Enku Book Arrived

My copy of Enku: Sculptor of a Hundred Thousand Buddhas, by Kazuaki Tanahashi arrived this morning.

The very first time I ran into Enku's work was in Frank Olinsky's Buddha Book: A Meeting of Images, from 1997, which is a collection of ancient-to-modern Buddhist artwork ranging from monumental, to temple altar, to print media. The Enku carvings were featured in two photographs. The first was of fourteen figures out of "one thousand Bodhisattvas" and the other was what can only be described as a pile of several hundred "chip Buddhas" (or koppa-butsu).

Several years later I happened on a fantastic hardbound book of Enku carvings in a bookstore in San Francisco, but it was written entirely in Japanese. Happily took it home with me anyway and pored over the photographs.

I had a copy of his Enlightenment Unfolds as required reading, but until last week wasn't aware of the extent of Kazuaki's publications, much less that he had done a book on one of my favorite sculptors of all time. Just ten pages into it and already learning a great deal. 

This was published in 1982, but Kaz started his Enku research as early as 1967.  The photo on the back--he's so young!

I give you just a quick excerpt or two:

Enku was a lower class itinerant monk who used any piece of wood he could find as material for his carving. His sculptures provoke such a feeling of intimacy that we are almost tempted to touch and caress them instead of looking at them from a distance.  Once I went with a group to visit a mountain temple, we saw a monk splitting wood with an ax and someone said "Oh, I want to carve a Buddha image on a piece of wood like that!" We all understood how he felt. Enku gives us the heart of creation.

Certainly at a tactile level I resonated strongly with his carvings the moment I saw them. Enku leaves his toolwork so exposed and raw that as a carver myself (although my preference is stone), I could almost feel his movements and the wood shaving off under my own fingertips.

Enku was born in 1632 in Mino, one of Japan's central provinces ... Enku may have begun his religious practice as a monk of one of the Pure Land schools of Buddhism in a temple near his home. It was probably during the first few years of training that he was given the Buddhist name Enku, which may be translated as "round or complete emptiness."

I based my earlier statements regarding Enku's vow of carving 120,000 Buddha forms on a few web references. But Kazuaki corrects that understanding. More likely his vow was to carve 100,000 -- still an astounding and worthy vow.  There are two collections (boxes) that Enku produced as sets that contain 1,000 "chip-Buddha's" each, just to give you a sense of his incredible rate of production. All of these supposedly carved with a single implement: a hatchet.

On one of the boxes of 1,000 Bodhisattvas, Enku  wrote a poem:

The rotting driftwood
picked up
--now 
the guardian gods
of children.

More from this great volume at a later date.

Dreams and Radical Creativity

A few years ago I had a dream that challenged my opinions about the human capacity for creativity.

Now, there is not much more offputting than listening to someone trying to recount their dream, but I ask you to bear with me as I share just this one scene:

I am visiting my old college art professor at his home studio, the one where I worked so many hot afternoons helping to prepare canvasses. As we catch up, I am casually flipping through his stack of recent artwork. Pausing briefly to reflect on each image, I comment on perhaps eight to ten paintings, lithographs and other prints. Overall I view perhaps twenty works, before he and I wander into another room, and the dream takes me elsewhere.

None of the works were ones I had seen before. All were done in his style. I was dreaming in full color, because I remember remarking on his use of color in several pieces.

None of the works actually existed, except as instantaneous, fully completed creations of my dreaming mind.

The reason I even recall this dream is that once I woke up, I was struck by the fact that for the most part when I would try to draw or paint I would get completely stuck. Before I even started, all these doubts and judgements would arise about the final product. And more often than not, no matter what I wound up creating, I was unsatisfied with the result.

So how did that square with a dream where I could and did create what to my own critical eye were complete and satisfying works, twenty in a row, in the space of a few moments? Whether I had the skill technically to create them by hand myself is immaterial. The vision was there.

What this dream -- and indeed the entire human facility of dreaming -- points to is that the human mind is capable of absolutely astounding creativity. And what stops us from accessing that creativity are mostly our own ideas, fears and stories about our limitations, and about what makes an acceptable final product. Ideas which also don't exist except in our minds.

For the purposes of this post, I am only talking about visual art. But I believe that everything stated above just as easily applies to any other type of human creativity, be it music, choreography, narrative or what have you.

Attempting to work with what I learned from that dream, I have tried to retrain myself when faced with a blank page to just dive in and start making marks. To just see what comes up. Sure, I will continue to draw an occasional still life. But I find it a lot more satisfying these days to start without any plan at all and see what happens.

Turns out this is a lot more fun, and more often than not, I am satisfied with the final product.

What is circular for me about all this is that "just dive in and see what happens" is a lot of what my college art professor was trying to teach us so long ago.

This sums it up, from ZenDot Studio:

“If I was asked to get rid of the Zen aesthetic and just keep one quality necessary to create art, I would say it’s trust. When you learn to trust yourself implicitly, you no longer need to prove something through your art. You simply allow it to come out, to be as it is. This is when creating art becomes effortless. It happens just as you grow your hair. It grows.”

--John Daido Loori from "The Zen of Creativity"

The Magic Disappearing Blog

Talk about a quick lesson in impermanence.

I checked the blog this afternoon and got a message "Blog has been deleted or domain name has already been taken."  Upon further click-through to FAQ's, "why has my blog been deleted" possible reasons included policy violation(s).

I couldn't figure out what policy I could possibly have broken in only a week or so posting. Logged into Google and got it sorted. Still don't know why it was deactivated. There were no messages on the dashboard. Just in case, I deleted the image from the WaPo article.

And I copied all the posts to the local HD.

Just the universe trying to keep me from getting to attached...

A monk arrayed in purple/ would be laughed at by monkeys and cranes.

Brush Painting

For years I admired a certain genre of Chinese brush painting, where tall, distant mountains are revealed in the swirling mists. Perhaps with a spare hut nestled amongst ferns and bamboo . Their scenes have such an ephemeral quality, and evoke the tactile -- you can almost feel the cool humidity on your face, smell the foliage.

For my birthday, a friend gave me a big coffee table book of Zen paintings, full of these types of scenes, and I would try to copy certain elements on rice paper.

I had always thought that these paintings must be very highly stylized. Kind of like a Zen cartoon. No mountains could possibly be so tall or picturesque. Surely it's just a case of wanting to squeeze more mountain shapes into yet another vertical scroll-painting. A style that must have developed over the centuries as a kind of spiritual shorthand, not representational. Kind of like Christian iconography developed its own style and shorthand.

Then I actually visited rural China, and was absolutely gob-smacked. And chastened.

The mountains not only looked a lot like those paintings, they looked exactly like those paintings. Incredibly steep and jagged vertical faces, rows of these mountains sitting like monks in a Ch'an monastery. And mist! Every morning heavily shrouded in the (swirling!) mists. And growing on them all the Chinese herbs and ferns and bamboo you could possibly shake a stick at.

Great jumping jehosephat, those guys were no cartoonists, they were the hyper-realists of their day, just paintin' 'em likes they sees them.

Proud mountains, robed in mist ... open our eyes

they look just like that.

 

Buddha statue contains hidden truths

From the Washington Post last week.

This statue was taken to a medical center and put through xray and CT scans -- leading to a remarkable discovery.

I think it would be great if there could be more blending of the disciplines around research like this. It was wonderful to read about the entire Radiology department gathering around to be a part of solving this mystery of what could be inside the statue.

Inner and Outer Weather

For several years I worked with the practice of pausing whenever I left a building, to just look up at the sky. To notice what was happening there. I would do this especially before entering or leaving the office.

Each morning and evening, look up. How is mind today? Mind has stars, moon and Milky Way. Mind has rising sun. Mind is cloudy. Mind is dark. Mind is clear blue. Mind is cooling into evening redness.

This was a great support for sitting practice, to consider the mind as the big open sky, always changing. To recognize more fully how both are always changing. That thoughts, like clouds -- if allowed to just be in that mind-sky -- would eventually move on or dissipate. That we have internal weather not unlike the outer weather in the sky. 

Just last night I made a new connection between internal and outer weather that caused me to recall my old practice of looking up.

Of course we may become wrapped up in our inner weather, and mediation can help us get perspective on that; to work with it. But consider that we also come into unavoidable contact with other weather systems in the form of family, friends, colleagues. And for those the outlook can be anywhere from calm, to stormy-gloomy, or even stormy-exuberant. For most of us, this is weather that cannot help but affect our own weather system.

The National and International climate may also affect our internal weather.  Earthquakes, floods, financial collapse -- hard not to be affected.

Cultivating a mind that sees clearly. This can be difficult especially if we are not conscious of the effects of outer weather on our inner weather. So we may need reminders to check the weather, to metaphorically look up, and see what is happening.

Like Joko Beck advises about the practice of specifically labeling our own thoughts, not just "thinking. thinking" or "worrying. worrying. worrying." but "having a thought about work." And through labeling, the thoughts become like the clouds and eventually dissipate. (For most of us, quickly replaced by new clouds!)

Over time as we practice labeling our inner weather, we may also find ourselves better able to label outer weather as we encounter it. Not just "Janine: So angry today!" but to be specific: "Janine is expressing her feelings of anger and frustration." Perhaps that way we can, depending on circumstances, either talk with Janine about, or simply ruminate silently on the roots of that frustration without being drawn into its cyclone.

This is just another way of saying, work with circumstances as they arise. Cultivating a mind that sees clearly.

Back to the practice of looking up at the sky. It has another benefit. After a time, this practice becomes just delightful in that you begin to sense down to your bones something normally reserved for dreams: endless, radical variety.  Even viewing the sky from the same vantage every morning and evening, it is never remotely the same twice.  Compare two consecutive grey and overcast days, and the quality of grey, the luminosity pushing through the fog...always new, always different.

I want to write about this and its relationship to creativity a some point soon.

Authentic Suffering and Health

In my family growing up there were two deep cultural traditions around the enumeration of suffering.

One of these came from what I have to assume was a South Eastern US pass-time of gossiping about the neighbors' hardships, with the obligatory hand-wringing, doleful noises, not so secret sense of superiority and relief that lightning hadn't struck closer to home. More than semi-pro, such sessions could go on quite a while in gruesome detail until our elder matriarch might state with finality, "Well let's not dwell on that, no we won't dwell on the negative. No." 

And our poor young psyches, still vibrating from what one of my siblings calls the "litany of horrors" were expected to switch gears and go on with a light and lively conversation. Pass the dinner rolls, dear, thank you. 

Alongside and intertwined with that was a Southern European tradition that I only became conscious of when watching the singularly depressing My Life as a Dog. Which is to say whenever we were confronted with suffering in our own lives, we engaged in a group exercise of pointing out that surely there were others who were suffering much more, and then go on to list a few examples in great detail. So while meant to make you feel better in comparison, such a verbal smoke-bomb instead reduced the value and integrity of whatever experience we might have been needing to work through.

While I think I've done a good job eschewing the gossip, damned if I can't break myself of the My Life as a Dog habit even now, facing my own recent health issues. "Our friends lost their son in a freak accident; so and so's child has cancer..." etc.

All of this is adding story on top of story, layering and spinning so that we aren't present with our own suffering. An attempt at self-insulation. My sense lately is we cannot find perfect health, even amongst infirmities, unless we can be present with the reality of our own suffering.

The Dalai Grandma offers us this translation of a Buddhist chant from Thich Nhat Hanh:

I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.
I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape ill health.
I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.
All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. 
There is no way to escape being separated from them.
My  actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences  of
my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.

Which I will begin working with, and for which I am grateful.