Where Art, Life and Leadership Collide
Blows My Mind
A viburnum bush sits outside my window. For two glorious weeks in the Spring its white blossoms send out a powerful, heavenly fragrance that wafts through the air and into my studio/office. It gives reason to pause.
In The Unknown Craftsman; A Japanese Insight Into Beauty, Master Potter Soetsu Yanagi (1889-1961) tells us:
A true artist is not one who chooses beauty in order to eliminate ugliness, he is not one who dwells in a world that distinguishes between the beautiful and the ugly, but rather he is one who has entered the realm where strife between the two cannot exist.
This is the truth of Buddhism. Yanagi goes on to tell us that according to a Zen catechism: Buddha is also dust. Zen monks ask us if the Buddha is not plainly before our eyes in everything.
Everything is Buddha and Buddha is everything. This leads to an underlying connectedness between all things--an orientation toward oneness. Differentiation is an illusion because all is one.
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche writes:
All that is straight lies. All truth is crooked.
To the Western mind all is about complexity and differentiation. Zen Buddhism sees oneness and connection and the West migrates toward categorization and analysis and a preoccupation with distinctions.
What is one to do with this dichotomy? Is Viburnum Fragrance also dust?
Later Nietzsche says time itself is a circle. Is this an opening? Do East and West meet in the fullness of time and connect back up with each other?
I never appreciated either/or. I believe the opportunity is to find the part in the whole and whole in the part. Another paradox? Buddha says paradox is an illusion. I would like to believe that. But then I smell the Viburnum Fragrance and it simply blows my mind.
