Zen Culture Part 19

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The Lessons of Zen Culture

_It is not surprising if the religious need, the believing mind, and the philosophical speculations of the educated European are attracted to the symbols of the East, just as once before the heart and mind of men of antiquity were gripped by Christian ideas.

_

Carl Gustav Jung_, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious

_

EVERY MAJOR ZEN cultural form is designed to operate on the mind in some manipulative, non-Western fas.h.i.+on. If we look carefully, we find that not one of the Zen forms has a real counterpart in Western culture. Zen archery and swordsmans.h.i.+p seem almost a species of hypnotism. Zen gardens are a bag of tricks and specifically designed to deceive one's perception. Zen painting is a product of the nonrational counter mind; although it requires training at least as rigorous as any that a Western academy could supply, at the critical moment the training is forgotten and the work becomes wholly spontaneous. No drama uses clever devices of suggestion to push the mind into areas of understanding too profound for words, while the open-ended Haiku is a spark igniting an explosion of imagery and nonrational perception in the listener's mind.

The traditional j.a.panese house is a psychological chamber from floor to ceiling. Zen ceramics by subtle deceptions destroy our impulses to categorize, forcing us to experience directly materials, process, and form. The tea ceremony is still another exercise in deliberately altering one's state of mind, this time under the guise of a simple social occasion. It seems almost as if the Zen arts were intended to be an object lesson to us on the limitations of the senses in defining reality. Just as the _koan_ taunt the logical mind, the Zen arts, by toying with perception, remind us that there is a reality not subject to the five senses. In Eastern philosophy, although "seeing" involves the senses, it must ultimately transcend them.

Zen culture has been devised over the centuries to bring us in touch with a portion of ourselves we in the West scarcely know--our nonrational, nonverbal side. Whereas Ch'an masters of a thousand years ago were devising mind exercises to short-circuit and defeat the limiting characteristics of the rational side of the mind, the idea of the counter mind has only recently found experimental validation--and hence intellectual respectability--in the rationalist West. (As one example of many, recent experiments at Harvard University found that "questions demanding . . . verbal . . . processes result in the greatest left [brain] hemispherical activation . . . [while] emotional questions elicit the greatest right hemispheric activation."1) Apparently not only did the Ch'an masters intuitively realize the existence of the nonverbal half of the mind during the T'ang era (618- 907), but they, and later the j.a.panese, used it to create a spectrum of art and cultural forms which exploits, strengthens, and sharpens these same nonverbal faculties.

Zen cultural forms are the perfect physical proof of the strength of the counter mind. Even those using language (the No and Haiku) rely more on suggestion than on words. Indeed, the very language of j.a.pan was recently described by a j.a.panese scholar in terms that make it sound almost like an intuitive,

counter-mind phenomenon: "English is a language intended strictly for communication. j.a.panese is primarily interested in feeling out the other person's mood, in order to work out one's own course of action based on one's impression."2 This difference in approach to language, in which it is seen as a virtual barrier to communicating what is really significant (one's subjective response), appears to be a side effect of Zen culture. As a j.a.panese critic recently observed,

_A corollary to the j.a.panese att.i.tude toward language might be called the "aesthetics of silence"---making a virtue of reticence and a vulgarity of verbalization or open expression of one's inner thoughts.

This att.i.tude can be traced to the Zen Buddhist idea that man is capable of arriving at the highest level of contemplative being only when he makes no attempt at verbalizations and discounts oral expression as the height of superficiality.3

_

Finally, Zen cultural forms use the nonverbal, nonrational powers of the mind to produce in the perceiver a complete sense of identification with the object. If a Zen art work is truly successful, the perceiver has no sense of "I" and "it." If reflection or a.n.a.lysis is required, the work is of no more use than a joke whose punch line needs explanation. One's mind must immediately experience something beyond the work. Even as the eye cannot see itself without a mirror, so it is with the mind. The inducing of introspection turns out to be a deliberate function of Zen art--the forcing of the mind past the surface form of an art work and into a direct experience of a greater truth.

The Zen arts are, we realize at last, completely internalized. They depend as much on the perception of the viewer or partic.i.p.ants as they do on any of their own inherent qualities. For this reason they can be sparing and restrained. (They also happen to be perfectly suited to a land that, over the centuries, has been as physically impoverished as j.a.pan.) By using small- scale, suggestive arts that depend to a large extent on the special perception of the audience for their impact, Zen artists were able to provide immense satisfaction with only a minor investment of resources. It is rather like the relation of radio to television drama. Given an audience with a good imagination, a radio dramatist or a Zen artist can achieve the intended effect through suggestion. This is what Sir George Sansom had in mind when he remarked upon the

_important part played by aesthetic feeling in the enrichment of j.a.panese life. Among j.a.panese of all cla.s.ses, an instinctive awareness of beauty seems to compensate for a standard of well-being which to Western judgement seems poor and bleak. Their habit of finding pleasure in common things, their quick appreciation of form and color, their feelings for simple elegance, are gifts which may well be envied by us who depend so much for our happiness upon quant.i.ty of possessions and complexity of apparatus. Such happy conditions, in which frugality is not the enemy of satisfaction, are perhaps the most distinctive features in the cultural history of j.a.pan.4

_

Zen culture, working with the already highly developed vocabulary and capacity for perception developed in the Heian era, unlocked powerful new techniques that have made j.a.panese culture a special case in the annals of world civilization. Perhaps the best case in point is the stone garden at Ryoan-ji, which is a triumph of pure suggestiveness. It is clearly a symbol--but a symbol of what? It is clearly an invitation to open one's perception--but open it to what? The work gives no hint.

With Ryoan-ji Zen artists finally perfected the device of suggestiveness to the point where it could stand on its own. The garden seems almost to be a natural object, like a sunset or a piece of driftwood. The impact of a traditional Zen room is similar. It simply amplifies whatever powers of understanding the viewer already possesses. Of itself it is a void.

By relying so strongly on perception, the j.a.panese have created a strikingly original way of using and experiencing art. Western critics for several hundred years have argued about the function of art, the responsibilities of the audience vis-a-vis a work of art, the varying types of perception, and so on, but they have never dealt with the peculiar phenomenon of Zen art, where the work can be merely a device to start the mind going. How do you write a critical a.n.a.lysis of a work of art that only takes shape after it gets inside your head? It is interesting to watch critic after critic struggling with Ryoan-ji, trying to explain its power, only to collapse at last in defeat.5 Similarly, the most effective Haiku are those about which the least can be said. Ryoan-ji takes your breath away when you first see it; like a good Haiku it slams you against a moment of direct experience. Yet when you try to a.n.a.lyze it, you find there is nothing significant to say.

Ryoan-ji may not even be a work of art by our Western definition; it may be some sort of mind device for which we have no word. Similarly, Haiku's relation to Western poetry may be limited to typography. The arts of the West--painting, poetry, drama, literature, sculpture--are all enhanced by critical a.n.a.lysis. When we speak of Milton, we really speak of Milton as seen through many layers of critical explanation and interpretation. The Zen arts have inspired no such body of critical a.n.a.lysis, perhaps because they do not have many of those qualities we normally think of as aesthetic. Does Ryoan-ji have beauty in any conventional sense? It merely exists. It is, if anything, anti-art.

If we in the West wish to borrow from the complex world of Zen culture, we must first begin to train and intensify our powers of perception. In this regard, one is tempted to speculate that the j.a.panese must have learned to turn these powers down as well as up. How else can one explain the j.a.panese ability to ignore so much of the blight of modern civilization while maintaining a national fetish for such purely aesthetic phenomena as cherry blossoms? As Donald Richie observed, "j.a.pan is the most modern of all countries perhaps because, having a full and secure past, it can afford to live in the instantaneous present."0 Alongside all the aesthetic indignities of the twentieth century, the ancient sense of taste appears to have survived undiminished. A concern for beauty is still very much a part of everyday life in j.a.pan. Whereas the appreciation of art is usually the pursuit of a privileged few in Western countries, in j.a.pan the aesthetic quality of everyday objects is commonly acknowledged to be fully as important as their function. It is not uncommon to discover a rustic day laborer arranging flowers, practicing the tea ceremony, or fas.h.i.+oning a garden in his spare time. The peasant may be as sure a judge of tea bowls as the prince. Even the match boxes from the sleaziest bars are minor works of art, as are bundles and packages from even the most modern commercial establishments. A sense of beauty is not considered unmanly; indeed, it is regarded as essential to the good life, harking all the way back to the virile _samurai_.

Zen culture's primary lesson is that we should start trying to experience art and the world around us rather than a.n.a.lyzing

them. When we do this, we find that everything suddenly comes alive. If we can take this power of direct perception, sharpened by the devices of Zen art, back to everyday activities, we will find a beauty in common objects that we previously ignored. Flowers--indeed individual petals--become objects of the most intense loveliness. When we see the world with a Zen-honed awareness, our sense of the beauty in objects supplants our desire to possess them. If we allow the ancient creators of Zen culture to touch our lives, we open wider the doors of perception.

References

CHAPTER 2 THE PRELUDE TO ZEN CULTURE

1."The Diary of Murasaki s.h.i.+kibu," from Diaries of Court Ladies of Old j.a.pan, trans. Omori, Annie Shepley, and Kochi Doi (Tokyo, 1935; reprint ed., New York, AMS Press), p. 147.

2.The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, trans. Ivan Morris (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), p. 40.

3.Ibid., p. 214.

4."The Diary of Murasaki s.h.i.+kibu," p. 74.

5.The Kokin Waka-shu, trans. H. H. Honda (Tokyo: Hoku-seido Press, 1970), p. 35.

6.See Wm. Theodore de Bary, ed., Sources of j.a.panese Tradition, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958).

7.Earl Miner, An Introduction to j.a.panese Court Poetry (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1968), p. 9.

CHAPTER 4 THE CHRONICLES OF ZEN

1.Essays in Zen Buddhism: First Series, trans. D. T. Suzuki (London: Grove Press, 1949), p- 181.

2.Translated in A Buddhist Bible, ed. Dwight G.o.ddard (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), p. 315.

3.Ibid., p. 323.

4.Chuang Tzu, Basic Writings, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), p. 94.

5.The Sutra of Hui Neng, trans. A. F. Price and Wong Mou- Lam (Berkeley: Shambala, 1969) p. 1 5.

6.Ibid., p. 18.

7.The Diamond Sutra, trans. A. F. Price and Wong Mou-Lam (Berkeley: Sliambala, 1969), p. 37.

8.de Bary, Sources of j.a.panese Tradition, 1: 236.

9.George Sansom, A History of j.a.pan to 1334 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1958), p. 429.