the kick of your legs, the perfect effortless stroke. What happens in the imagination affects us, even makes us who we are. As Yeats says, “In dreams begin responsibilities.” Stories, paintings, art itself is a tool that our ancestors worldwide passed down to us, an impressive technology, if you will, to refine the inner life, to improve our dreaming. To paint a picture.

This goes against the grain of a certain contemporary view that Buddhism, especially Zen, is not about dreams and imaginings, but rather about “reality” and “truth.” The salvation Buddhist practice offers is, in this view, freedom from all such old-timey “fluff.” I have even encountered some Zen practitioners who hold that imagination is the furthest thing from Buddhism, and, indeed, useless to its practice.

But we could just as well assert the opposite — that Buddhism, Zen included, is a great engine of wish and dream. In fact, the Bodhisattva ideal, the core of Mahayana Buddhism of which Zen is one aspect, might be said to depend almost entirely upon the power of Imagination itself. To vow to save all beings one must not simply imagine, but one must imagine bravely, totally, immensely, and deeply. Why commit oneself to a small dream, tediously emptying a vast ocean by the teaspoonful, when a great dream can encompass everything, even Truth itself, and swallow up the entire universe in a single gulp?

Of course, “imagination,” like “myth,” can for us, today, summon quite opposing connotations. The popular meaning of myth, like imagination, is that it is something “false.” But myth can also mean something so true it cannot be put into one final linguistic or imagistic form. It underlies all forms. It is a story truer than words can say.

Ariya Martin, Teeny Tower # 2, archival pigment print, 34x22", 2010

As for imagination, it need not mean fantasy, reflection, daydreams, thoughts, insights, or the stream of internal vision and thought, where we are isolated, withdrawn, and separated from whatever is right before us: that teacup; this bug. That damned leaky faucet. It can just as authentically mean Imagination, in the sense of infinite creative potential, the realm we might enter in meditation (zazen) when body and mind fall away; emptiness that is neither static nor dull, but free (empty) of all limitation; that is, a realm of infinitely creative potential, the realm out of which we dream/create our own unique daily, never-to-be-repeated, moment-by-moment, breath-by-breath, thought form-by-thought form, lives. It is where the highest we can imagine is the same as what IS, the state one might experience in watching the night dances at Zuni Pueblo where plants, birds, thoughts, galaxies, and stars enter the plaza as living, dancing beings. “There is a dream dreaming us,” is a Bushmen saying pointing to this realm. It is the Empty realm of Reality. Blake says, “The imagination is not a State: it is the Human existence itself.” And what is that? It is simply, “To see a world in a grain of sand,/ And a heaven in a wild flower, /Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,/ And eternity in an hour.” (W. Blake, “Auguries of Innocence”)

So, what we most usually term “reality” is, as it turns out, simply another dream, an imagining and a somewhat limited one at that. In the end, reality and imagination, Mind and stories cannot be separated. Painted cakes do feed our hunger. Not only are they not two, they are not even one: “In other words, myth is reality and reality myth. Dogen did not believe . . . in a dualism between reality and myth . . . rather his purport was to clarify, purify, and reinforce myth — that is, Buddha-nature — in order to see and touch reality as it was.” (Hee-Jin Kim, Eihei Dogen: Mystical Realist

Again, to repeat Dogen himself:

If you say the painting is not real, then the material phenomenal world is not real, the Dharma is not real. Unsurpassed enlightenment is a painting. The entire phenomenal universe and the empty sky are nothing but a painting. Since this is so, there is no remedy for satisfying hunger other than a painted rice cake. Without painted hunger you never become a true person.

One of the central koans (literally “public record”) in the venerable Mumonkan (Gateless Gate or Gateless Barrier) collection of koans and commentaries by the early thirteenth century Chinese Zen Master Mumon (Wu-men) is its second case, that of “Hyakujo’s (Pai-chang’s) Fox.” The case itself is essentially a folktale about karma and essential nature in which a head priest is reborn 500 lifetimes as a fox. Wu-men’s pithy comment on the case ends, “If you have the eye to see through this you will appreciate how the former head of the monastery enjoyed his five hundred happy blessed lives as a fox.”

Here Mumon might be making a sly reference to jataka tales – stories of the Buddha’s former births, often in animal form. In the jataka tradition, the Buddha himself lives (essentially) five hundred past lives, before stepping forward and making his final, total effort to embody the Way, thereby becoming Shakyamuni, the Buddha of our own historic period. Mumon’s reference touches an interesting and classic point —were any of those 500 previous lives any less “Buddha”? The Zen question here is — are any of our lives now?

The voice of a mythic, deeply imaginative Zen runs like quicksilver through the koans, turning back and forth on fundamental points of karma and essential nature. And behind that, lie pointers to the Buddha’s past lives as brought to life through the Dharma folklore of the jatakas, little paintings, snapshots of moments on the Way, all part of the traditional context of Buddhist practice and aspiration. They show the Buddha painting his own picture of Buddha, an enso portrait, with the brush and ink of countless kalpas of sustained and dedicated practice.

Ariya Martin, Teeny Tower # 3, archival pigment print, 34x22", 2010

***

In Ariya Martin’s Teeny Towers one surface meets another in a clambering balancing act of daily aspirations. Containers at a modest bathroom sink - familiar to our hands in weight and shape and barcoded - summon grand triumphs in small daily actions. Intimate, domestic spaces are the scene of our own placing, where we often contemplate our actions in more administered spaces. Here, the symbolic imagination has been invited into the measured placement of one thing atop another in the midst of precarious life.

Ariya Martin is the daughter of Rafe Martin, a nice review of these photographs can be found at her website here. Martin received her MFA in imaging arts-fine art photography from Rochester Institute of technology. She moved to New Orleans in 2006 to put her photography skills to use as instructor and co-director of The New Orleans Kid Camera Project (a project of One Bird), the non-profit organization she co-founded. For the past two years she has been teaching photography as adjunct faculty at University of New Orleans, where she currently is the Artist in Residence.

Rafe Martin is an award winning, internationally known author and storyteller whose work has been featured in Time, Newsweek, and USA Today. He has been a featured teller at the National Storytelling Festival, the International Storytelling Center, and the Joseph Campbell Festival of Myth and Story among many others, and is a recipient of the prestigious Empire State Award. He was Roshi Philip Kapleau’s chosen editor for his own final books, and is also a fully ordained lay Zen practioner, with many years of Zen practice and study. Among his many books are The Hungry Tigress: Buddhist Myths, Legends, and Jataka Tales. The Banyan Deer: A Parable of Courage and Compassion, and available on September 28th, Endless Path: Awakening Within the Buddhist Imagination – Zen Practice, Daily Life, and the Jataka Tales.

Sweetcake Enso Opening at the Empty Hand Zen Center, Saturday October 2nd and 3rd, 12:00-5:00

2010-09-05T13:06:00.000-07:00

Anne Humanfeld, 100 Different China, 18x12 collage and monoprint on 30x24" nylon. As designated by the artists all proceeds from this sale are to benefit the Empty Hand Zen Center.

Sweetcake Enso draws attention to the abstract circle as a symbol of presentness in daily life, and opens out the traditional calligraphy of the Enso to include the work of Buddhist artists that is thriving in the contemporary art context. Alongside of Zen Master Nonin Chowaney’s traditional calligraphy will be that of artists more internationally known in the contemporary art context, such as Sanford Biggers, Noah Fischer, and Max Gimblett. Above is an image by Anne Humanfeld, a member of the Empty Hand Zen Center. Sweetcake Enso will also include the work of local community artists, and is traveling from Zen center to Zen center in order to showcase their work in the context of larger Buddhist community.

The inaugural exhibition at the Empty Hand Zen Center in New Rochelle coincides with the opening of the Hakuin show at the Japan Society, a very rare opportunity for people in this country to see the work of a Japanese Zen master of a distant century. Exhibited alongside of Hakuin at the Japan Society is the work of Max Gimblett, below, also in the Sweetcake Enso exhibitions. Sweetcake Enso exhibits are a tribute to the teachers who have come before us and those who are with us now, to an exchanging of the bones from one generation to the next. As these exhibits move from Zen center to Zen center they will be raising funds to support the tradition of the student-teacher relationship.

Max Gimblett, Sweet Cake, sumi ink, Thai Garden embossed handmade paper, 22 1/4x30 1/2", 2001, as designated by the artist all proceeds from this sale are to benefit the San Francisco Zen Center.

The Empty Hand Zen Center is located at 45 Lawton Street, New Rochelle, New York, 10801. Directions can be found here.

The work in these exhibitions is for sale. To make an inquiry please contact Catherine Seigen Spaeth, catherine.spaeth@gmail.com.

Sweetcake Enso: Exchanging the Bones

2010-06-18T08:31:00.000-07:00

A monk asked Yunmen, ”What is talk that goes beyond Buddhas and Patriarchs?” Yunmen said, “Cake.” Case 77 of the Blue Cliff Record.

To penetrate one thing does not take away its inherent characteristics. Just as penetration does not limit one thing, it does not make one thing unlimited. To try to make it unlimited is a hindrance. - Dogen, “Gabyo”, or “The Painted Rice Cake,” 1242

In American culture Zen is often represented by the Enso, to the extent that the Enso can be regarded as a logo for a brand identity. However, the Enso is truly known for the singularity of each mark as the expression of presentness. And as a symbol of emptiness the Enso is where the relative meets the absolute. Also true is that as an abstract circle the Enso is frequently given names, one of which is the Sweetcake Enso. According to one definition, found here, "Zen circles are profound but they are not abstract, and when enlightenment and the acts of daily life - "sipping tea and eating rice cakes" - are one, there is true Buddhism."

The koan above is one of the one hundred cases that Dogen copied overnight before his ship departed from China to Japan. This legend of an impossible night’s writing is often held beside that of Dahui’s burning of koan collections in the previous century, as though this tale of continuous tradition is not permissible without corresponding rupture. Rupture and continuity appears in the very words Dogen has copied - here is Yuanwu’s concluding commentary on the koan’s interpretations:

Followers of Ch’an these days just go to “cake,” or else they go to “beyond Buddhas and Patriarchs” to make up theories. Since it is not in these two places, in the end where is it? Thirty years from now, when I’ve exchanged my bones, I’ll tell you.

Fifteen years after copying this koan collection in a single night, Dogen wrote his essay Gabyo, or "The Painting of a Rice Cake.” Truly an exchanging of bones, Dogen begins where Yuanwu left off. He responds to the statement that “A painting of a rice cake does not satisfy hunger,” a derogatory phrase often directed towards language and scholarship. Dogen’s response is that “If you say a painting is not real, then the myriad things are not real,” and that “without painted hunger you never become a true person.”

Dogen has effectively thrown Yun Men’s “cake” into an entirely different register, but a register that was available to him in conventional speech. “Painting” renders the world’s visibility for us in the space and history of a medium and its traditions. Within its own conventions painting models the relations of what is large and what is small.

This sense of convention and relationship is extended beyond the literal surface of painting's illusionism. In our own time there has long been the understanding that Zen Art is defined by an unmediated spontaneity. But this is a convention – even those who experience awakening upon the sound of bamboo are “all paintings,” according to Dogen.

Shubun, 15th Century, found here.

The circle as a Zen form also appears frequently in the Oxherding Pictures – it may appear as the ultimate achievement of enlightenment and conclude the series, or be followed by the return to the marketplace. Whether or not this return to the marketplace is after enlightenment or as enlightenment is a question that is often posed, but “as Buddha-dharma is real, a painted rice cake is real,” there is no separation between enlightenment and the marketplace for Dogen.

There is the story of a tea lady selling rice cakes by the side of the road. A priest walks by her stand boasting of his scholarship of the Diamond Sutra. She asks him, “I have heard it said that according to the Diamond Sutra past mind is ungraspable, present mind is ungraspable, and future mind is ungraspable. So where is the mind that you wish to refresh with rice cakes?” As the story goes, the priest cannot answer the question, and she refuses to sell him a rice cake. In his essay "Ungraspable Mind" Dogen takes issue with the tea lady's response, suggesting that the more adequate response would have been to offer the priest three rice cakes, one each for the past, present and future. For the truth is that “the mind refreshes the rice cake, or that the mind refreshes the mind.” And in Gabyo, he concludes that ”As a rule, to realize the ungraspable mind is to imbibe and to savor a painted rice cake.”

To call attention to the Sweetcake Enso is to extend an invitation to express the emptiness of all forms in their singularity. More specifically we are thinking here of the circle as a conveyor of meaning. It is above all the circle that is associated with Zen. With regard to the Sweetcake Enso exhibits, whether it is a sleeping cat or a compost bin there is not a limitless collapse of the boundaries between art and life, but a specific inquiry into form as emptiness, an inquiry for which the Sweetcake Enso is our emblem. Abstract, representational, or both this can be expressed in any medium.

Shubun, 15th century, found here.

References:

Case Seventy-seven of the Blue Cliff Record, Thomas C. Cleary and J.C. Cleary, trans., Shambala, Boston and London, c. 2005, pp. 424-427.

Eihei Dogen, "Painting of a Rice Cake," in Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dogen, Kazuaki Tanahashi, ed., North point Press, c. 1985, pp. 134-139.

Eihei Dogen, "Ungraspable Mind: A Translation of the KS "Shinfukatoku" Fascicle," in Steven Heine, Dogen and the Koan tradition: A Tale of Two Shobogenzo Texts, Suny press, c. 1994, pp. 253-256.