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A professor of philosophy may start his first lecture by talking about the realness of a chair and all the assumptions that have been made to arrive at the idea that the chair is a solid item, out there and real. This is something that most in the West would think a little crazy to even contemplate. Of course the chair is a solid Newtonian object that exists in its own right. To deny this would mean that our deterministic view of the world was wrong and that the ontological precepts that are so ingrained in our thoughts would have to be reassessed. Through education and devotion to science we have left behind the ideas that the world may hold a little more magic than we suspect. The following poem by Edgar Alan Poe encapsulates the slavish demands of a scientific worldview.
Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities
Zen would say that in adopting, too completely, the scientific view of reality we have closed the door on a more holistic view of life and are limiting ourselves to a rather mundane view of something altogether extraordinary. There is a little irony that the science that brought us the Newtonian view of the world has now found, through the study of atomic and astral physics, that in fact the world is far from Newtonian. A solid particle has yet to be found, and instead scientists are coming to the realization that matter as we know it may not actually exist but is rather a movement of energy. Time, space, and mass are all relative concepts, and the view that the world in real, solid, and out there has become untenable to the scientific community, too. Despite these discoveries there still seems a dogged determination to hold on to the old views of reality, which tend to provide a rather comfortable haven for the frail intellect that feels the need to hold on to its view of the world.
Zen maintains that our dualistic view of life means that whatever we perceive goes through our mental filtering systems before being cognitively understood. We use mental boxes for all aspects of our daily lives so we can make sense of our world and interact with others. With the development of language, though, this cognitive grasp of reality means that everything we perceive is subject to these mental processes, and so from early childhood we lose the ability to directly perceive the world. This is the point where dualism starts.
Nevertheless, in our more intuitive side, maybe we can still sense the lost world we had as infants, and it may well be this more intuitive feel that wabi sabi art helps to engender. It can put us back in touch with our nondualistic perception, where the need for words becomes obsolete and art can touch our innermost feelings. Starting from the Buddhist premise that newborn babies are in an enlightened state, it follows that their perceptions of the world would be radically different from those of an adult who has learned a completely new way of understanding reality. The emotions of childhood and the memories that are stored in the deepest recesses of the mind can be touched by truths we may be consciously unaware of, and it may be this unconscious affinity with things wabi sabi that trigger the emotional responses we feel toward them. The Zen monks, with their insights into reality, saw this link between art and the state of an enlightened infant, and have used art as a vehicle to rekindle these connections.
Returning then to the question of “What is Zen?” The answers given by Zen masters illustrate the illogical and nonintellectual nature of the question. Some of the more famous answers are:
“Zen”
“The clouds in the sky and the water in the jug”
“I do not understand”
“The silk fan gives me enough of a cooling breeze”
Zen was often studied in a semimonastic environment where austerity and intense meditation, combined with hard physical work, were fundamental tenets for the improvement of one’s spirit. Despite the sparse nature of the temples, they were great fountains for artistic endeavors, and much of the art was done by Zen monks. These endeavors were not limited to brush painting, but encompassed calligraphy, the martial arts, gardening, architecture, and even the drinking of tea.
The dedicated monks, in a spirit of quiet and resolute determination, sought to find artistic expression in all they did, and this art was then the fruit from their very focused minds. The renowned monk Hakuin had a favorite expression that meditation in the midst of activity was far better than meditation in stillness. For the Zen monks, everything they undertook became a spiritual task in which they had to immerse themselves totally, and in doing so they absorbed themselves in the activity rather than in their ego’s understanding of the activity.
Zen’s direct approach and its determination to avoid explanations gave it a more direct vision of nature rather than a verbal interpretation of it. In Zen philosophy the mind should be a window, rather than a mirror, so that the world is seen directly and not through the filters of the intellect.
The Zen view of the world, complex and alien as it is to the West, may be characterized by the following beliefs:
These ideas on life had a dominant effect on the development of art, not just in the temples but also in the societies of Japan and China, and the subject matter of Zen art is a physical manifestation of their beliefs. The paintings tended to be based on scenes from the rural environment, such as birds, trees, rocks, and mountains, and were presented merely as images that encapsulated their essence rather than exact interpretations of their nature. The work was usually done in moments of inspiration and often in broad and sweeping brush strokes, where the vision held by the artist was committed directly to paper with a minimum of deliberation or contemplation.
It focused more on the direct experience of perception rather than ideas relating to those experiences. These works, more often than not, had many elements that could be defined as wabi sabi, and perhaps one could define the four tenets of wabi sabi as follows:
As Zen became more established throughout Japan during the Muromachi period (1333–1568), its influence on politicians and artists grew tenaciously, and the tenets of its philosophy, so closely bound to those of wabi sabi, found representation in the arts of painting, No drama, flower arranging, and of course the tea ceremony.
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