"This is my renunciation." Serial Part 5

Learning from "Zen and Enlightenment," the definition of ultimate peace of mind (renunciation).

Introduction

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🔽This is a magazine compiling this series🔽

Time flies, and before I knew it, this series has reached its fifth installment. It is the final one.

Up until now, I have been exploring how to calmly get through these hopeless days while using somewhat pretentious words like "Zen" and "enlightenment."

But, on the eve of the final installment, what is occupying my mind is not the scenery of a quiet temple. It is the image of an incredibly wild "dragon."

Hokusai's "Boredom" and the Discomfort with Ideals

There is a painting called "Dragon Crossing Mt. Fuji" that Katsushika Hokusai painted at the age of ninety, just before he died.

When you look at this carefully again, it is completely different from what is called a "splendid landscape painting."

Painters up until the early Meiji period were actually also thinkers. Educated people painted harmonious and beautiful scenery to show "this is how an ideal world should be."

In the world of Japanese religious painting, specifically Buddhist painting, paintings of Amida Buddha coming to welcome people gently, or the appearance of the Pure Land filled with perfect order, have been depicted.

Or the immortality and eternal life of the immortals appearing in Taoist and Buddhist figure paintings. These were all projections of an untainted ideal world, such as "salvation after death" or "liberation from suffering" that humans hold. In a sense, they were well-behaved symbols to prove the righteousness and mercy of the world.

But, looking at Hokusai, I cannot help but feel that "this person definitely thought that kind of thing was boring."

Hokusai must have yawned while painting the expected salvation or beautiful scenery.

The "correct utopia" or "Buddhist salvation" that educated people talk about were nothing more than boring molds with no stimulation for Hokusai.

He did not want to be saved after death; rather, he wanted to drag the "truth" of this raw, vivid world out by force. I feel that this spirit of rebellion against "boredom" is connected to the eerily realistic detail of every single scale on that dragon.

The Memory of Hands, Starting as a Woodcarver

Tracing Hokusai's roots, it is actually very earthy. Before entering his master's school, he started as an apprentice "woodcarver."

For several years starting at age fourteen, he trained to carve lines thinner than a hair into wood without a single inch of error.

What is there is not noble religious truth, but thorough "technique" and the physical sensation remembered by the fingertips. Before kneading stories of the Pure Land in his head, he started from the "manual" labor of the chisel biting into the wood, the tension where a line would die with a moment's carelessness.

Seeing the world not through the "head" words of ideology and education, but the realization that his own hands carve out the world. Is this not Hokusai's starting point and the reason he did not escape into "logic" until the end?

After that, even when he entered the world of ukiyo-e, he did not fit into a single mold. He was excommunicated for stealing techniques from other schools on his own, and he incorporated Western drawing styles...

For him, art was not a tradition or religious sentiment to be protected, but a "field" that should be broken and constantly updated.

The Blooming "Merchant's Pride"

Thinking about it that way, I think Hokusai was perhaps more of a shrewd "merchant" than a noble "artist."

How can I sell my name as the most dangerous thing in this world? How can I hammer the product called "Hokusai" into history? He simply loved painting and wanted to make it more interesting than anyone else. That "merchant's intuition" and "madness that compelled him to create" carried him to such a place.

While noble thinkers were talking about "the world as it should be" or "Buddhist salvation," he was sharpening his "selling blow." He surely wasn't thinking of anything as virtuous as "painting to be saved."

"How about that? My painting is amazing, isn't it? The dragon I paint is much more alive than the Buddha's utopia."

He thrusts that at the world. That guts is what kept him alive. From the perspective of a weakened modern person like me, that is a punk and incredibly cool way of life.

The Night Where Madness and Zen Connect

Here, I suddenly thought. "Zen" has a quiet image, but isn't it actually something very intense?

There is a saying, "If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha." What remains after destroying all the correct answers and the stories of "ideal Buddhist salvation" decided by someone else. If that is the essence of Zen.

The fact that Hokusai abandoned the traditional landscape mold, abandoned the pride of noble religious painting, and finally arrived at a child-like obsession of "I just want to paint. I want better lines" might have been "enlightenment" itself.

He didn't paint to be saved. He just used himself as a brush to forcibly create a new landscape to enjoy the unsalvageable reality. That was the meaning of "renunciation" for Hokusai, and for me.

In the end, you just have to create

The true nature of the "peace of mind" I found in this series. It was to stop expecting the "correct answers" prepared by society or the "salvation" given by someone else, and to settle into my own "nature."

I don't need eternal life, and I don't need a forced Pure Land. I can throw away heavy ideals like "I have to work properly" or "I have to become someone great." For me, Zen is abandoning such correctness and starting to create something with my bare self.

Just as Hokusai carved wood as a woodcarver. Just as he painted a dragon at ninety, wishing for "a better painting." I, too, have no choice but to turn these pathetic days into words and keep creating something.

　　　　"In the end, you just have to create"

Only within this resignation is there a freedom that no one can invade. I may never be satisfied, but I feel I have gained a little bit of courage through these five installments to live while enjoying that "unfinished hell."

Now, the night is late, and the room is completely silent. I may have forgotten the important thing I thought of earlier, but I will leave even that on this white screen as part of who I am now.

Holding onto an unfinished dragon, I will swim through this floating world with my own handwriting. That is the form of "renunciation" I have chosen.

🔲 For a good luck wallpaper

*The subject depicted here is Mt. Fuji and a dragon.
Fuji means immortality. It represents eternity.
The dragon depicted here is a rising dragon.
It represents career advancement.
It can also be used as an auspicious New Year's painting.
Please save it and use it as your smartphone wallpaper!!
By the way, since this is an image from Wikimedia Commons, you can use it with peace of mind♪
If you plan to use it as a wallpaper, I would be happy if you could like, follow, or leave a comment!

🔲 Images used

Image 1
Katsushika Hokusai, "Dragon Crossing Mt. Fuji," Edo period, Hokusai Museum
Source: From Wikimedia Commons