Performing Mind, Writing Meditation: Dōgen’s Fukanzazengi as Zen Calligraphy

Notes

1. I would like to thank Steve Heine and Jane Copeland Habegger for early conversations on these topics. Likewise, I am thankful to the two anonymous reviewers for their many helpful comments and suggestions for revision.

2. Stephen Addiss, The Art of Zen (New York: Henry N. Abrams, 1989), 206, footnote 1.

3. The following four paragraphs represent a synthesis and summary of a vast body of scholarly writing that initially developed out of the practice of bibliography and has gone on to inspire important theorizations in the fields of literature and visual arts. While citing all the key texts here would take too much space, some of the major works are as follows: FW Bateson, “Modern Bibliography and the Literary Artifact,” English Studies Today, 2nd ser., ed. GA Bonnard (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1961), 67–77. [Repr. “The New Bibliography and the ‘New Criticism” in Bateson, Essays in Critical Dissent (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1971), 1–15.] René Wellek and Austin Warren, “The Mode of Existence of a Literary Work of Art,” Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1956), 129–45. Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). Robert Darnton, “What Is the History of Books?” Book History Reader, ed. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (New York: Routledge, 2002), 9–26. Peter Schillingsburg, “Text as Matter, Concept, and Action,” Studies in Bibliography 44 (1991), 31–82. Gerald Bruns, “The Originality of Texts in a Manuscript Culture,” Comparative Literature 32 (1980), 113–129. DF McKenzie, “The Book as an Expressive Form,” Book History Reader, 27–38. For some important articulations of these general theses and important adaptations and reworkings of them in Asian and Buddhist contexts, see Sheldon Pollock, “Literary History, Indian History, World History,” Social Scientist 23 (October–Dececember 1995), 112–42; and Fabio Rambelli, “Materiality and Performativity of Sacred Texts,” Buddhist Materiality: A Cultural History of Objects in Japanese Buddhism (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007), 88–128.

4. D.F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 37.

5. Peter Shillingsburg, “Text as Matter, Concept, and Action,” Studies in Bibliography 44 (1991), 31–82.

6. Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, 37.

7. The manuscript is known as the Tenpuku-bon as it was written in the first year of the Tenpuku era (1233–34).

8. Heine, “Table of Dōgen’s Literary Productivity,” Did Dōgen Go to China?, 2–3.

9. William M. Bodiford, “Remembering Dōgen: Eiheiji and Dōgen Hagiography,” The Journal of Japanese Studies 32, no. 1 (2006), 1–21.

10. Stephen Addiss provides an excellent overview of the complex cycles of obligation and calligraphic production in his The Art of Zen. See also Stephen Addiss, “Three Sōtō Zen Responses to the Twentieth Century,” The Art of Twentieth-Century Zen: Paintings and Calligraphy by Japanese Masters, ed. Audrey Yoshiko Seo (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1998), 108–136.

11. See Bodiford, “Remembering Dōgen.”

12. For an account of this canonization, see Yokoi, “Fukanzazengi goshinpitsubon ni tsuite.” Occasionally, other examples of calligraphy attributed to Dōgen will surface, but none of these has maintained the same level of appraisal and authentication. See, for instance, Yoshida Shōkin, “Shinkokuhō Dōgen hitsu Sansuikyō ni tsuite” [新国宝道元筆山水経について] (On the new National Treasure: Mountain and Rivers Sutra in Dōgen’s hand), Nihon Bijutsu Kōgei 129 (July 1949), 21–23. For a reproduction of some texts thought to be authentic, see Ōkubo Dōshū, Dōgen zenji shinpitsu shūsei, supplemental volume to Dōgen Zenji Zenshū (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1970). Some of the texts in this volume have been contested by Furuta Shōkin, Shōbō genzō no kenkyū (Tokyo: Sōbunsha, 1972), 17–43. On the evolution of Japanese law regarding national cultural properties, see Noriko Aso, Public Properties: Museums in Imperial Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).

13. In recent years there has been a great deal of fruitful dialogue among cognitive scientists, phenomenologists, and Buddhist studies scholars that delves into the ways in which “bodily movement and the motor system influence cognitive performance – how the body shapes the mind.” Shaun Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 9. For a succinct overview of this complex discussion, see the summary of the recent NEH Summer Institute “Investigating Consciousness: Buddhist and Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives,” electronic resource, accessed January 23, 2015, http://coseruc.people.cofc.edu/investigatingconsciousness/.

14. Steven Heine, Did Dōgen Go to China? What He Wrote and When He Wrote It (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 22.

15. Carl Bielefeldt, Dōgen’s Manuals of Zen Meditation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 33. According to most traditional, sectarian accounts, Dōgen composed the brief treatise in 1227, immediately upon his return from the Southern Song, as a succinct set of instructions for practicing seated meditation (zazen), a technique he mastered under his teacher Rujing. He supposedly made a clean copy of the essay six years later, in 1233. Contemporary scholarship, however, suggests that there was no 1227 version and that the extant 1233 manuscript is, in fact, Dōgen’s earliest written description of seated meditation. In this reckoning, he composed the text while he was already in residence and directing students in meditation at Kōshōji.

16. As cited in Yokoi Kakudō, “Fukanzazengi goshinpitsubon ni tsuite” [普勧坐全儀御真筆本について] (Concerning the Fukanzazengi in Dōgen’s writing), Shūgaku Kenkyū 11 (March 1969), 78–90. The multivalent word seki generally indicates some sort of material trace. In the case of Zen calligraphy, the material trace is taken to be that of the calligrapher’s enlightened mind. For more on the treatment of calligraphy as a relic in Japanese Buddhism, see Willa Jane Tanabe, Paintings of the Lotus Sutra (New York: Weatherhill, 1988). For the relationship between text and relic in early South Asian Buddhism, see Gregory Schopen, Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks: Collected Papers on the Archaeology, Epigraphy, and Texts of Monastic Buddhism in India (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997). The profession of art appraisal first came into being in Japan in the early decades of the seventeenth century. It was quickly dominated by the Kohitsu family, who were particularly renowned for their evaluations of calligraphy. Indeed, the clan’s professional name literally means “ancient brush” (kohitsu). Kohitsu Ryōhan was a leading voice of the family’s tenth generation, and his endorsement of the manuscript signals not only its authenticity, but also its aesthetic value as an example of the calligraphic arts. That he was involved in the movement of the manuscript from some private collection to the Eiheiji treasure house is in keeping with the general practices of the connoisseurship, authentication, appraisal, and art dealership of ancient calligraphy as it was practiced in Japan during the 1800s. For more on the Kohitsu family, see Komatsu Shigemi, Kohitsu (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1972). For information on Kohitsu Ryōhan in particular, see Satō Atsushi, “Bakumatsuki no shoga kantei ni okeru ken’i no arika: ‘Kohitsu Ryōhan/ Anzai Un’en kantei ikken shimatsu’ o chūshin ni” [幕末期の書画鑑定における権威のありか：古筆了伴・安西雲煙鑑定一件始末を中心に] (Concerning authority and the appraisal of artwork in the late Edo period: Focusing on the unfolding of the dispute between Kohitsu Ryōhan and Anzai Un’en), Kindai gasetsu 18 (2009), 114–16. Very little is available on the family in English, though some information can be gleaned from Satoko Tamamushi, “Tawaraya Sōtatsu and the ‘Yamato-e Revival,’” Critical Perspectives on Classicism in Japanese Painting, 1600–1700, ed. Elizabeth Lillehoj (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004), 53–78.

17. For a modern typeset version of the 1233 kanbun treatise, which employs some modern simplifications for archaic characters, see Suzuki Kakuzen, Sakurai Hideo, Sakai Tokugen, and Ishii Shūdō, eds. Dōgen zenshi zenshū 5 (Tokyo: Shunjusha, 1989), 10–12.

18. For more on Song dynasty book history and sutra production practices, see Tsuen-Hsuin Tsien, Written on Bamboo and Silk: The Beginnings of Chinese Books and Inscriptions (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004).

19. Unless otherwise noted, all translations of Fukanzazengi are taken from Bielefeldt, Dōgen’s Manuals of Zen Meditation, 175–87. Bielefeldt’s study includes a very useful appendix in which he provides side-by-side translations of five manuals of Zen meditation: the twelfth-century Chinese monk Zhanglu Zongze’s Chanyuan qinggui (the oldest book of regulations ordering Chan/Zen monastic life, a section of which is devoted to describing meditation), Dōgen’s 1233 Tenpuku manuscript version of the Fukanzazengi (the text I am examining here, which draws heavily, in its descriptions of posture, on the Chanyuan qinggui), Dōgen’s later revision of the Fukanzazengi (generally referred to as either the Rufubon, “popular version,” or the Karokubon, after the era in which it was composed, 1242–46), and two other texts in which Dōgen describes the practice of seated meditation.

20. Bielefeldt, Dōgen’s Manuals of Zen Meditation, 175.

21. Bielefeldt, Dōgen’s Manuals of Zen Meditation, 175.

22. For a detailed account of the complex interactions between semantic content, material format, author, and reader, see Peter L. Shillingsburg, “Text as Matter, Concept, and Action.” Studies in Bibliography 44 (1991), 31–82.

23. In the later, popular expansion of this section of the treatise, Dōgen added a sentence instructing the practitioner to “take a breath and exhale fully, rock your body right and left, and settle into steady, immovable sitting.” The added sentence draws further attention to Dōgen’s multivalent sense of the term “pivot.” The spine and sit bones provide the physical pole around which seated meditation coheres, while the practitioner’s possession of a human body, in a more idealized sense, represents a “pivotal” opportunity to engage in Buddhist practice—the most pivotal element of which is, in Dōgen’s view, the seated meditation he is describing. For an English translation of the revised treatise, see Bielefeldt, Dōgen’s Manuals of Zen Meditation, 175–87. For an alternate translation, see “Universally Recommended Instructions for Zazen,” Sōtōshū nikka gongyō seiten (Sōtō School scriptures for daily services and practice), electronic resource, accessed January 16, 2015, http://web.stanford.edu/group/scbs/sztp3/translations/gongyo_seiten/translations/part_3/fukan_zazengi.html/.

24. Bielefeldt, Dōgen’s Manuals of Zen Meditation, 178–81. I have included an alternate translation for two short phrases in brackets.

25. Bielefeldt, Dōgen’s Manuals of Zen Meditation, 182. I have added the word “simply” (set off in brackets) to Bielefeldt’s translation to account for two characters (自然, “naturally, smoothly, as a matter of course”) that he seems to have omitted.

26. This descriptive note comes from an interview with Fukushima Keidō, abbot of the Zen temple Tōfukuji. Wirth, ed. Zen no Sho, 85, no. 6.

27. The technical term “flying white” (hakuhi) refers to a particular technique in which—because of the brush’s speed, the pressure on the brush, or the depletion of ink—the bristles of the brush separate, creating streaks of negative (white) space. It is commonly taken as evidence of rapid, spontaneous, and dynamic brushwork.

28. The relevant passage of the Vimalakirti Sutra may be found in T 14.475.539b15–21. Taishō shinshū daizōkyō, ed. Takakusu Junjirō, Watanabe Kaigyoku, and Ono Gemmyō, 100 vols., (Tokyo: Taishō Issaikyō Kankōkai, 1924–34).

29. On the art historical concept of the “period eye,” see Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 29–40.

30. Eric C. Mullis, “The Ethics of Confucian Artistry,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, no. 1 (winter 2007), 99–107. See also John Hay, “The Human Body as a Microcosmic Source of Macrocosmic Values in Calligraphy,” ed. Susan Bush and Christian Murck, Theories of the Arts in China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).

31. For a thorough account, see Markus Rüttermann, “‘So That We Can Study Letter-Writing:’ The Concept of Epistolary Etiquette in Premodern Japan,” Japan Review 18 (2006), 57–128.

32. A brief, partial list of such manuals might include Kingyoku Sekidenshō (金玉積伝抄, attributed to Prince Kaneakira, 914–87), Kirinshō (麒麟抄, attributed to Fujiwara Yukinari, 972–1027), Yakaku Teikinshō (夜鶴庭訓抄, attributed to Fujiwara Koreyuki, d. 1175), and Jubokushō (入木抄, composed by Prince Son’en, 1352). For a more complete survey, see Gary DeCoker, “Secret Teachings in Medieval Calligraphy: Jubokushō and Saiyōshō,” Monumenta Nipponica 43, no. 2 (summer 1988), 197–228, and 43, no. 3 (autumn 1988), 259–78.

33. The passage is from the Jubokushō by Prince Son’en (1298–1356). Cited in Gary DeCoker, “Secret Teachings in Medieval Calligraphy: Jubokushō and Saiyōshō,” Monumenta Nipponica 43, no. 2 (summer 1988), 213. The term juboku (入木, lit. “entering the wood” or “penetrating the tree”) was sometimes used metaphorically to mean “calligraphy.” The term, which originated in the eighth-century calligraphy collection Shuduan (書断), refers to the fourth-century calligrapher Wang Xizhi 王義之, whose strokes were said to be so powerful that the ink from his brush penetrated the wood on which he was writing.

34. Yuriko Saito, “The Moral Dimensions of Japanese Aesthetics,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, no. 1 (winter 2007), 89.

35. For a fuller account, see Gary DeCoker, “Secret Teachings in Medieval Calligraphy: Jubokushō and Saiyōshō,” Monumenta Nipponica 43, no. 2 (summer 1988), 197–228, and 43, no. 3 (autumn 1988), 259–78.

36. To give one further example, the Heike Nōkyō is a heavily decorated, hand-copied sutra set that the powerful warrior and politician Taira no Kiyomori (1118–1181) dedicated to the Itsukushima Shrine in the ninth month of 1164. In many instances, the composers artfully intertwine their calligraphy with underlying motifs and ornaments on the paper, thus creating extended rebuses, subtle double meanings, partial vernacular translations, and literary allusions. Dōgen’s calligraphy in Universally Recommended Instructions for Zazen does not go to this extent, but I offer this example to indicate the general visual-verbal culture in which he was operating. For a fuller visual analysis of the Heike Nōkyō, see pages 223–27 of Charlotte Eubanks, “Illustrating the Mind: ‘Faulty Memory’ Setsuwa and the Decorative Sutras of Early Medieval Japan,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 36, no. 2 (fall 2009), 209–30.

37. Bernard Faure, “The Buddhist Icon and the Modern Gaze,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 3 (spring 1998), 768–813. Robert H. Sharf, “On the Allure of Buddhist Relics,” Representations 66 (spring 1999), 75–99. Brian D. Ruppert, Jewel in the Ashes: Buddha Relics and Power in Early Medieval Japan (Boston: Harvard East Asia Monographs, 2000).

38. Anne M. Blackburn, Buddhist Learning and Textual Practice in Eighteenth Century Lankan Monastic Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). Christoph Emmrich, “Emending Perfection: Prescript, Postscript, and Practice in Newar Buddhist Manuscript Culture,” Buddhist Manuscript Cultures: Knowledge, Ritual, and Art, ed. Stephen C. Berkwitz, Juliane Schober, and Claudia Brown (New York: Routledge, 2009), 140–56. Natalie Gummer, “Buddhist Books and Texts: The Ritual Uses of Books,” Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed. (2005), 1261–65. The quote is from 1262.

39. For a discussion of these examples, see Charlotte Eubanks, Miracles of Book and Body: Buddhist Textual Culture in Medieval Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). See also “Reading by Heart: Translated Buddhism and the Pictorial Heart Sutras of Early Modern Japan,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 220 (2013), 7–25; and “Unearthing Practice: Sutra Interment and Fantasies of Resuscitation in Medieval and Contemporary Japan” (forthcoming).

40. Willa Jane Tanabe, Paintings of the Lotus Sutra. Paul Copp, The Body Incantatory: Spells and the Ritual Imagination in Medieval Chinese Buddhism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

41. Eugenia Bogdanova-Kummer, “The Buddhist Dimension of Japanese Post-War Avant-Garde Calligraphy as a Factor of its Internationalization” (Tokyo: Asian Studies Conference Japan, June 2014, unpublished paper). See also Eugenia Bogdanova-Kummer, “Negotiating Art Borders: Between Avant-Garde Calligraphy and Abstract Painting; The Role of the Bokujinkai and Other Agents,” in Modernism beyond the West: A History of Art from Emerging Markets, ed. Munro Majella (Cambridge: Enzo Arts Publishing, 2012), 41–63. Also: “Neuedefinitionen der Japanischen kalligraphie,” Ostasiatische Zeitschrift n. s. 26 (spring 2013), 29–36.

42. Bert Winther-Tamaki, Art in the Encounter of Nations (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001), 22. For an in-depth exploration of the influence of Zen on the US art world, see Daniel Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

43. “Expressive Art of Japanese Calligraphy on View in Exhibition Opening August 17 at Metropolitan Museum: August 17, 2013–January 12, 2014,” electronic resource, accessed December 10, 2014, http://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-museum/press-room/exhibitions/2013/brush-writing-in-the-arts-of-japan/. The quote pertains to works of Zen calligraphy in the Sylvan Barnet and William Burto Collection, many of which have been donated or promised to the Metropolitan. For another example of the degree to which the formulations of Hisamatsu Shin’ichi, the concerns of Abstract Expressionism, and the display of the calligraphy of Zen monks remain intertwined, see the essays in Jason M. Wirth, ed., Zen no Sho: The Calligraphy of Fukushima Keidō Rōshi (Santa Fe: Clear Light Publishers, 2003).

44. This is the general thrust of several articles featured in Bokubi. For example, Hasegawa Saburō opens the fifth installment of his survey of modern art with a statement “in anticipation of the day when the calligraphic arts will achieve their rightful place in the contemporary international [art] world” (29) and points out the importance of premodern Zen art and architecture in this regard. Hasegawa Saburō, “Gendai geijutsu (5),” Bokubi 15 (1952), 29–33. Similarly, Morita Shiryū begins a roundtable discussion of the Kyoto Museum of Modern Art’s 1965 exhibit The Arts of Zen with the question, “Why are we six years behind Europe in exhibiting Zen arts [in a modernist context]?” (4) Morita Shiryū, Hisamatsu Shin’ichi, Kitayama Masamichi, and Nakamura Nihei. “‘Zen no Bijutsu’ ten ni furite: ‘Shūkyō to geijutsu’ o kataru: Atarashii runessansu no tame ni” [「禅の美術」展にふりて：「宗教と芸術」をかたる：新しいレネッサンスのために] (On the ‘Arts of Zen’ exhibit: Discussing ‘religion and art:’ Toward a new renaissance), Bokubi 146 (1965), 4–17. Tellingly, the transcript of the roundtable is preceded by a one-page essay by one of its participants, Hisamatsu Shin’ichi, titled “Zen bunka no kindaisei” [禅文化の近代性] (The modernity of Zen culture), Bokubi 146 (1965), 2–3.

45. As quoted in Winther-Tamaki, Art in the Encounter of Nations, 47.

46. “Paintings and Calligraphy by Zen Master Hakuin at the New Orleans Museum of Art,” electronic resource, accessed January 23, 2015, http://artdaily.com/news/45166/Paintings-and-Calligraphy-by-Zen-Master-Hakuin-at-the-New-Orleans-Museum-of-Art#.VMJqamNOSdk/. The exhibition The Sound of One Hand: Paintings and Calligraphy by Zen Master Hakuin, organized by the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) and on display there February 11–April 17, 2011, also traveled to the Japan Society Gallery (October 1, 2010–January 9, 2011) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA, May 22–August 17, 2011). The tendency to associate Zen arts with modernist art movements seems to be more pronounced when the exhibit focuses solely on the work of Zen masters and much more muted when the exhibit covers a broader range of objects. Even here, however, exhibition notes at times draw comparisons between, for instance, the calligraphy of a premodern Zen master (such as Sesson Yubai, 1290–1346) and the Action Paintings of Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock. See, for example, the collectors’ notes for the exhibit Faith and Form: Selected Calligraphy and Painting from the Japanese Religious Traditions, which was on display at the Freer|Sackler March 20–July 18, 2004. “Faith and Form: Notes on Ways in Which Japanese Buddhist Objects Convey Meanings,” electronic resource, accessed November 29, 2014 http://www.asia.si.edu/exhibitions/online/faithandform/essays.pdf/.

47. Doug MacCash, “Paintings by Zen Master Hakuin (1685–1768) at NOMA Friday,” The Times-Picayune, February 7, 2011, electronic resource, accessed January 23, 2015, http://www.nola.com/arts/index.ssf/2011/02/paintings_by_zen_master_hakuin.html/.

48. The last four terms on this list come from Stephen Addis, The Art of Zen (New York: Abrams, 1989). Quoted in Faith and Form. These adjectives describe the early Zen calligraphy of Seigan Soi (1588–1661), whose work was featured in the Faith and Form exhibition held at the Freer|Sackler (March 20–July 18, 2004).

49. Stephen Addiss, How to Look at Japanese Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Incorporated: 1996), 55.

50. In fact, in many of his writings, Dōgen frames the everyday and the spontaneous as two sides of the same coin. For instance, the title of a letter (Genjō kōan 現成公案) composed in Japanese for an unknown lay believer from southern Japan and dated to the same year as Fukanzazengi can be rendered either “Spontaneous Realization of the Kōan” or “The Kōan Realized in Everyday Life.” For a discussion, see Heine, Did Dōgen Go To China?, 135.

51. Suzuki et al, eds. Dōgen zenshi zenshū 5, 12.

52. David E. Shaner, “The Bodymind Experience in Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō: A Phenomenological Perspective,” Philosophy East and West 35, no. 1 (January 1985), 17–35.