The Cultural Effects of Zen

Posted 2/2/20 | Updated 7/4/20

Rocks

Zen has entered into many aspects of the life of the Far East — painting, architecture, gardening, chivalry, tea ceremony, etiquette, poetry, and ethics.

Zen affects every sphere of daily life from the statecraft of the ruler to the menial work of the laborer. As a Zen poet says:

How wondrous, how miraculous, this —
I draw water and I carry fuel!

Its moral effects are profound but not obvious, for the oriental idea of goodness is not so self-conscious and self-assertive as the occidental. As Lao-tzu said, the wise man hides his virtue and appears on the surface like a fool, for "true grace [Te] does not appear as grace, and thus is grace; false grace is so aware of itself as grace that it is not grace." Zen produces thousands of Bodhisattvas who do not advertise themselves.

The most obvious effects of Zen are in the realm of aesthetics, for Chinese art of the T'ang, Sung, and Yuan periods, the Japanese painting of Sesshu and the Sumiye school, the gardening art of Kobori Enshiu, the haiku poetry of Basho and others — all these have had direct inspiration from Zen, or from a Zen-flavored Taoism. Three major characteristics of Far Eastern art exemplify aspects of the Zen life:

1. Absence of symmetry.

The phenomena of nature are rarely symmetrical in form; at most there is only an approximation to absolute symmetry, and Zen perceives in this fact the lively and dynamic quality of nature. For symmetry is a state of such perfect balance that movement is no longer possible; a form so balanced is dead, and thus the symmetrical form is analogous to that mental and emotional fixation which in Zen is ever broken down. It is for this reason that Chinese and Japanese paintings are so seldom architectural and wooden. There is no feeling at all of stuffing and the glass case in their drawings of birds, and the very rocks and mountains seem to flow. As a Western poet has said:

The hills are shadows, and they flow From form to form, and nothing stands.

2. The use of emptiness.

As Zen perceives the forms of life within Sunyata, the all-inclusive mystery of the Void, Chinese painting makes the greatest use of the empty background, of large expanses of mist, to suggest depth. For the empty spaces of Chinese painting are no mere emptiness; they are creative and suggestive, exciting the imagination and giving a startling clarity and vividness to the objects drawn against and within them. Zen taste deplores the cluttering of a picture or of a room with many objects. It likes to take an empty space, and, within it, concentrate attention on one point — like the koan thrown into the still pool of the mind, like the one point of the living moment within the emptiness of past and future.

3. The instantaneous quality.

This might be called, too, the momentary quality, for Chinese and Japanese art love to portray moments of life, as if the painter had just glimpsed his subject for a second. A duck is painted just in the act of alighting, or a spray of bamboos caught in a sudden gust of wind. The very media of the art — brush, ink, and silk or absorbent paper — require a swift, evenly flowing technique. As in life itself, a stroke once made can never be retouched. Zen, as Suzuki points out,

permits no ossification as it were of each moment. It takes hold of each moment as it is born from Sunyata, that is, Emptiness, according to Buddhist philosophy. Momentariness is therefore characteristic of this philosophy. Each moment is absolute, alive, and significant. The frog leaps, the cricket sings … a breeze passes through the pine branches … Buddhism is quick to catch each movement of nature and expresses its impressions in a seventeen syllable poem or in a few strokes of the brush.

Zen

Zen by Alan Watts

Alan W. Watts was a British-born American philosopher, writer, speaker, and counterculture hero, best known as an interpreter of Asian philosophies for a Western audience. more

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