Again the Winter Shower Ruffles the Water Gochiku

Everything that happens in life is accidental… Fifty-fifty the things we imagine to be deliberately planned out are the result of accidentally stimulated controlling. I do non remember what it was prompted me to acquire (accidentally) Alan Watts' The Way of Zen somewhere around 1963 when I was accidentally mired securely in wage slavery – more deeply than I ever was after the following year when I started existence 'trained' as a teacher when I learned to manage wage slavery in a much more positive kind of way – only reading the book over again recently I am amazed at how deeply information technology has afflicted my state of being; in particular, my attitude to writing (especially haiku), painting and musical composition – yous merely accept to Practise it… Information technology prepared the way for my embracing the Sartrean course of Existentialism, and a little more x years after, The Fourth Way.

My version of sumi-e painting washed in the Malverns August 2018

Hither are some notes & thoughts while focusing on Affiliate 4 called Zen in the Arts. Information technology speaks to me now.

• At that place's this Western idea that the artist has to conquer something in the same way that '…explorers and scientists speak of conquering mountains or conquering space. To Chinese and Japanese ears these are grotesque expressions. For when you climb it is the mountain equally much as your own legs which lifts you upwards, and when you paint information technology is the brush, ink, and paper which make up one's mind the upshot as much every bit your own hand…'

• Zen represents '…a mentality which feels completely at home in this universe, and which sees man-beings as an integral part of the environment. Human intelligence is non an imprisoned spirit from afar merely an aspect of the whole intricately balanced organism of the natural world… the yang and the yin – the male and female… in dynamic balance, maintain the order of the world. The insight which lies at the root of Far Eastern culture is that opposites are relational and so fundamentally harmonious… our stark divisions of spirit and nature, discipline and object, good and evil, artist and medium are quite foreign to this culture…'

• Sitting quietly doing cipher – the spirit of Zen. '…Paradoxical as information technology may seem, the purposeful life has no content, no indicate. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. Not hurrying, the purposeless life misses nothing, for it is just when there is no goal and no blitz that the man senses are fully open to receive the world. Absence of hurry also involves a certain lack of interference with the natural course of events, especially when it is felt that the natural course follows principles which are non foreign to human intelligence…'

• The whole Zen attitude in the arts is a DOING, a Way of activity, nothing to do with the meaningless brainchild 'inspiration', not a sitting effectually waiting for the Muse to descend.

• In sumi-east painting the relative emptiness of the picture appears to be role of the painting and non just unpainted groundwork. It's '…painting by not painting' or what Zen sometimes calls 'playing the cord-less lute'. '…The hole-and-corner lies in knowing how to balance class with emptiness and… in knowing when one has 'said' enough…' For Zen avoids explanation, second thoughts, and intellectual commentary…' Emptiness gives the feeling of the 'marvelous Void' from which the consequence of a sudden appears.

• 'Equally impressive is the mastery of the castor, of strokes ranging from delicate elegance to crude vitality, from minutely detailed trees to bold outlines and masses given texture by the 'controlled accidents' of stray brush hairs and uneven inking of the paper…'

• The painting becomes the thing not what'southward beingness 'copied'; the 'suchness' of things is arrived at by spontaneous accident which is why the Western mind is dismayed when there seems to be a 'principle of dubiousness'.

wild geese do non intend to cast their reflection;
water has no mind to receive their image

• '…Thus the bumming life is the constant theme of Zen fine art of every kind, expressing the artist's ain inner state of going nowhere in a timeless moment. Nosotros all take these moments occasionally, and it is only and then that they catch those brilliant glimpses of the world which cast such a glow over the intervening wastes of memory – the smell of burning leaves on a morning of autumn haze, a flying of sunlit pigeons against a thundercloud, the sound of an unseen waterfall at dusk, or the single weep of some unidentified bird in the depths of a forest. In the fine art of Zen every mural, every sketch of bamboo in the wind or of lone rocks, is an echo of such moments…'

• 'Where the mood of the moment is solitary and tranquillity it is called sabi.'

• 'When the artist is feeling depressed or sad, and in this peculiar emptiness of feeling catches a glimpse of something rather ordinary and unpretentious in its incredible 'suchness', the mood is chosen wabi.'

• 'When the moment evokes a more intense, nostalgic sadness, connected with autumn and the vanishing abroad of the earth, information technology is called aware.'

• 'When the vision is the sudden perception of something mysterious and foreign, hinting at an unknown, never to exist discovered, the mood is chosen yugen.'

• 'From the primeval times Zen masters had shown a partiality for curt, gnomic poems – at one time laconic and directly like their answers to questions about Buddhism…' An attempt to capture a alive moment in its pure 'suchness'.

• In poetry, as in sumi-e painting, the empty space is the surrounding silence which a short poem requires – '…a silence of the listen in which i does not 'think about' the verse form but actually feels the awareness which it evokes, all the more strongly for having said so little… drops the subject nearly every bit soon every bit information technology takes it upward…'

• '…a expert haiku is a pebble thrown into the puddle of the listener's heed, evoking associations out of the richness of memory. Information technology invites the listener to participate in 'nothing special' instead of leaving him impaired with admiration while the poet shows off…'

• Bashō (1643–1694): 'To write haiku get a three-foot child…'

you light the fire;
I'll show you something prissy
– a great ball of snow!

• In that location'southward an avoidance of literary and 'highbrow' language,

weeds in the rice-field
cutting and left lying but so
– fertilizer!

• In Zen you take no heed autonomously from what yous know and see…

Gochiku:-

the long nighttime;
the sound of the water
says what I call back

stars on the pond;
again the winter shower
ruffles the water

Bashō:-

on a withered branch
a crow perched
in the autumn evening

with the evening breeze
the water laps confronting
the heron's legs

in the nighttime woods
a berry drops:
the sound of the h2o

• Sabi is loneliness in the sense of Buddhist detachment, of seeing all things as happening 'past themselves' in miraculous spontaneity the unexpected recognition of the 'suchness' of very ordinary things, especially when the gloom of the time to come has momentarily checked our ambitiousness, is perhaps the mood of

brushwood gate
and for a lock
– this snail

the woodpecker
keeps on in the aforementioned place:
twenty-four hour period is closing

winter desolation;
in the rain-water tub
sparrows walk

• Aware is not quite grief, and not quite nostalgia in the usual sense of longing for the return of a beloved past.

evening haze;
thinking of past things –
how far-off they are!

the stream hides itself
in the grasses
of departing fall

leaves falling
on i another;
rain beats on pelting

• Yugen signifies a kind of mystery, it is the most inexplainable of all modes to depict…

sea darkens;
voices of wild ducks
faintly white

what is existence shouted
between loma and boat?
a trout leaps;

• '…Soto Zen monk and hermit Ryokan (1758–1831) was a saint whom anybody loved – perhaps because he was natural, again as a child, rather than good. It is like shooting fish in a barrel to form the impression that the Japanese dearest of nature is predominantly sentimental, domicile on those aspects of nature which are 'nice' and 'pretty' – butterflies, ruby blossoms, the fall moon, chrysanthemums, and erstwhile pine trees. But Ryokan is also the poet of lice, fleas, and existence utterly soaked with common cold rain…'

on rainy days
the monk Ryokan
feels sorry for himself

the sound of the scouring
of the saucepan blends
with the tree-frogs' voices

• '…In some ways Ryokan is a Japanese St Francis, though much less obviously religious. He is a wandering fool, un-selfconsciously playing games with children, living in a lonely hut in the forest where the roof leaks and the wall is hung with poems in his marvelously illegible, spidery handwriting, then prized by Japanese calligraphers. He thinks of the lice on his chest every bit insects in the grass, and expresses the nearly natural human feelings–sadness, loneliness, bewilderment, or compassion – without a trace of shame or pride. Even when robbed he is even so rich, for…'

the thief
left it behind –
the moon at the window

the wind brings
fallen leaves enough
to make a fire

• '…When life is empty, with respect to the past, and aimless, with respect to the time to come, the vacuum is filled past the nowadays, reduced to a hairline, a split 2d in which there is no time for anything to happen with a sense of an infinitely expanded present…'

• To go some special apprehension of exactly the style things are '…one must be sitting 'just to sit' and there must not be any intention to experience what's called satori, a sudden inexplicable moment of 'enlightenment'…'

• '…Sudden visions of nature which form the substance of haiku ascend in the aforementioned way, for they are never there when one looks for them. The artificial haiku e'er feels like a piece of life which has been deliberately broken off or wrenched away from the universe, whereas the genuine haiku has dropped off all past itself, and has the whole universe within it…'

• '…A world which increasingly consists of destinations without journeys between them, a globe which values only 'getting somewhere' every bit fast every bit possible, becomes a world without substance. One can get anywhere and everywhere, and yet the more this is possible, the less is anywhere and everywhere worth getting to… The betoken of fine art is the doing of it rather than achievement. But, more than this, the real joy of information technology lies in what turns upward unintentionally in the course of practice, just as the joy of travel is not about so much in getting where one wants to become equally in the unsought surprises which occur on the journeying. Planned surprises are as much of a contradiction as intentional satori – whoever aims at satori is similar a person who sends himself Christmas presents for fear that others will forget him…'

• In that location is no dualism in Zen – no sense of controller and controlled, mind and torso, spiritual and material, thinker & thought, observer & thing observed. Everything just is…

• '…Zen is a liberation from time… When we open our eyes and meet clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality. Until this has become clear, it seems that our life is all past and time to come, and that the present is nothing more than than the minute hairline which divides them. From this comes the awareness of 'not having time to…', of a world which hurries by so rapidly that information technology is gone before we tin can enjoy information technology. Through 'awakening to the instant' one sees that this is the reverse of the truth: it is rather the by and future which are the fleeting illusions, and the present which is eternally real. We discover that the linear succession of fourth dimension is a convention of our unmarried-rail verbal thinking, of a consciousness which interprets the earth by grasping little pieces of it, calling them things and events. But every such grasp of the mind excludes the rest of the world, and then that this type of consciousness tin can get an estimate vision of the whole merely through a series of grasps, one afterward another. Even so the superficiality of this consciousness is seen in the fact that information technology cannot and does not regulate even the homo organism. For if it had to control the heartbeat, the breath, the operation of the nerves, glands, muscles, and sense organs, it would be rushing wildly around the torso taking intendance of one thing later on some other, with no fourth dimension to practice anything else. Happily, it is not in charge, and the organism is regulated past the timeless 'original mind', which deals with life in its totality and then can do ever so many 'things' at one time…'

• '…In that location is but this now. Information technology does not come from anywhere; it is not going anywhere. It is non permanent, but it is not impermanent. Though moving, it is always still. When we try to take hold of it, it seems to run away, and yet it is always hither and there is no escape from information technology. And when nosotros plough circular to find the self which knows this moment, we find that it has vanished similar the past…'

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Source: https://colinblundell.com/2018/10/22/notes-on-chapter-4-of-alan-watts-the-way-of-zen-1957/

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