TALK ABOUT WHIPLASH – in the middle of a busy day where I’d just interviewed an expert about the future of AI, I suddenly found myself sitting down with a Zen teacher. Kazuaki Tanahashi is a man revered for his writings, his translations, his activism on behalf of nuclear disarmament and the environment, and his achingly beautiful and simple works of art as a calligrapher and one-stroke painter.
Since 1977, he’s been active in the United States and a frequent guest teacher to Santa Fe’s Upaya Zen Center.
I felt honored to meet with him to talk about creating art, learning Aikido, and mastering the art of translation. I felt a little more enlightened when I left.
How did you develop your style?
I’m an East Asian style calligrapher. We do close study of classical Chinese masterpieces. Copying, copying, copying. Gradually we learn that with each stroke, we concentrate. Each stroke has maybe different elements, but we do it with full attention. And we do it with full relaxation. Trungpa Rinpoche, Tibetan master, he said, you can express your entire life in one line. That’s true.
So I thought, well, if you can do that, then why don’t we just make a painting with only one stroke? To do that we need a larger brush, human-sized brush, and maybe even bigger brushes, like three, four, five foot-wide brushes, maybe of felt bristles.
But then felt itself is too soft. So we reinforce it with an illustration board strip. And then draw one line with dancing motion, make a large painting by one stroke. There is so much landscape within. To do this maybe we need to first pour the paint first on the canvas. Because the brush cannot hold so much paint to cover the whole canvas, or half of the canvas. So I developed this idea of using ketchup bottles, squeeze bottles. We put a paint in the squeeze bottles and then different colors, different places.
I did this for The United Nations 50th anniversary of signing of the UN charter in San Francisco. We spread five pieces of canvas, 4×25 feet or something like that. Then we asked children to pour paint. We had seven kids using human-sized brushes with seven handles. We painted it like this, on the outside of the War Memorial Veterans Building downtown, where United Nations charter was signed.
You say that everything in your life that came before is somehow expressed in that moment when your brush hits the canvas.
Maybe not everything, but that means all together, all the life history and then aesthetics, enjoyment and suffering and everything. Yes, that’s right. And in order to do that, you have to be conscious of your life, of what just happened and of what’s happening.
It’s like a paradox, each moment you live. It’s called Zen circle. It expresses enlightenment or complete wisdom. Miracles of each moment.
You’re a scholar, you’re wrapped in history. But here you are doing something, as I understand it, that is new.
I think there is some kind of a need. So I think to paint, say, a mountain by one stroke. What do we need? We may need a big brush and the big canvas, but maybe commercially built brushes are not big enough. Then we should design the brush.
And also it’s pouring paint on the canvas before painting, some kind of Copernicus conversion. That the earth moves around the sun backwards. There are artists, poets and musicians even business people, who use imagination to do something away from the conventional. These artists have some instinct to become free from rules and conventions. Yeah.
Tell us about the Enso, the Zen circle.
Well, the circle is a paradox. Babies draw circular lines. Anyone can draw circles.
There is no composition, only circles. But everyone’s circle is different.
And even every circle drawn by the same artist is different. Also, a circle can be complete. Circles can be exclusive, but also inclusive. There is inside the circle, there is outside. A circle can be almost everything. The Zen circle, the East Asian Enso, is always a masculine black ink on paper.
But I thought, well, this is a country of diversity. Why don’t we use color and why don’t we ask everyone to draw colors? The Enso doesn’t have to be accomplished by the master. Everyone can do it. So in a way, I think I invented a circle.
You grew up in the ‘30s and ‘40s in Japan, a terrible time. How did that affect you and your art?
The whole nation became so imperial, a kind of military complex. When I was in the second grade, the whole school was converted to national school and started worshiping the emperor. There was a shrine in the schoolyard and everyone lined up in the morning and bowed to the emperor. And there was military training, even for small kids.
I just hated it. I really hated it. The war and the bombing and being bound to be killed. It was a horrible time. We were given no choice of surrendering. Japan will not surrender to the ashes. So that was our life. I don’t want any children in the world to experience that. So I work for peace. That makes me free from my trauma. Tremendous trauma I had. But I don’t feel like a victim.
When I was 13-years-old, I had the opportunity of living with the master Morihei Ueshiba, founder of Aikido, and then practicing with him. That was the only class of Aikido in Japan, in a small village north of Tokyo. It was illegal. Japan had lost the war and we were all, how do you say, demilitarized. We took away old weapons and then martial arts were illegal, but we were doing it every night. The master was exploring martial art in a peaceful time. So I tried, I learned to be present. The opponent attacks and then you receive the attack, so you move your body a little bit and then receive the energy and then make use of the opponent’s energy and then throw him or her down. That time, there were only boys, six or seven boys. We learned it. Each time you have to be present, otherwise you’ll be beaten down. We learned how to use your mind and body most efficient way, to make each moment most effective. We learned that, that’s one thing.
I’ve been coming here (to Santa Fe) about 30 years. Every year we have this eight day Zen retreat. We are just, we just sit, and then what we do is doing nothing. But on the other hand, maybe also doing some developing the power of concentration. The power of concentration. So being more and more present, not being distracted about talking or listening or doing something, but doing nothing.
So you’re saying you had at a very young age, you saw someone who could teach you and who exemplified this.
Right, exactly.
When you look around and see what’s happening today, what goes through your mind?
Well, there are many crises, but maybe each one of us needs to choose one or two. So I choose to plant trees in the Amazon forest. I asked my Brazilian friends to find the uncorrupted, respected organization of non-indigenous and indigenous people together to plant trees. So we identified our partner. My organization, Inochi, a US nonprofit organization, made a partnership with the Rainforest Alliance. Reverse climate change with the help of indigenous friends.
I don’t own the trees. I invite people. We all plant. So kind of ecological, economical and egalitarian garden.
You have an interesting take on Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths.
In Buddhism, there are four noble truths. The first is that no situation is impossible to change. So it’s like Buddhist teaching of impermanence. Usually impermanence means we become old and die. But it also can mean that there seemsto be an impossible situation, like the US is now rushing towards self-destruction. It’s like an impossible situation. But no situation is impossible, so how do we change? We need a vision, not an individual vision, but a communal vision. And we need strategy. Instead of running around and shouting, we should meditate, find the most effective way, and work with continuous effort. That way we can change the situation. That’s the second truth.
The third truth is everyone has a power to help change. We don’t have a power to change, but we have a power to help change. And then no one is free of responsibility. We all need to participate.
The worst crisis in human history was the nuclear arms race. We were capable of flattening the surface of the earth multiple times. The two sides were increasing the nuclear weapons and were ready to shoot anytime. It was a real crisis in 1979, 1980. So I started a group trying to study first and then do demonstrations, letter writings, vigils in downtown, but nothing seemed to work. Then all of a sudden, Berlin collapsed. And then Soviet Union collapsed and the nuclear arms race stopped. Retrospectively, we feel that everything we did was a part of the breakthrough. We didn’t know that. I think now we have this political crisis and environmental crisis and then people are doing many things and nothing seems to be working. But maybe we should trust that a breakthrough is happening and we can see the effect later.
You do a lot of translation work. Bad translations have cost us a lot of things in this world. People who claim that they understand the native language and put their own propaganda, feelings, biases…
There is something called literal translation, but I learned the best translation is you deconstruct the original kind of sentence and then find a new kind of another sentence in the opposite language. Find the best meaning and the best poetry, how do you say, transferring it. Deconstruction is often necessary, and a good translator does that.
It requires some active imagination.
In my case I translated (13th century Japanese Zen Master) Dogen into modern Japanese first. That’s my Native language. It was fine and then I translated it into English. But I always had a partner; there are 95 chapters, 95 essays. Each essay, I had one partner. I translated roughly and say, this is it, this is a key term and we have to find the right English. We compete in a way, who comes up with the right language first. That’s how I learned English.
Is it different to translate a single individual like Dogen or, say, the Heart Sutra that’s put together by a group of people?
I don’t think so. The Heart Sutra, I translated with Roshi Joan here. The process is the same. You know, maybe I know the basic language, Sanskrit and then Chinese or Japanese. And then Roshi is very good at the kind of sentences that are good for chanting. Heart Sutra, we chant it every day in English, so it has to be chantable. One person may be able to do that, but usually I think it’s better to have partners. My goal for the Dogen translation was that we gave the illusion that Dogen gave his teaching in English — so very natural.
But no translation is perfect, even in one word, water. Water has its own kind of range of meaning associations. In English water can be watering the garden or territorial water, it has its own range of meanings and feelings. So even one word you cannot translate. You have to pick some narrow areas of the word and then pick another one. There is no translation that is perfect. My friend Peter Levitt says that translating is, how do you say, traumatizing two languages.
Was it Upaya that brought you to Santa Fe?
Santa Fe is such a beautiful city. Amazing city. I’m here just for serving the Upaya Zen Center, so I participate in meditation; I give Dharma talks. I’m a lay practitioner, not a priest, but Roshi Joan asks me to give talks. And also I do a Dogen seminar, inviting various experts on Dogen. We do it onsite and online. Hundreds of people join us. And I do calligraphy. I’m here just to do something new, something together with people.
This weekend we have poetry, haiku. Next year will be the 100 ancient Chinese cold mountain poems of Han Shan, with Peter Levitt. We’ve been doing these haiku seminars for some time. So I’m here to enjoy and do something new, something together with people.
Before he died, Scott Momaday said something to us, he was looking at a mountain and he said, I don’t own it, but it’s mine.
He’s right.
