Author: dorakuan

As beginners of Zazen most of us went through a similar experience: after the first excitement about the new discovery vanished and we learned to master the leg-pain which kept us busy the first half year or so, we sit on our pillows fighting sleepiness, boredom and a wandering mind.

A good practise maintained (and possibly with the support of a good teacher), after some time we learn to benefit from regular Zazen and appreciate the time sitting on our pillow, instead of just waiting for endlessly long minutes to pass by (change your teacher, if you got stuck here for years!).

For many years, though, I was unable to transfer my positive Zazen experience into playing the Shakuhachi. While sitting Zazen felt very o.k., I was often bored and tortured by a wandering mind when practising Honkyoku, and hoped to reach the end of a long ancient piece to come soon while playing. It almost drove me mad to realise how difficult it was to take something of my Zen experience into “daily life”, and be it just another Zen exercise.

What made me not give up were the lessons with my teacher. Physically and intellectually very demanding and never boring hours, each time I saw and heard him play or played together with him I was once again sure where this way can lead me, if I just keep on going.

These days, playing the Shakuhachi or Kyotaku and sitting Zazen is the same for me, no difference at all … but it was a very long way to get there. Thanks to this experience I consider it so very important to study a Zen-Art in addition to just sitting Zazen. It gives us the chance to learn how to expand Zen to every day life, and it provides us with a qualified and maybe sobering feed-back about how deep or shallow our Zen experience really is.

The ancient name for the Japanese bamboo flute Shakuhachi is Kyotaku (虚鐸), which means “false bell”. Legend has it that the Chinese Monk F’u Hua Ch’an Shih was ringing a bell when he went begging. His want-to-be student Chang Po, though being rejected by F’u Hua Ch’an Shih, tried to imitate the sound of the bell with his bamboo flute.

I consider the idea quite inspiring that the Shakuhachi origins from the imitation of a bell by a rejected student, though nowadays it is believed this legend was just made up by the Komuso, the Shakuhachi playing monks of the Fuke sect.

While the modern Shakuhachi, which developed since the Meiji era, is just for musical performance, the ancient sound of the Kyotaku can still be heard at hidden places. Many of it’s followers insist their practice of the original pieces, the Honkyoku (本曲), is some kind of prayer and never for public performance.

In my Dojo, playing the Kyotaku is performed as “Blowing Zen” (Suizen 吹禅) practice, and instead of reciting Sutra after Sutra. Said that, I believe that like the music of J.S. Bach, which extended beyond its original religious purpose in Western culture, the Kyotaku has a similar potential. Be it a prayer, a Sutra recitation or just music, the sound of the Kyotaku is able to directly touch the listeners heart, independent of his or her religious or cultural background.

When my daughter was little, she insisted doing everything on her own before she was actually able to do it … dressing up, closing shoe-laces, climbing up and down the stairs. No parent’s help allowed! All kids are like that: looking out for new challenges and expanding their skills by overcoming difficulties.

Becoming adult, many of us loose that attitude, and we spend considerable effort into making our environment and things and tools of our daily life as easy to use and comfortable as possible. The sad extreme is someone who is best at operating the TV’s remote control while lying comfortably on the sofa, eating ready-made food.

A significant part of practising Zen or Zen-Arts is overcoming difficulties. Why do we sit on a pillow instead of a sofa, why do we use an ancient brush instead of computer software to write and draw. Why is Budo training so close to pain, sweat and tears? And why is Suizen (“blowing Zen”) practised with a rough seven-hole bamboo stick instead of perfectly tuned and easy to play modern Shakuhachi or silver flute?

We learn new things and grow only with overcoming difficulties, and by that we become more and more free and independent from random circumstances. The deep essence of Zen is no-ego … that suffering, nerve-wrecking needy “I” “I” “I”, which does not feel comfortable until the whole world around is modified to meet it’s requirements vanishes … and one day everything what just comes along is good.

Though, it requires a bit of a kid’s enthusiasm and focussed effort to get there, or “Zen-training”, as we adults like to call it …

When I started learning how to play the Shakuhachi about thirteen years ago, I got the impression it is not much more than a roughly cleaned stick of bamboo with seven holes: one on top, one on the bottom and five finger holes. And it is terribly difficult to produce any proper sound with it, if not any sound at all. I was shocked how much this very expensive flute I got from my teacher failed to match any criteria for a proper musical instrument I for example saw perfectly fulfilled by my cherished Selmer saxophone.

It took me ten years to understand why the seemingly imperfection of the Shakuhachi I struggle to play makes it so suitable for my practise, and why the modern Shakuhachi, designed considering the complicated physics of sound generation and therefore easy to play, do not.

Recently I started making Shakuhachi myself … just rough bamboo sticks with seven holes. They sound very much like my teachers flute, yet they are a bit too easy to play. I guess I have to impair their musical quality, to make them good instruments for Zen practise.

Most of my spare time these days I spend practising Shakuhachi, the Japanese bamboo flute. From all the instruments I play, I love the Shakuhachi most. Its rough and yet refined sound is closest to nature, like the wind going through a bamboo grove.

Whenever possible I play with the windows of my Dojo wide open, so the singing of the birds outside nicely merges with the sound of my flute. I feel the birds’ voice is very inspiring for my play.

The other day I woke up from birds’ singing which sounded much like the imitation of my Shakuhachi. HO-U HO-U RU-RU … I wonder, maybe the inspiration is both ways?

“Thank you, I’m fine, don’t need no help …” the old man living on the street in Manhattan says. I saw one of his paintings in the exhibition of Japanese art from the US internment camps. Traumatised, uprooted, just living through and for his art, “Mirikitani, Grandmaster Artist” he introduced himself in the beginning of the documentary film called “The Cats of Mirikitani” (I highly recommend, the trailer can be seen here).

A while ago I read about art as therapy. After watching “The Cats of Mirikitani” I tend to believe that making art can well be the last activity remaining, when everything else in a creative person’s life has collapsed. And the best thing to bring one back; in the end the homeless “Grandmaster Artist” was saved. Drawing cats and scenes from the internment camp, while keeping a safe distance from what he calls “commercial art”, Mirikitani stubbornly refuses to take any money except for his paintings.

A simple message like “make art not war” sounds very different, when someone with his life experience says it, while in the background the twin towers are on fire.
–
P.S.: Jimmy Mirikitani passed away October 21, 2012, at the age of 92.

Today I saw a unique exhibition of Japanese art. All items were produced by Japanese Americans while being imprisoned in internment camps during World War II. Contrasting the stunning beauty on display, the hardships of the artists and their families who lost all their possessions and eventually often their life was documented.

Creating art obviously is an inherent necessity of us human beings, next to finding food and shelter, and much more than just a luxurious pastime to beautify our saturated life. Or otherwise a method to produce objects for financial investment and speculation. I quote from the exhibition’s webpage:

The Art of Gaman […] is a universally uplifting story for its celebration of the nobility of the human spirit in adversity. Soon after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, all ethnic Japanese on the West Coast […] were ordered to leave their homes and move to ten inland internment camps for the duration of the war. While in these bleak camps, the internees used scraps and found materials to make furniture and other objects to beautify their surroundings.

Gaman is a Japanese word meaning to bear the seemingly unbearable with dignity and patience. Arts and crafts became essential for simple creature comforts and emotional survival.

(The William Breman Jewish Heritage & Holocaust Museum)

Through this exhibition I learned a lot about the social importance of art. It gave me a second view on what it means to live the life of an artist under all circumstances, and that it is possible to create the most beautiful art with just the material you have at your hands.

A few days ago, while washing dishes, I listened to a radio interview with a German Zen teacher. I don’t much like talks or writings of Zen people who seem to have explanations and answers for everything, giving us the impression that thanks to Zen in their life no problems do exist. I think it is dishonest.

As a scientist, I experienced that quick answers often fail … and I enjoy the privilege of travelling the world. In the spare time during my frequent trips I explore the places I happen to visit, usually by just stepping out of the hotel and getting lost walking in the neighbourhood for hours. Wherever I go, sooner or later I very much start liking the place and feel “at home” … and if I don’t like it, I believe it is somehow my fault, I just did not yet explore it’s nice or interesting side …

Currently I am in a city once called “Terminus”, built on the land of the Cherokee less than 200 years ago as the final destination of a train line starting in Chattanooga. Every time I visit the US I do have severe problems, because my usual approach getting to know and eventually loving a place completely fails.

I did not yet figure out how to make sense of my stay here without renting a car and spending money for shopping. Usually, I end up looking pretty strange as the only pedestrian making unexpected use of empty side-walks, in search of something interesting to see, or at least a supermarket to buy some food. Walking around in a desert must be more stimulating I thought today
during my (eventually failed) attempt finding a grocery store.

Said that, I am not yet giving up to find out what is my problem with this country. The people I have met here are just too friendly (although I was mistaken as a Spanish today, a blond haired blue eyed Spanish “… you can hear it in my accent when I talk”).

In Hitsuzendo, the way of Zen-calligraphy I teach, and most other Japanese calligraphy, Kanji (Chinese characters) are written. It is worth noting that in Japan a special set of characters, the Kana, were derived from the Kanji for a phonetic transcription of mainly poems and love-letters, written by female court nobles.

The other day I attended a vernissage in Düsseldorf, where the Japanese Kana Artist Kaoru Akagawa displayed some of her works (also shown on her webpage).

There is much beauty and sublimity in Kana, so I wonder if that way of writing, which was also used to compose ancient novels like the Tale of Genji (源氏物語) and the Pillow Book (枕草子), isn’t also suitable for Zen Calligraphy. The poet, calligrapher and Zen Monk Ryokan once wrote some Kana for an illiterate farmer, which later became a most famous piece of art: いろは (I-RO-HA, as much as A-B-C in Latin alphabet).

Maybe we will practise いろは in the next seminar …

Last weekend I attended a concert and workshop given by the young shakuhachi master Yoshida Koichi in Cologne. For many years I had studied the shakuhachi in a very traditional way with an old Japanese master, but in spite of all technical progress, I never could become really one with my instrument. Frankly speaking, more often than not I even did not very much like listening to my own performance…

The workshop in Cologne was attended by only a few other students, most of them completely inexperienced. Yoshida Sensei conducted more or less a beginners’ lesson with basic blowing and fingering exercises, and he explained how to listen to the sound the flute makes. Nevertheless, I very much enjoyed the workshop, and maybe for the first time I also enjoyed playing a shakuhachi.

It was a new discovery, and practising the old Honkyoku (ancient “original pieces”) in my Dojo this week, I really love listening to my shakuhachi’s sound. It is such a pleasure to play, while through the open windows of this lovely countryside house the bird’s singing can be heard. Maybe, over the years of practising the flute, I had lost a bit my beginner’s mind…?