Zen
Chef's Table: Jeong Kwan
Mountains are mountains
Just a whinny again
Zero Mass
Translation is always a treason
Translation is always a treason, and as a Ming author observes, can at its best be only the reverse side of a brocade—all the threads are there, but not the subtlety of color or design. But, after all, what great doctrine is there which is easy to expound? The ancient sages never put their teachings in systematic form. They spoke in paradoxes, for they were afraid of uttering half-truths. They began by talking like fools and ended by making their hearers wise. Lau Tzu himself, with his quaint humor, says, "If people of inferior intelligence hear of the Tao, they laugh immensely. It would not be the Tao unless they laughed at it."
The mundane and the spiritual
A special contribution of Zen to Eastern thought was its recognition of the mundane as of equal importance with the spiritual. It held that in the great relation of things there was no distinction of small and great, an atom possessing equal possibilities with the universe. The seeker for perfection must discover in his own life the refection of the inner light. The organization of the Zen monastery was very significant of this point of view. To every member, except the abbot, was assigned some special work in the caretaking of the monastery, and curiously enough, to the novices was committed the lighter duties, while to the most respected and advanced monks were given the more irksome and menial tasks. Such services formed a part of the Zen discipline and every least action must be done absolutely perfectly. Thus many a weighty discussion ensued while weeding the garden, paring a turnip, or serving tea. The whole ideal of Teaism is a result of this Zen conception of greatness in the smallest incidents of life. Taoism furnished the basis for aesthetic ideals, Zennism made them practical.
In a state of reverberation
Irwin's terms of sudden, physical realization – bam! – call to mind the suddenly enlightening Zen slap or rap on the forehead. It also calls to mind [Philip Guston]'s own remark..."Look at any inspired painting...it's like a gong sounding; it puts you in a state of reverberation." Reverberation is another way of suggesting a kind of sudden, energetic, physical experience.
The most incidental detail
Black rakuware tea bowl (late sixteenth century), Kyoto, Japan. Freer Sackler Museum of Asian Art.
For Irwin, the lesson of [the raku tea cups] was twofold: first, their presentation was important, insofar as the ceremony involved a gradual preparation of the audience's aesthetic attention. Then, when the time came to handle the cups, the intimacy of the experience fused visual and tactile sensations into a single continuum. As he also noted:
he would set on the table this box with a beautiful little tie on it – very Japanese – and you untied it, you opened up the box, he let you do that. And then inside of it was a cloth sack. You took the sack out, and it had a drawstring, and you opened up the drawstring and you reached inside and took out the bowl. By that time, the bowl had you at a level where the most incidental detail – maybe even just a thumb mark – registered as a powerful statement.
Until we leave the gate behind
And yet the timeless way is not complete, and will not fully generate the quality without a name, until we leave the gate behind.
Indeed this ageless character has nothing, in the end, to do with languages. The language, and the processes which stem from it, merely release the fundamental order which is native to us. They do not teach us, they only remind us of what we know already, and of what we shall discover time and time again, when we give up our ideas and opinions, and do exactly what emerges from ourselves.
At this final stage, the patterns are no longer important: the patterns have taught you to be receptive to what is real. It is the gate which leads you to the state of mind, in which you live so close to your own heart that you no longer need a language.
This is the final lesson of the timeless way.
It will revenge itself in judgment
To the average man, life presents itself, not as material malleable to his hand, but as a series of problems of extreme difficulty, which he has to solve with the means at his disposal. And he is distressed to find that the more means he can dispose of—such as machine-power, rapid transport, and general civilised amenities, the more his problems grow in hardness and complexity. This is particularly disconcerting to him, because he has been frequently told that the increase of scientific knowledge would give him “the mastery over nature”—which ought, surely, to imply mastery over life.
Perhaps the first thing that he can learn from the artist is that the only way of “mastering” one’s material is to abandon the whole conception of mastery and to co-operate with it in love: whosoever will be a lord of life, let him be its servant. If he tries to wrest life out of its true nature, it will revenge itself in judgment, as the work revenges itself upon the domineering artist.
Shortlist of interesting spaces
The journey begins by letting go
The journey begins by letting go of control, and becoming flexible.
Only when it has ceased to be a pattern
Here I would like to append three lines in praise of muji:
A pattern that is not a pattern is a true pattern.
Create patterns until they are no longer patterns.
The true pattern is a patternless pattern.When creating a pattern, one’s heart must also be muji. A pattern must be followed through until it is no longer a pattern. It is a true pattern only when it has ceased to be a pattern.
Not as a star
But I’m warning you,
this is my last existence.
Not as a swallow, not as a maple,
not as a cat-tail and not as a star.The utter nothingness of being
Everything written symbols can say has already passed by. They are like tracks left by animals. That is why the masters of meditation refuse to accept that writings are final. The aim is to reach true being by means of those tracks, those letters, those signs - but reality itself is not a sign, and it leaves no tracks. It doesn’t come to us by way of letters or words. We can go toward it, by following those words and letters back to what they came from. But so long as we are preoccupied with symbols, theories and opinions, we will fail to reach the principle.
"But when we give up symbols and opinions, aren’t we left in the utter nothingness of being?"
Yes.
It doesn't look like anything to me
It is related that the bodhisattva Manjusri was once standing at the gate, and seeing him, Shakyamuni Buddha called to him, "Manju, Manju, why don't you come inside the gate?"
Manjusri replied, "I don't see anything outside the gate."
The Void
Objects or elements which have the greatest depth, which actively draw the senses in, have at their heart an area of deep calm and stillness – a void bounded by and contrasted with an area of intense centers around it.
When an element becomes all detail, its own constant buzz tends to dilute its overall strength. Like a musical wall of sound, it pushes against our perception to produce a flat field-like state. Conversely, it is the pause which allows us to interlock with a piece of music and feel its depth. The presence of void, at many scales, provides a contrasting calm to alleviate the buzz and strengthen the center.
Flexible imagination
By giving up preference for harmony,
we accept dissonance to be as desirable as consonance.Besides a balance through color harmony, which is comparable
to symmetry, there is equilibrium possible between
color tensions, related to a more dynamic asymmetry.Again: knowledge and its application is not our aim;
instead, it is flexible imagination, discovery, invention – taste.One candle can light another
Lighting one candle
with another candle—
spring evening.Buson is saying that we accept the light contained in the work of others without darkening their efforts. One candle can light another, and the light may spread without its source being diminished.
A thousand different roads
They great Way has no gate;
There are a thousand different roads.
If you pass through this barrier once,
you will walk independently in the universe.No door at which to knock
Penetrating the Blue Cliff, you will open
the eye within eyes
and realizing life through the Blue Cliff,
you yourself will become a torch,
the light beyond light.Being so, you will find no door at which to knock, nor any door to be opened.
In one there are many; in two, one
The ultimate path is without difficulty;
Speech is to the point, words are to the point.
In one there are many kinds;
In two there is no duality.Mind of no mind
To you, mind of no mind, in whom the timeless way was born.
Autumn breezes blow
One day you are born
you die the next –
today,
at twilight,
autumn breezes blow.Aggressively Zen
"He was dealing with Zen in the most aggressive way Zen has ever been dealt with." — Irving Blum
Don't mistake my finger for the moon
Many people mistook the string itself for the work of art ("When I point my finger at the moon, don't mistake my finger for the moon" is a Zen aphorism that Irwin is fond of citing). By mid-1976 Irwin himself was prepared to Jettison—along with figure, line, focus, permanence, and signature—the very requirement of any overt activity of making as a necessary prerequisite for artistic viability.
The Timeless Way of Building
A Book by Christopher Alexander- Mind of no mind
- The quality without a name
- An objective matter
- Bitterness
- The most precious thing we ever have
Japanese Death Poems
A Book by Yoel HoffmanIn Praise of Shadows
A Book by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki & Thomas J. Harper- Things that shine and glitter
- A naked bulb
- The Japanese toilet
- Empty dreams
- Most important of all are the pauses
Silence
A Book by John CageThe Blue Cliff Record
A Book by Yuanwu Keqin, Thomas Cleary & J.C. ClearyKokoro
A Novel by Natsume Sōseki155-217-155
A Website by Nick TrombleyList of games that Buddha would not play
A List- …
- Guessing at letters traced with the finger in the air or on a friend's back. (letters in the Brahmi script)
- Guessing a friend's thoughts.
- …
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind
A Book by Shunryū SuzukiDon't Rush to Simplicity
An Article by Shawn WangYou've probably heard this story before:
A businessman finds a fisherman, who is living an idyllic, peaceful life by the sea.
He laughs and tells the fisherman how to get rich instead.
The fisherman asks him what he will do after he gets rich.
He replies that he would retire to an idyllic, peaceful life by the sea.There's supposed to be a deep life lesson in there, but it's always felt insincere to me.
To me it is better to have reached the heights of a career, or suffered an epic defeat, even if I do end up in the same place as everyone else in the end.
To me simplicity is made more beautiful when understood through a long personal struggle with complexity. When I can dance with it, having turned a mighty nemesis into an old friend, and teach others to do the same.
Better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
A Book by Robert M. PirsigIs perfection boring?
An Article by Ralph AmmerWe love to see the process, not just the result. The imperfections in your work can be beautiful if they show your struggle for perfection, not a lack of care.
The Nature and Aesthetics of Design
Any imaginable shape
The thing which sharply distinguishes useful design from such arts as painting and sculpture is that the practitioner of design has limits set upon his freedom of choice. A painter can choose any imaginable shape. A designer cannot.
Useless work on useful things
Anyone can verify by simple observation two important facts.
The first is, that whenever humans design and make a useful thing they invariably expend a good deal of unnecessary and easily avoidable work on it which contributes nothing to its usefulness.
The second fact is that all useful devices have got to do useless things which no one wants them to do. Who wants car to get hot? Or to wear out its tires? Or to make a noise and a smell?
Presentable
I have sometimes wondered whether our unconscious motive for doing so much useless work is to show that if we cannot make things work properly we can at least make them presentable.
The principle of arrangement
It is really rather remarkable that, while anyone can tell whether a thing is a pocket-knife because, presumably, anyone can recognize the principle of arrangement which constitutes the similarity between all pocket knives, no one can visually abstract that arrangement. We recognize it when we 'see' it embodies, we can describe it disembodies, but we cannot visualize it disembodied.
The minimum condition
When a device is so designed that its component parts are only just strong enough to get the intended result without danger of failure, we may say it is in its minimum condition.
I suspect that the functionalists sometimes meant by functional design simply design aimed at the minimum condition for a device. In that case 'form should follow function' would mean that every system should be in its minimum condition, thus having certain limitations imposed on its form.
The requirements of economy
Economy is the mother of most inventions, not necessity, unless in the sense of poverty and hardship. A requirement for convenience is simply a diluted requirement for ease and economy.
It seems to be invariably true that those characteristics which lead people to call a design functional are derived from the requirements of economy and not of use.
When design gets too easy
Design has invariably exhibited styles because some clear limitations on freedom of choice are psychologically necessary to nearly all designers. When design gets too easy it becomes difficult.
The one best way
It is a most diverting spectacle to see the experts in work study exercising their considerably ingenuity to find the one cheapest way of doing operations which could perfectly well be dispensed with; for example, getting shiny surfaces on furniture. The 'one best way' of doing things like that is not to do them.
The versatility of flat surfaces
The versatility of flat surfaces is not commonly seen in nature.
The works of God
Via reddit
Thus the first and most important stratagem adopted to cheapen construction was the squaring and turning of components in order to eliminate offering up and individual fitting. The flatness, straightness, and squareness which more than any other characteristic distinguish man's construction from the works of God, derive from economy. We see the mark of economy in every building of squared masonry however magnificent it may be. Only the few remnants of ancient polygonal masonry remind us that the pattern of stone work where each stone is individually fitted can be very different from the cheap squared pattern to which we are accustomed."
Skill vs. knowledge
We should say that anybody has skill enough to build a good dry-stone wall but that few know how to design one, for the placing of the stones is a matter of knowledge and judgment, not of dexterity.
6 methods for economical design
- Use readily available materials.
- Use easily worked ('wasted') materials.
- Avoid dexterous labor.
- Use standardized materials or components.
- Avoid intermediate states (get straight to the final product).
- Use standardized language and geometry. Design only what can be easily communicated.
Old solutions
Where the problem is old, the old solutions will nearly always be best.
The bloodless ghosts of memory
The bloodless ghosts of memory.
A strangely negative character
Utility has a strangely negative character. We speak of the secret of happiness, for its causes are elusive; but there is no secret about the causes of unhappiness: thirst, hunger, want of sleep, exhaustion, pain, constraint of movement and too great heat and cold, are evils which can effectively prevent happiness. Utility has a negative character, because useful devices are adopted in the main for the sake ultimately of avoiding such evils.
From the fact that deadly injury, pain, and exhaustion prevent the fulfillment of the universal wish for happiness, we have always tended to infer that if only life were safe, comfortable, and effortless, we would be happy. It does not follow.
Sine qua non
What we see of a device is rarely the essential part, the sine qua non, but nearly always the superstructure which economy has imposed on it.
It seems that the work we call purely utilitarian is not more useful than its more ornamental counterpart. It is merely more economical.
The contribution that something in them yet compelled them to make
Makers and designers must gradually have come inwardly to believe that half their work had been mere frivolity because it had been avoidable, and because some of it had contributed nothing to the satisfaction of people's material wants. This must have affected them like a conviction of original sin.
The idea that utility was the purpose of work overpowered them and seemed unanswerable. From that time on perhaps the artist and workman have been weakened by an inward suspicion that they are supporting a lost cause. They have perhaps half-believed that the world could get on very well without the contribution that something in them yet compelled them to make.
No more than a sketch
The quality of a musical performance depends on the performers as much as on the score. The performers are said to be interpreting the score, but in fact they are adding intention of their own to those of the composer, recognizing that no score can in practice ever fully express the intentions of a composer, that it can never be more than an indication, a sketch; and no designer can in practice ever produce more than a sketch.
Purpureus
Our way of talking about surface quality as 'texture' is rather like the ancient Roman way of calling anything bright colored 'purpureus' on the principle perhaps that any bright color was much the same as any other.
The weather in the space
The architect's special preoccupation is first to decide what kinds of spaces shall be enclosed.
All manner of different considerations will influence an architect's decisions about the shape of the spaces they are to enclose, but the chief of them will always be the probable activities of the people who will enjoy the weather in the space.
Holding together a civilization
It is only in the present age that it has been asserted that 'architecture is not an art' or 'should not be an art': and that strenuous efforts are made to made a distinction between design and art. And nowadays we build cities of such a quality that no one likes living in them, everyone who can do so gets a motor car to escape from them. Because of the multitude of motor cars, escape is now denied us, the country is destroyed, and the cities become still less tolerable to live in.
All that is the consequence of contempt for art. Art is not a matter of giving people a little pleasure in their time off. It is in the long run a matter of holding together a civilization.
A cumulative effect
It is a cumulative effect, this character. It results from the combined impact of the design of a great many separate things, none of which is so very atrocious but too many of which are flatly negative, wanting. The design of each single thing in the environment, however small it may be, is really important.
Scenery
What is designed and made outlasts the people for whose profit and for whose use it was made.
We may think we are designing furniture of motor cars, but we are not. If we are designing a motor car for one man, we are designing scenery for fifty thousand others.
Something more is required
Efficiency, the capability of performing effectively, never made anything beautiful yet and it justifies no design in itself. To say of a design 'it works, it does its job', or 'it gets the intended result' no more commends or excuses it than to say of a man 'he has never actually defrauded anybody'. That is not what virtue means! Something more is required.
Beauty is like a joke
If some story makes you laugh aloud, then something in it causes the experience which issues in laughter. But can you describe that something to a person who does not think it funny in such a way as to make him see the joke and experience just what you have experienced?
A being-without
Not having a toothache is no goal for a lifetime. Happiness, however one defined it, is not something negative, a being-without.
Some emptiness in us
Whenever we encounter beauty we become aware, each time with a sense of shock and pleasure, faint though it may be, that some emptiness in us, not consciously felt but continually present, has been assuaged and fulfilled. We have a sudden high sense of completeness and harmony.
The matrix of all we know
Man's species has existed for an immensely longer period, unimaginably longer, in an unmodified natural environment. That unmodified environment was the matrix of all man knows of beauty. All the means of his experience of beauty evolved in it. Now, in the artificial environment, art creates an equivalent for that beauty, for it is a need of man's spirit.
The evolution of devices
All the first antecedents of man's devices were given him by Nature. Every one of his devices is traceable back to something in nature which suggested the first remote and primitive beginnings of its evolution. And every feature in art that man's mind conceived is conceived by a mind that has evolved as a part of nature: that grew out of nature.
The evolution of devices is as much a natural process as the evolution of organisms.
Deliberate acts
I do not know what one should call the landscape of a long cultivated countryside, or the enchanting pattern of lights which shows at night time in a modern city seen from overhead. Are these not works of art? It is scarcely justifiable to say that these things have taken shape by chance. Each part of them has been made as it is by what seemed a deliberate act, and it need not necessarily be assumed to be a matter of chance that the results of many acts of many men over a considerably period of time should harmonize together aesthetically.
The skill of perception
The newborn baby and the [blind man suddenly gifted with sight] do not have to learn to see. Sight is given to them. But they do have to learn to perceive. Perception is learnt and learnt slowly. Skill is required for perception as for speech. We are largely unaware of the skill we exercise. None of the things we have to learn to perceive are self-evident, or, apparently, instinctively evident. No doubt, however, we have an instinctive aptitude for this learning, and once we have learnt we cannot easily see as though we had not.
As Ruskin says, one has to strive, if one is to see with the 'Innocent Eye'.
Who did the teaching, then?
It has been contended sometimes that our response to works of art is entirely learnt and in no way innate; but the questions 'Who did the teaching, then? and how?' have not, I fancy, been much investigated. This contention is very true of our responses to styles and fashions, but it is not true of our response to beauty.
No kind
No kind of shape, no kind of design or kind of picture or other work of art can be beautiful. No kind of color is beautiful. Beauty comes always from the singularity of things. Two things which happen to be closely similar in size, color, insurance value, smell, weight, or shape, may both seem equally beautiful. It is not therefore to be deduced that, say, a smell of turpentine is a necessary prerequisite of beauty; and nor is the fact that the two things' shapes are measurably within a millimeter of each other. They might still be as different as chalk and cheese: they might differ hugely in surface quality so that one lived and the other was dead. One judges a man by what he is, by his individuality, his idiosyncrasy; not by his measurable properties or measurable behavior or by the shape of his nose or the description in his passport. So with a work of art.
Tradition
Change is of the essence of tradition. Our declining civilization has largely lost the conception of tradition as continuous change by small variations – as evolution, in other words – and can produce only fashions which, one after another, appear, live for a little while, and die without issue.
What a greenhouse was for
The new-found ability to make a wall all of glass had advantages, undoubtedly, in certain particular cases, but not in nearly so many as the Bauhaus stylists pretended. It is not forgotten by those who have to work in buildings with these glass walls that their propagators must have known quite well what a greenhouse was for and what it did. That knowledge counted for nothing beside the imperative necessity of showing how new the 'new architecture' was, by doing something obvious different from the fenestrated walls of the styles which had preceded it.
The act of creation
What I suggest has usually happened [during the act of creation] is this: the artist has glimpsed something: he has seen, perhaps fleetingly and indistinctly, some particular relation or quality of visible features which had previously been disregarded, and which impressed itself on him by its beauty. By means of making a work of art he then seeks as it were to fix isolate and concentrate what he has seen.
No one has ever succeeded in demonstrating in principle how this is done, but done it is; and when we see it done we find it hard to understand why it should have been so intensely difficult to do.
The imprint of a man
Art is the imprint of a man: a creature whose nature is idiosyncrasy sparring with conformity.
Déjà vu
The artists expression may make us aware for the first time of something we had too little regarded or had not been fully conscious of, presenting us with something which is quite new to us and yet at the same time disturbingly familiar – déjà vu.
The signature
It has long been understood that striving for originality as an end in itself is the mark of an inferior artist. The personal style of a good artist is never something that has been deliberately cultivated and forced but something that has appeared unsought as inevitably as the personal style of a man's handwriting.
But since artists of note are seen to have a distinct personal style, no artist can hope to make a reputation in a competitive society unless he too can show a distinctive style which easily differentiates his work from that of other artists and draws attention to it. Therefore artists of little capability or uncertain vocation will take great care to make their work look 'different', whereas those with any certainty in them will know that their work cannot help but look different from that of other people any more than signatures can.
It is worth reflecting that the fact of the unmistakable individuality of each man's signature is one foundation of modern commerce everywhere. To establish the individuality of it one need not write it vertically up the page in letters two inches high. And yet there are only twenty six letters, and everyone else uses them too.
It will not stand still to be pointed at
The cause of the experience of beauty is a series of events, not a state of affairs existing continuously. That perhaps is why the cause of the experience is something we find impossible to point out. It will not stand still to be pointed at. We can point out only what we perceive. We can never point out or describe what we see.