 Okay, and so I'm turning on the microphone. Is this okay for everyone? All right, I can also hopefully project as I have plenty of experience with all of my classes. All right, I can turn it up. Let's see. Does that work? Okay, great. Thank you again for all coming out on this beautiful Sunday afternoon, and I certainly hope that the lecture today is worth your while. All right, when you think of Zen, ideas of calmness, nature, or simplicity might come to mind. Or if you've been to a bookstore lately, you might think of all the titles with Zen and or in the art of, from Zen and the art of making a living, to Zen and the art of cooking beer can chicken. The best known of these is probably one of the earliest, Robert Persig's 1974 Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. How many people here have read this book? All right, so a pretty good percentage. I'll return to it at the end of the talk, but for now it will suffice to note that it has very little to do with Zen Buddhism, something acknowledged in the author's note. In fact, most books with these kinds of titles have little to do with Zen Buddhism. This also applies to the vast quantity of products that boast the Zen brand from MP3 players to a Zen of Zen Zinfandel. The question I'm attempting to answer in this lecture is, how do we get from Zen art? That is, paintings or calligraphy on Zen themes by Zen monks, as we see in the current exhibition, to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. In answering this question, what I will not do is claim that Zen art is authentic, while Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is inauthentic, or that Japanese Zen is the real thing, and American Zen is a cheap imitation. Instead, I will show how the same historical developments in the 19th and 20th centuries both shaped how we define Zen art and allowed the Zen and the art of genre to arise. In following this link from Zen art to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I take a historical approach. That is, I argue that the proliferation of books with Zen in or and the Art of Titles in the contemporary United States occurred because various historical factors converged, and I present a genealogy of the Zen in and the Art of Genre with reference to time and place. It is important for me to reveal myself for what I really am, which is a scholar of religious history. There are many opportunities for people to listen to or read about practitioners' understandings and experiences of Zen or of Buddhism. As one example, the monk Jeanne Punadamo of the Thai Theravada tradition of Buddhism will be giving a lecture on Buddhist views of nature and the animal realm in this same auditorium on November 16th of Friday at 2.30 for people who are interested in the practitioner's perspective. But this lecture today is an opportunity to learn about Zen and Buddhism from a different perspective. I've divided this lecture into roughly four sections. I begin by giving a sort of general background of the history and major themes in Zen Buddhism with a focus on how later legends present a one-sided view of the tradition. The second part of the talk concerns the problem of categorizing Zen art in pre-modern China and Japan. I'll go through some of the paintings in the current exhibit to illustrate this issue. In the third section, I turn to the modern reinvention of Zen in the 19th and 20th centuries, as seen in the works of people like Nukaria Kaiten and Diti Suzuki focusing on their characterization of Zen as the foundation of all Japanese culture, especially the arts. The final portion of the talk looks at how this vision of Zen affected views of Zen in the West. I examine the books Zen in the Art of Archery, which came out in English translation in 1953 and Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance published in 1974. So moving on to part one. The Zen paintings and calligraphy in this exhibit come from mainly 18th to 20th century Japan, but Zen began more than a millennium before this in 7th and 8th century China. The term Zen ultimately comes from the Sanskrit term dhyana, meaning a state of meditative absorption. Chinese Buddhists transliterated dhyana based on its pronunciation, rather than on its meaning, turning it into channa. Channa was abbreviated to chan, which is the character pronounced Zen in Japan, and so on in Korean, Tianan Vietnamese. For the sake of convenience, I'm going to use the term Zen throughout the talk, even when talking about the Chinese tradition. So Zen is one of many forms of Buddhism that developed based on the teachings of the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, who lived in northern India between roughly 566 and 486 BCE. Zen belongs to the Buddhist tradition called Mahayana, which means the Great Vehicle. So we see it in Mahayana there. This term, Great Vehicle, is one that Mahayana Buddhists came up with to describe themselves. And it refers to this ideal of Mahayana practice, the bodhisattva. A bodhisattva is somebody who postpones final enlightenment or final Buddhahood to lead other beings to enlightenment, hence the metaphor of the large vehicle. It can take many people over to enlightenment. Mahayana Buddhists, however, use the pejorative term Hinayana, or small vehicle, to refer to Buddhists who championed the arhat ideal of attaining nirvana oneself and leaving the cycle of rebirth, so not sticking around. Nobody calls themselves Hinayana. This is why it's in quotation marks. It's a very negative term. So Mahayana Buddhism is the form of Buddhism that becomes most popular in East Asia, where it gives rise to many different schools. In addition to the Zen school, we have the Pure Land School, Tendai, and Kegon, or Huayan schools, which are all Mahayana traditions. So Zen is one of many Mahayana traditions. Meanwhile, Theravada is the form of Buddhism that's found mainly in Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka, while Vajrayana Buddhism, or the Thunderbolt or Diamond Vehicle, is dominant in Tibetan and Mongolian cultural regions. Mahayana Buddhism developed centuries after the Buddha's death, but Zen legends claim that the Buddha initiated their lineage one day, one day while giving a sermon, the Buddha didn't say anything, but held up a lotus flower. I've tried this in classes before, just starting by holding up usually a pen or something like that. It creates confusion. And that's what happened when, according to legend, the Buddha did the same thing. The audience responded with confused looks and shrugged shoulders, save for the Buddha's disciple, Mahakashipa, who smiled. For Mahakashipa, the Buddha's gesture sparked an awakening. So this exchange is sometimes called a mind-to-mind transmission, but the concept of transmission is itself misleading because it implies that the Buddha gave something to Mahakashipa. It's better to understand it as the enlightened teacher that is the Buddha, recognizing that the student has attained the same kind of enlightenment. So this account of the first then transmission probably never happened historically, but the story's themes represent important then teachings. First, we have the notion of Buddha nature or innate enlightenment reflected in Mahakashipa's sudden insight. Buddha nature is the idea that people are already Buddhas or are already enlightened, but most people don't realize that. This idea is what makes it possible to have sudden awakening experiences, unlike earlier Buddhist doctrines that prescribed a long process of gradual insights and purification of karmic defilements. With Buddha nature, people just need to awaken to their innately enlightened state. Sounds easy, right? Just realize you're a Buddha and you are. Of course, it ends up being more complicated than that. The problem is figuring out what's going to trigger that awakening and how to determine whether the full awakening has occurred. This is where the teacher comes in. As an enlightened person, the teacher knows how to use various techniques, especially non-verbal techniques or unusual uses of language, to prompt an awakening in students. Then self-definitions include separate transmission outside the teachings and does not rely on words, which refer to this rejection of conventional language. The teacher is also qualified to judge through communication with the student whether the student is really enlightened. The close teacher-student relationship is closely related to the second major theme expressed in the story of Mahakashipa's awakening, which is that of lineage. For Zen Buddhists in China, Mahakashipa became the second Zen patriarch when he received the transmission or non-transmission from the Buddha. The lineage then passed through 26 other figures before reaching Bodhidharma, the 28th Indian patriarch and first Chinese patriarch who brought Zen to China. Bodhidharma is a key figure in transmitting the Zen lineage to East Asia, and legends describe as well as a character. After he arrived in China, Bodhidharma attracted considerable attention and even received an audience with Emperor Wu of the Liang Dynasty, a devout Buddhist. Emperor Wu had donated huge amounts of resources to Buddhist monasteries and sponsored the creation of Buddhist statues, scriptures, etc. He asked Bodhidharma how much good karma he had accrued through his philanthropy. Bodhidharma answered, none. The outraged Emperor demanded of Bodhidharma, who are you to say that to me? Bodhidharma replied, I don't know. Emperor Wu ordered his officials to seize the impudent monk, but Bodhidharma used his powers to escape and cross over the wide Yangtze River on a rush-leaf. Afterward he retreated to Shaolin Monastery, yes, that Shaolin Monastery, and sat in enlightenment in a cave for nine years. Worried about maintaining his concentration, he cut off his eyelids to retain focus. I do not recommend this to the students in the audience for studying even when finals come around. Several paintings in this exhibit depict Bodhidharma and refer to these episodes, either visually or through the inscriptions, which shows his continued importance in Zen. The second patriarch of Zen in China was a man named Hui Ke, who repeatedly sought instruction from Bodhidharma only to be rejected each time. It was only when Hui Ke cut off his own arm, as we see here, he's holding his arm, and offered it to Bodhidharma that he was accepted as a disciple. From Hui Ke, the transmission passed to the patriarchs Sung Chan, Dao Xin, and Hong Ren before reaching the sixth patriarch, Hueneng. After Hueneng, the lineage splits into multiple branches, but all of these trace their genealogy back to Hueneng, back to Bodhidharma, and ultimately back to the Buddha. This account of early Zen history in China reflects the very real importance of lineage and legitimation in Zen, but it is, again, not historically accurate. For starters, Bodhidharma was not the iconoclastic rebel he appears to be a legend, but a fairly conventional Indian monk who taught Buddha nature, a widespread Mahayana doctrine at the time. There's also no evidence that he saw himself as introducing a distinct form of Buddhism called Zen to China, because there's no reference to a Zen lineage in China until centuries after his death. It is also not the case that Zen transmission was passed exclusively from one patriarch to the next until the sixth patriarch, Hueneng. Both this idea of a string of pearls transmission, that is an exclusive transmission from one exceptional figure to the next, and legends of Bodhidharma's life developed retroactively, only crystallizing in the ninth century. But even if they don't tell us what Zen patriarchs did during their lifetimes, the legends still tell us what was important to Zen Buddhists in the ninth century and later. It is those later Zen Buddhists who embrace the idea of Bodhidharma as an irreverent iconoclast and continue to elevate the image of shocking and unconventional Zen masters. This is especially clear in the encounter dialogues that became a defining genre of Zen literature in the Song dynasty from 960 to 1279. Encounter dialogues feature short exchanges between a Zen master and his disciple. Women are rarely represented in these encounters in which the master uses confusing or provocative language or sometimes physical violence to trigger the student's awakening to his innate Bodhid. In one example, the Zen master, Judi, was known for holding up one finger when people asked for his teachings. We don't know which finger it was. I'm going to go with a polite one. One day a visitor asked a young novice monk what his master taught in response to the novice held up a finger. Judi heard about this act, chased after the boy and cut off his finger. Holding a bloody hand, the boy ran away crying. But the master called to him. When the boy turned around, he saw Judi holding up a finger and became instantly enlightened. Violence is also a theme in the following exchange. At the monk Nanchen's place one day, the monks of the Eastern and Western halls were arguing about a cat. When Nanchen saw this, he then held up the cat and said, If you can speak, then I will not kill it. No one in the community replied. Nanchen cut the cat into two pieces. Nanchen recited this story to question his disciple Zhaozhou. Zhaozhou immediately took off his straw sandals, placed them on his head and left. Nanchen said, If you had been there, you would have saved the cat. To reassure you, no cats were harmed in the making of this encounter dialogue. It is most likely fictional. But it does represent Zen ideals of spontaneity in activating the Buddha nature. The monks of the Eastern and Western halls were too worried about what they would say to save the cat that they didn't say anything. In contrast, Zhaozhou reacts without thinking, just puts his sandals on his head and leaves. In another famous example, the Zen master, Lin Ji Yixian, founder of the Lin Ji lineage pronounced Rinzai in Japanese, gave his audience the following instructions. Whatever you encounter, either within or without, kill it at once. On meeting a Buddha, kill the Buddha. On meeting a patriarch, kill the patriarch. On meeting your parents, kill your parents. By not cleaving to things, you freely pass through. Now, Lin Ji was not advocating literal Buddha-side or patricide, but encouraging his students to not get too attached to the idea of Buddhas or other external authorities. Killing the Buddha is the only way to realize one's own Buddhahood. So this kind of Buddha-side rhetoric or violent rhetoric is common in Zen literature. But when we look at Zen practices, a different picture emerges. Far from killing the patriarchs, Zen monks enshrined them posthumously and made offerings to them. Usually offerings were made to portraits of deceased masters, but in some cases it was their mummified corpses that received this honor. This is important to note because modern scholars of Zen often paint Zen as devoid of the ritualism and superstition that they see in other religions. Zen monastic life was highly ritualized, though, and included devotional and miraculous elements, such as the veneration of deceased masters' relics and attribution of supernormal powers to advanced practitioners. Furthermore, in contrast to Bodhidharma's legendary impudence in his dialogue with Emperor Wu, Zen monks in the Song dynasty cultivated connections to powerful patrons, including emperors and local scholar officials. In pointing this out, I'm not trying to cast Zen monks as hypocrites, but to show that Zen is more than the image that emerges from these textual sources of encountered dialogues and recorded sayings. Even if these encountered dialogues and recorded sayings didn't actually happen historically and did not represent all of Zen, they did become an important part of Zen practice. In China, these texts became the basis for public cases or precedents called gong'an in Chinese, but better known through their Japanese pronunciation koan. One of the Zen lineages that developed in the Song dynasty, that of Linji or Rinzai, made meditation on koans its key practice. In this case, students would focus on the critical phrase of the koan. For a koan like, does a dog have Buddha nature? No. The critical phrase is no, or mu in Japanese. Meditating on no wasn't meant to lead practitioners to a logical understanding. You can't reason your way out of no. Instead, this form of meditation drives the mind beyond its reliance on conventional discursive rational thought to the breakthrough insight into one's true Buddha nature. The student would discuss his understanding and the teacher verified whether the student was on the right track and whether the student had attained enlightenment. So just to give you a sense of the various lineages that split off in China, the other main Zen lineage that developed in China in the Song dynasty, the lineage called Cao Dong in Chinese and Soto in Japanese, did not emphasize meditation on the critical phrase of the koan or the sudden experience of enlightenment such practice was meant to bring about. Instead, Soto Zen emphasized enacting one's Buddha nature in every moment of life, particularly through seated meditation. There was no specific object of meditation. A third Zen lineage called Obaku in Japanese and Huang Bo in Chinese developed later in the Ming dynasty from 1368 to 1644. Huang Bo was the teacher of Lin Ji Yixian so some monks in this lineage claimed to belong to the Lin Ji or Lin Zai lineage, but not all Lin Zai monks Obaku monks represented the form of Chan that had become popular in the Ming dynasty, one that combined Chan with Pure Land Buddhism, a more clearly devotional tradition that aimed at rebirth in the Pure Land of the Buddha Amitabha where people could attain Nirvana more easily than in other rebirths. So when Obaku monks fled to Japan in the chaos surrounding the fall of the Ming dynasty in the 17th century, some Japanese Zen Buddhists were suspicious of their teachings and saw them as Zen in contrast to the Pure Song dynasty form that had arrived in Japan centuries earlier. One of the reasons I'm mentioning these three forms of Zen is that two of them the Lin Zai and Obaku lineages are heavily represented in the exhibit so you can see representative works from the Lin Zai and Obaku schools. Alright, it's time to move on then to this very idea of Zen art. One of the central questions that I'm thinking about the literary and visual arts of pre-modern Chinese and Japanese Zen is whether it's even possible to separate a Zen art genre from the broader art world. Zen monks in both China and Japan relied on educated elites scholar officials in China and warriors in Japan to support their monasteries. Most well-known Zen monk artists were themselves highly educated in the classical traditions poetry, calligraphy, and painting. The arts were thus a common language that monastic and secular elites could use to establish strong ties for mutual benefit. Robert Scharf, a professor of Buddhist studies at UC Berkeley, has pointed out that many of the arts now associated with Zen, the tea ceremony, calligraphy, dry landscape gardens, and no drama were part of a broader cultural vocabulary in pre-modern East Asia. That is, they were no more a Zen than they were Confucian, Taoist, or Buddhist. One of the difficulties in talking about the presence or absence of Zen art in pre-modern East Asia is that a lot of art historians base their definitions of Zen art on modern conceptions. They sometimes read anything that they can interpret in accordance with Zen teachings as having been understood as Zen art. Zen, in this case, is primarily defined in terms of enlightenment. Zen art is that which expresses the enlightened mind. The use of art in other ways, for example, to establish ties with donors or to use in funerary practices is sometimes ignored because these uses are not seen as being essential to Zen. The easiest works to categorize as Zen art are paintings and calligraphy by Zen monks and nuns that depict distinctively Zen themes such as Zen patriarchs, Zen teachers, or sayings attributed to Zen masters. Most of the works in the current exhibit fall into this category. All of these artists were Zen monks. Some belonged to other Buddhist schools but depicted Zen themes. And not all of the Zen monks depicted distinctively Zen themes. Some portrayed Shinto shrines, Buddhist ideas that weren't distinctive to Zen or nature scenes. I'll return to the exhibit in a minute, but I want to first give an outline of Zen arts in China and Japan prior to the Edo period, which is when most of the works in the exhibit come from. So Zen monks in Song Dynasty China were active in the arts, but there was no concept of Zen art nor distinctive tradition of Zen art that developed at this time. The closest thing to Zen art was art on topics related to Zen, such as representations of the patriarchs, the ten ox herding pictures that represented the Zen path, the symbol of the circle representing complete enlightenment, and literature that explicitly invoked Zen. Zen also became associated with monochromatic ink paintings, which used the splattered ink and untrammeled artistic techniques of which this PowerPoint theme could be one example. But these did not arise themselves in Zen contexts. Zen monastic training did not require artistic training, and Zen monk artists participated in the larger culture of the Song Dynasty. They studied the same techniques and classical sources as their non-monastic counterparts and monastic counterparts in other forms of Buddhism. Of course, the larger culture of the Song Dynasty was itself heavily influenced by Zen, and lay literati of the Song Dynasty were likely to be familiar with Zen teachings, even if they also had extensive knowledge of Neo-Confucianism and Taoism as well. When people talk about Zen art in Song Dynasty China, they usually refer to those ink paintings and calligraphy that they understand as embodying the spontaneity and unmediated nature of the enlightened mind. This interpretation owes a lot to modern redefinitions of Zen, as we will see, and it also leaves a lot out. Robert Scharf and T. Griffith Folk have shown that the portraits of abbots were central to Zen funerary ritual, in which they occupied a place similar to that of the ancestral tablet in the non-monastic Chinese family. Monks regularly made offerings to these portraits and treated them as the substitute bodies of the deceased. The portraits were seen as more than just representations. They embodied the deceased in the absence of a flesh body. These portraits, statues of Buddhist figures enshrined at Zen temples or natively printed scriptures, and the temples themselves should also be included in the Zen art category. These same considerations apply when we look at Zen in Japan. The Rinzai and Soto lineages were introduced to Japan in the 12th and 13th centuries. Both lineages flourished, but the Soto lineage became more popular in the countryside among commoners, while the Rinzai lineage became especially popular among the samurai class that had risen to power in the Kamakura period. The samurai class rose at a time when the emperor essentially lost any real political power, so Shoguns, the generals were in control of the Japanese government, really from the Kamakura period through the Edo period. In the 13th century, when the Mongols conquered China, more Rinzai monks emigrated to Japan and brought with them not only Buddhism, but other parts of Song dynasty Chinese culture, including the visual arts, intellectual trends like neoconfusionism and architecture. The Five Mountain Gozan network of Rinzai Zen monasteries became especially associated with the literary and visual arts at this time. Government sponsorship of Zen monasteries continued into the Muromachi period when the Ashikaga Shogunate supported and expanded the Gozan Institution, the Five Mountains Institution. However, things began to change with the Tokugawa or Edo period that began around 1600. The Tokugawa Shoguns adopted a more hands-off approach to Buddhism, making Buddhist monks more dependent on private patronage. And many of the monk artists in this exhibit created paintings and calligraphy for these donors. The Third Zen lineage, Obaku entered Japan in the Edo period as well and contributed to the development of the literary and visual arts in Japanese Zen. Obaku monks introduced later artistic developments from the continent to Japan, including their distinctively fluid yet bold form of calligraphy. Images from the current exhibit highlight issues surrounding the definition of Zen art in the Edo period and into the 20th century. As I'll discuss in the third part of this talk, the exhibit spans the periods of time in which there's a shift in how Zen art is defined. Most of the content related Zen themes in this exhibit relate to the previously discussed notions of innate enlightenment and lineage. Three of the images in the exhibit portray Bodidharma, the legendary founder of the Chinese Zen lineage and infamous provocateur. So we see Bodidharma in his iconic pose on the rush leaf in this painting by Gocho Kankai, a Tendai monk, so not a Zen monk who painted Zen content. Another image of Bodidharma by the late 19th and early 20th century monk Sohan Gempo depicts the patriarch in standard form with heavy beard and eyebrows to signify his Indian identity and includes a line attributed to Bodidharma in teaching the second patriarch Quaker. He says outwardly, still all conditions, inwardly, the mind does not gasp. When the mind is like a wall, you may enter the way. This reflects the practice of calming the mind and alludes to the story of Bodidharma's many years of wall contemplation inside the cave. Several lines of calligraphy quote Chinese masters from his perceived golden age. For example, the Tang dynasty monk Ma-zu is quoted in the line, great master Ma's this very mind is the Buddha which essentially means your mind is the Buddha's mind, a reference to innate enlightenment. This phrase comes from in counter dialogue in Ma-zu's recorded sayings and later becomes the critical phrase of a koan on which monks meditated. Here the monk Jiun Onko who belonged to the Shingon School of Buddhism that is not Zen renders the statement as a single line of calligraphy. Now the idea of Buddha nature or innate enlightenment was also a part of Shingon Buddhism but Ma-zu belonged to the Zen lineage. For Jiun Onko to choose this line for his calligraphy shows the extensive interactions among monks from different Buddhist schools and makes it difficult to clearly delineate Zen art. Ma-zu's grand disciple the Tang dynasty monk Zhao Zhou who we just saw putting his sandals on his head and leaving also has sayings that appear throughout koan collections and he has featured several times in this exhibit. The gourd on Zhao Zhou's east wall the great road or way passing through the capital, tea everybody attentively drinks Zhao Zhou's tea and ordinary mind is the way these examples of calligraphy were all painted by monks in the Rinzai and Obaku Zen lineages and they represent a distinctly Zen tradition. The same is true of those on Ekko's calligraphy the hidden bird is playing with true suchness. This relates to koan meditation because it was the second half of a capping phrase for a koan the first half of which is the old pine is speaking wisdom. So basically these collections of capping phrases were based on earlier Zen literature and became part of koan meditation in Japan. So students who gave satisfactory answers to their koan would be sent to these collections of capping phrases to choose the one that best fit their understanding of the koan. So they would have to have you know some reason to choose this particular capping phrase over another capping phrase but you might have noticed that this phrase in itself does not make a whole lot of sense. Hidden bird playing with true suchness. I wanted to figure out what this said in the first place because one wouldn't necessarily think to put those words together in this way. All right so other content in the exhibit depicts the Zen practice of priests begging for food which we see here this is a practice known as takohatsu in Japanese and is seen in this image by Deryu Kutsu. The calligraphy reads itinerant priests throughout the world their begging bowls resound like thunder. The priests as unsui literally clouds and water a Zen term for novices who have not yet settled on a temple to call home. Elsewhere in the exhibit we see images of the monk Buddha or cloth bag called Hote in Japanese who is a popular figure in Zen art. He's considered to be an incarnation of the future Buddha Maitreya. We also see images of the fifth and sixth patriarchs of Chinese Zen so there's a lot of clearly Zen themes. It's reasonable to call depictions of distinctively Zen themes Zen art but not all of the work in the exhibit or in other collections of Zen art portrays distinctively Zen themes. For example in this exhibit Sengai Gibon's painting of the Hakozaki Shinto shrine in Kyushu and calligraphic inscriptions do not have clearly Zen themes though Sengai elsewhere does paint distinctively Zen content. Is anything he does Zen because he's a Zen monk? We could ask the same questions about the Obaku monks, Dapeng and Raiho's paintings of bamboo. Bamboo was a common theme in both Chinese and Japanese painting but it certainly wasn't limited to Zen monk artists and the plant itself has more confusion symbolism historically than Zen symbolism. One of the most difficult aspects of preparing this talk has been finding information about how people in the Edo period themselves talked about these issues. Most scholarship on the topic claims that the genre of Zen painting or Zengai developed in the Edo period to refer to precisely these kinds of images that is monochromatic ink paintings and calligraphy. But even if this genre of Zen painting did arise in the Edo period we can still question the concept of Zen art as a category. For one thing ornate objects and temple decorations remain part of Zen temples making them part of the world of Zen art and more importantly the concept of Zen painting does not encompass the other arts with which Zen has become associated. Zen monks participated in other arts including the tea ceremony no drama, rock gardens haiku poetry etc but those arts were part of a broader cultural landscape and not associated specifically with Zen. Members of other Buddhist schools participated in these arts too as did members of the upper classes who were not Zen monks. There is also no indication that people in the Edo period identified these arts specifically with Zen. But this changed starting in the 19th century. It was in 1853 that Matthew Perry and his black ships arrived in Japan and forced Japan to open up more to trade with other countries aside from the Netherlands and China which had been its only trading partners prior to that time. In 1868 the Meiji Restoration brought the emperor back to power after centuries of Shogun rule. These events ushered in a new age in Japan one in which Japan encountered the imperial powers of the modern west as well as the discourses of nation, religion and philosophy. Japanese intellectuals created a modern Japan within this new framework. This process fits into Edward Said's well-known notion of Orientalism. In Orientalism people who identify with the west create a conceptual opposite in the east. To mix cultural metaphors the east serves as a feminine passive yin to the west's masculine active yang. The east can also fill in that which the west lacks. It is the mystical, intuitive counterpart to western rationalism and science. A key part of Orientalism is also that people in the east also accept and identify with this paradigm. In the case of Japan, intellectuals took up ideas of nation, religion and philosophy and looked to compete with western powers at their own game. They felt the need to define Japaneseness and represent the east much as European powers defined their own national identities and claimed to represent the west during the same period. This emphasis on Japaneseness presented a problem for Buddhists whose Japanese credentials were questioned in the early years of the Meiji period when Shinto came to represent the essence of Japanese culture. Buddhists suffered a period of persecution called Haibutsu Kishaku, abolish Buddhism and destroy the Buddha Shakyamuni when Buddhist monks were attacked and Buddhist objects destroyed. In 1872 and 1873 Buddhist clerics were officially allowed to eat meat and marry, effectively ending celibate monasticism for Japanese monks though not that many monks had been following the rules all that well anyway. Though many monks opposed these reforms, the reforms paved the way for a modern Buddhism since celibate monasticism was at that time seen as hopelessly outdated. Buddhist priests began to train more lay followers and lay Buddhists began to assume more prominent roles as well. Japanese Buddhists responded to Meiji era nationalism by asserting their own Japaneseness. By the end of the 19th century, Japanese Buddhists claimed that it was in fact Buddhism not Shinto that embodied the essence of Japanese culture and was best suited to guide Japan in the modern age. They acknowledged the corruption that plagued Buddhism during the Edo period and advocated a return to a pure unadulterated Buddhism that just happened to conform to enlightenment ideals of empiricism and rationality. These claims were directed both toward a domestic audience and toward an international audience. Among Japanese Buddhists representatives of Zen were the most successful at first getting the attention of the international audience and then gaining fame at home. The person who first publicized Zen Buddhism in the West was Shaka Soen, a Rinzai monk who represented Zen Buddhism at the 1893 World Parliament of Religions in Chicago and later published the first English language work on Zen, 1906's Sermons of a Buddhist Abbot. Soen, a widely traveled and well educated man, presented Zen as a universal religion compatible with other so-called world religions as well as science. Shaka Soen didn't shy away from Japan's national concerns though. He gave lectures in Korea and Manchuria the part of northern China that Japan had conquered titled The Spirit of the Yamato or Japanese Race and published essays defending Japan's military aggression in Manchuria. So this is a quotation from his work. War is not necessarily horrible provided that it is fought for a just and honorable cause that it is fought for the maintenance of civilization of noble ideals that it is fought for the upholding of humanity and civilization. Many material human bodies may be destroyed many human hearts be broken but from a broader point of view these sacrifices are so many phoenixes consumed in the sacred fire of spirituality which will arise from the smoldering ashes reanimated and nobled and glorified. Shaka Soen is not unique in holding these views. Many other Zen Buddhists and Buddhists from other schools similarly supported Japan's imperial expansion and associated military efforts from the late 19th century through World War II. We can see examples of this. These are images from the book Zen at War by Brian Victoria. On the left you have the tree which is the great Japanese empire. It's being watered with the Zen school basically. So it's showing the contribution that Zen makes to the empire. On the right we have the image of Zen priests holding rifles in support of the war effort. There were, of course, dissenting voices among the Buddhist priesthood lest I give the impression that all Zen monks were war mongers. But it is important to point out that Buddhists are not different from followers of other religions when it comes to justifying violence in certain situations. Shaka Soen's translator on his later trips to the U.S. was a man named Daisets Suzuki known as D.T. Suzuki. I just really like this picture of him with the kitty. Suzuki's depiction of Zen became even more important than Soen's in defining the tradition for a Western audience. D.T. Suzuki was himself not a Zen priest but a lay follower who studied with Shaka Soen in Kamakura from 1891 to 1897 when Suzuki was a student at Tokyo University. For middle class laymen like Suzuki as opposed to an bureaucratic patron or monk to be able to study koans at a monastery on weekends and school vacations was itself a product of the modern reformation of Buddhism in Japan that would not have been a common practice prior to this time. In 1897, Suzuki moved to La Salle, Illinois to study with the German philosopher Paul Karoo. Paul promoted a religion of science in which there is no difference between scientific and religious truth and people must have faith in this unity. He placed the world's religions along an evolutionary scale in relation to his religion of science and he saw Buddhism as the most advanced. In 1894 he published The Gospel of Buddha his own retranslations of Buddha scriptures from available sources. It was not well received by scholars of Buddhism but Shaka Soen praised it and Suzuki ended up translating it into Japanese. Suzuki stayed in La Salle until 1909 when he returned to Japan and started working as a professor of Buddhist philosophy and founded the journal Eastern Buddhist. Though Suzuki later downplayed his connection to the eccentric Karoo, Karoo's understanding of religion and active writing career shaped Suzuki's work on Zen. Another reason I mentioned Paul Karoo is that the Germany-Japan connection will reappear when we consider the book Zen in the Art of Archery. Suzuki's early work was less concerned with promoting Zen than with defending Mahayana Buddhism in general. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries Western scholars of Buddhism saw Mahayana as a degeneration of original Buddhism which they identified in the earlier writings of the Pali language canon. According to the narrative of the time original Buddhism was rational, empirical, and compatible with science while Mahayana Buddhism was corrupted by supernatural, miraculous, and devotional elements. Suzuki thus sought to defend Mahayana as an authentic or even the authentic form of Buddhism. Suzuki's specific interest in Zen arose after his high school classmate Nishida Kitaro published works on unmediated experience in Japanese culture that became the basis of the Kyoto School of Philosophy. Nishida combined elements from Buddhism with ideas from Western philosophy, particularly the emphasis on experience found in works of Schleiermacher, Rudolph Otto, and William James. Experience in contrast does not feature much in pre-modern Buddhist writings. Nishida's definition of pure experience is as follows. Experience means to know reality exactly as it is. It is to know by entirely abandoning the artifices of the self and following reality. Since usually those who discuss experience actually conjoin thought of some sort of to the idea pure means precisely the condition of experience in itself without the admixture of any thinking or discrimination. Therefore, pure experience is identified with immediate experience. When one immediately experiences a conscious state of the self there is still neither subject nor object knowledge and its object are entirely one. This is the purest form of experience. But Nishida was also interested in defining a distinctly Japanese philosophy that rested upon the Orientalist Divide of East and West. He associated Japan and the East with pure feeling, the emotional, the aesthetic and the communal, and the West with intellectualism, rationalism, and science. Nishida additionally proclaimed that the true spirit of the Mahayana is in the East preserved only in Japan and encouraged Japanese people to identify with Japan's national interests as their own interests. Nishida and Suzuki influenced each other and Suzuki began writing books on Buddhism, Zen, and Japanese culture. It is in Suzuki's writings that we see the dissociation of Zen from historical context and the definition of Zen as a universal experience. Yet, this is a universal experience that finds its fullest fruition in Japan. For Suzuki, the Japanese mind is best suited to grasp the Zen experience and Zen is best suited to Japan. In the book, Japanese Spirituality, he claims that the Western mind does not know how to approach Zen. Quote, the only thing we can state here about Zen is that it is altogether unique product of the Oriental mind refusing to be classified under any known heading as either a philosophy or a form of mysticism as it is generally understood in the West. Zen must be studied and analyzed from a point of view that is still unknown among Western philosophers. By Oriental mind, he really means Japanese mind. In Zen and Japanese culture, he writes, it is a significant fact that the other schools of Buddhism have limited their spheres of influence almost entirely to the spiritual life of the Japanese people. Zen has gone beyond it. Zen has entered internally into every phase of the people. He goes on to note that this is not the case in China where apparently Zen remained on the spiritual surface rather than penetrating deeply into the cultural marrow. Suzuki's claim that Zen infused Japanese culture was not new. In 1913, the university professor and Soto Zen priest, Nukarie Kaiten published an English language book called Religion of the Samurai, a study of Zen philosophy and discipline in China and Japan. Nukarie claims that the Zen ethic are one and the same, and he identifies Zen with Bushido, the way of the warrior. This identification bolstered Zen Buddhists' support of Japanese military efforts and claims of legitimate Japaneseness. The idea of Zen informing the Samurai ethic is probably familiar to many of you. And Zen Buddhism was popular among the Samurai class prior to the Meiji Restoration. However, the term Bushido or way of the Samurai is rare in pre-Meiji sources with the indication that Zen monks in the Edo period or earlier identified Zen teachings and practices with the Samurai lifestyle. This identification of Zen with the way of the warrior is part of the modern reinvention of Zen. The idea of Zen permeating Japanese culture, especially in the martial arts, informed the first book to use the Zen in the art of title. Suzuki's essays on Zen Buddhism inspired a German philosophy lecturer named Oigen Herigl to go to Japan and learn archery as a Zen practice. In Zen in the art of archery, Herigl wrote that Diti Suzuki has succeeded in showing that Japanese culture and Zen are intimately connected and that Japanese art, the spiritual attitude of the Samurai, the Japanese way of life, the moral aesthetic, and to a certain extent even the intellectual life of the Japanese owe their peculiarities to this background of Zen and cannot be properly understood by anybody not acquainted with it. Herigl became interested in Zen Buddhism while in Heidelberg when he made the acquaintance of a Japanese student named Ohazama Shuei, a lay practitioner of Rinzai Zen. It was Ohazama who invited Herigl to lecture at Tohoku Imperial University from 1924 to 29, the period when Herigl studied archery with the teacher Awa Kenzo. Herigl expressly wanted to study archery to learn about Zen. His wife pursued the same goals with the art of flower arranging. Archery nor flower arranging was associated distinctively with Zen prior to the 20th century, but things were different in the new Buddhism of Suzuki and Nukareya Kaiten. Luckily for Herigl, his archery instructor Awa Kenzo was eccentric in his own right. Awa differed from other archery instructors in presenting archery as a religious practice. He encouraged students to, quote, put an entire lifetime of exertion into each shot and to identify one's self which reflects the radiance of the Buddha. However, Awa did not present archery in terms of Zen specifically. It was Herigl who undertook the study of archery with the assumption that it was a Zen art. He found what he was looking for regardless of whether it was actually there. Herigl wrote Zen in the art of archery after returning to Germany and taking up a position as professor at the University of Erlangen. In the 1930s, Herigl wrote essays supporting Nazism and praising Hitler as a miracle and joined the Nazi party in 1937. During World War II, Herigl rose up the ranks at Erlangen becoming rector in 1944. After the war, he attempted to dissociate himself from his Nazi affiliation but his own writings and the accounts of others suggest that he was committed to the Nazi party and its causes. The German book Zen in the Art of Archery came out in 1948 and was translated into English in 1953. The year the English translation came out, the then 83-year-old B.T. Suzuki traveled to Germany to visit Herigl and express his admiration for the work. Herigl's Nazi affiliation was not mentioned except for a 1961 letter by Gershom Sholem to the journal Encounter. Herigl's book had a big impact in Germany, the U.S. and Japan where it was translated into Japanese. In the U.S. it inspired the many Zen in and the art of titles starting with Robert Persig's Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. D.T. Suzuki's understanding of Zen in the arts was extremely influential in the U.S. and found increasing support in Japan as well. Hisamatsu Shinichi was a Lei Rienzai Buddhist and professor of philosophy. He defined Zen as an ahistorical spiritual knowledge that served as the basis for all authentic spirituality. Hisamatsu found this amorphous Zen most readily in the traditional Japanese arts and in his book Zen and the Fine Arts he claims that everything from no drama to Chinese landscape painting and Zen experience. Not everyone accepted these claims about Zen in the arts or Suzuki's overall characterization of Zen, but these claims have stuck in American pop culture. In some respects, this new interpretation of Zen is itself nothing new. Change has been a constant in Zen history from its very beginnings in China where it arose as a new form of Buddhism through its transformations in Korea, Japan and Vietnam. It continues to change as it spreads throughout the world. What is problematic about the identification of Zen with the arts of Japan is that it makes historical claims that historical evidence doesn't support. Calling a rock garden a Zen garden now is fine. The association has been established. But claiming that people in the Edo period or the Muramachi period saw rock gardens as Zen gardens is simply incorrect. The same is true of the martial arts drama and tea. These have become Zen arts in the 20th century, but they weren't always seen that way. The extreme end of this idea is the idea that anything is done with an enlightened mind. In this way one must know the spiritual state of artists to determine if their work is truly Zen. Universalizing Zen experience in this way also has the effect of minimizing historical factors including pesky details like advocating the murder of innocent people in the name of imperial expansion or racial purity. Uprooting Zen from any historical context turning Zen into universal experience sets the stage for what we see in the last part of the 20th century. The journey to Robert Persig's Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance requires one more stop to connect his work to that of Suzuki and Harry Gell. So Suzuki had become an increasingly well known figure in the U.S. in the post-war years when he took up a position at Columbia University in the 1950s. His teachings inspired such artists as John Cage and many beat writers who were attracted to his ideas of spontaneity and mediated experience and nothingness. 1958 saw major stories about Zen in time in Mademoiselle magazines as well as a special issue of the Chicago review devoted to Zen and edited by Alan Watts. This attention to Zen did not uncritically reproduce Suzuki's version of Zen and there were important dissenting voices within the American Zen community. Ruth Fuller Sasaki for example who became abyss of the Ryosen on sub-temple of the famous Rinzai temple Dai Tokuji accepted Suzuki's claims that Zen influenced East Asian art and culture but she criticized Zen's numerous followers for discovering that Zen existed quote, all along in English literature. Ultramodern painting, music, dance and poetry are acclaimed as expressions of Zen, then is invoked to substantiate the validity of the latest theories in psychology, psychotherapy, philosophy, semantics, mysticism, free thinking and what have you. It is the magical password at smart cocktail parties and Bohemian get-togethers alike how far away all this is from the recluse Gautama, the Buddha sitting in intense meditation under the Bodhi tree trying to find a solution to this problem of human suffering, end quote. Alan Watts wrote an essay called beat Zen, square Zen and Zen in which he too criticized the casual appropriation of Zen in beat writing. These criticisms show though how much Zen had pervaded American pop culture in the immediate post-war period and how this view of Zen was intimately connected to the arts. This brings us at last to Robert Persig's 1974 Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. After a stint in the army Persig studied eastern philosophy and spent time in India before taking a job teaching creative writing at Montana State University. In the early 1960s he suffered a psychological breakdown and was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and depression. He wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in the period after this. The book chronicles a motorcycle journey from Minnesota to California that Persig took with his son and for the first nine days they were joined by other friends, John and Sylvia Sutherland as well. So Persig intersperses the events from the 17-day journey with his own ruminations on this idea of quality, a philosophical concept that he had been developing since his student days. This is quality with a capital Q. Quality is reminiscent of Paul Carouse's Religion of Science in that it attempts to meld the rational and romantic approaches to existence. Persig initially identifies with the rational problem solving side of quality which manifests in his approach to motorcycle maintenance. Though he gives the disclaimer in his author's note that the book, quote, should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to Orthodox Zen Buddhist practice, he clearly associates Zen with the romantic side of quality and it pops up a few times throughout the book. Persig sees Zen as one of many oriental religions that denies the duality of subject and object. He mentions seated Zen meditation and meditations on the mu koan that does the dog have a Buddha nature, no koan, as practices leading to awareness of quality. But Zen is by no means the only tradition he includes here. Hinduism, Greek philosophy and modern thinkers like Henry David Theroux all point to what Persig sees as a universal truth that people must realize through experience. In fact, Persig looks to Greek philosophy far more than Zen in outlining his theory of quality. Persig's use of Zen in the book relies on the notion of Zen as transcultural experience. His use of Zen in the title draws on Herigold's Zen in the art of archery. So Zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance was first rejected by 121 publishers before being accepted and it went on to sell over 5 million copies. This puts it actually in the Guinness Book of World Records for most initial rejections of a future bestseller. But it did become popular and its popularity paved the way for more books with this title. There had been a few books with Zen in the art of titles that came out before 1974 including Zen in the Art of Photography, Ray Bradbury's Essay, Zen in the Art of Writing and a poetry collection subtitled Zen in the Art of Loving which I'm curious about. So all of these followed Herigold's practice in the English title using the phrase Zen in the Art of. But the proliferation of books with the title Zen and the art of follows the success of Piercig's work. A quick search on Amazon or any database of recently published books reveals a huge number of books with Zen and the art of as their title. Zen and the art of knitting and Zen and the art of making a living are fairly representative while Zen and the art of vampires and the Zen of zombie stretch the meaning of the phrase itself. I don't know what the art of vampires could possibly refer to here. There's an interesting sort of mistranslation in the Zen of zombie. I think it's supposed to say better living through the undead in Chinese or Japanese but it says life is stronger than death. So not exactly the same thing. All right. So we have this proliferation of Zen and the art of titles. If Zen's pop culture profile were limited maybe as a byproduct of the success of Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance but Zen doesn't just show up in book titles. People commodify Zen in other ways especially in labeling consumer goods. There are Zen MP3 players on left. Zen yarn. Zen bicycles. Zen dog shampoo and treats. Zen wine. Zen of Zen. And even Zen tobacco and rolling machines. Imagine the same products labeled with the names of other religious schools or denominations. Presbyterian dog shampoo. Baptist rolling papers. Silafi yarn. In many cases there's no clear connection to Zen. But some of these products use the term Zen to convey a sense of calm or naturalness. This works for a certain demographic usually middle class and upper middle class people that sees Zen in terms of sophisticated minimalism and uses Zen products to signify their own worldliness and sophistication. In many ways, Zen in American pop culture has been aestheticized or turned into an artistic mood rather than a religion. It's not like the religious practice of Zen has stopped. Zen survives in its celibate monastic forms in China and Korea while the tradition of married priests into a lesser extent nuns exists in Japan. Zen centers in which people study meditation techniques with Zen masters can be found throughout the United States but many people in the U.S. encounter Zen primarily through Zen stuff or references to Zen in pop culture. There are various moments of Zen. This image of Zen in American pop culture did not spring fully formed from the late 20th century but developed from the late 19th and early 20th century claims that Zen is everywhere, especially in the arts. If Zen is everywhere Zen is anywhere, including Zen in the art of vampires and Zen rolling papers. The same trends in Meiji, Japan that led to the view that anything can be Zen art from flower ranging to archery also set the stage for Zen to become uprooted from any specific meaning. If anything can be a Zen art, why not motorcycle maintenance? Thank you. Alright. If there are any questions, please feel free. Yes. What is Zen tradition? Ohotai is the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese name Budai which literally means cloth bag. There are legends that he was an actual sort of Zen monk in the 9th and 10th centuries but he's another figure for whom there is no sort of contemporaneous historical documentation. Most Zen tradition depicts him with a huge bag, sort of the cloth bag that becomes his name and also depicts him surrounded by a lot of children. He's a sort of fat figure. He's the figure that most people identify as the Buddha when they see him though he's technically sort of the future Buddha in incarnation of the future Buddha. That's how I understand Budai or Hote as a figure who becomes an emblem of then ideals of contentment and happiness in both Chinese and Japanese art. He's certainly a popular figure. I believe there are a couple of images in the exhibit that either represent him or a figure that looks like him. I hope that answered the question to some extent. Yes. That's a very good question. The question of the life cycle rights in Japan that are associated with Buddhism in various ways. The life cycle right in Japan that's most associated with Buddhism is that of the funeral in part because death is highly polluting in Shinto so Buddhist priests have become more responsible for those ceremonies. It's not unique to Zen. All Buddhist priests from other Japanese traditions perform funeral rites as well but Zen did play a role in formulating some aspects of Buddhist funeral rites in the Tokugawa I didn't talk much about Soto Zen but Soto Zen really takes the lead with this issue in part because it was more popular among commoners as opposed to the aristocratic class. Part of the Zen funeral is essentially making the deceased enlightened after he or she has died performing rituals that effectively turn the deceased into Buddhas. The deceased are ordained posthumously they're given the precepts they're given Buddhist names of different ranks so I mean there is a kind of idea of this and is an interpretation of it that there's no self anyway so why does it matter that the deceased can't sort of be aware of its own ordination? Yes. So the question is whether koan sayings influenced haiku poetry in Japan and there is some connection there I mean certainly some of the language some of the imagery used in haiku is similar to that used in koan one of the famous haiku poets, Basho was himself very trained in Zen literature including koan traditions though he himself was not a Zen priest it was actually the fashion of the time for some sort of educated men to wear robes when they traveled even if they weren't priests and Basho did that so he was definitely engaged in the Zen world and I think you can make the argument that haiku is related to the kind of language used in koan kind of natural imagery that tends to come out there Yes. So the question, just to make sure everyone can hear it is how Shinto and Buddhism integrated in Japan they integrated fairly smoothly actually it was really in the modern period that you see a lot more anxiety to distinguish one clearly from the other there was some a crimineer, sort of bad feelings between them when Buddhism first entered Japan the clan that represented sort of the indigenous gods resented this Buddha figure that they saw the Buddha is infringing upon their clan god's territory but ultimately the people supporting Buddhism won out and so most people in Japan would not have felt the need to choose between Shinto and Buddhism. One of the ideas that forms in Japan is called Honji Suijaku which is the idea of original ground and then the hanging traces and Buddhists claimed that their Buddhas and Bodhisattvas were the original ground and then the Shinto gods were provisional manifestations of those Buddhas and Bodhisattvas actually identifying the native Shinto Kami or gods with the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas but also claiming that it's the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas that are primary. So a lot of these kinds of techniques were used to claim that they're harmonious but usually there's some kind of hierarchy implied. Yes. Since that's not an area I've worked on primarily I don't have immediate sources that come to mind. Certainly chanting is the most common aspect of sound in Zen and I would think possibly the percussive instruments that are used for chanting would be the clearest example of sound that one finds. Aside from that I suppose koans encounter dialogues about sound being the trigger for people's awakening so the idea of hearing the clink of bamboo in one example triggers an awakening experience so I think you could talk about the idea of sound there as one of the many sort of non-verbal cues that can prompt some kind of enlightenment experience but that's as much as I can say on it at this point. Yes. This is a very interesting question and one that I'm interested in from my own research as well. The role of women in modern Zen and it really depends on which country you look at in Japan nuns have a fairly marginal role in society one of the reasons is that nuns are not the ones who are hired to perform most of these sort of main rituals and so nuns there's a much smaller group of them there's also sort of less acceptance of nuns being married and having kids whereas with Zen priests in Japan it's very common for there to be a temple wife and then the role of priest is passed down from father to son if you look at Korea and mainland China and especially Taiwan the image looks really different and Taiwan is where you see nuns really taking a dominant role sort of in the Buddhist tradition and Chan or Zen is not the only form of Buddhism that's dominant there but it's one of the main ones and a lot of the nuns are really risen to positions of authority in Taiwanese or part of the Zen tradition and then in the United States women have also attained more prominent roles Ruth Fuller Sasaki is one of the earliest female figures who attained a prominent role in Zen and that continues in the various Zen centers in the US yes yes definitely I mean the idea of Buddhism as you know not involving rituals comes from a more sort of modern reinterpretation of Buddhism I mean historically Buddhism had many rituals and Zen monastic life today is still heavily ritualized there's some descriptions of it including one called women living Zen which is about female Soto Zen nuns in Japan that talks about how they've manifested every step of their day is and the various rituals surrounding meditation as well as reciting scriptures making offerings and things like that so I think ritual is a big part of Buddhism so working with it yes well I mean I was called in to look at some of the images a lot of the calligraphy a lot of the images I think can be difficult to engage with without knowing more about the background for example something like you know the hidden bird is playing with true suchness so I mean one of my tasks was to try to make these lines meaningful in some way to an audience that might not be able to read them so that was a main concern and I certainly hope that people are able to get something from the labels so going through I mean finding the calligraphy said in some cases because there weren't always translations of everything so you know deciphering the calligraphy translating it and then explaining what that translation meant because often the translation itself is not that much help so that was the biggest job I had to do and then one of the really interesting things I think about this exhibit is that it also includes objects that would have been part of you know most Zen Buddhists you know religious worlds the devotional objects that lay people you know gave to temples as well as the pilgrimage robes that are not unique to Zen but which Zen Buddhists would have encountered as well and I think that highlights that I mean there's a very sort of rich world of material objects associated with Zen and we see you know some of that with the scrolls but I think those objects bring in another aspect of it yes one more that's a very good question and there's actually a debate in an English language journal between Husha who is a Chinese intellectual at the time and Diti Suzuki and they're essentially fighting over who really has ownership of Zen with Husha claiming this is Chinese this originated in China it can only be understood in relation to Chinese history and Diti Suzuki essentially claiming that history is not really the way to understand Zen saying that and he claims he makes the claim in some of his books that you know Zen originated in China but it didn't really like sink into Chinese culture like it did in Japan it's an interesting move because in pre-modern times some Japanese Buddhists were really anxious about the fact that Japan was so far from India they're saying you know how can we have an authentic form of Buddhism were so far from India and then this flips by the time we get to the 19th and 20th century saying Japan is where Buddhism has its truest, fullest expression in Japanese culture so it requires some hermeneutic moves I think to get to that claim thank you