拈花微笑 The Flower Sermon

Transformation in a moment

1.

It happened on Vulture Mountain. When the Buddha held up a flower, and his disciple, seeing that single flower, broke into a smile. In that instant being enlightened.

No words and yet: enlightenment

In Joan Stamm’s wonderful book about ikebana, Heaven and Earth Are Flowers: Reflections on Ikebana and Buddhism, she talks about the way flowers lend a heightened presence to an occasion…. which is why we give them to people who are in mourning. Why we put them on graves; why we carry them down the aisle at weddings and give them to lovers on Valentines Day. This is something we do without even thinking—why flowers? And yet, of course, flowers!

2.

登科後　孟郊
昔日齷齪不足誇
今朝放蕩思無涯
春風得意馬蹄疾
一日看尽長安花

Meng Jiao:

Upon Passing the Imperial Examination
All my past worries no longer worth mentioning
As I gallop my horse this morning
Elated, my thoughts soar in the spring breeze
For in one short day
I see all the peonies of Chang’an

Has that ever happened to you? In the blink of an eye, t you see all the flowers in the world?

3.

This year’s Taiga Drama Berabou べらぼう (in English, "Unbound") is set in the infamous Edo period pleasure quarters of Yoshiwara. If you like Ukiyoe prints you might like watching the show since it is interesting to see the lavish hairstyles, kimono, and famous kabuki actors you know from the floating world pictures brought to life …But to be honest, even though I love the actor Ken Watanabe, I am not very interested in the show and have only watched the first three episodes.

In episode three, though, the protagonist, in his struggle to attract new clients to visit Yoshiwara, creates a book to advertise the courtesans and prostitutes.

The book is called, 一目千本 hitome-senbon which means, “a thousand trees in a glance.”

You might have heard the more well-known expression: 一目千本桜 hitome-senbon-sakura… for that incredible vision when a large cluster of cherry blossom trees suddenly burst into bloom in profusion—from a distance resembling puffy clouds hovering along the mountainside or creating long tunnels of flowers that you can meander beneath~~ finding yourself in wonderland.

We lived by a place like that in Tochigi and every year we would bike out to the spot and leisurely walk under the blossoms. I have never experienced anything like that anywhere else but in Japan. Truly, it seems like the world has been transformed in the blink of an eye. Enlightened?

Anyway, in the drama the protagonist creates this book in which he compares each flower to one of the “girls.”

Except he doesn’t illustrate his book with drawings of flowers but rather each flower is accompanied by a picture of an ikebana arrangement. Ikebana became incredibly popular in the Edo period, for it was during that time period when a more naturalistic and more accessible style of flower arrangement came into popularity —including the style I study Sogetsu.

Right now in my beloved lessons, we are working on the nageire 抛入花 style of upright arrangement. Nageire means “thrown in,” and this could be apocryphal but on the English Wikipedia page it says it was developed when a bored samurai tossed plant material into the small opening of a tall, deep vase on the opposite corner of the room, giving the style its name.

If only it was that easy!!

More pictures from my lesson below! The flowering branch is Oklahoma red bud—with lilies.

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Notes:

I am still so sad about the passing of Ken Rodgers, the managing editor of Kyoto Journal. Ken was the person who gave me my first break in publishing (accepting some translations I had made after graduate school and then accepting an essay I wrote soon after that). I have known him for years— and respected him enormously. The magazine is going forward with its next issue, and as the translation editor I am on the lookout for wonderful translations— short stories, poetry, creative nonfiction? From Japanese, Chinese (the last one we worked on was from Tamil). If you have something you would like to share—please send it our way!