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THE WAY OF THE FLOWER:
MEDITATIONS ON A SOFT-HEARTED
PEDAGOGY
Alison Pryer
University of British Columbia
I THE WAY OF THE FLOWER
One
day, instead of giving his usual lesson, Buddha sat
in silence. Hundreds of his followers waited
for him to say something. After a long time,
he held up a single flower and said, “Here
is the true Way.”
August
I
arrive at my teacher’s house after dark. It
is hot and humid inside so she has drawn open the
balcony door to catch some of the gusts of wind that
blow through the city. The rain falls more
intensely on the roofs and sidewalks, giving warning
that the typhoon is drawing nearer. It will
hit in all its fierceness tomorrow afternoon. Tonight,
before my ikebana lesson,
I kneel on the tatami matting in front of my teacher’s flower arrangement. The
heavy face of a raggedy sunflower sits before a tall
proud banana leaf. The bright plane of the
leaf is broken by lemon-yellow discolouration and
tiny holes where insects have nibbled on its green
flesh. The bottom part of the pliant leaf has
been torn away—by wind or by human hand?— leaving
it wounded and asymmetrical. An evergreen sprig
of privet peeps out from behind the battered but
still-strong banana plant. From my kneeling
position, I bow down low before the flowers. The
pungent smell of the moist rice straw on the tatami matting rises to meet my face. I wonder how the second
rice harvest will survive the coming storm.
New Year’s Day
I
view my friend’s flower arrangement: A
heavy snow cloud of white baby’s breath hovers
over blood-red camellia blossoms, waiting for the
right moment to fall. Earlier that day, I visited
a shrine where two thousand warriors lay buried. Like
everyone else there, I prayed to the kami-sama,
or shrine god, wishing for good luck in the coming
year. As we walked down the shrine’s
steps past the many stone lanterns, we could clearly
see the volcano, Sakurajima, its three peaks looking
as if they had been powdered with a thin covering
of rice flour. Suddenly, the volcano exploded,
the terrifying boom stopping everyone in their tracks,
the force of the blast pushing a grey plume of dust
and rock high into the sky.
March
I
walk barefooted along the temple veranda, surprised
by the silky coldness of the boards. Over the
centuries the dark wood has been polished smooth
by thousands of human feet. I pass by a wet,
green grove of bamboo, azalea, moss and rock. I
am about to make my way inside when I notice that
some twisted plum branches have been placed in a
stone urn by the doorway. Their impossibly
delicate blossoms signal that spring is already here. I
pause a while longer in the winter garden.
April
When
I think of ikebana lessons,
I am stirred by memories of the innocent seductiveness
of flowers, the clipping sound made by the secateurs,
the cool surface of hand-thrown, ceramic vases brimming
with water, the fresh smell of discarded leaves and
soft blooms piled on sheets of old newspaper, and
the quick movement of my ikebana teacher’s hands. “Do you see how vulnerable
a tulip becomes when you curl back its petals this
way?” she asks.
August -- Leaving Japan
I
know how far a bulrush stem bends before it breaks.
I know how a blue iris bud uncurls, revealing its
yellow
heart. I know how a lotus leaf tips,
trickling rainwater out of its cupped centre. I
know how cherry blossoms fall from their lichen-covered
branch. I know the brittleness of knotted
kiwi wood. I know the turmeric stain of perfumed
lily pollen.
II OPENING TO THE SENSUOUS
My
beginner’s attitude towards ikebana was
goal-oriented. I was concerned solely with the
beauty of my final arrangement, and with making comparisons
between my work and that of others. In
fact, I often felt inadequate when I saw the exquisite
arrangements of the other students. I did not
realize the importance of being in the moment, whether
I was arranging flowers or cleaning up. As a
westerner with little experience of meditation, I was
completely baffled by the seriousness with which the
students would sweep the tatami mats after class, and puzzled by the slow deliberation with which
they washed out their vases before putting them away. These
activities were performed with as much sincerity as
the flower arranging.
As
the weeks passed, I began to notice small things during
my lessons—the slight difference between the
front and the back of a single iris leaf; the sparkle
of grey stones as I placed them at the base of my arrangement;
my fingers slipping over a vase’s slimy interior
as I rinsed it under running tap water; the bristles
of the hand brush rasping against tatami.
After
a few lessons, my teacher, whom I called Sensei,
told me that it was important to look at plants in
their natural environment so that I would be able to
understand how they grew, how they moved when the wind
blew through them, how the face of a flower turns toward
the sun. As I went on my daily walks past gardens
and fields or through the woods, I began to feel a
special joy. The beauty of the natural world
seemed so much more intense, colours were more vivid,
and forms more dynamic. I never discussed these
euphoric feelings with my ikebana teacher. What
mattered most to her was that I simply practice ikebana regularly.
There
is a Zen saying:
Before
Zen, mountains were mountains and trees were trees.
During
Zen, mountains were the thrones of the spirits and
trees were
the voices of wisdom.
After
Zen, mountains were mountains and trees were trees.
(Estes,
1992, p. 359)
It is the mundane, repetitive, procreative, cyclical qualities of
everyday life that the ikebana student
is encouraged to dwell upon. What my teacher
was trying to develop in me, and in all her students,
was an increased awareness of everyday lived experience.
The
ritual of ikebana is
a physical expression of humility, respect, and reverence
for the earth, for life. It is an art that garners
meaning through repeated performance, through cycles
of creation rather than acts of completion. The
performance of the art of ikebana opens,
and is symbolic of the opening of, the practitioner’s
heart-mind (kokoro) to the mystery and wonder of the sensuous now. One comes to
knowledge not by trying to grasp and control it, but
by letting go and moving into the unknown. Instead
of attempting to conquer and colonize knowledge, one
continually opens up to the world, engaging the moment
with increasing intimacy and intuitiveness. This
opening to knowledge is an ongoing process—even
highly accomplished Zen teachers approach their practice
with a sense of studentship.
III THE PRACTICE OF MINDFULNESS
Awareness
of the “sensuous now” is often called “mindfulness.” Mindfulness
is not really a state of mind; it is a dynamic process
of becoming. This process is so important because
it alters the way in which the practitioner perceives
the world, and herself as part of the world. The
development of mindfulness is “not about the
isolated self in the isolated moment” (Tomm,
1995, p.115). Rather it is “a life-long
process that is never completed but continually opens
up new possibilities for greater connectedness to oneself,
other people, and the natural world of animals and
things” (p. 15).
Sensei never
talked about mindfulness, and never appeared to “teach” it
in any overt way. Ikebana practice
was characterized by what seemed to me at first to
be repetitious action. This repetition was, in
fact, sacred ritual. Sensei would show me a new style and then I would practice it over and over
again for months, sometimes years on end. I studied ikebana in
Japan with Sensei for three years, and at the end of the third year I was still intensively
practicing even the most elementary of skills and styles. At
first, I felt as if I were being asked to merely copy. But
I was not really copying; I was re-creating.
This
process of re-creation is completely absorbing. It
draws the practitioner deeper and deeper into the mysterious
realm of creative time and space, where the mind “opens” in
order to maintain union with the flowers, and then
enters a state of embodied oneness in which the dualistic
boundaries between the practitioner and the object
of practice (the flowers) blur and disintegrate. Brennerman,
Yarian and Olson (1982) call this process of re-creation “imitation
of an archetype” (p. 93). They write:
Imitation is to be distinguished from rote
copying. Imitation means here the act of opening
to and participating in the archetype, as an act of
conscious dedication to bringing it into material manifestation. In
rote copying, the practitioner can be removed and work
in a purely mechanical fashion. Imitation calls for
uniting with the archetype in consciousness and seeing
it as an object worthy of one’s total service.
(p. 94)
Or, in the words of the photographer Minor White, “I make objects
sacred by the quality of my concentration” (cited
by Brennerman, Yarian & Olson, p. 82). This
kind of unconscious consciousness is also known as
transparent mind or perfect concentration (Joaninha,
1998).
When
the “artist” enters the work in this spirit,
the result is a new creation, a reinvestment of the
sacred
archetype. No two images of the same archetype
are exactly alike—as would be the case if it
were a matter of copying—but the dominant impression
is of a powerful and living image of the collective
tradition (Brennerman, Yarian & Olson, 1982,
p. 96).
In ikebana “the
reinvestment of the sacred archetype” is achieved
through the re-creation of the traditional styles of
the Ikenobo School. Each of the traditional styles
has its own characteristics, qualities, and conventions. Yet,
each time the practitioner creates an arrangement,
she finds herself improvising on the style. No
two branches or flowers or grasses are the same. Each
is unique, although familiar, to an experienced practitioner. The
skill of the ikebana practitioner lies in the way she responds to the materials in the
moment. Mark Epstein (1995), a Buddhist psychotherapist,
writes:
Rather than promoting a view of self
as an entity of place with boundaries, the mindfulness
practices tend to reveal another dimension of the self-experience,
one that has to do with how patterns come together
in a temporary and ever-evolving organization. (p.
142)
Every
few months my teacher would give me a book on ikebana. She ordered these books especially from the Ikenobo School
of ikebana at the Rokkakudo Temple in Kyoto. Each one contained detailed
guidelines for various styles and technical advice
on all aspects of ikebana. I
would devour each new book seeking to learn something
new, something I did not already know, but I was always
slightly disappointed. I asked Sensei politely, “Could
you give me each book before I
begin a new style, please? That way I will be
able to read all I have to know about each style first.” Sensei always nodded and smiled, but she continued to give me each new book
only after I had gained
considerable firsthand experience. I yearned
for the certainty of the written word, for the comfort
of the printed page, but what Sensei wanted
to teach me was not to be found in a book. Mindfulness
must be directly experienced by the student herself
as a physical and experiential, not solely intellectual
or cerebral, process of becoming. As Varela,
Thompson, and Rosch (1995) point out, in Buddhist traditions
knowledge “is not knowledge about anything. There is no abstract knower of an experience that
is separate from the experience itself” (p. 26).
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IV THE FULLNESS OF EMPTINESS
When
a practitioner creates an ikebana arrangement,
the flowers arouse her senses; she can smell, touch,
hear and see the natural world and its cycles of life
and death, perceiving intuitively the chaos and order
in living systems. The practitioner is mindful
of the primal relationships between human beings and
the earth, and the earth’s cyclical flow of energy. By
arranging flowers, ikebana practitioners make these invisible bonds visible and tangible. For
example, the bud is highly prized in ikebana. Heavy with hope, it expresses a blissful potentiality: that which
is not yet, but will soon be. In Japan, people
gather around lotus buds, awaiting the glorious moment
when they will pop open in the summer heat. As
summer turns to fall, and the lotus flower has already
blossomed and died, its pliable green leaves begin
to yellow and curl. When used in ikebana arrangements, the imperfect beauty of these blemished, dying leaves
bear poignant witness to the passing of the seasons.
The
Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh (1995),
calls our interconnectedness with all things “interbeing” (tiep
hien). He writes:
When we look into the heart of a flower, we see clouds, sunshine,
minerals, time, the earth, and everything else in the
cosmos in it. Without clouds, there could be
no rain, and there would be no flower. Without time,
the flower could not bloom. In fact, the flower
is made entirely of non-flower elements; it has no
independent, individual existence. It “inter-is” with
everything else in the universe. (p. 11)
These
simple teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh are profound indeed. Notions
of the individualistic, atomistic, independent self,
which are still widely prevalent in North American
society and which permeate its major institutions,
are obviously no longer valid or tenable if one believes
that there is no permanent self or entity independent
of others. In Zen, the self is understood to
be a complex web of interrelationships with no clearly
demarcated “I”—the self is a fiction. This
understanding of the transience and impermanence of
life, and the fictional nature of our self-identities,
is called “emptiness.”
For
many, the idea that there is no persisting, inherent,
individual nature can be distressing. Yet, an
understanding of the impermanence of all things is
all one can really count on. Life and death are
part of one whole, where “death is the beginning
of another chapter of life” (Sogyal, 1993, p.
11). In Tibetan Buddhism the word bardo is
used to describe the states between life and death
and rebirth when the possibility of enlightenment is
greatest. Bardos are “occurring continuously throughout both life and death” (Sogyal,
p. 11). Indeed, every moment of life is a bardo. This
knowledge is vital and transformative. Sogyal
Rinpoche writes:
Every time I hear the rush of a mountain
stream, or the waves crashing on the shore, or my own
heartbeat, I hear the sound of impermanence. These
changes, these small deaths, are our living links with
death. They are death’s pulse, death’s
heartbeat, prompting us to let go of all the things
we cling to. (p. 33)
Paradoxically,
if we welcome these small, daily deaths we may feel
more alive. We loosen the grip of the atomistic
notion of self, and open to the sensuous richness and
mystery of the everyday world. The practice of
a meditative art, such as ikebana,
helps to cultivate an intuitive understanding of the
fullness of emptiness, and a deep reverence for the
interconnectedness of all things. This understanding
gives rise to an experience of communion, communion
being a sense of non-dualistic consciousness and participation
in the world that nourishes one’s desire to act
with love and compassion.
V A SOFT-HEARTED PEDAGOGY
The
knowing self can only exist in relationship. As
Gregory Bateson (cited in Epstein, 1999) says, “It
takes two to know one” (p. 102). Knowledge
is created through direct, intimate relationship, or
non-dual communion, with another. Because of
its relational nature, one cannot possess or gain knowledge, one
can only do or perform knowledge. Thus, knowledge
can be thought of as conduct (Trungpa, 1996), or social
improvisation (Hershock, 1996).
The
wisdom of skilful Zen art practitioners lies in their
vibrant responsiveness to the social and the environmental.
Through continued deep engagement with the processes
of creating
and learning, students of the Zen arts develop the
sensitive improvisational skills required for such
social and environmental reciprocity. The
practice of a Zen art is in itself a non-dualistic
improvisational pedagogy in which mind and body and
heart are brought together through practice and tradition.
As Sensei commented about the development of my practice, “Before, you
looked with Western eyes. Now you feel with a Japanese
heart-mind (kokoro).”
The
accomplished Buddhist artist, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
(1996), defines art as “being able to see the
uniqueness of everyday experience” (p. 27), and
believes that art “is not an occupation; it is
our whole being” (p. iix). The Zen artist’s
medium is the stillness and movement of everyday life.
The way in which we go about all of our everyday activities
and rituals—washing, dressing, eating breakfast,
brushing our teeth, sleeping—is expressive and
communicative of our embodied mindfulness. Thus,
every aspect of a practitioner’s life may be
thought of as an improvisational art, a recursive flow
of creativity, which in turn creates the artist.
The
aim of improvisation is not the negotiation or regulation
of “an agreement about how things are, but rather
the creation of a novel harmony through jointly articulating
a new world” (Hershock, 1996, p. 76). The
harmony of improvisation is a generative interplay,
with no particular end goal, in which the individual,
isolated self ceases to exist, and in which knowledge
and meaning arise in playful partnership and mutuality. The
unceasing changes in our improvisational conduct give
rise to an infinite multiplicity of meanings.
In
a curriculum characterized by multiplicity “what
counts are not the elements, but what there is between,
the between,
as a site of relations which are not separable from
each other” (Delenze and Parnet, cited by Aoki,
1996, p. 11). What lies between are marginal,
fecund, creative spaces of difficulty, ambiguity and
ambivalence, spaces between
life and non-life,
between the known, and the unknown,
between universals and particulars (non-universals),
even between the possibilities and impossibilities
where inspirited newness is ongoingly constituted and
re-constituted. (Aoki, p. 12)
Such
pedagogical spaces offer a doubled potentiality: simultaneous
opportunity for growth of new self and loss of old
self, an endless process of nascency and mortality,
becoming and unbecoming. Feelings of destabilization—a
sense that one has been cast adrift from all that is
familiar, safe and known—may arise in students
and teachers who find themselves in a pedagogical environment
characterized by a multiplicity of meaning, the impermanence
of self, the transience of all knowledge, and the flux
of conduct. Yet the experience of constant pedagogical
comings and goings, the continued travel in and out
of an awareness of emptiness, the ebbing and flowing
of knowing, unknowing and between-ness are an unavoidable
part of all learning and change in consciousness.
Suzuki
(1959) proffers the remark that “a certain sense
of loneliness engendered by travelling leads one to
reflect upon the meaning of life, for life is after
all a travelling from one unknown to another unknown” (p.
255), and he relates the following travel story:
When Dogen (1200-1253) came back from China after some years of study
of Zen there, he was asked what he had learned. He
said, “Not much except soft-heartedness (nyunan-shin)” (p.
275).
Suzuki
continues:
“Soft-heartedness” is “tender-mindedness” and
in this case means “gentleness of spirit.” Generally
we are too egotistic, too full of hard, resisting spirit. We
are individualistic, unable to accept things as they
are or as they come to us. . . . When there is no self,
the heart is soft and offers no resistance to outside
resistances. (p. 275)
A travelling life
Several
years ago I immigrated to Canada, moving first from
Japan, then to two different cities in Ontario, then
finally to Vancouver. Although I had to move
from one continent to another, then right across
the breadth of North America, my three large boxes
of carefully stored ikebana materials travelled with me each time. They contain
Japanese vases of varying shapes, colours and textures
for use with different ikebana styles, my hand-made ikebana secateurs,
wires and tapes of different thicknesses, several
manuals and reference books, my own personal journal
documenting every arrangement I created, each entry
containing notes on the date, the flowers and type
of vase used, as well as a detailed sketch of the
final arrangement. And, of course, there are
the photographs of many lessons, of my arrangements,
my teacher and her work, and my classmates at the
New Year’s ceremony at the shrine. Nowadays
I rarely use my ikebana materials, but I would never dream of leaving the boxes
behind, or of giving away or selling my vases. Although
I have become caught up in the busyness of graduate
study, teaching, and research, and have not made
time for the practice of ikebana, I treasure the contents of these three boxes. I
know that some day I will practice ikebana again. But why do I cling to these unopened boxes
of possessions that I no longer really use?
I live in a small apartment crowded with books and papers—the
usual detritus of academic life. Yet, the presence
of the sealed boxes in my storage closet is strangely
comforting. As a teacher educator and doctoral
student in the area of curriculum theory, I am all
too aware of the prevalence in North America of dualistic,
technical-rational, corporatist approaches to curriculum
and pedagogy. My three “ikebana boxes” contain more than fond memories of times past. They
are talismans of another powerful, transformative
educational paradigm. They remind me of a soft-hearted
pedagogy, a pedagogy of intimacy, a pedagogy of the
sensuous now. They remind me that it is possible
to live a playful, engaging pedagogy, created in
a spirit of studentship, mindfulness and compassion,
a pedagogy that nourishes tender hearts.
References
Aoki, T. 1996. Spinning inspirited images in the midst
of planned and live(d) curricula, Fine (Fall):
7-14.
Brennerman, W., Yarian, S., & Olson, A. 1982. The
seeing eye: Hermeneutical phenomenology in the study
of religion. University
Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University.
Epstein, M. 1995. Thoughts without a thinker: Psychotherapy
from a Buddhist perspective. New York: Basic.
Epstein, M. 1999. Going to pieces without falling apart. New
York: Broadway.
Estes, C. 1992. Women who run with the wolves: Contacting
the power of the wild woman. London:
Rider.
Hershock, P. 1996. Liberating intimacy: Enlightenment and
social virtuosity in Ch’an Buddhism. New York: State University of New York
Joaninha 1999. The art of the moment, Kyoto Journal, 42, 51.
Nhat Hanh, T. 1995. Living Buddha, living Christ. New
York: Riverhead.
Sogyal, R. 1993. The Tibetan book
of living and dying. P.
Gaffney & A. Harvey (Eds.). San Fransisco: Harper.
Suzuki, D. 1959. Zen and Japanese culture. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University.
Tomm, W. 1995. Bodied mindfulness: Women’s
spirits, bodies and places. Waterloo, Canada: Wilfred Laurier University.
Trungpa, C. 1996. Dharma art. J. Lief
(Ed.). Boston: Shambhala
Varela,
F., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1996). The
embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge,
MA: MIT.
About the Author
Alison Pryer has taught in German and Japanese public
schools, as well as in the Teacher Education Program
at the University of British Columbia. A recent doctoral
graduate of UBC, the focus of her research is non-dual
pedagogy and the embodied self. In the last four years,
she has also been conducting research on the Canada-wide “Learning
through the Arts” project.
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