Monday, February 28, 2011

The Dharma Gate Of Beauty, Soetsu Yanagi, trans. Bernard Leach

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2005

As


The Dharma Gate of Beauty, by Soetsu Yanagi, trans. Bernard Leach

As a student of Soto Zen Buddhism,I don't completely agree   with Yanagi's parallel between Pure Land Buddhism and "The Unknown Craftsman."I believe he ignores the importance of the Connoisseurin recognizing the "Unknown's" work.   I will write more about my ideas
soon.               --Lee

Complete text:

YANAGI  SOETSU  THE  DHARMA  GATE  OF BEAUT Y

Following are excerpts from an essay by Yanagi Soetsu, translated by Bernard Leach, which was published in "The Eastern Buddhist" Vol. XII No. 2 (October 1979). The excerpts are reprinted with the kind permission of Mrs. Janet Leach and the Folkcraft Museum, Tokyo.
* * *
When I come to attain Buddhahood, unless all the beings throughout my land are of one form and  color, unless there is no beauty and ugliness among them, I will not attain highest enlightenment.

The Larger Sutra of Eternal Life

Human beings brim with falsity to the end of their days. They cannot remain without imperfection nor avoid contradiction. But this is not something original in them. Originally they have no faults. This means not that they are perfect, simply that they are embraced in their imperfectness into a faultless world. Their faults are then, just as they are, no faults. On his own, man cannot rid himself from fault and become faultless, but all is originally so constituted that however a thing is made, whatever and by whomever it may be, it can be embraced in beauty. The superior make things in superior ways, the inferior in inferior ways, and whatever they may draw, however they may carve, all is disposed so that they are included in true non-dual beauty.

This is confirmed in the Buddha's attainment of highest enlightenment. The Sutra of Eternal Life was written to relate the astounding influence his enlightenment worked. So, whether they are good or bad, believers or unbelievers, all of the works of all men are in receipt of his mercy. Illusion is left in only because this implicit promise of his does not get through to them, or else because 
they struggle against it. Ugliness, then, is an appearance which has been separated from its original and native state. In religion, this is called sin.
So it is up to us to get beyond the discrimination that sets beauty and ugliness apart. Let us return prior to that, to our original self, the original state of suchness, leave behind the artificial constructs of beauty and ugliness, and dwell in "everydayness." Making distinctions of beauty and ugliness is a mental disease. What we must do is regain the original well-being of "buji," where nothing "happens" to us even when we are at our busiest. To do this we must first discard our small ego-self, for if the slightest flicker of attachment lingers illusion will not leave. Then, we must not allow ourselves to be hindered by discrimination, for as long as we lean on our own judgments we shall never find our way free of the world of duality.

That is where purity and innocence come in. There is a more than small measure of truth in the fact that so many saints have extolled the quality of childlikeness. The Japanese priest Myozen is said to have always taught that an infant's Nembutsu is best. Such statements endeavor to expose to usthe shortcomings of discriminatory thinking. They do not mean that it is totally valueless, but unless it is broken through we can never go beyond duality. Hence the deep suggestiveness of the infant's innocent mindlessness. It is not a return to the cradle being recommended, rather an attainment of the realm of selfless and unimpeded freedom. Once there, nothing can go wrong; even though we err, the error remains just as it is, and is no longer error. We may  say this is the virtue inherent in no-mindedness. Once detached from its realm, however, even those things which are not wrong fall into error. The very fact that they assert they are not wrong is the proof that they are. How often it is that things which the world boasts of as beautiful prove to be ugly.

The problem, then, must not be allowed to turn upon beauty and ugliness. How effective could any standard for measuring beauty and ugliness be? Anything which could be so measured should never be spoken of as beautiful. True beauty is native to a realm which Buddhism calls "Mu" (nothingness). 
Nothing should be praised as beauty which has not reached the profundity of this realm of nothingness. (Beauty and ugliness are mere forms of beingness.) Fortunately, the essence of man does not reside in forms of being, and that is why his original estate is said to be innocent and pure. Impurity is the vestiges of the sins he has produced.

The Zen master Rinzai says, "Just don't strive!" For as long as the slightest ambition to make or to do remains, everything, both the beautiful and ugly, will be tainted by the ugliness of artificiality. Yet if "non-striving" or "artlessness" is then attached to, that will be just another form of striving. We find good substantiation of this in raku ware bowls, in which the effort to make beauty inevitably results in ugliness. As long as any such conscious effort or intention remains, the result cannot help being ugly.

Were men all in their native purity where distinctions of beauty and ugliness have yet to appear, they could never fall into error, the error, for example, of creating differences between men. The commonsense view would say that the world of beauty is one which requires genius. The notion that genius alone can produce great art strikes most people as reasonable. But it is only a partial truth. The amount of talent people have, the distinctions of intelligence between them, are trifling and foundationless considerations fathered by a relative world. They only arise because everything which forms a part of that world works to breed distinctions between the superior and the inferior.

Prizing the good and loathing the bad being the norm of that world, while we remain within its confines we have to comply with its laws. Respect for genius and reverence for sanctity  would  seem  to  be  most commendable.  But  we  must  not  overlook that they
belong to the world of dualism. Once in the different dimension of the non-dualistic world, differences such as intelligence and stupidity, goodness and badness, hold very little meaning. Zen teaches the profundity of "not thinking good and not thinking bad." It tells us we should "Be careful not to do good"—for then there can be no rationale for doing evil. These voices come from a realm beyond duality.
So even with the differences between good and evil, a world exists in which those differences as such disappear, where contradictions as mere contradictions melt away. Nembutsu followers call this the Pure Land, but it might also be called God's Heaven. It is the land of equality, of freedom, of peace of mind, and harmony. There, where opposing principles do not exist, the contention of opposites never materializes and one could not separate beauty and ugliness even if one wanted to. 
All things and all people are in a state of salvation. Whatever anyone might make, it cannot disturb the working of the Buddha's all-embracing compassion. The genius is taken in and so is the ordinary man. There are no ranks or distinctions at Heaven's round table. Those are the product of our discrimination. The Buddha's eye and our eye are not the same.

The belief that the artistic genius is the only one who can accomplish work of outstanding merit betrays an extremely narrow  way of thinking. The ordinary man should be able to produce splendid work as an ordinary man. Did not the Pure Land teacher Honen (1133-1212) say: "If you cannot recite the Nembutsu as a priest, then recite it as a layman.. .The bad man should recite it just as he is"? The Pure Land is not a place ever to be attained through one's own power, a power in any case ordinary men could never boast of. But Self-power is not the only gate to salvation. Another, belonging to the Other-power, has been erected for him. Through it, everyone, however dull-witted, can make their way to safe haven on the "Other shore." Not by working the oars, but by letting the wind swell the sails. Honen's brief "One-Sheet Document," which tells ordinary men in unmistakable terms how to attain the Pure Land, has in this sense an indeed wonderful message.

Those who enter by the Gate of Self-power may gain experience in the path of absolute self-dependence, though through it few are able to actually make their way to full attainment. The road is a steep one fraught with great difficulty. In contrast, those who travel the path of Other-power, placing all their trust in Amida and the promise of his Vow, reside in a realm of absolute dependence. A Way of salvation is given them despite their inferiorness. The reference to the Other-power teaching as the "Easy Way" (Ig yo- do) comes from this.

* * *
Some people may still demur, and say that while universal salvation may indeed have been promised, what about all those mediocre people going around making this world progressively uglier. Why are 
they left unsaved like that? Was not the Buddha's Vow a glorious pipedream after all? How long must we be plagued by such people? And how long will we have to go on deploring this state of affairs?

The answer is simple and clear. It is because the minds of those mediocre people persist in asserting their own insignificant egos. Because, in imagining they can achieve something through their own power (a fundamental illusion), they becloud their originally pure nature. Ugliness is the color produced by this defilement. But the Buddha's Vow to save all beings never weakens because of this; in fact, it becomes all the more  available  to   them.  It   is  for   them,  the   sinful  and   the   mediocre,  that the compassionate Vow continually rains down its benefits. It is one thing to be aware of one's sins, but one should not for a moment doubt that they are redeemed by the Buddha's great compassion. In the Yuishinsho ("On Faith Alone"), it is said: "You think it is impossible for you to be saved because of your guilt and sin, but do you realize how great the Buddha's power is?" Buddha's Vow is not swayed by the number of our sins. Despite the blessing such a favorable wind can provide, man foolishly insists on lowering his sail and rowing forward on his own—only to tire out in mid-journey. Ugliness comes into being when we place reliance on our own meagre self. So the Buddha tells us to abandon it.

In past ages of deep faith, people were more innocent and humble and closer to the truth. They could forget their self without much trouble. That was an advantage it would be difficult to overestimate. We in an age of deep scepticism see talented and untalented alike striving to understand things by themselves. That explains the separation of beauty and ugliness. It is not surprising those with little talent  soon find themselves overwhelmed. Ugliness is a sign of their 
self-power's insufficiency. Why is it they do not realize and realize keenly their ignorance? Or is it their ignorance is so deep they cannot realize it? If they throw themselves into the contest between beauty and ugliness their work is cut out for them. They are digging holes and burying themselves in the process.

From here on, countless numbers of ugly objects will no doubt continue to be produced— just so long as the small self, greed, and discrimination prevail. But we may still cherish some hope. We may believe in the Buddha's attainment of highest enlightenment. We may place full faith in his all-encompassing Vow of salvation, which is a guarantee that everyone and everything is taken into a land originally prior to the beauty-ugliness duality. What hope would there be without this Vow? Salvation is not a mere possibility. Possibility assumes impossibility, and those are words in man's vocabulary, not the Buddha's. His compassion, to borrow Ippen's words, is "neither too little nor too much." It is only due to our own ignorance that we do not realize its wonderful meaning and thus lose out on its blessings.

Therefore, it falls upon those who have reached true faith to guide those who have not to the path to Buddhahood, even if that has to happen while they are still in the state of unbelief. They are to be guided so that even while they themselves are unaware of it, they dwell in the Buddha's Land naturally. They would be incapable of returning there even were they told to do so, yet they are guided back, their inability unchanged, in an environment in which they will at some time find for themselves that they have been dwelling in their native land all along. This makes us realize what an extremely welcome thing tradition is for people of lesser abilities. It comes to the aid of those who cannot stand on their own, like a great safe ship that enables a small and insignificant 
being to make his way across vast ocean expanses. Tradition provides support for him in his frail individual existence. Indeed we should remember that many beautiful things in the world did not in themselves possess the strength to become that way. Their salvation is not owing to any specific qualifications on the part of the individuals who made them. Something greater than them is doing 
the work. Herein is hidden the disposition of the Buddha.

So although people  say man creates beauty, that is not so. Buddha himself does the work. No, to make things beautiful is the Buddha's nature. Beauty means a Buddha becoming a Buddha. Creating beauty is an act performed by a Buddha toward a Buddha. Beauty is the product of Buddhas working together.
2 & 3
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Pages 16 & 17
Pages 18 & 19
Pages 20 & 21

The "Unknown Craftsman."

Mesopotamian Potter's Wheel
I think the central problem with Yanagi's approach to Mingei begins with the artificial construct that he created: "The Unknown Craftsman." While I disagree with Kikuchi's labeling Mingei as "Ultra-nationalist", I do believe the Unknown Craftsman perspective is related to Yanagi and Leach's membership in colonial/imperial societies, and the artificial notion of looking at the peasant potters from the perspective of bon sauvage or noble savage. I really don't believe that the personhood of a peasant potter is different in kind, but only degree. I've always thought, if you want to know who the Unknown Craftman is, just talk to one of my relatives who is a farmer or an uncle who worked on the assembly line at Ford Motor Company. They are people like you and me. When Yanagi came up with the idea from Buddhism of tariki, or "other power" as found in Pureland Buddhism, he was looking for the counterpart (that already existed for over 800 years) of the Zen Buddhist influences upon the educated practicing the fine arts via Tea Ceremony. Yanagi was compensating for the uneducated craftman, but somehow, the "other power" of the uneducated craftsman was put on a pedestal above the educated person's "self power", ignoring the importance of the connoisseur to the tariki craftsman.  As a Tibetan teacher once told me, these different kinds of Buddhist teaching are "expedient means" and are giving to people according to their eduction, intelligence and abilities.  Each way has elements of the other in it.  And jiriki ways are more effective, but devotional ways are accessible to more people. This has not been adequately explained to people, especially in the West.
 I realized this about jiriki/tariki in reference to craft immediately, the first time I read about it because of my over thirty years as a practicing Soto Zen Buddhist. 
Making beautiful craft is not something more difficult from the perspective of Jiriki. Actually, where Tariki is concerned, the maker is dependent upon someone else, a connoisseur, to help them in the evaluative process. That is why Yanagi's eye is so important to the collection at the Mingeikan. He picked the best out of tens of thousands of craft objects, that would otherwise meet the criteria that others have shared the link to at the Mingeikan's posting of Yanagi's criteria.   In the modern individual studio craftman, because of the benefits of wealth and education brought to us by the modern middle class, both the maker and the connoisseur can exist in one person.

Sunday, February 27, 2011

Serizawa, Mingei and Studio The Artists' Dilemma.


Functional yet exceptional in design and more than ordinary:  herein lies the tension epitomized by Serizwaw’s productions, which were promoted and marketed through department store exhibitions starting in the 1930s.  In keeping with Mingei disavowed signatures and ciphers, Serizawa's works bore no emblazoned brand name. His distinctive designs, however, became a signature of their own.
Serizawa's subsequent acceptance of the Living National Treasure designation reinforced the elevated status of his works, Ultimately, he became a commercially successful artist producing recognizable and eminently marketable products, but they were not ordinary, nor were they ''made by the many for the many.
How then did Serizawa -whose later works were anything but anonymous, inexpensive, and collectively produced - navigate the ideological terrain that separates mingei objects from recognizable works produced by artists who attain government recognition and sponsorship? The debate regarding the role of the anonymous artisan versus the individual artist began in the 1930s and went increasingly public when the government instituted a system for designating Living National Treasures. The 1950 Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties was enacted in part to prevent the disappearance of skills in arts deemed to have historical or artistic value. It was later revised to include all arts bearing significant historical or artistic value, endangered or not. While the selection criteria remained opaque, the laws were amended in 1955 to emphasize three basic tenets: ''artistic value, importance in craft history, and local tradition" Serizawa's was an exceptional designation. Beyond celebrating his works because they produced a painterly composition that ''cannot be found in designs painted by hand," government authorities coined a new term, kataezome (stencil-picture dyeing), for his technique.
This neologism effectively acknowledges Serizawa's innovative, even transcendent, dyeing practices.
As a founding member of the Nihon Kogei Kai, Serizawa presumably was cognizant of shifting attitudes toward ''tradition.'' In 1955 the first board director, Nishikawa Tekiho, expressed his hopes for the organization as follows: ''This association is not about being hidebound by the word 'tradition' nor simply worshipping the culture of the past. Our foremost goal is to promote works that make the best of both Japanese traditions and elements learned from foreign countries," It would be naive to assume that the term traditional can be equated with qualifiers such as unchanging or bound by national borders. In either of these cases, materials, techniques, motifs, and formats would ossify and quickly lose their freshness and appeal. The paradox of mingei is that it promotes the suppression of the artist's individuality for the sake of preserving time-honored techniques and collective practices.. yet some of its major proponents, like Serizawa, nevertheless produced highly individualistic, nontraditional works. Similarly, the Living National Treasure system promotes and preserves the traditional arts of Japan, yet even as the system acknowledges how artists bow to Japanese precedents, rarely does it recognize the myriad cultural borrowings and adaptations - Korean, Okinawan, European, and American - that reflect the wider world in which the artists conceive, produce, and sell their works.
One might ask: How many generations must pass before a foreign novelty becomes part of a nation's ''tradition''? Serizawa as remembered in the cultural imagination represents an important transitional figure moving from the anonymity of the mingei artisan to the celebrated position of Living National Treasure as embodied in an individual craftsperson. While his works reveal polarities between tradition and innovation, everyday and extraordinary, inexpensive and costly, regional and international, anonymity and identity, their attraction may lie in their ability to extract essential elements from the visual arts and technical processes of various cultural practices and transform them, appearing fresh yet steeped in time-honored conventions. His commercial success made it impossible for him to remain an ''unknown craftsman'' and thereby adhere to the strict mingei ideal, yet he ensured the longevity of certain motifs, techniques, and formats by cultivating a demand for his deliberate selections of eclectic motifs and tech- niques. Later in life, he established a research institute to train apprentices in his paper-dyeing technique.
His works link one generation of Japanese artisans to the next at the same time that they bridge cultural borders. Serizawa navigated the turbulent wafers between tradition and innovation, steering a new course for successive generations of Japan's artist-designers.

From Cataog:  Serizawa, Master Of Japanese  Textile Design.
Photo above SERIZAWA KEISUKE (1895-1984) Japanese Syllables, 1960s. Framed, stencil-dyed raw silk, 25 3/4 x 13 3/4 in. John C. Weber Collection.


Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Making Chawan In The 21st Century

Jean asked me to save this note I wrote to a facebook friend.  They asked about the rationale of making tea bowls in modern times. 
Korean Ido Tea Bowl Name Kizaemon.
I see no reason to disregard superior techniques or methods simply because they come from another place, culture or time. 

Or, if it is a more general discussion about our post-modern preoccupation with the present, I believe that we are fortunate with Clay. Unlike painting, which is circumscribe within the arena of studio arts, there are many entries into our medium. I come to clay from three general areas that do not have the "studio arts" baggage or need to measure itself against the atelier: anthropology, Zen Buddhism and ecology (informed by author/poets like Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry, and also Henry David Thoreau.) From the anthropological perspective, whether a work is done in th 15th century or the 21st really has no meaning. You judge the quality of the work and its merits solely by the work itself.
Green tea is a part of my culture. We do leaf tea all day (I start the day with a bowl of coffee. My current coffee bowl is a very 21st century MacKenzie shino bowl.) In the afternoon, around 3:00pm, we have powdered whisked tea. 

One of the big advantages ceramics has in Japan is the tea culture which informs not only art, but crafts, dance, theater and also, the martial arts. It is the single thing that makes ceramic culture there light years ahead of ours. (I say ceramic culture specifically, not ceramics.) In Japan, ceramicist do not have to think of themselves as the poor stepchild of the studio arts. With all the health benefits of green tea being discovered, there is no reason why tea culture cannot help ceramics here. But certainly, not everybody, not even the majority, of pottery makers have to be concerned with tea aesthetics. But IF you make tea bowls, it helps you make things that are not a "facade". Most American tea bowls (unlike Rob's that are made with tea in mind) have nothing to do with tea. They are just small bowls. That is where the "facade" dwells.