The answer is an enthusiastic: “Nope.”  However, we did chat about sharing some experiences of the First Patriarch.

108buddhas come to a close this week as we head to the first anniversary of 108 Zen Books.  A deep bow of gratitude to all of you who have encouraged my practice and tracked the paintings!  It has been a fascinating journey, all the more for the approach-avoidance pattern I have with the brush.  The idea of productivity is still deeply ingrained in my mind. One paints for a reason and that reason is to produce something of (monetary) value. Throughout this journey, I’ve struggled to embrace these 108buddhas as sufficient in and of themselves.  Breath, brush, and body are not the the path to a practice of shodo.  They are practice.

I thought Bodhidharma would be a nice way to explore this progression from productivity to presence (with no suggestion that I’ve cultivated presence!) especially through his presence in Zen art.  In The Art of Twentieth-Century Zen, Audrey Seo & Stephen Addiss describe Zen master and calligrapher, Nakahara Nantenbo (1839-1925), as fiercely dedicated to the practice of Zen and whose “use of the brush (was) a form of Zen practice.”  Nantenbo was often impatient with the constant demands to produce works by his hand; he was prolific and productive but not willing to be controlled by quotas.  His style was unrestrained and the often-over-sized characters exploded across large doors, screens and scrolls.  The characters he painted are blunt, direct, and filled with spirit and his attitude to painting reveals an unrelenting practice:

The reason for not speaking while writing a large character is that the character will “die” unless it is written in one breath.  One should magnify one’s spirit and write without letting this magnified spirit escape.  The character will die unless it is written using the hara (literally, gut, here suggesting the center of one’s spirit).

Seo & Addiss, p 21

There are so many examples of Nantenbo’s art that embody this passionate dedication to magnifying one’s spirit.  Daruma painted on a tea bowl  (1913) is my favourite.  Bodhidharma is rendered with childlike simplicity: the wide-eyed look, bushy eyebrows, uncompromising mouth.  And the ear-ring.  I like to think of this rendering of Daruma as the early days of the Holy Man from the West: youthful, determined, and still able to be astonished by his unfolding practice.

My version (above) of the tea bowl Daruma likely reflects more of my own early days.  The eyes are not straight ahead, ready to meet whatever shows up.  They glance to the side and down as if watching for some obstacle I might trip over.  And no ear-ring; not yet ready to be different.  I do remember innocently buying into the form of practice as it was in the first sangha I attended.  But in a short space of time, under the weight of the blind, unquestioning faith that was required to be in that community, I began to feel my spirit shrink with the breath rather than magnify.  And then the real teachings began.

I appreciate the shared worry in our expressions.  Perhaps Bodhidharma is wondering why he had crossed the subcontinent to end up in Northern China, doing battle with the already established Buddhist practitioners who found his wall-staring meditation style somewhat on the fringe.  I know I worried about the vast inner expanses I was covering doing battle with established habits and reactionary behaviours, feeling this new way of being unravel my fringes.

Nantenbo’s inscription on the tea bowl is Vast emptiness; nothing sacred.

And so it is in the practice of staring down the self.

Thank you for practising,

Genju

Image: Tea bowl from Plate 7 in Seo & Addiss, The Art of Twentieth-Century Zen

“The first question I ask myself when something doesn’t seem to be beautiful is why do I think it’s not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.”

— John Cage

A day or so later, Tricycle’s Facebook blog had a terrific article titled Disconnect the Dots by Cynthia Thatcher who explores the teachings given to Bahiya by the Buddha:

“When seeing,” the Buddha said, “just see; when hearing, just hear; when knowing, just know; and when thinking, just think.” (Udana 1.10)

Thatcher goes on to apply this practice of bare awareness to a painting by George Seurat:

Consider the painting again: close-up, you see meaningless flecks of tint that don’t represent anything. Beings and objects, time and place, have vanished. The Seine, the trees, the woman’s face—all have exploded into particles, scattered across space. But when you step back from the picture, recognizable shapes leap into view as the eye “pulls” the specks together.

The individual points of color, and the identities that coalesce when the eye connects them, occupy the same space. From one vantage point there is a vista of permanent beings and things. From another, there’s no solid ground—only empty sensation that you can’t name. The painting presents a visual metaphor for conventional truth versus ultimate reality; self versus nonself.

Suddenly, it all makes sense.  Sometimes, I pull too far away from the dots and lose the coalesced images; from that point out in the universe, everything is a lumpy blur, even beauty.  Then it’s easy to find reason why something isn’t beautiful.  The balance between the flecks of brush strokes and the pulled-together specks is tricky.  One seems so much more reliable than the other, as self is less anxiety-provoking than non-self.  And yet, self cannot coalesce without nonself – and certainly cannot do so unless I’m willing to take a step back and out of my own vision.

Thank you for practising,

Genju

A long time ago, when we had just moved into our farmhouse and were still socialized enough to have relatives visit, my parents, cousins, and cousin-lings came for lunch.  A rather large presence, my elder cousin swept into the kitchen, lifted lids off pots of simmering curries, looked at the pot of rice and proclaimed, “We can’t feed everyone with what you’ve cooked!  Besides what would they think… rice in a small dish like that!”  She can be a fearful deity in the kitchen and I tend to take a submissive stance with her.  So we dispatched Frank to the far reaches of rural Ontario to find more white rice.  Brave soul, he returned with a couple of pounds of grain and she cooked it all up.  We ended up freezing tons of the stuff and eventually threw it all out.  But our reputation as generous hosts was intact.

This is deeply trained stuff.  “Good enough” is often taken to mean I’m only just doing what is required to get something done – and half-heartedly at that.  The idea that we may do more by titrating our offerings to the actual need of the situation or person is a tough sell. Not only does it require letting go of imagined judgements but it also requires trusting that we have listened deeply for what is truly being asked of us.

An interesting sidebar which may be related in the deep interconnected recesses of my brain: My ordination dharma name is Chân Diệu Thi.  On the certificate, it is translated as “True Wonderful Fulfillment.”  While on a personal retreat at Blue Cliff Monastery, I was helping out in the kitchen.  The monastics were teasing me about my need to get everything done (feeling fulfilled, I guess) before zazen when one asked for my dharma name.  I told her and gave the translation at which point there was rapid-fire discussion in Vietnamese among the monastics.  Apparently, the more accurate translation is True Wonderful Offering.  As disappointed as I am not to be fulfilled, I must admit this is a better challenge for my practice.  How to be True in my Offerings…

Thank you for practising,

Genju

Over the years, I’ve come to see this as an act of humility.  There is something egoless about copying a painting.  I differentiate that from the act of humiliation that I frequently embody when copying the great masters.  The former is a way to get beyond the freeze when breath, body and brush are not up for a dance.  The latter is what I put myself through in a moment of hubris:  “How hard can it be?  It’s just splotches of gray and a bunch of lines!”

Lately, I’ve welcome these moments of humility.  Like bowing when I enter the zendo, or the prostrations at morning service, I feel a release of all that binds me to that high need to achieve.  And part of that practice of abjecting myself to the Creative is to let in the shades of grey.  How else to give depth and spirit?

I like these orchids.  They asked of me something I tend to be stingy with: slow, unwavering attention to each brush stroke.  You can see the unleashed exuberance in buddha98 – chaos with a dabble of grace.  I like that too.  It just that if I want to do one, there has to be a momentary pause to create the intention to do just that and not the other.

Thank you for practising,

Genju

PS: I came across Sweetcake Enso in my visitor’s listing and would like to bring your attention to it.  Looks like some great work that will be travelling around the US!

There are Four Gentlemen who have a prominent place in my artistic life – such as it is.  They have been very patient as I wandered various paths of being schooled by the brush.  I’ve appealed to their rules and regulations frequently when sloppiness tried to pass for abstraction.  But I’ve never really become proficient under their guidance.  It’s probably more that I lack actual talent for composition and design than any lack of desire in my heart to be skillful at the formal aspects of brush painting.

The Four Gentlemen are the four styles of brushstrokes: bamboo, orchid, chrysanthemum, and plum branch.  Practising with the  brush strokes that make up a bamboo leaf, orchid, chrysanthemum blossom and plum branch it considered the foundation to learning how to paint in the Oriental style.  Tomoko Kodama, my “root teacher” of shodo, however, noticed that Westerners had a hard time controlling the brush itself rendering the Four Gentlemen more difficult than for her Asian students.  She attributed this to the latter group having grown up using the brush to write Japanese or Chinese characters – which are in fact, the elements of the four primary strokes.

She developed a series of practice strokes using the Roman alphabet – a stroke of genius – and for the past 40 years has been teaching her Canadian students these skills.  You can read more about her on her website; there’s even a DVD – narrated by yours truly.  I spent about 10 years as an inconstant student (only because of the rather bizarre registration policy of the art school which wouldn’t announce when the class schedule would be released until the last minute) and managed to be part of one show at the Japanese Embassy.   I learned from Tomoko how to play with the brush using the lines from both the alphabet and kanji characters, slowly translating them to flowers, people, landscape, and a variety of free form lines.  But the process often left me frozen with anxiety when my eye couldn’t find the lines in the object I was to paint or copy.  At such times, I resorted to the Four Gentlemen and learned how to be in partnership with the brush even if my eye for composition lagged or my impatience created a cluster of chaos on the paper.

Later I studied with one of Tomoko’s students – a brilliant and warm-hearted man whose work you can see here.  Peter encouraged me to stick with a single kanji character until I felt every brush stroke!  Then slowly, painstakingly, he would let me in on the secrets and nuances of how the character deconstructs just enough to create something new, yet familiar.

The 108buddhas have been a journey of melding the teachings of two very different teachers with one single love: the love of a simple line.  And it has been a journey in seeing buddha in all things.  Not that different from my path of practice.

Thank you for practising,

Genju

PS: The commonality between the buddha97 & 97a is subtle but they are there – single lines expressing the essence of both bamboo and buddha.  Buddha97b shows the common brush strokes more overtly.

None of it really worked to make my life any happier.  However, as these things tend to do, it taught me lots about guck, holes and the nature of finding one’s way around such galaxies.  It also taught me some bad habits – like excusing my lack of development in practice as “waiting for the right moment” or “the teacher hasn’t come so why waste my time being ready.”  Of course, the life of practice is simply Life – the getting on with things like cleaning the house, going to Work, getting out the brushes and paper, learning how to use that new camera.  It can also include doing three prostrations, sitting on a zafu without falling off, and learning the Prajnaparamita chant.  But since I didn’t want to waste time being ready for a teacher who seemed to have no respect for my schedule, the Life time for these things tended to get killed “watching crime shows” (to quote one of Aitken Roshi’s gathas).

This feeling of having wasted my life is quite overpowering at times.  It’s the edge between the guck and the hole.  Over the past couple of weeks, I mentioned on Bookbird’s delightful post panic! with a houseplant that I was disappointed to discover I did not own the rights to “Procrastination as Inspiration.”  That particular skill was my pride and joy.  Working on my shodo: “No, I’m not delaying the inevitable.  I’m waiting for my Muse.”  Working on my photography: “This camera is too complicated to figure out the lighting.  I’ll just wait until the sun moves.”  Working on my writing: “The publisher wants too much front-end legwork.  I’ll just start a blog.”

Later in the week, I commented on ZenDotStudio’s post Creative Compost that my procrastination had really been challenged by her dedication to her art.  She along with her artist friends are a formidable group (and I have to include Dakini Dreams as well).  Their work has turned me towards my own, not just in terms of the shodo.  There’s a fearlessness in their risk-taking that I love – using the catch in the breath right at that edge where the ink drips onto the paper as a pause before leaping.

Ready or not, the teacher arrives.

Thank you for practising,

Genju

After a conversation recently, I got the impression I needed some remedial practice – something to remind me of the usefulness of boundaries.  buddha41 is the outcome of setting the frame of practice and working through what the hell is happening on this journey of going nowhere, being no one.  Yes, I’m frustrated and angry and really not feeling much faith in what I’m doing or who I am.

End of pity party.  Please take the empties and leftovers as you leave.

Zen practice is no different from calligraphy practice.  In Zen, we go from the 2.5 sq feet of mat and cushion to the vastness of the life we inhabit.  With calligraphy, we start with a frame to define the space in which the character must develop and move into vast canvasses and variations.  Traditionally, the practice sheet is a grid of 9 x 15 squares which are also outlined to highlight units of 3 x 3 squares.  The little squares allow practice of the character itself.  There’s not much room to fake it in one square inch.  The larger 3 sq in squares allow for composition and a bit more freedom of expression.  I chose the 1 x 1 inch squares and counted off 108 squares, a 9 x 12 grid.

The intent was to see where my attention drifts and where my entitled mind kicks in.  Square #1 is the answer.  First character in the first upper left corner got me off on the wrong foot.  It looks like “Buddha” but it actually isn’t; it’s what I’ve been practicing for the last few months, a swooping set of lines which may suit the post-of-the-day but is not the intent of this exercise.  By square #25 (circled), I realized I had not even started the project honoring the intent.  Square #26 corrected that.

Such is practice, I suppose.  We start out with all our skills sharpened on other desires and are blind to the fact that the starting point is not when an event touches our life any more than when the brush touches the paper in this moment.  It began sweeping its downward arc long before this singular desire, this moment of wanting something to emerge from the joy and mess we’re in.  Correct it in the next moment.

Attention held well for the next 27 squares and I decided I need to let go of the wrist support (starts with the second circle outline).  It’s not a really bad habit to brace on my wrist when I’m using a small script brush but the actual skill is in the brush tip being the only contact – and fulcrum of balance.  Shaky, insecure, uncertain strokes invited the peanut gallery of Inner Critics.  Then the fear and grasping kicked in: I can’t do this without more support.  I NEED more… more… more.  Not asking for or taking what is neither offered nor available is a deep practice.  And I rarely see it as applicable to what I ask of myself too.  Correct it in the next square.

By the third outline circle, I’m ready to fly solo with variations.  All kanji characters have variations drawn by the Old Masters.  There’s a dictionary-like book of them – a lexicon of pretzel lines and ancient scripts .  I neither speak nor write Japanese so I’m pretty proud of being able to find the variations of different characters.  Sometimes I get it wrong or I can’t find the version I need.  Such is practice too.  Zen centers, Zen traditions, Zen teachers, Zen concepts – the language of communities is as complex as their practice preferences and the variations are all in a format which takes persistence to decode.  I find myself leaning into some variations but, as with this exercise, I devote time to as many as I can before settling on one… or two, remembering all the while that while the flesh and bones vary, the marrow is the same.

On the last line, I choose the formal script and become hyper-focused – yet the mind has wandered off – until I realize I’ve lost the grid and am drifting up into the previous lines.  I reset using two of the last three squares (fourth circle outline) for a seal script – the ancient style used to inscribe characters onto hard surfaces like tortoise shells and wood.  This is where I am in practice: returning to the source teachings, seeing that the grid of discipline has faded from the paper and that the drift says I still need these constraints.

Still, that’s not going to stop my rebellious 108th character from falling totally outside the wire!

Thank you for practicing,

Genju

the stream of all ancestors

carrying the wisdom
of all my teachers

in empty hands,
shaped, hollowed out,

by the stream of
all ancestors

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Thich Nhat Hanh has written almost a hundred books; I’ve lost count.  Each one is a jewel but none as challenging and raw as Cultivating the Mind of Love.  In it, he speaks candidly of his first love, a nun met when he was teaching at a temple in the Highlands of Vietnam.

I knew that I loved her.

How simple.  How incredible.  I knew that I loved her.  Thay takes this story of his “first love” and weaves it into a journey to find our “original face.”    Just as the face we are born with may not have been our original face, our first love may not really be our “first love.”  So he “goes upstream” to show the many streams that feed into who we are in this moment.  For Thich Nhat Hanh, the source of who he is in the present moment arose in his childhood experiences of seeing a drawing of the Buddha, searching for the hermit in the woods, drinking from a clear mountain stream, his brother’s ordination as a monk, and his mother’s dedication to his well being.  When he met the young nun who ignited strong feelings of love, he writes that he could see the line of ancestors that flowed into the stream of his life and hers.

Please look into the river of your own life, and see the many streams that have entered it, that nourish and support you.  If you practice the Diamond Sutra and see the self beyond the self, the person beyond the person, the living being beyond the living being, the life span beyond the life span, you will see that you are me, and you are also her.  Look back at your own first love and you will recognize that your first love has no beginning and no end.  It is always in transformation. (p. 60)

He goes on to say,

Whether water is overflowing or evaporating depends on the season.Whether it is round or square, depends on the container.  Flowing in spring, solid in winter, its immensity cannot be measured, its source cannot be found.  In an emerald creek water hides a dragon king.  In a cold pond it contains the bright full moon.  On a bodhisattva’s willow branch, it sprays the nectar of compassion.  One drop of water is enough to purify and transform the world in ten directions.  Can you grasp water through form?  Can you trace it to its source?  Do you know where it will end?  It is the same with your first love.  Your first love has no beginning and will have no end.  It is still alive in the stream of your being.  Don’t believe it was only in the past.  Look deeply into the nature of your first love, and you will see the Buddha. (pp. 75-76)

I struggle with this, trying honestly to see all the loves and not the losses.  Going to the source of the mind of love, bodhicitta, means letting go of the loss and opening to each love as a branch of the stream that originates deep in the past and flows forever into the future.  If I value that powerful, steady outpouring of love in the river of my life, I have to value myself as a steam in the lives of those I touch.

For now, I invite you to look far enough into the future, so far that you cannot help but see yourself, become yourself, the source of a stream of love and life.

Thank you for practicing,

Genju

going home

here,
in this moment
we tread a path

that not-knowing
stamped out.

familiar
and new,

ordinary
and amazing.

as simple
as
going home.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Now that was an eventful week!  Before I continue on this meander, let me give a deep bow to Philip Ryan at the Tricycle Editors’ Blog who graciously picked up 108ZB’s Ox Herding adventure and made this whole enterprise a chance to practice a lot of calming breaths.  It was fascinating to watch the oxy-moronic mind grab the event and create catastrophic dramas out of it – with rumbling omens provided by our little 5.5 earthquake on Wednesday.  And that precisely is the process of Ox-Herding, isn’t it?  How great to have it unfold all in Real Time!

In this stage of Ox-Herding we are in partnership with ourselves, integrating practice into the everyday, bringing the disciplined mind into service so that there is a seamless quality in our interactions.  In my own staggering along the path, I get to a point, after the dance and the trusting embrace, where I can no longer deny the relational.  Not only do the Ox and I continue to create each other, we now also create the world we move in.  In that world, I can no longer see things the same way, interact with the same unskillfulness – well, I can, but no longer without awareness that I’m doing so.  And interestingly, I don’t want it to be any other way.  This feels real; it feels like the compass is set in the right direction.

In sangha, last week, I was asked to talk about where I was with the Upaya Chaplaincy studies.  I preferred to talk about Ox-Herding.  It turns out it’s one and the same.  One of the sangha members asked if the stages were re-visited at different points in our lives or if we “got it” enough to fall forward continuously.  If I think about the unfolding of many (all?) of my experiences, I can definitely say it starts with a search; more accurately it starts with a yearning.  After that, trajectory and mileage on the ox will vary.

That this is a recursive process was really evident upon seeing my posts tagged as “art” on the Tricycle Editors’ Blog.  It threw me into Stage 3 (Seeing the Ox), triggering all the concepts what “this means.”  Twenty or thirty years ago, when I bought my brush for $1.96 + tax, the only intent was to take lessons to feed my love of all things Japanese (there’s a karmic link there that I will explore someday).  As my teacher’s inept student, taming the grasping and wild mind definitely overlay the other stages of seeing the traces and actuality of how I could grow.  At some point, I invested myself in the process (in first glimpse, did you notice the hat transforming into the horns of the ox).  If I rode the ox home then, it was along paths that were tangled with thorny bushes which tore at my skin.  I left the teacher but not the path – or the ox – and started the search again and again.

The Chaplaincy process is similar – but different.  The ox is larger – about the size of Babe the Blue Ox and I’m no Paul Bunyan.  It too started with a search; unlike the art, this began with a yearning to create some meaning out of this mess I call “my life.”  What I saw as traces and then the reality of who I am in this particular journey has been hard to comprehend.  I feel I’m asking to learn how to offer the incense but instead, I’m caught up in a whirlwind of learning how to grind the ingredients and glue them together.  But that’s fine because I’m reminded that when I grind the ink for my paintings, it gives them a special depth.  More important, there are moments when I am struggling to do things differently; graduate school was an abusive environment and it gave me survival skills that I’d prefer never to re-activate.  So up to this stage, dancing with the Ox is giving me a lot of practice cultivating different skills – trust, boundless joy, equanimity, understanding presence.  And walking away quietly.

I do feel I’m riding the Ox home in the Chaplaincy and the path has to be negotiated with both intention and awareness of lessons learned.  It cannot be goal-driven, not simply to catch a ride home; this time it must be different at every level of my body/mind.  But, cattle love to take the same route home to the barn each evening.  Look out across a field where they have been wandering and you will see well-defined tracks.  Creatures of habit, they are not easily dissuaded.  So Babe the Blue Ox and I have some negotiating to do because some of these well-worn tracks are not how I want to get home.

Thank you for practicing,

Genju (and Babe)

taming the Ox

strike
and i am the anvil

fly
and i am the air

stop
and i am the stillness

when nothing more is possible
we submit

to trust

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From The Sabbath Poems

1979:  I

I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
Around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
Where I left them, asleep like cattle.

Then what is afraid of me comes
And lives a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
And the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.

Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
And the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.

After days of labor,
Mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
And I sing it. As we sing,
the day turns, the trees move.

From the book A Timbered Choir, by Wendell Berry.
New York: Counterpoint. 1998

Thank you for practicing,

Genju