Part 1 (1/2)
Zen Culture.
by Thomas Hoover.
Foreword
ANYONE WHO EXAMINES the Zen arts is immediately struck by how modern they seem. Many of the most famous stone gardens are abstract expressionism pure and simple, created out of found objects. The ceramics of the sixteenth-century Zen artists could be interchanged with the rugged pots of our own contemporary crafts movement and few people would notice a difference. Ancient Zen calligraphies, bold and slas.h.i.+ng, suggest the monochromes of Franz Kline or Willem de Kooning, and if the word ”impressionistic” has any real meaning left, the spontaneous, intuitive, impulsive Zen painters should have first claim to it. The apparent nonsense and illogic of Zen parables established the limitations of language long before the theater of the absurd decided to ridicule our modern doublespeak; indeed, our new-found skepticism about language as a medium for communication was a commonplace to j.a.panese artists who created both a drama (the No) and a poetry (the Haiku) that neatly circ.u.mvent reliance on mere words for expression--and in two entirely different ways. Four-hundred-year-old Zen architecture appears to be virtually a copy of contemporary design ideas: modular sizing, exposed woods and materials, movable part.i.tions, multifunctional rooms, bare walls and uncluttered s.p.a.ce, indirect lighting effects, and a California marriage of house and garden. The celebrated tea ceremony might be considered an early form of j.a.panese group therapy, while Zen landscape gardens are nothing less than a masterful deception masquerading as the ”natural” look.
If all this were not coincidence enough, consider for a moment our present-day artistic conventions and aesthetic ideals. Like much of what we consider ”modern,” Zen arts tend to be as simple as possible, with clean, even severe, lines. Decoration for its own sake is virtually nonexistent; Zen artists had no more taste for the ornate than we do today. The works of medieval Zen artists were rough and asymmetrical, with a skillful exploitation of deliberate imperfections and blemishes to make the viewer aware of both the materials used and the process of creation. If it is true that cla.s.sic art makes one aware of the form and romantic art makes one aware of the artist, Zen art makes one aware of the work of art itself.
We have absorbed into our Western culture almost unawares such Zen cultural forms and aesthetic principles as j.a.panese ideas of architecture, gardens, and flower arranging. Other forms, such as Haiku poetry and Zen-style ceramics, we have borrowed in a more open-handed way, freely acknowledging the source. Actually, none of the Zen arts is really out of our reach, and a critical following has developed in the West for almost all of them. The great Irish poet and dramatist William Butler Yeats embraced the Zen-inspired No drama, although he probably knew next to nothing about Zen. (For that matter, we should recall that no English-language books were written on Zen until well into the twentieth century.) It seems fair to say that the Zen arts have touched us because they express some view of the world that we have, several hundred years later, quite independently come to share.
Yet for all the seeming familiarity, there remains an alien quality. We are not always aware of the really quite extraordinary mind manipulation inherent in Zen art. Why, for instance, does a j.a.panese garden often seem much larger than it really is? How does the j.a.panese- style room alter human perception in such a way that people's experience of each other is intensified? Why do Zen ceramics always manage to make one take special notice of their surface? This subtle manipulation of perception is all done by ingenious but carefully hidden tricks. But since the Zen arts appear so modern, we are lulled out of looking below the surface to find the fundamental differences.
Most important of all, it is easy to miss what is surely the most significant quality of Zen arts--their ability to unlock our powers of direct perception. Since Zen teaches that categories and systematic a.n.a.lysis hinder real understanding of the outer
(or inner) world, many Zen arts are specifically designed to awaken our latent ability to perceive directly. They appear innocent enough on the surface, but they involve a subtle mind- ma.s.sage not obvious to a casual observer. It is this added dimension of Zen art that truly sets it apart from anything we have produced in the twentieth century.
In these pages I will attempt to trace the history and characteristics of both Zen and the Zen arts--to explain where they came from, why they arose, what they were intended to do, and how they go about doing it. I have also included some Western-style a.n.a.lysis of their very non- Western qualities. The aesthetic ideas embedded in Zen culture and its perception-inducing works of art are among the most stunning achievements in world art history. Zen culture, concerned as it is with the process of perception as much as with actual works of art, can open our senses so that we experience anew the arts of both East and West, ancient and modern.
Part I
THE BEGINNINGS: PREHISTORY TO 1333
CHAPTER ONE
Zen Culture and the Counter Mind
_ Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow.
_Matthew 6:28
_Pre-Buddhist clay figure _(haniwa)
THE ZEN TRADITION extends back some fifteen hundred years to a wandering Indian teacher of meditation named Bodhidharma. As Indian gurus are fond of doing, Bodhidharma left his homeland and journeyed abroad, following what was in those days a well-beaten trail to China. Upon reaching Nanking, he paused to visit the Chinese Emperor Wu, a man known to be a particularly devout Buddhist. The emperor was delighted to receive his famous Indian guest and proceeded immediately to boast of his own accomplishments. ”I have built many temples. I have copied the sacred _sutras_. I have led many to the Buddha. Therefore, I ask you: What is my merit: What reward have I earned?” Bodhidharma reportedly growled, ”None whatsoever, your Majesty.” The emperor was startled but persisted, ”Tell me then, what is the most important principle or teaching of Buddhism?” ”Vast emptiness,” Bodhidharma replied, meaning, of course, the void of nonattachment. Not knowing what to make of his guest, the emperor backed away and inquired, ”Who exactly are you who stands before me now?” To which Bodhidharma admitted he had no idea.
Sensing that the emperor was not yet prepared for such teachings, Bodhidharma left the palace and traveled to a mountain monastery to begin a long career of meditation. Over the years his reputation for wisdom gradually attracted many followers--dissident Chinese who rejected cla.s.sical Buddhism and all its rigmarole in favor of Bodhidharma's meditation, or _dhyana_, a Sanskrit term they p.r.o.nounced as Ch'an--later to be called Zen by the j.a.panese. This teaching of meditation and vast emptiness shared very little with other branches of Chinese Buddhism. Ch'an had no sacred images because it had no G.o.ds to wors.h.i.+p, and it de-emphasized the scriptures, since its central dogma was that dogma is useless. Handed down from master to pupil was the paradoxical teaching that nothing can be taught. According to Ch'an (and Zen), understanding comes only by ignoring the intellect and heeding the instincts, the intuition.
Thus Zen became the religion of the antirational, what might be called the counter mind. The counter mind has taken on more concrete significance in recent years with the discovery that the human mind is not a single ent.i.ty but is divided into two quite different functional sections. We now know that the left hemisphere of the brain governs the logical, a.n.a.lytical portion of our lives, whereas the right hemisphere is the seat of our intuitive, nonverbal perception and understanding.
As far back as the ancient Greeks, we in the West have maintained an almost unshakable belief in the superiority of the a.n.a.lytical side of the mind, and this belief may well be the most consistent distinguis.h.i.+ng quality of Western philosophy. By contrast, the East in general and Zen in particular have advanced the opposite view. In fact, Zen masters have deliberately developed techniques (like illogical riddles or _koan_) to discredit the logical, verbal side of the mind so that the intuitive perceptions of the right hemisphere, the counter mind, may define reality.
What is the counter mind really like? What is there about it that has caused Western thinkers to disavow its functions for so many centuries?