Tag Archives: Stephen Addiss

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to make a painting

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See your own nature,
become Buddha

Yuzen Gentatsu
(1854-1930)

At some point along the journey there is a moment of softening.  This Daruma is a shift from the stern Patriarch and shows a gentling in the old teacher’s features.  The artist, Zen Master Yuzen (his Daruma is below) was best known for his plum blossom paintings and the soft hues that reflected his calm nature.  Although he began to paint from a young age, he was discouraged from continuing because, he was told, it would interfere with his training as a monk.  He put aside the ink and stone but, thankfully for us, took it up again later.

The beauty in Yuzen’s perception of practice is the softness he elicits from ink and paper.  Bodhidharma no longer needs to project the harsh unyielding authoritarian teacher (inner or outer) but rather can sit in an empathetic space.  The upturn of the inner brows, the open gaze, and cartoon nose invite us to pour our struggles out to him.

No.  Really? he says.  Why struggle against yourself?  You are not the enemy.

In the path of practice, there was a moment when I felt the shift from hoping practice would make me a better person to realizing practice was only going to bring me face-to-face with this person I am.  And, in  bearing witness to the reality of who I am, I had to face the harsh, unforgiving, relentlessly self-abusive ways I had developed to deal with myself.  Jomon, author of Nothing to Attain, quoted her teacher, Rev Hogen, saying, “Zen is not a self-improvement project.”  I really liked reading that – and also feel it’s one of those pronouncements that can too easily slip away from what is really meant.  Zen cannot bring about self-improvement; but the practice of zazen is like calling in a housing inspector before the renovations start.

To see my own nature, as Yuzen exhorts us to do, is to be that inspector poking around in the rotted beams and taking disciplined measure of the flow of water and electricity.  In fact, I’ve had inspectors come through This Olde Farmstead who ended up looking at me with the same kindly expression on Daruma’s face.

“Really?  No, seriously.  I know you’re really attached to these wall switches but they are short-circuiting your lights.”  The wall switches went and enlightenment was possible – when I remembered to flip the switch.  And that was what practice becomes: not just a process of pointing out the warped planking or the rattling plumbing and restoring them to their true nature.  It becomes a process of remembering to flip the new switches so that I can see everything alight.

Yuzen was also fond of putting off his patrons who demanded art from him.  He was crafty:

“Hmmmm.  That painting?  Well, to make a painting requires a lot of zazen.”

(Seo & Addiss, pp. 65)

Well, to make a person requires a lot of zazen.

Thank you for practising,

Genju

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productivity to presence

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In August, Joseph and Chong Go Sunim of the amazing Wake Up and Laugh! blog delivered a one-two punch on the topic of “difficult people” and “difficult emotions.”  Being the quintessential difficult person, I side-tracked the discussion to the picture Joseph had included of Huik’o cutting off his arm in an effort to be accepted by Bodhidharma.  The comments devolved from there to Joseph’s suggestion that, with the closing of the 108buddhas, I might consider a new project of 108Bodhidharmas.

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