Day 293: Hardcore Zen

QUESTIONS ABOUT REINCARNATION inevitably come up at every one of Nishijima’s zazen retreats. In fact that was one of the first things that got me really cheezed off at Nishijima. Sometime during the second retreat of his I attended, several years before the attack of my demons, Nishijima made the sweeping statement that “Buddhists do not believe in reincarnation.”

What?! Richard Gere says Buddhists believe in reincarnation and so does that guy from the Beastie Boys not to mention nearly everyone else. “Of course Buddhists believe in reincarnation, you old goat! Millions of people all over the world who call themselves Buddhists believe very strongly in reincarnation.” I didn’t actually say this. I just sort of sat there with black smoke coming out of my ears. I did that a lot in those days.

We’re all scared of dying and we all want some kind of assurance that we’re going to live forever. Having a kindly old man in black robes tell you you’re going to be reborn after you die is pretty comforting. Plenty of old men in robes have made a good living that way. Nishijima’s stock answer assures that at least half of the participants at his retreats go home extremely unhappy. “There is no life after death,” he always says. “When you die, you never come back to life again.”

When Nishijima says Buddhism doesn’t accept reincarnation, arguments usually follow. But I’ve never once seen the old man back down.

It seems that for a lot of people today, Buddhism is the belief in reincarnation. There must be a hundred books at your local New Age book shop that give detailed explanations of how we move from life to life. Most of them cite the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a book accepted by many as a Buddhist scripture. You can find references to the idea of rebirth in pretty much any Buddhist sutra you choose to look at. Even Dogen’s Shobogenzo is packed full of stories of people dying here and being reborn somewhere else, or even as something else—a fox, for instance. Clearly, then, Nishijima must be wrong. Buddhists do believe in reincarnation.

Whenever anyone—and it has frequently been me—points this out to Nishijima, particularly in connection with his beloved Dogen, he will say that these stories are just based on old Indian mythology. They’re in there to add a little color to the piece. We were never meant to actually believe these people really, literally did die and get reborn somewhere else later. He likes to cite a chapter called “The Wholehearted Way” in the Shobogenzo, in which Dogen says the following about reincarnation:

According to that non-Buddhist view, there is one spiritual intelligence existing within our body. When this body dies, however, the spirit casts off the skin and is reborn. If we learn this view as the Buddha’s Dharma we are even more foolish than the person who grasps a tile or pebble thinking it to be a golden treasure.

The standard thing for me to do right here would be to to explain to you all of the ways in which the Buddhist idea of rebirth is completely different from the older Brahmanistic notion of transmigration. According to that theory of transmigration, there is a soul, an atman, that lives inside our bodies like a person renting an apartment. When the landlord, God, kicks the person out for making too much noise or not paying rent on time, the person moves to another building. We do not know if the soul gets its security deposit back, but I’m guessing that God pockets it and claims it was spent on cleaning and repairs. The Buddhist idea of rebirth, it is said, is a much more subtle view. There is no soul as such, the standard line goes on to say, but the conditions that created the body and mind you have now will continue after your death and manifest themselves as another form, perhaps another kind of sentient being, usually a human, in the future.

This idea ends up sounding like, “You do reincarnate, but you just don’t have a soul.” For years and years that’s exactly how I took it. After reading Philip Kapleau’s The Zen of Living and Dying in which he gives a very thorough and detailed explanation of why the Buddhist idea of rebirth is different from the usual idea of reincarnation I figured I had the whole thing down pat. Though Kapleau’s ideas are well presented and logical, I think the best answer to the question of what Zen people think about reincarnation goes like this:

A guy walks up to a Zen master and asks, “Is there life after death? The Zen Master says, “How should I know?” The guys replies indignantly, “Because you’re a Zen master!” “Yes,” says the Zen master, “but not a dead one.”

~~Hardcore Zen -by- Brad Warner

Day 214: Zen Landscapes

The dry garden of Ryōan-ji in Kyoto is one of the most analysed and photographed works of art in the world. Thus, well before my first visit in November 2006, I felt I knew the garden intimately, and was thoroughly prepared to elaborate on the knowledge I had attained from dozens of books and hundreds if not thousands of images. As soon as I stepped onto the veranda of the temple overlooking the garden, I was stupefied, first by its sublime beauty and soon afterwards by the fact that it hardly corresponded to any description I had read of it. How could this be? Could all previous commentators have been so wrong? Could I have been so blinded by my own prejudices and paradigms? Could I have fallen into the textual trap of confusing image and description for the garden itself? Certainly my attraction to Japanese dry gardens stems from the fact that they corroborate my aesthetic principles, wishes and utopias. But might this passion, hitherto untested against its objects, have falsified my vision? I immediately suspected that my disorientation went far beyond mere culture shock. With each discovery about Japanese culture, my bewilderment seemed to multiply even as my knowledge expanded, and I seemed further from aesthetic enlightenment than ever, as Ryōan-ji led me to consider other art forms and other viewpoints: the stones had their antecedents in Chinese and Japanese painting; the surrounding walls evoked unglazed pottery surfaces; the stone borders hinted at the complicated issues of inside and outside in Japanese architecture; the sparse moss suggested the need for water in an otherwise dry garden, thus pointing to the essential role of atmospheric effects in Japanese art; the raked gravel stressed the role of stylization and stereotype in image and word; and the overhanging cherry tree evoked the crucial interpenetration of art and world. I was to discover that these correspondences were not mere free associations, but are deeply ingrained in Japanese aesthetics. After nearly two decades of meditation on Western gardens and landscape from the Baroque through the modern and postmodern eras, I realized that I had to reorient my ways of seeing completely in order to be able to elucidate my initial astonishment before Ryōan-ji.

As a result I offer here a certain number of principles, composed in the form of a ‘Manifesto for the Future of Landscape’, to give a sense of my attitudes and hopes – often against the grain of contemporary theory and practice – regarding landscape creation, appreciation and conservation.

1. The garden is a symbolic form, which suggests that symbols are as important as images to guide appreciation as well as restoration. The garden is earthly, but it also reaches to the heavens, and occasionally to the underworld.
2. The garden is never merely a picture, and the ground plan is usually misleading. The spatiality of gardens is plastic and dynamic, such that kinetics is of the essence. The garden is thus a synaesthetic matrix.
3. The garden is a Gesamtkunstwerk, a web of correspondences, a site that should encompass all the arts. Consequently, every garden must be continuously reinvented as a scene for contemporary activities.
4. The garden is simultaneously a hermetic space and an object in the world. Thus the ‘formal’ garden must remain open to the ‘informality’ of nature. Garden closure is a sociological and psychological phenomenon, not an ontological one.
5. The garden is a paradox, necessitating that complexity and contradiction should not be avoided, since the finest metaphors are often unstable and equivocal.
6. The garden is a narrative, a transformer of narratives, and a generator of narratives, such that a garden is all that it evokes. Consequently, tales and symbols are an integral part of gardens.
7. The unpeopled garden is either an abstraction or a ruin, suggesting that all aesthetic value has a use value that must be respected. The most complex landscape is the one most closely observed.
8. The garden is a memory theatre, which must bear vestiges of its sedimented history, including traces of the catastrophes that it has suffered. In the history of landscape, accidents are not contingent, but essential.
9. The garden is a hyperbolically ephemeral structure. Anachronism is of the essence, since a garden is all that it was and all that it shall become.
...
One of the classic Japanese tales adapted by the Noh theatre, Ugetsu, concerns the itinerant poet and monk Saigyō (1118–1190). One evening he arrived at a very dilapidated hut with a good part of the roof missing, and requested shelter for the night from the elderly couple who lived there. The man politely refused, explaining that their abode would be unworthy, but the wife, seeing that the traveller was a monk, wished to accommodate him. The problem was that the woman loved the moonlight so much that she did not want the roof repaired so the moonbeams could stream into the house, while the man preferred the patter of the rain and thus desired a suitable roof. As autumn was approaching, the situation became even more serious, since this was not only the best moon-viewing (o-tsukimi) season, but also that of the most delectable rains. The couple asked the monk:

Our humble hut –
Is it to be thatched, or not to be thatched?

The monk responded by saying that they had just composed a fine, though incomplete poem, in response to which they suggested that if he could complete the poem, they would lodge him, whereupon he proclaimed:

Is the moonlight to leak?
Are the showers to putter?
Our thoughts are divided,
And this humble hut –
To be thatched or not to be thatched.

He was invited in, and as the night deepened, the moon advanced and finally entered the house. Soon afterwards they heard the sound of rain on the horizon, only to realize that it was in fact the rustling of leaves – a shower of falling leaves in the moonlight. This poignant tale is a veritable allegory of Zen aesthetics, where paradox (the impossible simultaneity of moon and rain) is resolved by metaphor (leaves as rain).

Bashō, founder of the modern style of haiku, writes of the extreme love of nature among certain Japanese artists: ‘Whatever objects he sees are referred to the flowers; whatever thoughts he conceives are related to the moon.’ Indeed, many critics claim that one of the most moving, indeed sublime, moments in The Tale of Genji is when Genji pays a night-time visit to one of his loves, to find the door ajar and the moonlight streaming in, prefiguring his entrance into the room. D. T. Suzuki beautifully evokes the Japanese love of the moon and its centrality in the Japanese imagination:

The moonlight singularly attracts the Japanese imagination, and any Japanese who ever aspired to compose a waka or a haiku would hardly dare leave the moon out. The meteorological conditions of the country have much to do with this. The Japanese are lovers of softness, gentleness, semi-darkness, subtle suggestiveness, and everything in this category. They are not fiercely emotional. While they are occasionally surprised by earthquakes, they like to sit quietly in the moonlight, enveloped in its pale, bluish, soul-consoling rays. They are generally averse to anything glaringly bright and stimulating and too distinctive in its individuality. The moonlight is illuminating enough, but owing to the atmospheric conditions all objects under it appear not too strongly individualized; a certain mystic obscurantism pervades, and this seems to appeal to the Japanese generally.

Though this estimation of the Japanese soul might not be evident while strolling today in Ginza, Tokyo’s most prestigious commercial district, or in Shibuya, a forest of neon lights, the lunar attraction is the very essence of the Zen sensibility.

~~Zen Landscapes: Perspectives on Japanese Gardens and Ceramics -by- Allen S. Weiss