Zen-Boom “Culture Wars”

Chapter Five traces a postwar history of Zen as it emerged as a compelling and useful matrix for a Cold War era spiritual, social, political, and artistic conditions. Our present-day “Zenny Zeitgeist,” as I call it, developed in large measure from this period. But careful examination of the postwar Zen boom—in its varied manifestations, including serious Zen teaching and practice, Beat Zen and various countercultural Zen creative movements—reveals that Zen was by no means singular (if it ever was), solely related to religion, strictly serious, and exclusive to Japan or East Asia. Moreover, Zen and Zen inspired art became the focus of debate and even venomous attack. Public intellectuals and Zen teachers including D. T. Suzuki, Hu Shih, Philip Kapleau, Arthur Koestler, and Ruth Fuller Sasaki wrestled with each others representations of Zen and sought to resolve questions of authenticity and value, history and practice.

Danxia Burns a Buddha

Chapter 3 focuses on a medieval painting in the Zen art canon—Yintuoluo’s painting of Danxia Tianran (738/39-824), a Chinese monk said to have burned a wood statue of the Buddha—and situates it within its modern surround, particularly in relation to Zen iconoclasm, a prominent trope in postwar Zen cultural production including Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums and other countercultural works. The chapter suggests how premodern representations of the Danxia tale circulated in the modern world through art collecting, photographic reproduction, translations of hagiography into modern Japanese and English for lay and non-practicing readers, and “reverse orientalist” critique of Western views of Buddhism. It notes too the tale’s representation by modern artists in Japan, including Yamamoto Shunkyo and Okamoto Ippei. Whatever the representation of Danxia burning the Buddha meant in preceding centuries, in the early twentieth century, it responded to new prospects, ambitions, and conflicts, as much geo-political as personal.

The Look and Logos of Zen Art

What makes art “Zen” and Zen art “Art”? From where and when does it arise: Southern Song dynasty China (1127-1279), Muromachi period Japan (1333-1573), London in the 1920s, Manhattan or Japan in the 1950s and 1960s? How do we describe Zen art—including heirloom works such as Muqi Fachang’s Six Persimmons or the contemporary artist Murakami Takashi’s Daruma works—and why do we build description around particular religious terms, such as mushin, and seemingly timeless aesthetic qualities such as simplicity, spontaneity, abbreviation, monochromatic, abstraction, nothingness, and so forth? How do terms and sensibilities come to be normalized, and what sorts of Zen art might they exclude or repress, and why? What should we make of Hisamatsu Shin’ichi’s “Seven Characteristics of Zen art”? Why are the arts of Japan so often described as inherently or entirely informed by Zen? Beginning with writings from Zen campaigners and art historians in the 1920s, this chapter follows the lexical journey of Zen and Zen art, aesthetics to the present and suggests the discursive and ideological energies that propelled them toward the status of global “givens.”

Introduction: Walking the Zen-Scape

The Introduction points to the term Zen’s remarkable lexical adaptability and the striking, and sometimes unruly, social, political, and even etheogenic dimensions of Zen’s spread in the modern-contemporary world. It points to recurring categories of Zen art that draw attention (while obscuring others), including “Zen circles,” Zen gardens, and the “Splashed ink” landscapes of the premodern painter Sesshū. It explores efforts undertaken by Japanese lay Zen Buddhists and other Zen authorities to define Zen and categorize Zen practitioners, and it sets out for examination modern notions of “Zen art” and “Zen artists.” The postwar “Zen-scape,” it turns out, could be a rather rough space to venture into, with competing discourses on Zen’s promise or peril for the modern world. The Introduction maps some of these discourses and situates the author among the multiple constituencies drawn to Zen’s diverse modern-contemporary forms.

Zen Sells

This final chapter focuses on Zen associated commercial products and marketing campaigns that use Zen and Zen art, aesthetics as well as the sale of Zen meditation supplies by non-profit businesses run by Zen monastic communities. It examines corporate “borrowed interest” campaigns, on the one hand, and Zen teachings of Right Livelihood, on the other, to consider two dispensations of retail (retail Zen, and Zen retail, as it were), while also pointing to the circulation of representations of Zen from one space into another, and the counter-narratives and claims to authenticity that may emerge in the process. The chapter considers among other examples Shiseidō’s “Zen” perfume, a recent Mercedez Benz commercial, critique of the latter by members of the Treeleaf Zendo community, and the retail store of the non-profit Zen Mountain Monastery.

Zen Art before Nothingness

Chapter One describes the uncertain beginnings of Zen and Zen art within modern intercultural encounters between Japan and Europe and North America. The representations and perceptions of Zen in the West arising from initial contacts in the sixteenth century and thereafter from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth were not uniform with what we discover from the 1920s and 1930s onward, and certainly not identical to those of the postwar Zen boom. As a genealogical sketch, this history of Zen art before “Zen art,” suggests a sensibility of ambivalence or nascent interest during the mid-to-late nineteenth century leading to one of infatuation in the early twentieth, at which time there emerged a range of geo-political conditions and a group of active Zen campaigners promoting the formation of a specifically differentiated and instrumentalized Zen and Zen art.

Zen Influence, Inherence, and Denial

Centering on the work and reception of the composer John Cage, famous for his “indeteminant” works, Yoshihara Jirō and his “Circle works,” and the filmmaker Ozu Yasujirō’s Tokyo Story, this chapter examines the twining postwar rhetorical patterns of Zen influence, Zen inherence, and Zen denial as they inform interpretation of works of postwar art produced by artists in the West and Japan. Contrary to certain practitioner narratives, at times beguiled by hagiography and inclined towards grand narratives, the chapter suggests a grittier sensibility that reflects the rhetorical tussles that emerged contemporaneously and have since continued. Doing so, it points again to the multifarious nature of Zen in the postwar period, including those forms espoused by the avant-garde and its advocates, as well as the parallax effect of affirmative orientalist reception in the West of Japanese artists—praised when their work looked Zen, otherwise dismissed as derivative of New York School artists.

Coda

The book concludes with a Coda that suggests the ongoing importance and cachet of Zen in multiple spaces—religious, spiritual, artistic, commercial—continuing debates on authentic Zen, and the uneven processes of change underway in contemporary interest in and representations of Zen.

What’s So Funny?

Chapter Seven takes up the topic of Zen cartoons, which provide further glimpses of Zen and Zen art concepts, perceptions, and desires in operation away from the canon, even as they draw at times from canonical works and have their own “canonical” tropes. The chapter also explores the larger question of Buddhist/Zen humor in order to think through the very question of cartooning Zen. It proposes the category, “Bodhi-characters,” various figures drawn from the classical Chan/Zen pantheon along with recent Zen-master-esque figures, such as The Dude from The Big Lebowski (1997), who perform and are adored for their counter-normative if not absurdist attitudes and utterances that intimate (to some) Zen philosophical and spiritual truths. These figures create, I suggest, a modern-contemporary neo-“pantheon,” that embodies often the conception of Zen as residing in particular attitudes and demeanors, often linked to the comedic.

Making Zen Modern

Focused on D. T. Suzuki, this chapter considers the efforts of Japanese Zen monastics and lay Buddhists to reform and modernize Zen—to bring it out of the meditation hall—through emphasis on lay and global outreach, framed within Japanese exceptionalism and articulated through hybridization with Western theology and philosophy and premised in an argument for Zen’s universality. It turns then to critics of Suzuki’s presentations as well as the proliferation of Zen advocates in the West, including R. H. Blyth and Alan Watts, whose adaptations of Zen were not entirely consonant with the Zen promoted by Suzuki and other Japanese authorities.