Roshi Pat Enkyo O'Hara on the Intimacy of Zen Poetry, Part 1

Even if you don't fancy yourself an art historian, it's not unlikely if you've come across the works of the Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte before. Referenced frequently in the popular cultural lexicon of album artwork and Simpson's episodes, Magritte's visual vocabulary is as iconic as that of fellow twentieth century artists, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. One of his most well-known images comes from his "La Trahison des Images", or "The Treachery of Images", catalogue, a series featuring the "Ceci n'est pas un pipe", or "This is not a pipe", painting of 1928-29. "Ceci n'est pas un pipe" is a work that, while it states the obvious—the image of the pipe is not actually a pipe—actually goes much deeper by playfully questioning the veracity of the representativeness of an image, text, or linguistic abstraction. In challenging the authority of abstractions in iconographic, textual, or linguistic representations, and particularly those that are naturalized, "Ceci n'est pas" questions the relationship between language and perception, presence and absence, and the fixity or impermanence of meaning.

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• zen
• poetry
• Buddhism
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