Mountain Tiger-Sky Mind 虚

Ikebana Lessons~~

1.

I love it when sensei brings flowers and branches from her father’s garden for our lesson. I always knew I wanted to study the Sogetsu style 草月流 of ikebana, first because it was the style my tea teacher practiced. But I also loved the way it could be done anywhere in the world, using any kind of materials. As an expression of the spirit of the place, like wine, it is a celebration of terroir.

And so, this week I was excited to work with carnations and carob. Don’t you love the way the seeds and berries from the tree are cascading down the vase?

Whenever I watch sensei doing an arrangement, I am struck by her care, not only toward the flowers but her attention to the active empty space that is part of the floral field. When I took lessons in Dutch Still Life flower arrangement, I was surprised by the way the floral field is completely filled, in much the same way that an oil canvas is primed and fully painted. You never glimpse the canvas underneath an oil painting in the same way you see and appreciate the white spaces in a Chinese landscape painting.

Because, of course, the empty space is doing crucial work. In Japanese this is called 余白の美 the “beauty of the white space.” As an expression of “ma., it is an emptiness that is active and generative.

2.
When early Chinese translators first encountered the Sanskrit term fsunyata, they instinctively understood that rather than using the immediate translation choice conveying “absence” no/not/nothing 無,they instead employed the Chinese word for “sky” 空. Because sky is suggestive of the “ethers.” Like yin and yang—of mist and water, and energy.

We can all look out our window and immediately realize the sky is not “nothing” or “void.” Rather, it is a boundless and boundary-less sphere. The perfect place for birds to fly and clouds to form. A generative space. As the Heart Sutra tells us: It is “emptiness depending on matter” and “matter depending on emptiness.”

I always think of that when I watch sensei arranging flowers, in the the care she takes in this generative space. Between those carob branches I can easily imagine clouds forming above the magenta carnations. The space is filled with possibilities.

3.

In David Hinton’s book, China Root: Taoism, Ch’an, and Original Zen, he traces the concept of emptiness back to ideas found in Daoism. He explains that Daoist conceptions of emptiness were mapped onto the foreign India term sunyata, and then incorporated directly into Chan Buddhism.

To bring this idea home, Hinton describes a wonderful synonym for emptiness/sky 空 in the Daoist/Chan syllabary: xu 虚. Sometimes translated as void; emptiness; unpreparedness; crack; fissure; untruth, etc., the character was originally a pictographically-constructed representation of a sky whose life-energy is made especially dramatic with a tiger 虎 above a pair of mountain peaks 山.

This included a sense of “mountain tiger-sky. And hence, the “empty-mind” 空心 goal of Zazen, becomes “mountain tiger-sky mind.”

I love thinking of this during my lessons.

4

I also often find myself now thinking about plants as sentient beings— each, as some Buddhist philosophers might say, on their own path toward salvation and enlightenment. Michael Pollan, in his new book on consciousness, begins his journey with a long meditation on exactly this possibility when he describes the poppies in his Berkeley garden appearing to return his gaze one afternoon, and rather than dismissing the experience, he followed his feeling into the emerging science of plant intelligence.

Researchers have shown that plants are able to read their environment and solve problems. They appear able to learn, form memories, send signals to other plants, change their behavior in response, and even cooperate with plants they recognize as kin. Pollan stops short of claiming they have reflective selfhood, but he takes their inner life seriously. And so do I.

Mountain tiger-sky mind. I am still learning to see it.

In the picture below you can see how we have to make an architectural scaffolding, using the materials to keep the arrangement in place. It’s really hard!

Here is my post on Pollan’s book—and I also highly recommend David George Haskell’s new book How Flowers Made Our World. Finally, here is a post about Dutch Still life flowers.