THE BEAUTY OF IT ALL : A TENTATIVE EXPLORATION OF
TARIKI’S AESTHETIC ACTION
By Gregg Heathcote
It is with great
trepidation that I here venture into this subject area, for it is truly a vast
domain and I fear the necessarily brief excursion will fail to do justice to
the scenery, or will go miserably astray in the self-conscious attempt. Still,
I feel the grandeur of Jodo Shin in aesthetic perspective makes it worth taking
the risk, for this field of inquiry is potentially so fruitful, yet to my
knowledge no Shin scholar has hitherto attempted to cultivate understanding
therein.
A possible reason
for this neglect is that aesthetics, as a realm of speculative philosophy, is
alien to traditional Japanese thought. Although the love of natural beauty and
of refined artistry has long been a pre-eminent characteristic of Japanese
culture (1), the disciplined study of aesthetics as a branch of Western-style
philosophy was only introduced into scholarly Japanese circles in the late 19th century. Soetsu Yanagi, the revered founder of the great modern Craft Movement
in Japan, has been alone ( i.e. once again to the best of my knowledge ) in
speaking eloquently of the primal role Other-Power plays in the
unselfconscious creative process whereby beautiful artifacts etc. are produced
which are "objects born, not made". He has uttered the seminal
statement that "Faith and beauty are but different aspects of the Absolute
Reality." (2) In light of this, with truly good work freedom takes form,
and in so doing cogently exhibits the reality that tariki is engaged in
constant aesthetic action. I only wish that some profound expositor of the
Amida’s Buddha-Dharma would pick up where Yanagi left off.
However, to avoid
misrepresentation of the Dharma I must at the outset be careful to stress the
fact that the aesthetic action under discussion is finally the Amida’s. The
Absolute Reality of which Yanagi indicates faith and beauty to be but different
aspects is tariki as Enlightened Mind at superbly natural play in and through
the world. Many of the difficulties which arise with such a picture of immanent
splendour are of myopic manufacture, blinkered by the unsympathetically dim and
narrow view many people have of ‘aesthetics’. This is quite understandable when
‘aesthetics’ is erroneously associated exclusively with art, and art is
associated stereotypically with egotistical self-indulgence, decadent or effete
elitism, and sophistical pretence. No privileged clique may lay claim to
exclusive access to the Pure Land on the basis of being identifiable as
skilled/self-powered aesthetes or artists. Such jiriki artifice would certainly
contradict the Word of the Primal Vow as well as its spirit, expressive through
jinen honi. No, it is rather the inclusive aesthetic action of tariki that
renders all sentient beings identifiable as aesthetes and artists in Name only,
and for whom the Pure Land is in spontaneous consequence everywhere accessible.
Like Buddha and bombu, art and life itself are in their mutual essence
identical.
Two stories of the
Buddha Shakyamuni’s teaching are instructive regarding the role of beauty in
Buddhist life:-
" It is told
that once Ananda, the beloved disciple of Buddha, saluted his
master and said:
‘Half the holy life, O master, is friendship with the
beautiful,
association with the beautiful, communion with the beautiful.’
‘Say not so,
Ananda, say not so!’ the master replied.
‘It is not half of the holy life. It is the whole of the holy life.’ "
+
" ‘ Some
people,’ said Buddha, the master, ‘have accused me of uttering
these words:
When one attains
the release called the Beautiful, and abides therein, at
such a time he
considers the whole universe as ugly.
But I never said
these words. This is what I do say:
When one attains
the release called the Beautiful, at such a time he knows
in truth what
Beauty is.’ " (3)
For those
Buddhists who interpret ‘what Beauty is’ in a trenchantly dualistic way, these
teachings are troublesome. Self-power practitioners may be inclined to see
beauty as selfish sense gratification and samsaric enticement to desire which
distracts the mind and binds one in ignorance. Other-Power practitioners may
decline to see the imperfection and endemic ugliness of bombu life as anything
more than stark contrast to the ‘Beauty’ of Buddhahood, rendering the latter a
dismally distant prospect and one not calling for our most immediate gratitude.
Being so aesthetically insensible both groups miss the point - what I like to
call ( i.e. on Amida San’s vocational behalf ) the whole-pointedness of being.
Beauty’s transparency asserts that the transcendent reality of the Land of
Enlightenment is breaking through here and now, everywhere and everywhen.
Reflective aesthetics on the Amida Buddha’s behalf simply prepares chronically
closed eyelids for such a perfectly surgical cutting edge in its ‘good taste’
globally biting.
And when vision is
restored what cannot be seen in the one thought-moment of shinjin’s clarity?
Space is limitless embrace when timelessness is most timely.
Beauty-come-calling causes the hard-hearted sense of self-in-time to soften and
fall aside, letting drop if only momentarily all its attached drives. The
distinguished mythologist Joseph Campbell, drawing on both Joycean and Buddhist
philosophy, addressed this essential experience in the following terms:
" ‘The
esthetic emotion ... is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised
above desire and
loathing.’ Compare the state of the Buddha at the time of
his awakening on
the ‘Immovable (i.e. Static) Spot’, moved neither by desire
nor by fear.
I call this
parallel important...
( At such a
moment, Suchness ) or ‘Thing-in-Itselfness’ of an object is
perceived by an
unselfconscious subject. " (4)
Yanagi says
likewise that "any work of art, is not an expression of the maker alone,
but of a degree of enlightenment wherein infinity, however briefly, obliterates
the minor self." (5) Beauty, by the very nature of its action, is
Other-Powered.
Philosophers,
artists, sages etc. thinking about aesthetics over the centuries have struggled
to define, in so many different ways, this natural verity which is
simultaneously so evident and yet so mysteriously elusive. My own working
definition is that beauty is the intrinsic quality of conscious relationship;
the singular
‘Well, this is all
very well,’ some might say, ‘but even with shinjin, living amidst samsara is
not all sweetness and light! Our powers of perception are thoroughly
besmirched. In all honesty, how can Beauty find us here?’ To such misgivings I
would respond with reminders on two fronts. Firstly, the Amida’s aesthetic is
active, not passive. Oyasan makes good on his vows to endow beings with the ‘divine
eye of seeing’ and the ‘divine ear of hearing’ (6), and finds for us awe even
amidst the ordinarily awful. To paraphrase the poet William Blake’s famous
maxim (7) ,
Secondly, the
action of this aesthetic of Amida’s is ultimately non-dualistic ( hence the
"singular sensibility" etc. in my working definition ). Like the Vow
Power it expressly serves, Beauty indiscriminately embraces and includes its
seeming opposite.
Yanagi puts it in
this apposite way:-
"... from the
Buddhists’ point of view, the ‘beauty’ that simply stands opposed
to ugliness is not
true beauty... In the Muryoju-kyo (‘Sutra of Eternal Life’),
the following
statement is attributed to the Buddha: (8)
‘ If in the land
of the Buddha there remains the distinction between
the beautiful and
the ugly, I do not desire to be a Buddha of such
Beyond dualism,
every object - by whomever or in whatever manner it is
Needless to say (
but I am still going to say it! ), beyond dualism every subject also -
It really
shouldn’t surprise us to find Beauty working at the poignant heart of human
existence. Pathos is, after all, Beauty’s steadfast and loving companion. (10)
Well might we ask
how, in the end, consideration of all this aesthetic activity of tariki might
in practical ways actually advance the teaching of the Dharma. This leads into
another extensive area of tariki’s aesthetic action which invites exploration.
However such exploration will have to be undertaken in a future article which
will carry on the discussion where this one leaves off. Regrettably
restrictions of time and space preclude us from going farther here. I can
nevertheless foreshadow that in the discussion to come we will address the way
we Shin Buddhists approach the central issue of faith in Jodo Shinshu. The
experiencing of shinjin will hopefully then be cogently shown to relate to the
aesthetic experience of hearing the Dharma as "Pure Music" (13); to
the experience of play; and to the experience of what the psychologist Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi calls ‘flow’.
We seem to be
breaking fresh ground by venturing into Jodo Shin aesthetics. I trust you will
now agree with me that the terrain is beautiful in its own right. I further
trust we can establish the fertility of this fresh ground by cultivating the
deepened understanding which it suggests. That is the reflective task before us
- one bearing the promise of wonder at, and joyous gratitude for, tariki’s
gracious aesthetic action.
Namo Amida
Butsu.
NOTES
1. Charles Moore
goes so far as to write: " Tagore has called aesthetics Japan’s unique
Dharma ... So important is the aesthetic in Japanese culture that it has been
accepted by many students of Japan as the outstanding positive characteristic
of Japanese culture as a whole ... the essentially unique expression of
spirituality in Japan ... Their love of beauty; their extreme and seemingly
universal love of Nature; their attempt to express beauty in all aspects of
life ... - these are all well known and accepted as characteristic. "
Charles A. Moore (Ed.), ‘The Japanese Mind: Essentials of Japanese Philosophy
and Culture’, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu. 1987 (1st published 1967).
pp. 296-297.
2. Soetsu Yanagi
(Adapted by Bernard Leach), ‘The Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight into
Beauty’, Kodansha International, Tokyo. 1989 (1st published 1972). p. 215.
3. From the Samyuta
and the Digha Nikaya. Quoted in the Introduction to ‘The Dhammapada: The Path
of Perfection’, translated by Juan Mascaro, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth. 1983
(1st published 1973). pp. 20-21.
4. Joseph Campbell,
‘The Masks of God: Creative Mythology’, Penguin Arkana, New York. 1991 (First
published 1968). p.351.
5. Soetsu Yanagi,
op. cit.. p. 90.
6. Dharmakara’s 6th
and 7th vows respectively. ‘The Larger Sutra on Amitayus’ (Muryoju-kyo).
7. " If the
doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is,
infinite. " William Blake, ‘A Memorable Fancy’ from ‘The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell’. c. 1793.
8. Of course this
is another of Dharmakara’s vows, fulfilled upon his becoming the Amida Buddha.
9. Soetsu Yanagi,
op. cit.. p. 130.
10. For an
excellent article on the intimacy, and intimations, of beauty and sadness read
‘Burnished Gold: Beauty, Love, and Sadness in the Play of Light and Dark’, by
Christopher Bamford, in ‘Parabola Magazine’, Vol. XXII, No. 2, Summer 1997. In
fact this whole issue of Parabola is of pertinent interest as it addresses ‘The
Shadow’.
11. Stephen
Nachmanovitch, ‘Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art’, G.P. Putnam’s Sons,
New York. 1990. In this inspiring book Nachmanovitch has written a masterpiece
on spirituality, spontaneity, and their love-child the creative process. Its
aesthetic relevance is global.
12. The ingenuously
earthy ideal of the life of nembutsu is in natural sympathy with the aesthetic
principles of wabi, sabi, and shibui which have dominated Japanese taste since
the medieval Kamakura period, i.e. when Shinran himself was teaching.
13. The description
of the Amida and his Other-Power as "Pure Music" appears in Shinran
Shonin’s ‘Jodo Wasan # 39’. It is in keeping with the numerous references in
the sutras to the spontaneously sounding music which fills the Pure Land, and
through which everything to the Dharma naturally resonates.