The Comparative Phenomenology

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[1]Osvald Sir`en, The Chinese on the Art of Painting (New York: Schocken Books,
1963), pp. 18-23.
[2] Ibid., p. 22.
[3]Ibid., p. 23.

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In developing theories of knowledge, philosophers have persistently believed that for anything to be genuinely known (as opposed, e.g., to being controlled or used) there must be some measure of common nature between the knower and the known. Again and again the Chinese philosophers, Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist, have carried this point of view to the extreme--to know any-thing one must become that thing. Its application to art is taken very seriously. Even when nature is being represented the artist is concerned not to reproduce its aesthetic surface, but to lay bare its hidden spirit. The artist was, in a sense, doing what the phenomenologist does with the structure of consciousness. Simple introspection will not do the trick, since the structure which is sought is largely hidden. It has to be searched out and disclosed. In a similar way the real vitality, the life breath, of any subject matter for art, whether it is a person whose portrait is to be painted, or a mountain, or waters, or forest, must be discovered and manifested in the work of art.

On what does the success of which a venture depend? The Chinese and Japanese believed that it was possible because of an original underlying community of nature that obtains between Heaven, Earth, and Man. It is because of this oneness of nature and man--not only in the sense that man is in nature or that man is generated and supported by nature, but that there are identities of characteristics-that the spectacle of nature arouses the powerful emotion the artist experiences in its presence. And unless this feeling for nature pervades his entire being, there will not be the control of his skill which is requisite for the painting of a picture which has resonance or life movement.

It may be objected that this assumes an expression theory of art and is thus question-begging, But it can be cogently argued, as Marvin Farber has done, that experience as a concept will never cease needing analysis because, as the understanding of experience advances, experience itself changes.[4] Experience is not something we just come across. It is itself a continuous act of construction in which what we are, including our understanding (and specifically our understanding of experience), is a contributing factor. And it can be cogently argued that aesthetic theory, far from only following behind and interpreting art and taste, plays a dramatic role in transforming art and taste.[5] We may argue that the Oriental idealistic, expressionistic theory of art is not as useful in the interpretation of art and aesthetic experience as some other type of theory; the fact remains that it has influenced Oriental artistic taste and practice from ancient times.

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[4]Marvin Farber, "Experience and Subjectivism," in Philosophy for the Future,
Roy Wood Sellars, V. J. Gill, and Marvin Farber, eds. (New York: The Macmillan
Co., 1949), pp. 591-593.
[5]See Arthur Danto, "The Artworld," Journal of Philosophy, LXI, no. 19 (Oct. 15,
1964), p. 573.

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In his discussion of the aesthetics of Japanese painting, Henry P. Bowie cites first the principle of sei do, which seems to be the exact Japanese version of the Chinese ch'i-yün sh^enq-tunq. He translates it simply "living movement," but it springs from the same practice and the same aesthetic theory we have noted in the Chinese. Bowie describes it as the transfusion into the work of the felt nature of the thing to be painted by the artist. Whatever the subject to be translated--whether river or tree, rock or mountain, bird or flower, fish or animal--the artist at the moment of painting it must feel its very nature, which, by the magic of his art, he transfers into his work to remain forever, affecting all who see it with the same sensations he experienced when executing it.

This is not an imaginary principle but a strictly enforced law of Japanese painting.... Should [the student's] subject be a tree, he is urged when painting it to feel the strength which shoots through the branches and sustains the limbs. Or if a flower, to try to feel the grace with which it expands or bows its blossoms.[6] It is tempting to guess that this intense concentration isolated the forms which became the materials with which later painters worked. Bowie goes on to say that In Japanese art simple forms supplied by nature are often used for suggesting other

forms as, for instance, the stork's legs for the pine tree branches.... The universality of such underlying type forms recognized and applied by oriental artists is confirmatory of the principle that in both nature and art all is united by a common chain ... attesting the harmony between created things. A Japanese painting executed with the aid of such resources teems with vital force and suggestion, and to the eye of a connoisseur ...becomes a breathing microcosm.[7] A similar view with respect to the forms of nature and their use in art, but with a different guess as to their origin, is given by Sir Herbert Read. After discussing the balance of forces between gravity and surface tension which results in the unduloid shape of the pear, he says: "What I am suggesting is that when a coffee-pot or a milk-jug assumes this shape, and we find it beautiful, it is because the potter, in shaping the pot, has instinctively given it the tense form of a liquid drop. Once having discovered this essential form, he can, of course, play variations on it...."[8]
Perhaps we can put together the two guesses of how these forms originated--that they were discovered by careful concentration on what nature displays, on the one hand, and that they were instinctively hit upon by artists--in the

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[6]Henry P. Bowie, On the Laws of Japanese Paintinq (New York: Dover Publications, n.d.), p. 77 f. (First edition about 1911.)
[7]Ibid., p. 74 f.
[8]Herbert Read, Education Throuqh Art (New York: Pantheon Books, 1958), p. 21.

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Chinese and Japanese theory of Heaven, Nature, and Man forming one body, so that what one sees in nature is determined by what he is, and again that a given outward and visible form is the manifestation of an inward and spiritual principle.

Bowie's description of the technique of orchid painting is illustrative of this point.[9] The orchid, bamboo, plum, and chrysanthemum are called the "Four Paragons" in Japanese art. There is an established order of the brush strokes first for the leaves, then the stalk, and finally the flower. Constituent forms of the leaves are those of the "stomach of the mantis," the "tail of the rat," and "cloud longing." The latter expresses the longing of the leaf to turn to the sky, regardless of how its long slender form may droop to earth. All the leaves, therefore, whether in fact they point up or down, are painted with cloud longing. Examination of an illustrative plate indicates that this is probably achieved by lightening the brush stroke toward the tip of a leaf while preserving per-fectly its direction, and by a concomitant exhaustion of sumi or ink. Spaces formed by the intersection of leaves are the "elephant's eye" and the "eye of the phoenix." The smaller frail leaves are called "ornament," an exception to the usual basis of nomenclature. The smallest leaves in their entirety are called the "rat's tail," the "body of a young carp," and "nail heads." The flower stalk is made up of four "rice sheaths" and the flower itself is the "flying bee." . .

Before looking at other aspects of art it might be well to sum up what we have found so far. On the deepest level, we have seen (1) that nature reveals itself as something which can be described as possessing life or living movement; (2) that this same quality is transfused into the successful landscape by the artist; (3) that the basis of this transfusion is a resonance of spirit between nature and man; and (4) that the medium in which this is accomplished is perceptible forms which recur to such an extent, in both nature and art, that they can be called "ideal types."

So far I have been concerned with the principle of sei do or "living movement." I shall briefly mention two other principles which Bowie dignifies by the name of "canons of the aesthetics of Japanese painting." The second of these is esoraqoto, or "invention." It is directly related to the first canon, sei do, in that it is indispensable to the rendering of the living movement of a scene. Various writers on aesthetics, speculating on why it is that a painting often moves the beholder more profoundly than its original subject, attribute this to the painting's manifesting the creativity of the artist--roughly equivalent to the canon esoraqoto.

The third canon is Ki in or "spiritual elevation." It appears that from early _________________________________________________________________
[9]Bowie, op; cit., p. 67 f,

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centuries the writers on art in China and Japan have believed in an inborn character of nobility which is called "the clear character" in the ancient Confucian classic, The Great Learning. In a commentary on this work written by Wang Yang-ming about 1527, "manifesting the clear character" is explained first of all in terms of the unity of all things, which is shown in the feeling of commiseration that a man has for the suffering of a fellow human being, for birds and animals, for plants, and even for tiles and stones. "Such a mind is rooted in his Heaven-endowed nature, and is naturally intelligent, clear, and not beclouded. For this reason it is called the 'clear character."[10] This clear character is recognized in the truly great man, and in the same way ki in or spiritual elevation is recognized as a distinctive characteristic of great art.

SOME PHENOMENA OF ZEN BUDDHISM

First of all, although Zen is not in itself a creed or a philosophy, it must be pointed out that Zen assumes certain basic Buddhist philosophical points of view. For example, there is no permanent substance in things-preoccupation with individual existence is a pathological state which must give place to a vivid realization of the supreme reality which is behind all phenomena and which is variously called "Suchness," or the "Great Void," or "Emptiness." Attainment of this realization can be described as having the mind which is no-mind, or a consciousness which is a species of the unconscious. Paradoxically, the Zen consciousness heightens, rather than obscures, the conscious-ness of phenomena. I think this is due to two things. First, the Oriental type of meditation renders the sensory organs more acute. But the more profound reason is that something occurs which, whatever the explanation, can be described as coming to see individual objects not as substantial individual phenomena but as the transient embodiments of Suchness, or as crystallizations of the Great Void.

Very obviously this means that one is seeing things with a different eye, so to speak, than that of intellectual curiosity. There is a total effect which can be gained only by the same concentration on objects, whether natural or artificial, which is necessary for the artist--but now for a religious rather than artistic purpose. Complementary to (and partly the converse of) this belief in the transient, nonsubstantial nature of things is the Zen version of the identity of all things. Just how this identity is expressed differs in the various Buddhist literatures.

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[10]Wang Yang-ming, "Inquiry on the Great Learning," in instructions for Practical Livinq and Other Neo-Confucian Writinqs, Wing-tsit Chan, trans. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), p. 272. Also in Wing-tsit Chan, Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 660.

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In the Kegon school it is expressed in terms of relationship, rather than identity, using the figure of Indra's three-dimensional net in which at each knot is a jewel that reflects all the other jewels and all the reflections of all the jewels ad infinitum. But however expressed, dualism is negated and in some sense all things are one.

Now what can be said to bring out the phenomena of Zen experience, phenomena which are conditioned to some extent by these beliefs? It is extremely difficult to do this, and I think it is valid to say it can be done only indirectly. Without apology I shall use personal experiences, here and in what follows, because this is the best way I know to point to something concrete which will be at least analogous to the phenomena we are trying to discover and to make manifest. After a mountain hike with a Zen Master we returned to his monastery. "You will want to wash," said the Roshi. I have an obsession not to be a bother and so I replied that I would not need to. In his acknowledging exclamation I detected a note of disappointment, and remembering the extreme cleanliness of the Japanese I quickly reversed my decision. "Good ! Enter, and I will follow." I went by the front entrance, where I took off my shoes, and he went to the rear where he washed his bare, muddy feet. I made my way to the wash basin on the veranda and was drying my face and hands when he arrived. "Put your head down ! This cool water is from our own stream in the mountains!" Dash went a cold dipper of it against the base of my skull. I flinched, but he dipped again. "Another ! and another !" I flinched not so badly this time. "And another! And another! This is my gift to you!" At last the dash came and the flinch did not follow. I had perfectly relaxed, and the piercing cold spread through me without obstruction, with a clear vividness of sensation I had never before experienced. I thought the Master, who chortled with delight while tormenting me, was having a bit of fun. But reflecting on it later I came to believe it was all deliberate--an undisscussed, direct way to bring one to stand without obstruction before the simplest experience: the sensation of touch. Ordinarily our sense experience is a complex of signals to do something. In art and in Zen, sensation is pure reception. The phenomenon I am pointing to is not this simple sensation itself, but the state of mind which is open to what is before us in unobstructed receptivity.

Let me now turn to what is in one sense the exact opposite of this experience, and yet really is not so. I was once teaching a seven-year-old girl to ride a bike. Only a few days were at our disposal, so I wanted her to learn rapidly. My principles were two--she must go through the actual motions as nearly as possible, which meant that I must hold her loosely; and second, she must not be allowed to fall, so that she would not develop fear. So up and down the street we went at a walking pace, the bicycle swaying widely from side to

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side. Then there came the moment when, after a questioning backward glance, she whipped her face forward, thrust her whole weight on the pedals, and dashed off with me flying in pursuit. Now what did she see when she looked around? She saw that I no longer touched the bicycle at all, and that she was on her own. She stopped trying to learn to ride, and rode. The phenomenon I am pointing to is the Zen experience of discovering what one is searching for within oneself. Many stories occur in the Zen literature which illustrate this abrupt accession of self-confident mastery.

I come now to the most difficult phenomenon to lay bare; so difficult that it is questionable whether it is a phenomenon. It is the Zen experience of time. The transitory nature of all existence is a basic tenet of all Buddhism, but the attitude toward this transiency is not uniform. Life's being on the fly is one of the reasons for what is called the "direct method" of Zen instruction, "direct" contrasting with "verbal." When Suzuki was interviewed by a re-porter upon his arrival in Honolulu in 1959 and was asked just what Zen is, he tapped the table and said, "that is Zen." He did verbalize but he could have omitted the words just as well and merely tapped the table. It would then have been a perfect example of the direct method. The difficulty of under-standing this is a built-in feature of the kind of thing we are talking about, and
which we are trying to coax into making an appearance and thus become a phenomenon. Understanding, so long as it is a conceptual affair, is by nature an indirect process. It goes on by means of words which are about something in the near or remote past, but can never catch the moment which is present. Indeed, the logical difficulties are great in the very concept of the present or, for that matter, in the concept of time itself. There is also a psychological difficulty. We remember the past with nostalgia or regret, we anticipate the future with mingled hope and dread--we exist, if we exist at all, in the present. But when we try to bring this present into focus it eludes us.

Van der Leeuw, one of the best known phenomenologists of religion, has this to say: By "experience" is implied an actually subsisting life which, with respect to its meaning, constitutes a unity. Experience, therefore, is not pure "life," since ...it is inseparably connected with its interpretation as experience. "Life" itself is incomprehensible... .For the "primal experience," upon which our experiences are grounded, has always passed irrevocably away by the time our attention is directed to it. The immediate, therefore, is never and nowhere "given"; it must always be reconstructed; and to "ourselves," that is to our most intimate life, we have no access.[11]

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[11]G. Van der Leeuw, Reliqion in Essence and Manifestation (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), Vol. II, p. 671 f.

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If we should accept these words as final we would be forced to end our search at this point. But I shall press on hopefully remembering that Van der Leeuw was a Christian; by his own statement, that fact determines to a large degree the existential ground of his phenomenology. True to the Husserlian principle, he strictly puts in brackets the question of the truth or falsity of what Christianity has to say about reality, but the point is that the phenomenologist must dredge up the phenomena from experience, and while there is a wide overlap between Zen and some forms of Christian experience, that is not true of the central Christian tradition.

So let us take our bearings and see if we can make a fresh approach to this difficult phenomenon, if such it be. So long as we are talking about discerning and describing phenomena which were ingredients of our past life, we can pursue an understanding in the usual sense. And we cannot question the fact that the present is real. We cannot question it, but can we capture it? Van der Leeuw implies, and I think correctly, that our most intimate life, what we truly are, is whatever it is which is acting now, in the present. I also believe he is correct in saying that we have no access to this presently acting life, so far as this is attempted by the kind of inward perception to which we are accustomed. But can we say a priori that no other kind of perception is possible?

Now I think it is at this point that the direct method of Zen comes into the picture. It is a technique for focusing one's entire being on the present moment-it aims to catch life on the fly. And when it does so, it discovers not a _I fleeting present, but eternity in the present moment. Suzuki has said "I raise a finger, this is in time, and eternity is seen dancing at the tip of it.... This is not symbolism. To Zen it is an actual experience."[l2] The abrupt enlightenment which is called satori can, I believe, be said to be the confrontation of one's "most intimate life"--the primal experience of the present of which Van der Leeuw speaks.

Unfortunately, I cannot speak here with the authority of experience. I shall use two familiar Zen incidents as a basis for trying to characterize satori in these terms. The first is the demand which Hui-neng, in whom Chinese Zen first came to full expression, made of a monk who came to him for instruction: "Show me your original face before you were born."[l3] The second is of Chao-pien, a lay disciple who was a government officer of the Sung dynasty. "One day after his official duties were over, he found himself leisurely

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[12]D. T. Suzuki, Zen Buddhism, William Barrett, ed. (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1956), p. 266.
[13]Ibid., p. 79.

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sitting in his office, when all of a sudden a clash of thunder burst on his ear, and he realized a state of satori." He composed the following poem:

Devoid of thought, I sat quietly by the desk in my official room,
With my fountain-mind undisturbed, as serene as water;
A sudden clash of thunder, the mind-doors burst open,
And lo, there sitteth the old man in all his homeliness.[l4]

If we put together Hui-neng's demand, "Show me your original face before you were born," and the poem of the government officer, the latter reads like an answer to the former. The poem poetically represents the irruption into consciousness of a self-nature which is always there. In another story a question is asked about grasping the birthless and seeing into the timeless, and the answer is given that it is the birthless which grasps and the timeless which sees into.[15] This is close to saying that the actual self, or what we can call the true subject, can be said to be that which acts--that is, "that which grasps and sees into is birthless and timeless" implies that the present moment is what we are, and that our actual subject or self-nature is both present and eternal.

A PHENOMENOLOGICAL COMPARISON

After this too leisurely and yet inadequate effort to point to a few key phenomena in Japanese art and religion, I shall try to bring them into relation. An important range of phenomena in both is generated by a common philosophical position which for short we can name "nature mysticism"; "mysticism' connoting the fundamental unity of all things, "nature" indicating the impersonal interpretation of this unity.

What this means in the phenomenology of Zen is the sudden realization of non-duality. Sir`en, in his chapter on "Ch'an Buddhism and Painting," quotes Hung-j^en, the Fifth Patriarch:

The deepest truth lies in the principle of identity. It is due to one's ignorance that the mani-jewel is taken for a piece of brick. But lo ! when one is suddenly awakened to self-enlightenment, it is realized that one is in possession of the real jewel....Those who entertain a dualistic view of the world are to be pitied.... When we know that between this body and the Buddha there is nothing to separate one from
the other, what is the use of seeking after Nirvana (as something external).

Sir`en says of this that
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[14]Ibid., p. 106 f.
[15]Ibid., p. 76.