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.

.

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.

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*  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

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.

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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.”