Holland, In Two Senses of the Term

This evening, I went over to the DeFoor Center to check out the opening of their new show, Double Dutch, paintings by Dutch-American painters Sandra de Nijs and Karin van der Palm. I was especially intrigued by Ms. de Nijs' abstract expressionist acrylics, and had an enjoyable conversation with the lovely Ms. de Nijs about her methods, influences, references and so on.

Being in an arty mood, I also read a review in the on-line New York Times about a show opening at the Japan Society in New York. In the review, titled "Portraits in Zen, From Celestial to Comic," critic Holland Cotter states, "After I saw a show of early Buddhist sculpture there in 1983, I went home, packed a bag and flew to Tokyo. I needed to go to where that art came from, and I spent a month visiting temples and monasteries across the country."

Over the years, Mr. Cotter has written many excellent reviews of the arts in the Times, but I'm not sure what he learned in his month in Japan. His review of the Japan Society's exhibit contained several inaccuracies which I would like to correct, not to scold Mr. Cotter, but to counteract the impression some of his comments may cause.

For example, he notes that the Japan Society show, "begins with (the) celestial: the Buddha himself in his earthly guise as an Indian prince-turned-ascetic named Shakyamuni." This might give the incorrect impression that the Buddha was a divine being come to Earth as a man. This is not true to the teachings of Zen, or most Buddhism of which I know. Shakyamuni Buddha was first and always a normal human being, not a divine entity, who realized enlightenment and passed his teachings down for future generations. But his identity as Shakyamuni was no "earthly guise," and he was never anything other than a man.

"Three hanging scrolls, one Chinese and the other two Japanese, depict him coming down a mountain after six years of practicing extreme austerities in an effort to figure out how to live a spiritual life," Mr. Cotter continues. "He is stooped and frail. The Chinese picture’s faint, hazy, apparitional brushwork is a stylistic echo of his emaciation. But despite being wasted, he is smiling. He has the knowledge he was after, though it’s not what he was expecting, and it can be expressed in a single phrase: Lighten up!"

Mr. Cotter, I'm afraid, is projecting his own ideas into that smile. That's fine, but it misses the mark of what the Buddha later taught his disciples about his experience. On abandoning his ascetic practices, Shakyamuni realized that neither extreme - indulging in sensual pleasure or tormenting the body - led to his goal, the cessation of suffering. There must be a middle way, he decided, something between indulgence and asceticism, and he sat down under a ficus tree and began the meditation that would lead to his enlightenment. But the smile on his face was not because he had yet found what he was looking for, the cessation of suffering, but because he had found the Middle Way, the path leading to his goal.

But Mr. Cotter, seemingly informed by Hinduism, observes, "To torment your body, he discovered, is really to value it every bit as much as you do when you coddle it. So leave it alone; do it no harm. Do no harm to anything. Time, the recycler, takes care of that job, constantly, dispassionately, inevitably. Which means you’re free: free to be nothing, or nothing in particular, which really is freedom when you consider the grief you caused yourself trying to be something special." There may be some wisdom in those words, but it is not Zen wisdom.

Similarly, Mr. Cotter comes close, but again misses the mark when he talks about "the Indian monk called Bodhidharma, who, in the sixth century A.D. in China, initiated Chan Buddhism, sometimes defined as a body of ideas and practice that emphasized individual meditation over communal ritual and customized master-to-pupil teaching over memorized scripture; eventually it developed methods for achieving the sort of instant enlightenment popularized in the West as satori."

Close, and I like the description of Chan as "a body of ideas and practice that emphasized individual meditation over communal ritual and customized master-to-pupil teaching over memorized scripture." However, Bodhidharma and his heirs taught that one does not "achieve" satori, "instantly" or otherwise. We all possess the wondrous, perfect Buddha nature, they taught, only we obscure it with our own minds. Calm the mind, and the true nature will appear, just like the blue sky appears when the wind calms the storm clouds. Nothing is achieved, because you had it all along.

"By all accounts, Bodhidharma was a forcible, not to say willful, personality," Mr. Cotter notes. "When the Chinese emperor refused to meet with him, the great teacher didn’t plead or remonstrate. He left the court, crossed the Yangtze River by balancing on a floating reed and plunked himself down facing a bare cliff wall to meditate on what to do next. He didn’t budge for nine years." This is again projection. Bodhidharma was not meditating on what to do next, plotting his next move for nine years. That may be what it looked like to Mr. Cotter, from a cause-and-effect analysis based on his encounter with Emperor Wu (who, by the way, did not refuse to meet with him. Instead, they had a famous exchange, culminating in Bodhidharma's reply of "I don't know" to the question of "Who are you?").

No, Bodhidharma was not plotting what to do next, nor was he staring at the wall, striving to achieve enlightenment, or any other action what might ascribe. He was, instead, practicing what the Japanese call "shikantaza," or "just sitting" - not thinking, not not thinking, just pure sitting with no goal, no aspiration, no purpose - the purest practice of being in the present moment and directly realizing one's true nature (but not doing it for that reason either). In other words, that's the moment Zen as we know it was created.

Mr. Cotter continues the Bodhidharma story by writing, "During that time, various would-be pupils tried to get his attention. Finally one named Huike Shenguang managed to do so by slicing off his own arm. We see the two men together in a marvelous 13th-century Chinese painting from the Cleveland Museum of Art: Bodhidharma, cloak-shrouded and looking like Big Bird, stares at his wall; Huike huddles patiently nearby. Maybe they’re communicating telepathically."

Or maybe they're not. Bodhidharma taught his student the practice of shikantaza, just sitting, and the painting depicts the two of them, not engaged in any communication, but in the simple practice of just sitting.

I felt compelled to address these small details of an otherwise excellent review of what sounds like an excellent show. I wish I lived in New York to see it. But I'm content with seeing the works of the two artists from Holland as opposed to the works reviewed by a critic named Holland.