Zen Buddhism & the Arts

Before beginning the examination of the specific ways in which Zen Buddhism has become linked to various arts and crafts practices, it will be useful to give a brief history and background of the history of Zen and its more purely philosophical and religious elements.

Zen is a variant school of Buddhism that came about as the result of a fusion between the Mahayana form of Buddhism originating in India and the Chinese philosophy of Daoism or Taoism. Zen and Ch'an are, respectively, the Japanese and Chinese ways of pronouncing the Sanskrit term dhyana, which designates a state of mind roughly equivalent to contemplation or meditation, although without the static and passive sense that these words sometimes convey, especially to practitioners of Western religions (Rice 418).

Dhyana denotes specifically the state of consciousness of a Buddha, one whose mind is free from the assumption that the distinct individuality of oneself and other things is real. All schools of Buddhism hold that separate things exist only in relation to one another; this relativity of individuals is called their "voidness" (a translation of the Sanskrit term sunyata), which means not that the world is truly nothing but that nature cannot be g

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tea-drinking and Zen Buddhism, there would naturally occur an intimacy between Zen Buddhism and ceramics. But the connection between these two practices has another aspect to it as well, as noted above. The physical act of the creation of pottery is essentially Zen-like (and it is no coincidence that many of the world's religious draw explicit links between the shaping of the earth's clay and other such fundamental and essential processes as creating life.) It does not matter what aesthetics one is working with or what techniques one chooses to use, the "spirit of approach" of a potter to his or her work is deeply resonant with Zen Buddhism (Wilcox 27). However, while the connections between Zen thought pottery may run especially deep, there are clear connections to other forms of artistry, each one of which requires the artist both to make a direct connection with an experience in the world and to create a form in which the viewer (or reader) is also able to have the same form of direct, unmediated experience. It should be clear that such a mandate for the artist is nearly impossible to meet, for artistic endeavor is by definition a form of mediation. Zen-inspired art is designed to draw the thinnest and least refractive v
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Approximate Word count = 4140
Approximate Pages = 17 (250 words per page)