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  • Looking at Art Teaching Through Zen Aesthetics
  • Sheng Kuan Chung

This article explores Zen aesthetics as a lens through which to look at art teaching. It seeks to awaken the spirituality of those who are committed to educating others toward a greater sense of humanity, and particularly to ignite new aspirations for art teaching. Although the apparatus of Zen is colored with religious nuances, viewing Zen as a religious doctrine is probably not as accurate as seeing it as a lens for looking at life, because Zen is about living freely, consciously, and fully. In Zen practice, aesthetic experiences are essential to realizing one’s humanity and spirituality. They are the means by which we perceive, calm, maintain, and illuminate our minds so that we can listen to, feel, sense, hear, and smell directly not only our inner selves, but also the outer phenomena that surround us. The arts stimulate us to get in touch with our innate abilities so that we can see clearly, feel strongly, smell deeply, and hear sensibly. In the East, arts and aesthetics are embedded in all aspects of everyday life and interpreted in a much broader sense, including such unconventional practices as fighting, gardening, flower arrangement, tea drinking, and meditation. Living itself can be a form of art. Cultivating the mind, such as by teaching, is another form of art. These artistic practices are all avenues for gaining insight into our existence and for reaching the state of enlightenment (self-actualization).

The essence of Zen aesthetics is simplificative, intuitive, and suggestive. It is simplificative because, to see the truth, we must go back to our original state of being, the one that has not been influenced by modern civilization. Simplification is therefore the first step toward emptying our encultured minds to see our inner landscape. Simplification empties the mind for true wisdom to come in. The [End Page 14] empty mind is a spiritual state of mind—profound and void, transcendent and tranquil, beyond conceptualization or any linguistic form of explication. In the arts, simplification is a way to extract the essence of whatever is conveyed. It connotes the absence of pretense. For example, the painter does not need to draw a fine contour to be able to depict the subtlety of a tree. The director does not need a real horse on the stage to portray the wildness of a horse. The poet can express tranquility without using the word itself. Zen aesthetics is intuitive because any awakening, like enlightenment, cannot be obtained by rational modes of thinking or any form of linguistic rendering. Spiritual awakening results from intuitive insights generated by the illogical and intuitive mind. Zen is the art of cultivating, perceiving, illuminating, and liberating the mind. The human mind may be feeling-oriented or emotion-saturated, yet its power lies beyond any mode of conceptualization. Words can never fully transmit the message of/from the mind. In other words, true appreciation is an expression by one mind that is received by another mind. The greatest music cannot be cherished without the attentiveness of the mind. The greatest painting cannot become a masterpiece without the appreciation of the mind. The greatest poem cannot move anyone without the emotional engagement of the mind. A concern here is that teachers have come to so overwhelmingly treasure the cognitive aspects of learning that they have forgotten how the human senses acquire knowledge. In art education, the power of simply seeing without analysis or logical interpretation is often beyond our comprehension. Seeing a performance or painting goes directly into our souls, concretely and honestly. Zen aesthetics is suggestive because it integrates the empty space (areas of incompletion) into aesthetic creations. A work of art is incomplete without incorporating the thought of the viewer. Asian painters frequently leave an unexecuted area in their work to allow the viewers to fill it in with their imagination. This technique leads to a notable feature of Asian arts: less is more. The unexecuted space in a work of art is often considered the energy repertoire that keeps the work alive. It is also a spiritual space for the viewer to contemplate and then complete the work of art.

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