Author: dorakuan

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…?

When I left Kyoto beginning of April, I was sad about missing the peak of the cherry blossom by just a few days. Back home, while longing for the sakura in Kyoto, I almost missed a remarkably old and beautiful cherry tree in full bloom right here in this village, not even five minutes from my Dojo.

I must have never walked this particular way before, the view of the tree in the evening sun was most striking and by any means comparable to the most beautiful ones I have seen in Japan!

Maybe in your Dojo you regularly chant Hakuin’s Zazen Wasan (坐禅和讃). One line says 衆生近きを知らずして, 遠く求むるはかなさよ, in my clumsy translation: a pity to seek far away, without knowing about the living things nearby. Hakuin might have talked about seeking Buddha, but finding the beauty of a local cherry tree is not much different for me.

Some Sutra texts have a relevance for our daily life, so I recommend more advanced Zen students to actually spend effort into understanding their meaning. Just chanting SHUJO CHIKAKI O SHIRAZU SHITE, TOKU MOTOMURU HAKANASA YO without caring what the strange syllables mean is a good practice for beginners, but you risk to miss a friendly hint to a Buddha just around the corner…

Over the 13 years I worked with my former teacher, I took many pictures of him, including a short movie. But none of them came close to the one we shot in his Dojo in spring 2006.

We wanted to produce some material for a webpage and a book, still with my old analogue camera. Soon I sensed nothing worked: flash or not, additional light or not, I was not able to capture that specific silent and concentrated atmosphere present in the room when he was writing his calligraphy.

Suddenly, for a moment, the sun came through a gap in the clouds and flooded the Dojo with the most fantastic light. I said “Now!”, and without hesitation he took the brush and started writing a powerful 気. I took the picture, and a moment later the sun was gone.

No other photo we shot that day was anyhow good, but this one we used for many years to come…

Only when I am really and fully immersed in a situation or environment, I can take good pictures. It is nothing more than being here and catching the moment with my cheap little camera. If I fail to ban the atmosphere of a scenery, this tells me that I am not really aware of it, or just not fully present.

Usually I come back from Japan with a bunch of nice pictures, but I always failed to capture anything beautiful concerning the rock garden of Ryoanji-Temple in Kyoto.

While I enjoyed sitting on the veranda many times looking at the the famous stones in the sun, rain and snow, alone and with friends, I never managed to take a picture of the scenery I liked. Somehow, I concluded, in spite of their fame the couple of stones in the gravel do not
make much sense to me …

For that reason I hesitated to visit Ryoanji this time. But a storm was announced, and so I decided to change my plans hiking near Takao in the north of Kyoto last minute and went to Ryoanji instead. This was good luck, not just because the storm later became really severe.

When I entered the veranda of Ryoanji, the garden almost talked to me. It felt like looking into a mirror, or at my own calligraphy right after writing, a completely unexpected and joyful experience. For the first time I could easily take a couple of pictures of Ryoanji garden, perfectly reflecting what I saw and felt.

It is not the 15 stones (all Japanese tourists count before taking their picture). The beauty of Ryoanji’s rock garden comes from the vast emptiness, merely intensified by the stones, and from the old wall in the back. A perfect expression of 色即是空, 空即是色 from the Heart Sutra. To really see it, you maybe must ignore it is so famous …

Since my early teenage days I am into photography, though with several interruptions. A picture I like must be full of atmosphere, telling a story, magically transporting all the circumstances which cannot be printed on a sheet of paper: the scent of the flowers and warmth of an early spring day, the joyful activity and sound-scape of a street in Kyoto during Gion Matsuri, the smell of humid old cedar-wood and moss on a veranda facing a Japanese garden in the rain.

Aside from technical aspects (which often are ridiculously over-emphasized), I experience taking a picture very much like writing calligraphy: in this very moment I am fully present, and complete my work in one breath; not much can be improved thereafter. Most important is not being disturbed in my mindset by the action itself.

The reason why I gave up photography several times for years was that searching for nice views and handling a camera disturbed me experiencing the very situation I wanted to capture, and the wish of documenting everything became over-dominant. Doing calligraphy, you destroy your work already before the brush touches the paper if your mind is occupied by the desire to write something good.

One of my favourite photographers, Henri Cartier-Bresson, was made aware of Eugen Herrigels “Zen in der Kunst des Bogenschiessens” by his artist friend Georges Braque. Later, another famous photographer, Robert Doisneau, compared Cartier-Bressons work to that of a Japanese archer. It is not transmitted if he had in mind the aesthetic and solemn atmosphere of Zen archery Herrigel described in his book, or the wild yabusame horse riders who attempt to hit the bull’s eye in full gallop, but both images describe very well the process of taking a picture, I guess.