Man 0, Fish 1

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.”

Copyright © Patricia Mushim Y. Ikeda 2011 

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

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

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

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.

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Hirokazu Kosaka at Haguyji Temple in Japan.

You've Got to Serve Somebody

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.