Introduction

The arts of Zen are not intended for utilitarian purposes, or for purely aesthetic enjoyment, but are meant to train the mind, indeed, to bring it into contact with ultimate reality.

D. T. SUZUKI

Creativity is our birthright. It is an integral part of being human, as basic as walking, talking, and thinking. Throughout our evolution as a species, it has sparked innovations in science, beauty in the arts, and revelation in religion. Every human life contains its seeds and is constantly manifesting it, whether we’re building a sand castle, preparing Sunday dinner, painting a canvas, walking through the woods, or programming a computer.

The creative process, like a spiritual journey, is intuitive, nonlinear, and experiential. It points us toward our essential nature, which is a reflection of the boundless creativity of the universe.

Zen Buddhism and, particularly, the Zen arts are a rich source of teachings to help us understand and cultivate our creativity. Zen has become part of our popular culture, but the arts of Zen have yet to make a significant impact on the West. There are only a handful of books in English that deal with the Zen arts and most are no longer in print. The Zen arts contain a treasure house of techniques and insight into the creative process. And they point to a way of living that is simple, spontaneous, and vital. They profoundly impacted an entire culture in Asia but remain essentially untapped in the West.

This book is an introduction to the Zen arts, and an invitation to explore them as a way to help you live a more creative life. It is not a book about art history, art appreciation, or art theory. It will not teach you how to become a better artist, or how to sell your art. Hopefully, it will give you an appreciation of the Zen aesthetic and the power of creativity to affect both your art and the day-to-day encounters of your life.

Buddhism traces its history to its original teacher, Shakyamuni Buddha, who lived 2,500 years ago in India. The Buddha, upon his own enlightenment, saw that each and every being, as well as the great earth itself, is perfect and complete, lacking nothing. He pointed out that our idea of a separate, limited self is a painful delusion. The self is empty of any intrinsic characteristics. All the Buddhist teachings are skillful means to help people discover these truths for themselves.

When Buddhism first arrived in China from India during the first century, C.E., it encountered Confucianism and Taoism, China’s indigenous religions. From the second to sixth centuries, the elaborate, richly textured metaphysics of Indian Buddhist thought came face-to-face with the earthy pragmatism of Chinese culture. Indian Buddhism—replete with long lists of meditative states, elaborate practices, and a whole host of deities, demons, and other celestial creatures—was imbued with Taoism’s accent on simplicity and its deep appreciation of nature and the arts. These traits tempered Indian Buddhism’s philosophical tendencies. The result was the very direct and practical kind of Buddhism—Zen.

In the sixth century C.E., Bodhidharma, considered to be the first ancestor of the Zen lineage, put forth the four points that define Zen:

Zen is a special transmission outside the scriptures,
With no reliance on words and letters.
A direct pointing to the human mind,
And the realization of enlightenment.

Zen is about the experience of Buddha’s enlightenment, not the words and ideas that describe it. To understand or believe in enlightenment doesn’t impart any lasting strength. But to realize it— to make it real for yourself—can transform your life. The teachings of Zen always point directly to the inherent perfection of each one of us. The Zen arts are a form of that direct pointing.

During its early history, Zen was influenced by the refined practices of Chinese poetry, painting, and calligraphy. The Tao of Painting, a book written around 500 C.E., is a classic canon on the art of painting as a spiritual path. In the action of no-action (wu-wei), a cardinal aspect of the true creative process is set forth. In wu-wei, the mind is silenced and the work is allowed to express itself.

Taoist teachers often communicated their spiritual understanding with painting and verse, and the Zen monks who followed Bodhidharma took up this tradition. The Taoist approach to art was singular; it was centered on an intimate connection between a teacher and a student. The Tao of Painting talks about artists apprenticing with masters to learn how to discover and express the energy, or chi (Japanese ki), of a mountain, bamboo, or a plum blossom. Zen borrowed from these teachings to develop particular styles of painting, calligraphy, and poetry. The early Chinese Zen masters wrote their religious insights in the verse style of Laozi and Zhuangzi and other early Taoist sages.

By the Sung dynasty in China (960–1279 C.E.), the Zen arts of painting and poetry reached their highest stage of development, with the emergence of a novel phenomenon: painter-priests and poet-priests who produced art that broke with all forms of religious and secular art. This art was not representational or iconographic. It did not inspire faith or facilitate liturgy or contemplation. It did not function to deepen the devotees’ experience of religion. It was not used in worship ceremonies or as a part of prayer. Its only purpose was to point to the nature of reality. It suggested a new way of seeing, and a new way of being that cut to the core of what it meant to be human and fully alive. Zen art, as sacred art, touched artists and audiences deeply, expressed the ineffable, and helped to transform the way we see ourselves in the world.

Zen masters began to use art as a way of teaching the buddhadharma (the Buddhist teaching) to both monks and laity. The monasteries became magnets for secular artists who were interested in clarifying the relationship between the deepest spiritual yearnings and creativity.

When Chinese Zen first traveled to Japan in the thirteenth century, the arts followed and became quickly integrated into the culture. The ground for this integration of the Zen arts was partially prepared during the Heian period (794–1185 C.E.) when the courtesans of Japan created an artistic legacy that later became the foundation for the Zen aesthetic.

These brilliant women artists originated spontaneous verse, a poetic form that eventually developed into haiku, the pithy three-line poem that has become so identified with Zen. The poetry of the courtesans had many of the traits already present in the Taoistinflected Zen art of China’s Golden Age—a deep appreciation of nature and a keen awareness of the evanescence of life. But the courtesans further refined the Taoist influences and gave their artistic expression a distinctly Japanese flavor.

In the Japanese art of this period we see the emergence of wabi, sabi, aware, and yugen—qualities that have become synonymous with the Zen aesthetic. Wabi is a sense of loneliness or solitude. Sabi is the suchness of ordinary objects, the basic, unmistakable uniqueness of a thing in and of itself. Aware is a feeling of nostalgia, a longing for the past. Yugen is mystery, the hidden, ineffable dimensions of reality.

Between 1200 and 1350, as the Japanese capital and the center of cultural activities moved from Nara to Kamakura, the Zen aesthetic blossomed into what we now recognize as the traditional Zen arts. As had happened in China, Japanese artist-priests began to build a reputation for their innovative style and the way they used their paintings and poetry to express their religious understanding. Although they were not trained artists, many of the abbots and monks that made up the orders of the great monasteries were renowned calligraphers, poets, painters, and musicians.Art practice was intimately woven into the fabric of Zen training. Zen arts, creativity, and realized spirituality were seen as inseparable, and a Zen aesthetic developed which expressed eternal truths about the nature of reality and our place in the universe.

As a teaching vehicle for the Zen masters in Japan, these arts— tea ceremony, bamboo flute, landscape gardening, Noh drama, ceramic arts, and archery—became known as the “artless arts of Zen.” They transcended technique and were primarily used as tools for communicating spiritual insight. Paintings and calligraphy functioned as visual discourses. Poetry was used to create “live words” to communicate the essential wordlessness of Zen.

The most interesting aspect of these arts of Zen, as D. T. Suzuki has said, is that they don’t exist for the sole purpose of creating a work of art, but they are rather a method for opening the creative process. They comprise means of training the mind and of living our lives.

In chado, the way of tea; shodo, the way of the brush; kado, the way of the flower, and kyudo, the way of the bow, the suffix “do” means “way.” These arts were called ways because they were disciplines or paths of polishing the artist’s understanding of him or herself and the nature of reality.

Since the teachings of the artless arts are passed down from generation to generation directly, mind to mind, the role of the teacher is pivotal. Before these teachings can even begin, a bond between the teacher and student must form. A teacher must have the student’s permission to teach and the student must be ready to receive.

In the West, we learn mostly through explanations and specific instructions. In Zen and its arts, space is created for the process of discovery to take place. They are primarily taught through “body teaching.” The teacher becomes a tangible manifestation of the teachings. The students bring awareness to the moment and try to embody the example offered.

A calligraphy teacher bows to her students, lays out a sheet of paper, and slowly prepares sumi-e ink by rubbing an ink stone in a small dish containing water, until the ink has acquired the proper consistency. This process is a meditation for everyone involved. There is settling and stillness. The teacher moistens the brush in the ink and stands poised over the blank paper. In a single gesture, in a single breath, the brush touches the paper and the calligraphy is executed. The teacher cleans the brush, while maintaining her meditative absorption and attentiveness to detail. She bows to the students. The students then begin their work. The teacher moves among them, observing their progress, adjusting their arm or the angle of the brush. The entire process takes place, essentially, without verbal instructions.

Because this approach is not possible in a book, I introduce tools that act as an alternative to a teacher. When taken up with consistency, they can provide insight and guidance into the creative process.

Although The Zen of Creativity is broken into four sections, its connections and teachings are not linear. The sections overlap and amplify each other. Part One is the story of my own journey to Zen. It was impossible for me to enter Zen through the front door of a monastery. Yet I was able to enter the religious life through the back door of the arts, and gradually to trust my life to lead me where it would. As I was traveling, the path seemed incredibly circuitous, but I see now that it was the straightest course I could follow.

Part Two is based on the workshops that I’ve taught since the 1970s on Zen and the creative process. It presents practices to guide you to a new way of seeing and creating. This section is not about understanding these practices but about doing them, over and over again.

First comes instruction in zazen, Zen meditation, which is the bedrock of Zen and its arts. Zen is experiential, and it is extremely difficult to do Zen art or appreciate what Zen is all about without practicing zazen. After zazen, you will learn about creative perception, a direct, whole-body-and-mind, unconditioned way of seeing. You will then engage in a Zen approach to the creative process, which emerges from this fresh way of seeing, and you will learn how to work with creative feedback, a response to art that is experiential and intuitive, not critical. Part Two closes with an introduction to koans, the seemingly paradoxical questions that have been part of traditional Zen study. Koans are a potent tool to help you break through barriers that may be holding you back in your art and life.

Part Three of the book shows how the unique aesthetic of Zen functions in the traditional Zen arts, and how this aesthetic points to basic truths about how to live freely and generously. This section deepens the appreciation of the qualities that are embodied in both Zen and its arts—simplicity, mystery, spontaneity, and suchness. There are more practices in this section that extend and reinforce the teachings of Part Two.

Part Four comes full circle to the beginning. The journey—both creative and spiritual—is never over. With each step, with each breath, we start anew. This is the ineffable heart of Zen. It can be pointed at but not grasped. It can be practiced but not held. It is about the resolution of apparent paradoxes and contradictions. It is about the way the creative act expresses our inherent perfection and enlarges the universe by making visible the invisible.

The emphasis of this book is on the creative process—not on technical skill. The creative process is unique to each individual. It is unique to you. In reading this book and engaging the various practices provided, you will discover your own way of expressing yourself.

This process of discovery is the endless spring of creativity, always bright, fresh and new, brimming with life. Where it comes from is not too important. What matters is that it’s already present in each one of us, waiting to be uncovered. Ultimately, engaging the artless arts means to see into one’s own heart and mind, and to bring to life that which is realized.