Buddhism and Creativity Interviews: Kyoun Sokuzan

Welcome to the second in a series of interviews on Buddhist practice and creativity. I am talking to some long time practitioners and Buddhist teachers about the relationships between creativity and Buddhist practice in their lives. This month, I am delighted to present an interview with Kyoun Sokuzan, the head teacher and abbot of Sokukoji Buddhist Temple Monastery, in Battle Creek, Michigan.

 Lianghua Su Jill Eggers: I have known you for about four years since you began to come to the Dharma Studio to give monthly dharma talks. I have also visited you at the monastery and have seen your art work there and on the temple website. But I do not know too much about your art practice and art background, so I have a lot of questions for you about that.  Can you describe the role of art in your life—whether you studied it in college, how you came to your art practice.

 Sokuzan: When I was very, very young, I found that one of the things I could do better than my school mates was draw. I tended to focus on that instead of numbers, math, or arithmetic. Drawing carried through my youth first by being a keyline artist for Wolverine Insurance in Battle Creek, Michigan, where I grew up, and from there to being an illustrator for four years in the United States Marine Corps. I then went to art school at the Corcoran School of Arts and Design in Washington, D.C., where I studied drawing under Alexander Russo at the school in 1962-63.

I’ve seen some of your watercolor paintings.  There’s a very beautiful one on your website that I have seen in the monastery.  Can you tell us a little about that painting?

Sokuzan: “The Paradise of Maitreya” was inspired by a mural that was painted by Zhu Haogu on the wall of a 13thcentury Chinese Buddhist monastery, which no longer exists. Today, this wall painting is housed in the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. My watercolor is an interpretation of a small part of that mural showing a monk receiving vows by having his hair trimmed, a ceremonial practice called “tonsure,” for becoming a monk, bodhisattva, or Buddhist saint.
 

You teach a practice called, Opening the Eye Mind©—A Dharmic Approach to Art.   You teach this somewhat regularly at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, as well as other places. You were going to teach a session in this at the Dharma Studio, and then the pandemic hit. Can you talk about this practice and how you came to develop it?

 Sokuzan: This practice developed out of frustration at my understanding of art when I was attending the School of the Art Institute in Chicago in the early 60’s. I basically developed this approach by sitting for many, many hours in front of a painting of “Sylvette David” by Picasso. I developed a way to move the awareness to the peripheral vision of form that allowed the thinking process to detach from visual awareness so that one can see with the mind’s eye. We can experience something as it actually is visually rather than how we think it is without interpretation, intercession, an interlocutor, or stupidity.

 Once when you were giving a talk at the dharma studio, you referred to painting as, “dancing with the phenomenological world.”  That struck me as a beautiful way to describe the creative process. Can you say something more about that?

 Sokuzan: Whatever the medium—whether it is paint, sound, words—we always need to relate to that partner in a respectful way. We want to appreciate the shape of words, colors, contrasts in the painting, and so on. If there is true appreciation—which means being completely on receive—when viewing what is in front of you with the eye mind, then any movement of color or texture is like a dance with the partner, with the phenomenal world instead of being blinded by the fear of failure in one’s own eyes or others. 

 You have the unique spiritual heritage of having significant teachers from two very different lineage backgrounds—your root teacher, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, was Tibetan, and your other primary teachers were from a Soto Zen lineage. I notice that much of the liturgy and formal structure of the SokukoJi Buddhist Temple Monastery derives from Japanese Zen traditions, but your teaching style is also very much informed by Tibetan Buddhist traditions, specifically the influences of Trungpa Rinpoche. Zen and Tibetan traditions have very different ways of relating with the visual experience and creativity. American Zen teacher, John Daido Loori, and Chogyam Trungpa both were active as artists and wrote extensively about creative practice. Can you talk about how you relate with Zen and Tibetan aesthetic traditions?  

 Sokuzan: First of all, I don’t differentiate between the two. They are just forms that are held up and pointed at. Fundamentally, it is still just working with the elements of the physical world whether it is sound or music. Sound or sight or movement.

 A particular form that Trungpa Rinpoche used was three-fold logic, which also shows up in the Japanese art of flower arranging called ikebana, or Sogetsu, of heaven, earth, and man. Using these elements, one can use them in such a way that it evokes a feeling of perfection or completion.

 The two cultural differences are not particularly different at all to one who practices them. They are just forms. Some very simple, some very elaborate. Zen is very simple. Tibetan forms are very elaborate.

 Chogyam Trungpa was very engaged in art making in various forms. Did he ever talk with you about this or did you ever work with him on any creative projects?  

Sokuzan:  I never worked with him directly. He had thousands of students, but I worked with many of his senior students not only in dharma art but also various kinds of movement practices and on awareness practices that are more culturally extant rather than tied into specifically Buddhist awareness practices.  

 I’m thinking of one I took, which was a movement or dance course with Archarya Arawana Hayashi, that takes words and puts them into movement. I’ve been trained in it but I have not taught it. I know what it is about.

 Do you have a current art practice? If so, can you describe it. What kind of space do you work in, what kinds of materials do you use, whether you set time aside to paint, or just do it on occasion, etc.  

 Sokuzan: I do birthday cards. I like to do things with people and for people. There is a watercolor in the hallway of the monastery whose inspiration came from a good friend of mine, Rob Fisher, a sculptor in New York. Rob actually gave me the paper. It was 24-30 inches long and six inches wide. That’s how those things develop. He gave me the paper, and I just started making things. I did it with him in the sense he gave me the paper. There are probably fifty of them. Some of them have been brought together in that particular arrangement in that framed piece.

 I have worked with lots of people in the Shambhala and Vajradhatu organization for forty years doing artwork. I did artwork for fundraisers for Shambhala in Minneapolis where I would do large paintings and watercolors of dragons and so on. Then they would be auctioned off. I am always doing things with people or for them rather than seeing myself as some kind of a painter or artist who is trying to develop a style or reputation as a painter. I am not particularly collectible in that sense—unless you want to collect all the birthday cards I’ve ever made.

 Or if you look in all my sketch books, I’m constantly doing a practice I call “content repetition.”  I’ve been doing it for many, many years. I teach it to my meditation students occasionally. It is a personal practice. You draw a thousand images of the same content. I have gone way over a thousand, and the content I draw is cowboys. I have an abstract kind of form that kind of looks like a mushroom or ghost or something. I do that over and over and over. I have been doing it for decades. Content repetition helps one to break through the fixation on content. You have done the content so many times you eventually see what you are actually doing instead of thinking about what you are doing.  You actually begin to enjoy yourself.

 As a longtime teacher, you have seen and led many students through years of their practice.  Do you have any observations about the development of creativity through Buddhist practice?  

 Sokuzan: Anyone who is already creative is probably going to extend their creativity in different directions sometimes even slowing down on the awareness practices altogether and heightening the practice of music, art, or whatever. I think that is totally appropriate.  Sometimes people who are artists slow down in that area and begin to develop more intense awareness practices—sometimes up to, and even including, becoming fully ordained as monks. 

 Do you have anything else you would like to say?  

 Sokuzan: I really like you Lianghua Su, and I love your paintings.

Thank you, Sokuzan.

A selection from Stephen Batchelor on creativity and practice~

In the next days I will publish the second in a series of interviews with Buddhist teachers and practitioners on their creative practice, with Kyoun Sokuzan, the head teacher and abbot of Sokukoji Buddhist Temple Monastery. Meanwhile, here is a passage from the Imagination chapter in Stephen Batchelor’s, Buddhism Without Beliefs, that speaks to the ideas we have been examining:

“As soon as the imagination is activated in the process of awakening, we recover the aesthetic dimension of dharma practice. The cultivation of focused awareness, for example, cannot be adequately understood as a set of cognitive and affective transformations alone, because such awareness is also an experience of beauty.

As the turmoil of consciousness subsides and we come to rest in a heightened clarity of attention, the natural beauty of the world is vividly enhanced. We marvel at the exquisite reflections and ripples in a puddle of water, the deliquescent radiance of a human eye. Our appreciation of the arts is also enriched: a phrase of music, a line of poetry, a dancing figure, a penciled sketch, a clay vase may speak to us with unprecedented poignancy and depth.

Great works of art in all cultures succeed in capturing with the constraints of their form both the pathos of anguish and a vision of its resolution. Take, for example, the languorous sentences of Proust or the haiku of Basho, the late quartets and sonatas of Beethoven, the tragicomic brushwork of Sengai or the daunting canvases of Rothko, the luminous self-portraits of Rembrandt and Hakuin. Such words achieve their resolution not through consoling or romantic images whereby anguish is transcended. They accept anguish without being overwhelmed by it. They reveal anguish as that which gives beauty its dignity and depth.

The four enabling truths of the Buddha provide not only a paradigm of cognitive and affective freedom but a template for aesthetic vision. Any work of art that deepens our understanding of anguish, moves us to relax the constrictions of self-centered craving, reveals the dynamic play of emptiness and form, and inspires a way of life conducive to such ends bears the hallmarks of authentic beauty. And just as non-Buddhist works can have such an effect, so explicitly Buddhist works can fail to do so.

The same aesthetic vision inspires the imagination tasks of self- and world-creation. The ennobling truths are not just challenges to act with wisdom and compassion but challenges to act with creativity and aesthetic awareness. Our words, our deeds, our very presence in the world, create and leave impressions in the minds of others just as a writer makes impressions with his pen on paper, the painter with his brush on canvas, the potter with his fingers in clay. The human world is like a vast musical instrument on which we simultaneously play our part while listening to the compositions of others. The creation of ourself in the image of awakening is not a subjective but an intersubjective process. We cannot choose whether to engage with the world only how to. Our life is a story being continuously related to others through every detail of our being: facial expressions, body language, clothes, inflections of speech—whether we like it or not.

After his awakening, the Buddha spent several weeks hovering on the cusp between the rapture of freedom and, in his words, the “vexation” of engagement. Should he remain in the peaceful state of Nirvana or share with others what he had discovered? What decided him was the appearance of an idea (in the language of ancient India, a “god”) that forced him to recognize the potential for awakening in others and his responsibility to act. As soon as his imagination was triggered, he relinquished the mystical option of transcendent absorption and moved to engage with the world.

Thus the Buddha set out on a path that started from a vision, was translated through ideas into words and actions, and gave rise to cultures of awakening that continue to inspire today. This development is analogous to the process of creativity which likewise starts from an unformed vision and is translated through the imagination into cultural forms.”

~from Part Three, Fruition, Buddhism Without Beliefs

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Buddhism and Creativity Interviews: Deok Wun Sunim

Dharma Studio practices  examine how creativity and Buddhist practice interrelate. As an artist, educator, and Buddhist practitioner, I have observed and explored the deep relationships between creative work and awareness practices   I thought it would be interesting to talk with some long time practitioners and Buddhist teachers about the relationships between creativity and Buddhist practice in their lives.  So, over the next months, I will be conducting a series of interviews on this site.  

The first interview is with my own teacher of nine years, the Venerable Deok Wun Sunim, a fully ordained Buddhist monk.  Deok Wun Sunim was the founding teacher and former abbot of the Grand Rapids Buddhist Temple and Zen Center.  He left full time teaching several years ago and now runs a bed and breakfast in western New York.  He recently published the first in a trilogy of young adult fantasy novels.   I am looking forward to hearing about this new  creative venture, and how it relates to his practice.  

 These interviews are conducted in writing.  Questions are sent to each interviewee, and they send me their written replies.  

Deok Wun:  Before I answer your questions I would like to preface my remarks with a brief comment.

Buddhism IS inherently a creative practice. Once one engages Buddhism, they are undertaking a process that re-creates themselves and the world around them. Where previously they may have thought of themselves as an “I” and the world as something outside of them, Buddhism takes you on a journey to an awareness that the “I” is a fiction. This Buddhist journey leads to a direct realization that all things are interdependent. Nothing exists alone or apart. Buddhism asks that you re-create your view in accord with this realization. The result is a recreation of self. 

The vehicles used include rituals, study, and the direct experience of the universal truths of suffering, the causes of suffering, and ways to ease suffering. These direct realizations are, in my view, profoundly creative. In the end, the creator is not someone or something outside of you. You are the creator.

Lianghua Su Jill Eggers:  Your first novel in a trilogy, The Enchanters, has just been published.  I am very curious about where the idea for these books came from.    Did you have simmering ideas about writing in this genre for a while, or was it something that just popped up?

DW: I have always been fascinated by fairy tales. My interest was first aroused when I read Frazier’s The Golden Bough. He was a professor at Oxford who employed his graduate students in a world wide survey of all cultures to explore how fairy tales, totems, taboos, and “sympathetic magic” were used to influence their lives and the world around them. It is a weighty series of books. The abridged version runs almost 900 pages! Jung’s work on the Collective Unconscious was also a major influence. Then, as I explored Eastern traditions, I discovered that the same themes emerged. Tibetan Buddhism is especially rich with spirit realms. I learned that there were influences, real or imagined, that exists alongside that which we believe is “real”. The question for me became a “what if”. What if there is a parallel world? Next, I began reading about quantum physics, entanglement theory, multi-verse theory, and similar topics. I concluded that fairy tales were one way older cultures attempted to explain the phenomena they could not otherwise explain. This lead me to want to write a fairy tale that demonstrated these beliefs. The Clonfert House Chronicles attempts to weave a tale that shows that there is more to the universe than what we see. That there is more than one realm and that there are those who work to join those realms together for the greater good. 

As for the specifics of the Clonfert House Chronicles, I chose Ireland as the central setting because of its long tradition of the meeting between the spirit and human realms. I wanted the characters to be multi-cultural to show that the human realm is made up of diverse people who ultimately share a common commitment to do good.

The characters did just “show up”. The Temne twins, Affey and Minda, were African American from the very start. I am not sure why they showed up as such, but they did. Michael and Kevin are based on my two oldest and closest friends. The spirit world characters seemed to reveal themselves as the writing progressed. The professors of Clonfert House likewise just seemed to be present from the start. They each have some element of those teachers and mentors I have had. 

The story itself evolved as I wrote. I began with an outline of The Enchanters, but as I developed it, the story took on a life of its own. Where I started and where I ended up were not the same place.

As the story unfolded I relied on my Buddhist practice and discipline. Specifically, to be aware each moment of the characters, and the events. Rather than force the story, I tried to be aware of where it wanted to go. And that is how the story continues to unfold.

JE: I’ve read the manuscripts of both the first and second novel.  I kind of think of them as spiritual fairy tales.   You are a lifelong  voracious reader and know the tradition of the fairy tale.  This background and your knowledge of a range of spiritual traditions is apparent in your new books.  Did you do any specific research to figure out how to write this kind of novel, or was it more an organic outgrowth of your reading  and other experience?  

DW: I did not do any research on how to write a fantasy novel. I read a  lot in all genres and was familiar with what makes a fantasy a fantasy. You did touch on a central point---spirituality. I intentionally try to weave spiritual elements because it is such a fundamental part of my own world view. Someone once said, “write what you know”. That is what I did.  It was an organic process and continues to  be as I work on part 3 of the series. An example of the “write what you know” idea, the sorcerer in Book 2, Corradhu, and his roots in Sardinia, Italy, are all taken from my time living there. 

JE: Can you describe any discipline or routine you have for your writing practice?   

DW: When I set aside time to write I follow a strict routine as most writers suggest a person follow. I do not write from May through October because I am too busy with running the bed and breakfast. I write from November through March. Each day I write in the morning. I write a minimum of 500 words each day. Often it is more than that. I first write in long hand. Then, I begin to transcribe. As I do, I frequently change the thrust of the chapter.  The next day I start by proofing the prior day’s work. It helps me pick up the thread of the story. Then, It’s on to the next chapter. At the end of each week I read through the entire story up to that point making note of things to change or clarify. Once the first draft is done, I step aside for a few days before coming back to read through it again. 

JE: Did your experience of a practice discipline influence your  discipline in writing?

DW: Absolutely. To fully engage the process of Buddhism one must be disciplined in two ways: first, in sitting daily in meditation in whatever form that takes. Second, there is the discipline of awareness from moment to moment. Being aware of what one encounters, how one reacts to those encounters, and making no judgments, which is perhaps the hardest part. As the zen patriarch says in the Hsin Hsin Ming, “to separate what you like from what you dislike is a disease of the mind.” 

JE: I found the characters in these books to be very vivid and alive.  You get inside the head of each of them.  Can you talk about where they came from, and how you learned to develop characters as a writer, especially since you are new to writing fiction. 

DW: Character development comes from my experience in the theatre where I worked for many years as an actor and director. For these books, my experience directing children’s theatre was probably the main source. Working with young people in the theatre and teaching them how to create a character helped in creating the characters in this series. Working with young people also informed my understanding of how they view the world, the way the approach it. What I had to keep reminding myself is that the audience for this series is young adults whose experiences are still limited, yet their insights are not. While they are at times cautious, they are never really afraid of taking a leap into the unknow. I  tried to show these different approaches in the four main characters. Minda is the least cautious of the four and will leap into the challenges.  She is willful and sure of herself. Her twin sister, Affey, is at first reticent, but as you know, as the story progresses she emerges as a powerful young woman as she overcomes her fears.  Michael is the most cautious--a typical teenager who is not yet sure of his place in the world. Kevin, swings between caution and abandon. He represents the struggle young people encounter trying to figure out who they are. The other characters in part one are all based on archetypes, especially Jungian archetypes. One character who should have a special mention is Major Lisset. I wanted her to be the modern woman who can face any challenge and, at least in Part 1, makes a final dramatic appearance.

JE: Can you talk about any relationships that may exist for you between writing these stories, and being a Buddhist teacher?

DW: I have spent a large portion of my adult life as a teacher. In addition to being a Buddhist teacher, I have taught Humanities at the high school and college level. I have always thought that being a good teacher meant asking good questions. Good teachers help[ students discover what they already know or point them in the direction of discovery. I have tried to weave that approach through the adult characters who mentor the four teenagers. If  you notice, the adults never really tell the four what to do, Instead, they create moments of discovery. 

JE: Do you have plans for future books?  Any other creative projects you are working on that you want to share with us here?

DW: This winter I will complete Part 3 of the series. After that I plan on a book recounting the year in college when I lived in a haunted house where a 7 year old girl, Elizabeth, dwelled.

JE: When I was first looking at ways to teach creative practices in relation to Buddhist practice, you suggested I read the work of American Zen Buddhist teacher, John Daido Loori.   I also subsequently spent some time at a retreat at the Zen Mountain Monastery studying with one of his close students.  I found in his writing such a deeply found, felt relationship between practice, and creativity.   For Loori, the place of creating and place of practice are inextricably linked, and he came to Buddhist practice through his creative practice, in many ways..  Can you talk about how creative work, and Buddhist practice, are related for you?  

DW: Everything is related. I suppose one way to answer this question is by also addressing your question 11.  (JE: Note—the written interview questions were numbered.  Question 11 is two questions down.)  Too often Buddhists think that the practice only takes place in the temple or on the cushion in meditation. Those are just “trainings,” not the practice of Buddhism. Buddhism is a way of moving through the world---not the world of temples or monasteries, but the world of everyday living. How we work. How we are with family and friends. In fact, we don’t need temples or clergy. We need ordinary people who live the truths of Buddhism. In the Vimilakirti Sutra, the Buddha sends his disciples off to meet Vimilikirti, a layman who is enlightenment to the universal truths of Buddhism. His disciples are reluctant to go because they, like so many, think only someone special can gain  enlightenment. To his disciples dismay, Vimilikiti shows them just how wrong they are. There is a powerful lesson in this sutra. It points out that you don’t need to be a monastic. A person living an ordinary life has just as much of a chance at enlightenment as the most cloistered monastic. This sutra is what prompted me to leave the clergy and live an ordinary life in accordance with the universal truths of Buddhism, i.e., selflessness, ease suffering, recognize what is there in front of me moment to moment, accept my failures, embrace the transitory nature of all things, and work for the benefit of others. That is all Buddhism is. 

JE: In Grand Rapids you created and built a community of practice, and were engaged and immersed very deeply for years in that practice context: creating a physical temple space, organizing a liturgy, training and teaching students, clergy, and maintaining that detailed order of a religious organization with all the layers of ritual and practice.  Was this a natural kind of environment for you, making and sustaining a practice--and can you talk about your experience of that as a creative practice?

DW: At first it was. I have always had a monastic bent. But, as the years passed it seemed that I didn’t fit in that way any longer. I wanted something simpler. Also, I found that I could not convince others that there was nothing special about being a clergy person. Too many who want to be clergy want to be seen as special or apart from the very people they are supposed to serve. It was frustrating for me because they didn’t quite get it. I thought that perhaps if I left I could model a different approach. 

JE: One of my students is currently reading the Vimilakirti Sutra.  He was surprised to read about a lay practitioner and enlightened being who was also a businessman very engaged in the life of the world.  Over the years, you have had some of your students read this sutra to bring out this idea—that ritual and outer trappings were not the practice---the path of practice is not essentially linked to rituals, robes, and monastery life.  Many people reading this knew you as a Buddhist monk and were used to seeing you in robes and in the context of a temple, rituals, a weekly service, etc.  Now you are living a life as a layperson.  This is a difficult concept for many, because of our natural tendency to want to order and categorize—especially our tendency to want to separate the sacred and the profane.   Can you talk about this, and how you consider and relate with this change in your life? 

DW: “Missing” is not how I think of it. Students are usually the best teachers. The encounters with students is humbling. I do wish there were more students in my life, but the few there are, like you, give me hope that Buddhism will thrive.

JE: Do you have any advice to give to the practitioner about any aspects of nurturing creativity and developing practice?

DW: Seek out a teacher, like yourself, who models this. That is the best way. Such a teacher has had the direct experience of the junction between creativity and practice. They see not just the value of a creative practice, but they live their Buddhism in and through their art. Thinks of how it has affected you. As a creative artist, a teacher, and a teaching monk just let them come along with you. Point things out and ask them questions---lots of questions. Isn’t that what you do naturally?

JE: Is there anything else you would like to say?

DW: After all my years of practice and study I have reduced my Buddhist reading to a single document: The Hsin Hsin Ming. In 10 or so pages all of Buddhism is presented. All the universal truths are there. Want to know how to move through life happy? Read this text.

Forest Sutras

The Dharma Studio practices examine how creativity and Buddhist practice are a point of intersection—Buddhist practice leads us to open awareness, and here we encounter our innate creativity. And conversely, creative practices can be a fertile place to understand the teachings in immediate and intimate ways. The creation of the Dharma Studio is an outcome of my experience as an artist, professor, and practitioner. When I began serious Buddhist study, I began to notice the deep relationships between creative work and awareness practices. Hence, I began to work with creativity as a means of Buddhist teaching. Dharma Studio practices are designed for anyone, and no artistic skill or background is necessary for any of our practices. However, my own background is as a practicing artist. I recently completed a body of work which bring Buddhist writings and painting together and would like to share some of it here.

As part of my Buddhist training, a few years ago I read The Avatamsaka Sutra, or Flower Ornament Scripture, a very long and influential Mahayana Buddhist sutra written about 2000 years ago. It took me about a year to read most of its 1600 pages. Subsequently, for about a year I worked on a series of twelve paintings that related, for me, with the Avatamsaka Sutra’s kaleidescopic, florid descriptions of interpenetrating, infinite realms, mutually containing each other. The paintings were recently on exhibit at Central Michigan University. But the university closed for COVID within days of installing the exhibit, so it had no audience. However, the Vice President and chief diversity officer of CMU decided to make a virtual exhibit of the show, and here he is, with the exhibitions director, reading the short fragments of the Avatamsaka Sutra that I paired with each painting. I wanted to share that here.

https://www.cmich.edu/library/exhibits/Pages/Default.aspx

Reflections on Practicing Living, Practicing Dying, Session II

In session two of the Fall series of Buddhist art workshops on death and dying, we examined the inevitability of death, and what is important to us in light of our mortality, engaging the The Nine Contemplations, a traditional Buddhist meditation on this topic. We then worked with a variety of media to explore our personal experiences of this meditation. Given the challenging topics we are looking at, the emotional temperature in the studio was very warm, light, and playful. The practices of looking at death and dying are turning out to be a lot more fun than most of us expected. I asked the participants to write a bit about their experiences. Here is one response, from Katie, below. More will follow as we complete some of the art projects in another session. For this project, participants we had wooden cigar boxes as a starting point, and participants were invited to consider the box as a possible metaphor for the body and notions of self.

Dharma Art series: Process reflection...Oct. 2019

“I notice in approaching this process an internal dialogue going on that has something to do with the meaning or feelings I attach to color in my life. Now I’m aware that I was struggling to integrate the concepts shared in the reading by Joan Halifax. She writes, ‘...death collapses into an integrated energy that cannot be fragmented. In this view, to deny death is to deny life. We can live and practice in such a way that dying is a natural rite of passage, a completion of our life, and even the ultimate in liberation.’ I accepted Jill’s invitation to do two shadow boxes and was working on them simultaneously. I decided to make one of them monochromatic, but then noticed my resistance to that.  I find it hard to stay energized working on the gold box because it is challenging me to consider all the ways that color drains from ones life as death approaches. Not only is the physical body losing its capacities for independence, but the heart too can begin to withdraw during the final weeks of life. I am reminded of how we describe people when they are looking ill...”all the color has run out of her face”. For now, I am allowing my energies to stay with the colorful box which features the image of a woman standing naked beneath a bucket of water as she rinses her hair. She is helping me consider all the ways that death might be viewed as a liberator. I am intrigued by the possibility expressed in a favorite poem, ‘Maybe we dance from this elegant place, discarding our vulnerable bodies like old work clothes at the end of the day......or maybe like four-year-olds we drop everything and simply run forward dazzled again.’ (Poem ‘Maybe’ by Roberta D. K.) “——Katie R.

Opening the Mind Eye: A Dharmic Approach to Art. look for this one day workshop offered in Winter 2020

When we come into a museum or gallery space we are often not really open to what is there. When our preconceptions and opinions get in the way of direct perception our world is compromised and we miss the incredible power and delicacy of this visual dimension that is arising in front of us moment by moment.

Through group practice, open interviews with the teacher, and rousing exercises that ask us to investigate our conceptual compartmentalization of our sense-consciousnesses, we can cut through our tendency to pre-judge what is right under our noses and see, even participate in, the creation itself.

This program is ideal for artists who feel stuck, unstuck artists who wonder what’s next, and for “non-artists” who yearn to express themselves creatively. Participants are also heartily encouraged to share their work with the group whatever the medium or discipline.

Teacher: Kyoun Sokuzan, Abbot of Sokukoji Buddhist Temple Monastery, from Battle Creek, MI, brings to the Dharma Studio a one day workshop that he teaches regularly the NYC Shambala Meditation Center and the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. Closely linked to the Dharma Studio art practices, this workshop invites one to practice bare awareness in relating with visual art. Time and date to be announced. Please contact the Dharma Studio with any questions.

Recent news

Unadorned Lotus Dharma Studio welcomes your Buddhist practice and Art practice news and stories. Please contact Lianghua Su Jill Eggers.

Unadorned Lotus Dharma Studio. Buddhist Practice, Art as Practice.

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Dharma Art Saturday class, Spring 2019

Spring 2019 Dharma Art class.