{"id":4379,"date":"2014-08-15T08:29:55","date_gmt":"2014-08-15T13:29:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=4379"},"modified":"2014-08-11T20:21:55","modified_gmt":"2014-08-12T01:21:55","slug":"soens-mu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=4379","title":{"rendered":"Soen’s Mu"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

<\/div>\n

I was leading the “kinhin” walking meditation line this past Sunday at my local zendo, and my mind was pretty much on auto-pilot. I’ve led kinhin a good number of times before, and I can mostly do it now in my sleep. Actually, I hadn’t gotten enough sleep for the past 3 or 4 nights, so I wasn’t all that far from sleep. I wasn’t thinking about much, but I wasn’t “in the moment” either (such as the Zen teachers keep babbling on about). Just keeping count on how many circles we had made and how many we had left; 3, 2, 1, back into the sitting hall. <\/p>\n

When you have your mind in neutral like that, however, you never know when something previously unnoticed will suddenly capture your attention, just because of the random, chaotic “churning of attention” that goes on in the brain. I was walking towards the wall, leading the group into a turn, when my eyes quickly focused on the brush painting on the wall. Specifically, a brush calligraphy character representing the famous Zen-word “mu”. The painting was by the late but well known Soen Nakagawa<\/a>, a Rinzai roshi from Japan who made frequent visits to the USA during the 50s, 60s and 70s, as Zen was takiing root in America amidst the Beats and then the Hippie and New Age cultures of the 60’s and 70’s.<\/p>\n

Soen was known for being an eccentric but well-loved Zen teacher. Amidst his typical Japanese Zen students he supposedly was just another tough “Rinzai bastard”. But with Americans, he reportedly showed a lighter, more playful side hardly seen since his passing in 1984. The typically dour oriental Zen teachers spawned a group of even-more dour American imitators. <\/p>\n

So, here’s a shot of Soen’s artistic take on the famous “mu” concept of negation and contradiction, an idea found in a variety of koans (most notably Joshu’s Mu<\/a>, about dogs having\/not having Buddha nature). It’s just orderly and symmetrical enough for my mathematical side, and yet spontaneous with its imaginative claw things at the top and roller-coaster loop at the bottom. The big horizontal blob seems to anchor and stabilize things, while the loopy vertical crossbeam and the claw-like strokes at the top seem to give it all some motion. There’s a nice balance to it; it even looks like it could stand up just fine without tipping over, maybe even dance a little jig. <\/p>\n

Does a kinhin line led by a sleepy anti-Buddhist skeptic have Buddha nature? Probably not, but we are lucky to have that Soen brushwork on the wall to help us “wake up” just a bit. Thanks, Roshi, for a little jolt back to life last Sunday. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was leading the “kinhin” walking meditation line this past Sunday at my local zendo, and my mind was pretty much on auto-pilot. I’ve led kinhin a good number of times before, and I can mostly do it now in my sleep. Actually, I hadn’t gotten enough sleep for the past 3 or 4 nights, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,5,27],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4379"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4379"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4379\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4381,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4379\/revisions\/4381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}