Buddhism, Martial Arts, 書道/書法 and Cultural Appropriation

I could have sworn I'd written about this already but recent stuff I've been reading on social media leads me to believe that Certain Things Need to Be Written Down.  I know I commented on this elsewhere because there was a spate of "cultural appropriation in yoga" stuff a while back.  What motivates me today is not yoga critics but  recent critiques of cultural appropriation such as this.  Now the originator of that Twitter bit often has content worth one's attention, and is often rather witty.  But Certain Things Need to Be Written Down.

And with that a few words about "yoga appropriation" ought to be said first. I thought yoga appropriation as cultural appropriation rather absurd, as yoga as New Agey Thing has been a thing for a lot longer than the last decade and a half or so when it really took off.  And I thought if people didn't get peeved at New Agey yoga appropriation, what's the deal with cultural appropration?

And the trajectory by which the yoga meme (the Dawkins meaning,  folks) went from Indian thing to New Agey Thing to commercial thing to appropriated thing to alleged intellectual property is interesting because in some ways it mirrors the martial arts memes (without the New Agey step more or less), and in my view, despite the capitalist appropriation of yoga and martial arts, really damns the view of cultural appropriation of these disciplines i.e., the outcome of colonization and oppression of people of color by dominant white culture. NB: my examples here do not mean there is no such thing as cultural appropriation. Of course there is.  Yeah, Elvis Presley, white idiots who dress up like Native Americans and so forth.  But my point is not all instances of white people - or any other people - taking up a discipline "outside" their culture is stealing, is cultural appropriation or is wrong. And these "not all instances" are not "corner cases" - isolated instances which prove the general rule. They are, in my view vital for the survival of humanity in fact, at least when it comes to Buddhism.  They can be vital to the survival of the disciplines, too!

In a nut, the processes by which white people were introduced to yoga and martial arts  wasn't cultural appropriation at all.  It was cultural dissemination.  Yes, that's what it was. The same is even more true (and more important) for Buddhism, as I'll show. And it's also true for 書道/書法. I will readily and quickly grant that there is capitalist appropriation of yoga and martial arts just as there is capitalist appropriation of mindfulness.   But it was cultural dissemination to be sure.

Somewhere in my house I have this book. This lady trained for many years with B.K.S. Iyengar.  She didn't take it from him; he willingly taught it to her.  So it was with the Catholic nun who wrote the first book on yoga I ever read 46 or so years ago (though there were bits in there about being careful when you meditate, because Satan or something, if I recall correctly.) Point is, they learned it from those willing to teach it, and those willing to teach it thought it important to teach it to white people.

So it is with martial arts.  My Sifu, at his age (75 or thereabouts) wants me (60) to learn Wing Chun well enough so that I can teach others, and also so his lineage doesn't die out! Now, thankfully for Sifu, there's students in the class much younger and better than I! On the other hand, there's Tae Kwon Do, which is in several ways cultural appropriation of kung fu albeit as a  white and Korean cultural appropriation, but that's a whole other tangent. Here I should make the obligatory point that it is said that at least some of Ip Man's students had some resistance to Bruce Lee's studying of Wing Chun because of his mixed race background.  But I think I just made my point again.  I will make the point again shortly!

The difference between appropriation and dissemination is an order of magnitude more salient when it comes to Buddhism, especially in the Zen school.  Now I have heard some advocates for people of color make some ridiculously ignorant complaints about Western Convert Buddhists, which is used often as a signifier for white Western Convert Buddhists.  (NB: Read Arunlikhati's Angry Asian Buddhist blog for legitimate critiques of white Western Convert Buddhists.  Arunlikhati is a saint in my book.)   These ignorant complaints about white Western Buddhists often, but not always, come from Asian Americans with a Christian background.   So let me dispel a few myths that I've seen straightaway:

• YES, we know it's "awakening" and "understanding" and seeing into one's nature and not "enlightenment."  And some of us, unlike some of you, can read Chinese and Japanese.
• YES, we know it's asinine to go to places like Thailand sporting Buddha tattoos.  At least most of us do.
• YES, we know there are mistranslations of some texts.
• Many Buddhist texts were written in an Indo-European language before they were written in Sino-Tibetan languages.
• No, we don't all revere the Dalai Lama.
• YES there are quite a few frauds and hucksters and degenerates (white and Asian) in the White Western Buddhist Convert area, and YES, we've worked hard to try to deal with that issue. And YES, similar stuff goes on in Asia.
• NO, we're not all vegan/vegetarian.
• We're not all liberals. Heck, I'm not a liberal.

Anybody who's read about Bodhidharma knows that Zen was transmitted by cultural dissemination; this is emphasized in  the Platform Sutra.  And anyone who's read the Lotus Sutra knows that Buddhism is supposed to be universal.

But more importantly, one practices Buddhism to try to grok suffering, disillusionment, dukkha. This is about freakin' living one's life to deal with the fundamental human condition, and to help others to do so! If someone's going to call me out for "cultural appropriation," so be it!  But I would hope that such a person develops enough skill to be able to be a better practitioner than me.

Ditto for martial arts, at least in so far as they are taught to develop authentic 功夫.  I would wish that everyone be disciplined and accomplished.  This strictly speaking can't even be culturally appropriated for the same reason that Kierkegaard railed against the notion of "Christian nations." 功夫 happens at the individual level.

I could write a book on this. Perhaps I should.  One point I should make before I close is the same is true for 書道/書法; the author of the Twitter stream I referenced earlier took umbrage at a font.  I imagine he may not be happy at my practice of 書道/書法, but that may be again, like Asian Americans with a Christian background complaining about white Western Buddhists, due to a lack of familiarity with what 書道/書法 even is.  I hope not, but suffice it to say, 書道/書法, like 功夫 happens at the individual level.  When you see a work of  書道/書法, you are in fact seeing someone's mind.  How could anyone culturally appropriate that?

There's historical context for this...

Here's the only version I've been able to find of Ha Kirishitan (破切支丹, "Crush Christianity"), written in 1642 by Suzuki Shōsan (鈴木正三), which was written during the time when the proselytizing of Christianity created problems for Japan.

I'd like to be able to read it someday. From what little I've read of excerpts of translations on-line, 鈴木 anticipated many of the arguments against Christian apologists made by later. Thankfully, 鈴木 put some furigana in the text, but as the text goes on, I think it becomes less and less helpful.

But I can't get past the first sentence. I can make out "でうす,” (Deus) which was how 鈴木 referred to the Christian god.

There's historical context as to why a Zen monk came to write such a polemic, but I don't feel like going into it at the moment...

行雲流水, Clouds, Water, movement, flow and culture...

行雲流水、in Japanese represented as  "こううんりゅうすい" has the characters for "going" or "moving", "clouds," "flow" and water, read from up to down with the right column first.  More or less literally meaning "clouds move, water flows" it's taken as idiomatic as "go with the flow" or "going with the tide" according to on-line translations, more or less, but that's I think a bit superficial.  Oh, and the Chinese version of the translation of 行雲流水 has "fill the gap" or something like that.

Also I think Wikipedia's entry here is a bit superficial and contradictory (as I'll show in in a bit):

Unsui (Japanese: 雲水), or kōun ryūsui (行雲流水) in full, is a term specific to Zen Buddhism which denotes a postulant awaiting acceptance into a monastery or anovice monk who has undertaken Zen training. Sometimes they will travel from monastery to monastery (angya) on a pilgrimage to find the appropriate Zen master to study with.^[1]
...
The term unsui, which literally translates as "cloud, water" comes from a Chinesepoem which reads, "To drift like clouds and flow like water."^[2] Helen J. Baroni writes, "The term can be applied more broadly for any practitioner of Zen, since followers of Zen attempt to move freely through life, without the constraints and limitations ofattachment, like free-floating clouds or flowing water."^[1] According to author James Ishmael Ford, "In Japan, one receives unsui ordination at the beginning of formal ordained practice, and this is often perceived as 'novice ordination.'"^[3]

Then again,  there's this Chinese tea ceremony thing that uses the same term.   Which is why I think there's a bit of contradiction there.  I realize I might be more than slightly out of my depth here as I try to find the original poem from which 行雲流水 comes. That is to say, although I think  I can find the original poem from which 行雲流水 comes,  my knowledge of Chinese is pitifully poor to the point where there's no reasonable way I could put 行雲流水 in proper Chinese context at this point.   Maybe in 10 years...

The version of 行雲流水 that comes down to us as in Wikipedia is like a replica of a replica of a replica of something that was in a Chinese poem once. 

But that's only part of why I think the conventional "explanations" of 行雲流水 are a bit superficial...

First of all, 行雲流水 is meant to be put into 書道 (or 書法 if you prefer the Chinese term). 行雲流水  begs to be expressed as 書道.   See, unlike, say, Magritte's famous  not-a-pipe picture,  or the Zen expression "a picture of a rice cake does not satisfy hunger," 行雲流水 as 書道 is almost perfectly non-dually expressing flow without flowing, if executed even minimally competently. Or to put it another way, if you want to do 行雲流水 minimally competently, you have to express 行雲流水  in 行雲流水 .

I would love to have help finding the poem which gave fame to 行雲流水, and understand it.  But in the mean time, realize this is a bigger deal than you'll get in Wikipedia. 

本来無一物

Attributed to Hui Neng, it means - paraphrased of course - "Originally there is not one thing."   無一物 is "not one thing," or "having nothing."

It's good not to have things you might get stuck to.

 

"Life"

A little brushwork...

I didn't realize there was something under that... oh well...

行捨, equanimity

行捨 and 業者　-  pronounced 　ぎょうしゃ - are homonyms, evidently. 

I'm looking for a word in Japanese, and I don't know if I can find the right word.  It ought to be there. Perhaps it's the word for harmony, or balance.  But I haven't found it yet.

What I do know is that the word I'm looking for is what I'm trying to convey when the proper viscosity of ink is reached, so that it is absorbed by the brush just right so that it can be put onto paper just right.

Thankfully, with the help of my wife, I've figured it out to a certain extent.  Paper, ink,  brush, and ink stone must all be in harmony with each other, which must all be in harmony with the mind of the 書道人. And when it is...!

It's amazing.  Doing 書道 is a form of practice that emerged from the mindset of this understanding of the  道.

I'll be posting some more soon.

Why 書道 is so difficult, and why I do it

It was over 8 years ago that I met Sogen Roshi, who at that point had had some medical issues. He was a pretty accomplished calligrapher in Japan; and he graciously made for me 2 works. To see him work, putting his "spirit" into the works, was simply amazing to me. Years earlier I had gone to Zen Mountain monastery on a beginner's retreat, and there was about an hour or so where calligraphy was practiced. I'd thought I had no capability in this area, but one of the folks there had encouraged me, saying in essence that one's "capability" in this area was a preconceived notion, especially if one hadn't done it before. So, after seeing Sogen Roshi do this, I was quite intrigued. This man could put ink - handmade, mindfully made ink - on paper with a brush and he could leave himself everywhere. 

After returning home I started every now and then to use the 書道 set I'd acquired a couple of years earlier. And it's difficult. Forget the issues of stroke order in 漢字　 - stroke order is vitally important to writing the characters, but it is hardly even the beginning of doing this well. There is also the issue of "seeing" the characters on the paper before they're written, getting each character in proportion to the next. Then there are the variables of the type of brush being used, the type of paper being used, the quantity of ink on the brush, and the viscosity of the ink, what part of the brush is being used, and how much force is used to apply the inky brush to the paper. All of these play a role in how the ink is transferred to the paper, and each encounter of human, brush, and paper is unique. So yeah, it's good mindfulness practice. But beyond that, like 詠春拳, it's something difficult, and it's good to learn something difficult outside of one's own experience.  Oddly enough, though, the selection of subject matter seems to be pretty easy compared to the execution of it all.

I hope in the coming year to do much more of it.  Thankfully every now and then something gets on paper that's better than I thought it would be.  I also keep meeting experience when I do this, and practice continues that way.  Hopefully that's true in my day to day interactions with others as well.

書道 - Finally...Correctly Rotated

Now, in case, uh, my writing's even sloppier than I thought, the meaning should be apparent.

It has to do with this: It's the bit in the Heart Sutra that discusses the relation between form and emptiness.

書道 12/31/2011

Well, evidently I've not figured out how to rotate the photos, now, have I?

On the other hand, why the heck not adopt Eastern things?

Via Reverend Fisher's blog I came across this piece in the Guardian announcing that you don't need the "right" kind of zafu to be a Buddhist.  That in turn lead to Fisher's interview with one Miles Neale on "McMindfulness."  The author of the Guardian piece writes:

Unlike many western Buddhists, I don't feel a strong connection with the East. I've never been to India or Tibet, don't get excited about Japanese tea ceremonies, and am usually filled with irritation and embarrassment when fellow westerners greet me by saying "Namaste" or in some other way acting as if they're from Bodhgaya rather than Brent Cross or Bangor. While deeply grateful to the lineages through which Buddhist practices are taking root in the west, my attraction to them is primarily their clear and direct transmission of insights and instructions that speak to me practically, ethically and spiritually. The fact that they came from Asia seems unimportant.

So reading Dzogchen Ponlop's new book Rebel Buddha gave me heart. Ponlop is a well-respected Tibetan teacher, steeped in the cultural heritage of his tradition, and yet his central premise is that western Buddhists risk making fools of themselves if their practice is based on attachment to foreign rituals that were adopted wholesale by spiritual seekers in the 60s. "If the Buddha's teaching is to remain relevant," says Ponlop, "we can't hold on to our hippie-era presentation of it... it is senseless to hang on to the forms of a traditional, Asian Buddhist culture and pretend we can fully inhabit that experience in a meaningful way."

Ponlop notes wryly that he has encountered students who think they can't meditate properly unless they're sitting on precisely the "right" kind of zafu – they moan if asked to go out into the fresh air and practise sitting on a park bench, as if that experience wasn't enlightened enough. If the cause of suffering is fixation, as the second noble truth declares, then that must apply to fixation on Buddhism as much as anything else. It seems the human psyche, with its habitual patterns of grasping, avoidance and delusion, is highly skilled at turning gold into manure...

Ponlop isn't saying that the traditions themselves should be jettisoned, or that westerners can just go ahead and create their own version of Buddhism according to what suits – the danger there is the creation of a hollow shell that reflects spiritual immaturity rather than real understanding (see the recent discussion here on Hinduism and yoga, and the trend towards what Miles Neale has smartly called McMindfulness. Instead Ponlop is pointing us to the use of the meditative method as a way to forge a fresh embodiment of genuine wisdom for our culture and age.

Neale says:

Meditation is undergoing a similar surge of interest, albeit twenty years younger then the yoga boom. Everyone seems to want to learn and practice mindfulness. There are mindfulness workshops everywhere, mindfulness techniques for this condition and mindfulness for that condition, every other book is on mindfulness, and every third therapist wants to study mindfulness and use it with their patients. And like I’ve already said, that’s great—the more mindfulness the better—I stand by it and want to encourage it.

But I also see a kind of compartmentalized, secularized, watered-down version of mindfulness being offered, which I call “McMindfulness” in a forthcoming article of mine. Meditation for the masses, drive-through style, stripped of its essential ingredients, prepackaged and neatly stocked on the shelves of the commercial self-help supermarkets. From my perspective, McMindfulness lacks the integrity of the tradition and lineage from which it originates. My fear is that in wanting to procure meditation from Buddhism and the postures (asana) from yoga, we may be throwing the baby out with the bath water.

You see the Buddha didn’t just teach mindfulness, and Patanjali didn’t just teach postures. These great, enlightened sages taught the power tools within a psychological context, sandwiched neatly like the cream of an Oreo between ethics and wisdom. You can just have the cream—it’s lovely—but its more delicious as a cookie. People teaching and studying mindfulness these days typically focus exclusively on awareness training—you know, calming down, focusing on the breath, relating to thoughts and emotions with impartiality. This is incredible, and, as the research indicates, it does help to reduce symptoms and offer relief. But what happens when the high of the yoga class ends and the calm of the meditation session is over? You have to go back to the ordinary suffering of your life. Its like leaving your house a mess when you leave for a vacation—sitting on the beach for seven days is great, you feel rejuvenated, but you have to come home to the mess.

Neale is right in that there's more to Buddhism than meditation - much more, and the folks from the East taught that.   He's spot on that "McMindfulness" lacks the integrity of the tradition and lineage from which mindfulness originates.   On the other hand, it's not bad to point out that the tradition evolved as it passed from India to China by way of contact with Taoism.  But I say his point's right in another way: the integrity of the tradition and lineage through which this stuff passed suffers most in the watering down of skill required to put the ethics and other aspects of Buddhism into practice off the cushion.

Then there's the issue of, for want of a better term, globalization, which might, in this case, be the flip side of Orientalism.  There are folks like me that stand between (or among?) West(s) and Easts(s): my wife is Chinese;  many of my colleagues are from Asia; I'm conversant in Japanese (except to the Yakuza).  I train with Eastern and Western folk, both professionally and in the Zendo.  It was through a Japanese master calligrapher that fired my interest in the subject. (This was admittedly, long after exposure to the art at Mount Tremper, where someone asked that I suspend my judgments about whether I could do such things.)

In the course of my very short, very unskilled  practice of 書道 I learned many things can make something go wrong: the orientation of the paper, the layout of the tools for doing the writing, the amount of ink on the brush; in short, there's many variables that have to come together just so in order to have any kind of skilled work result.   If I was to dismiss this whole practice as "too Eastern" for a Long Island kid of Eastern European descent, there's mountains of things I could never begin to learn.

Practice is where you find it.  Maybe some of those folks who buy into "McMindfulness" will find the real deal, just as some of those kids who saw Bruce Lee movies were inspired to train with real martial arts masters.  If my son gets an inkling of the value of disciplined practice from a Jackie Chan movie, I won't complain.  Attachment is a two way street.

I do find it slightly ironic though that Shambhala Sun Space, of all places, is discussing "McMindfulness." If "McMindfulness" will come from anywhere, it might come from "mainstream" "Western Buddhist" media, which to this guy standing in the middle, looks a tad Orientalist to me.

Then again, I was like that once myself.  Japan was the place from where my father went on his business trips.  It was special in the 1960s. So people grow and evolve and change.

FINALLY! I can learn 草書 (そうしょ)

 草書 (そうしょ) (sōsho) or "Grass Script" is the style of calligraphy one often sees in "art" calligraphy.  As Wikipedia explains, folks (like me) with knowledge of how to read and write "standard" kanji might not be able to read 草書. 

On a quick perusal of the book I've acquired  it's clear that the forms  of 草書 I already have some degree of familiarity with based on my knowledge of kana.


But it's going to take some time to learn this, to make a gross understatement.

More 書道

"Wholehearted, one moment" "一心　一瞬間”

Things I'd like to do more of in the New Year

I suck at New Year's resolutions.  I never make them, and have no intention of keeping them.  I wish I could find an appropriate Humphrey Bogart quote here...at any rate, I don't have one.  Furthermore,  I think New Year's resolutions are made to be broken. I think the idea that one snaps one's fingers and whoosh! - an entire new persona develops is absolute nonsense.  Nobody stops being who they are because the earth passes through a designated point in the universe.  Nobody ever got anywhere because of volition or lack of it, except insofar as what can be achieved  in the present, in this very moment now, whenever that is, which is of course fleetingly small.

With all of that said, though there are things that I'd like to do more of in the future. Among them:

• I'd like to be more gracious and humble in what I do, as I noted the profound effect I saw what this did to myself and those in the audience when we attended the Leonard Cohen concert.

• I'd also like to be able to share the uniqueness of the present moment better with those around me.  I don't think I explain this well enough to people.

• I'd like to show more appreciation to my family members; to truly create a better sense of harmony in our lives.  That's not always easy.

• I would like to do more extended periods of zazen.    It's very important.   I might have a chance to do this in the summer.  Hopefully I can arrange to attend a sesshin.  

•  I'd like to work more on translating Buddhist work from (at least) Japanese to English, and help my wife with the translation of Laiguo's Seven Gates of Zen, if she has the time.

• I'd like to do more 書道.   It's very important to do this.  It's important for me for several reasons, among them, it's good mindfulness practice, and it helps me to train portions of my brain that I hadn't trained before.  It's important to keep learning stuff as we get older.    It's also useful to develop crafts and practices not entirely in the domain of one's training.

•  I'd like to get to reading all the material I've saved and printed out for myself.   There's great research I could have my team be doing, real forefront stuff,  I could even get it funded I believe.  But I need the time and space  to do it, and making the time and space - a theme running through this post, actually - is what I need to do.

•  I'd like to learn how to really swim.  I'll probably take a few lessons on this. 

• Finally, I hope to accompany my family in a performance at the Chinese New Year festival.  I've got to practice for this!

FINALLY! I get to do 書道 (書法)

I had been meaning to do this for a few days, but naturally things got in the way. Which is worse? (Yeah, they're both pretty bad, but you know how to get to Carnegie Hall! Click to see the "detail.")

                                                                         "Mu"　　（無）

                                                                     "Ku" (空）

You should've seen the ones I threw out.  Seriously, this is a great practice. Just you and the ink and the ink stone and the brush and the paper.  Takes much more paper than I'd thought, though.

I am not worthy!

As I've mentioned before, I have the iPhone app "Zenbrush" on my iPhone.  It's a useful thing for me to learn Kanji/Hànzì (漢字)  and to be able to write them.  It's a fascinating brain exercise: To be able to recognize Kanji (sorry dear, I learned Japanese first, and am only beginning Chinese!) is one thing, and to be able to write Kanji is an entirely different thing!  The two areas of the brain that are involved in learning these things aren't identical.  Furthermore, to be able to write Kanji one has to be able to cultivate one's "spatial memory" to an extent that is much greater than one uses for writing Western alphabets.

Anyhow,  just take a look at some of the uploaded images on the Twitter site #Zenbrush. I am a total piker, a rank beginner by comparison.  Oh well, it's not the point. I'm learning.  It'll take a while to learn.  And as I recall Suzuki roshi once wrote that people like me might actually get good at 書道 because we aren't trained to write perfectly.

That's comforting.

"Kaji," "Smith" (as in blacksmith etc.)

Yeah, I know it's not symmetric and all that, but hey, I'm never going to learn if I don't practice!

"Shin," Heart/Mind

OK, here's a post that will be good filler til I can think of something better...

I don't generally rave about my iPhone on this blog, though I do appreciate it greatly. One tip for those who want to cultivate your knowledge of East Asian languages is that in order to memorize all the characters and write them correctly, writing  need to be practiced, practiced and practiced again.  The symbolic representation of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean is more highly dependent on the brush than Western alphabets is that these 漢字 (hànzì in Mandarin or kanji in Japanese), and so it's been difficult to do this anyplace, anywhere.

Well, now  there's an app for that.

"Ki," energy.

To be continued...