The fifth and final aspect of Japanese art is the willingness to laugh at the world and ourselves.  Art work done by most zen masters often include a self-portrait that strips them of any delicacy.  The gloves come off and nothing is sacred.  Which is the heart and soul of any art, I suppose.  Nothing defiled, nothing sacred.  Even if art doesn’t teach us this, something will.  When we take ourselves too seriously, events always contrive to make sure we learn the necessary lessons.

Before we take this week’s posts too much into our heads, here is Billy Collins to smack us with a hose:

Introduction To Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Thank you for practising,

Genju

The third characteristic of Japanese art is “the ability to go to extremes,” write Addiss & Seo.  An artist may paint an intricate scene one day and, in the next, dash off a line or a splash in a split second.  It is not a contrast of content or style, really.  It’s more that the arc of the pendulum is so wide.  More than that, Addiss & Seo add, there is no competitiveness between extremes.  They are all equally contained in the broad canvas of creativity.

I wandered through the house looking.  The extremes, if they exist in my life, may not be apparent to me in this unenlightened state.  But I did note the variety of materials that tend to come home with me.  Acorns, twigs, stones, sand – all have followed me from various parts of the North American continent.  I don’t think I could experience the world differently.  The stick in the lower part of the picture above sits on my altar.  It is the Wood Dragon of practice, creative, inquisitive, imaginative.  I heard in another dharma talk that in order to transform our fears we must be willing to enter the cave of the Blue Dragon.  There we come face-to-face with our despair and all aspects of mind (read a great talk by Geoffrey Shugen of Zen Mountain Monastery here).  The twig in the upper part of the picture is from the root of a giant maple tree we cut down last summer.  Interestingly, that maple had no trouble with the extremes of its being: from broad crown to the finest hairs of its roots.

The two dragons together are an interesting contrast of determination and delicacy. They challenge the conventional concept of going to extremes in practice.  We already know that deprivation isn’t going to work simply because the Buddha went there, came back, and offered a different t-shirt.  Yet we do just that.  Serial retreats, restricted diets, intense scrupulosity.  I wonder if that serves more to avoid the gaping maw of the cave of the Blue Dragon.  Frank pointed out in his talk on Tuesday night that standing at the mouth of the cave of the Blue Dragon and yelling, “I’m not afraid!” is not the same as entering it with compassion for who we will find.

The extremes that we find in the sensibility of Japanese art is not about living with disregard for our mortality or disrespect for our limits.  It is not one of deprivation but of delight.  Delight in the grossest brushstroke and the finest line of ink.  Delight in the fragility of the plum blossom and the coarse boulder in the garden.  Delight in the raucous Ikkyu and the determined Hakuin.  These are the extremes of experience that are meant to be tumbled into, fearless of the edge.  And, here’s what we may find in the cave of the Blue Dragon: there is no edge.

What might happen if I am not the extreme I thought?

Thank you for practising,

Genju