Robert Reese

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Kyoto in the Dark

 “Zen is feeling your way along in the dark. You might think it would be better to have more light, to know where you are going, and to get there in a hurry, but Zen is feeling your way along in the dark. “ – Shunryu Suzuki Roshi

I often leave the house before sunrise. Beyond the front door is an extended porch with three steps to the driveway at the end.   If I forget my flashlight and there’s no moon to illuminate the porch, I must feel my way very slowly, cautiously guiding my hands along a cold stone ledge. On such mornings, I often remember Shunryu Suzuki’s Roshi’s recommendation to Ed Brown.

There are different meanings for “light” and “dark.” When was the last time you heard anyone using “dark” to describe something good?  Or the benefits of darkness? How did “darkness” become a synonym for all things wicked, wrong or sinister?  Darkness gets traction as a metaphor because it is commonly associated with the shadowy, demonic or generally bad. Want something to mar your otherwise bright and joyous life?  Done.  Bring on darkness. What are people afraid of? The dark. “Light,” on the other hand, is often associated with rational discrimination, optimism, clarity, “enlightenment.”

Suzuki Roshi’s recommendation raises perhaps one of the basic tactile questions of how we negotiate the complex terrain of darkness -- and everyday life. In addition to managing steps in the dark, the activities we engage in are sometimes transformative and we don’t know what’s on the other side of that transformation. Opening a door, doing the dishes, getting into a car, meeting the check-out clerk at Target, functioning in a relationship, working in a job, walking in the dark --- are all potentially transformative.

In some sense, Zen practice is leaving the door open to the unfamiliar, the door into the dark. Zen meditation is to rely on uncertainty and the unsure footing of a kind of deep unknowing. It is to be in the dark.  That’s where the most vital things come from, where we all came from and where we will all go. Darkness supports our vital unsteadiness, the way we are not actually standing on anything.

For artists, the dark –or the unknown-- is what must be traveled and discovered. It is the job of artists to open doors, step into the dark and invite in deities, the unacquainted and the unaccustomed.

In Japanese Zen, darkness is associated with ri, the absolute aspect, emptiness, or the background of our lives. Light, ji is the foreground, the distinct, individual form characteristics. In darkness, forms and colors become muted and vague. In the light, people, places and things are revealed in their particularity. In brightness we distinguish ourselves from others. Zen practice is to see sides--light and dark, differentiation and unity. Darkness, then, is not so much the absence of light, but the source of everything. Darkness is alive, fertile and full of potential.

In southeastern Kyoto is the Myoshin-ji, a massive 80-acre (nearly a Zen city) Rinzai temple complex established in 1337 by Hanazono, the 95th Emperor of Japan.  Myoshin-ji’s grounds are serene, immaculate and organized by garden rooms.  If visitors talk at all, they speak in hushed, reverent tones.  A frequent visitor to Myoshin-ji, D.T. Suzuki studied, wrote and planted azaleas on the grounds. The lecture hall (hatto) includes a painting by Tanyu Kano's: Unryuzu, (“Dragon Glaring in Eight Directions”).  It is one of the few temples where westerners can practice Zen in Kyoto. The hatto is dark and massive with peaked roofs flanked by pine trees. Like most Zen temples, Myoshin-ji’s hatto is imposing and dark inside.  However, it does not feel dark in a severe or ominous way—rather it feels intimate and close, with a darkened dais and Kano’s Dragon glaring down from the ceiling. Despite its size, there is an intimacy to the main hall, a kind of warmth that is not apparent at first, as if one were stepping into the embracing darkness of a warm, summer evening. The silence in Myoshin-ji’s lecture hall is so deep as to induce an aura of anticipation. In the shadows, boundaries are softened and gradually erased.

Once outside, however, the grounds are as neat and precise and legible as a blue mountain lake against new snow in winter. There was a kind of clarity to Kyoto’s slanting October light. Everything on the grounds is  wide open and in a light so sharp that things stand apart from each other as if their edges were cut out with scissors. After the muted light of the Myoshin-ji’s Dharma Hall, everything outside feels sharp and sudden, like the ringing of a telephone.  It is, of course, difficult to speculate whether the 14th century temple architects meant to evoke the relative and the absolute in their temple design plans or were simply adhering to temple design precedent.

Soto Zen is sometimes called the “careful and considerate way.” Feeling our way slowly, as if in the dark, is the principal connection between meditation and activities of daily life.

Reverend Myo Lahey of the Hartford Street in San Francisco writes of the Japanese term ‘memmitsu-no-kafu’: “In this expression, the character mitsu means "cotton"; men means "close, intimate, dense, secret"; ka is "family"; and fu is "wind" or "manner". Taken as a whole, the expression means a close, intimate family style, as intimate as the threads in finely-woven fabric. A household animated by this principle is characterized by attention unstintingly paid to the connections among people and things, and it is this that largely animates Sôtô Zen training, both inside and outside of the training halls.”  The “family wind” of the Soto house is to feel our way carefully in the dark for what is both intimate and absolute.

Kyoto has countless temples which evoke this seamless quality. The massive veranda of Kiyomizu-dera temple was built overhanging a cliff, but seems light and buoyant with a cypress roof that appears to be delicately suspended over Kyoto. Established by the Hosso (Yogachara) sect in 780, Kiyomizu-dera (the Temple of Pure Water) looms above a pilgrimage neighborhood of incense shops and tea houses in the shadow of Otowa Mountain.  Wooden planks along the cobbled stone streets mark places the poet Basho admired. Ottsui monks still bath in the “Sound of Feathers” waterfall up the mountain. The whole neighborhood is carefully preserved, with rock gardens, tea houses and sliding blonde wood screens opening on to a composed geometry of wood and water. Along neighborhood streets galleries sell Kiyomizu pots, folded fans and woodblock prints. Kimono-clad women handout samples of ice cream and candy.

A massive vermillion pagoda announces the entrance to Kiyomizu-dera. Beyond that, a broad wooden veranda appears delicately suspended above the Kyoto skyline. Set back from the deck is a dais, dark and thick with smell of sweet incense. Lanterns and fish-shaped lamps hang from the ceiling and visages of deities stare back from the darkness. Votive candles burn in the shadowy recesses.

Outside Kiyomizu-dera’s lecture hall is another broad wooden altar with steps to a basement which houses the Tainai-meguri, the womb of Daizugu Bosatsu (the mother of bodhisattvas). Shoes are removed and visitors are directed down a darkened stair-well supported by a railing made of smooth, knotted rope. Descending the stairs, it is impossible to move more than a few inches at a time because you cannot see further than the tip of your nose.  It is completely darkened because Daizugu Bosatsu is said to remove all attachments and the darkness is an enactment of nonduality. You have to descend the stairs incrementally, feeling your way as if the walls had directions written in braille. At the bottom of the stairwell visitors slowly come upon a pale, smooth stone dimly lit from above inlaid with kanji markings representing the womb of the mother of Bodhisattvas.  However, descending into the darkness, suggests a direction toward realizing the background of our life, an acknowledgement of ri.  It is not to look for the light switch, but to engage the dark in its own terms. To reach deeply into our life in slow, tactile steps. When we unlock the door to darkness we work our way slowly and carefully without a map. Shohaku Okumura discusses the term, “fue” or “not knowing,” to describe the dropping of conceptualizations. ‘Being in the dark,’ ri and ‘not knowing,’ fue are cut from the same bolt of cloth.

Being in the dark can sometimes be called the condition of mind that is without – without assumptions, without prejudices, without prized views, without the story we happen to have about how life should be at the moment--even our stories about being in the dark. At that intersection possibility occurs.  Being in the dark can be profoundly subversive to our usual habits of mind.  It is to examine the assumption that say “you are like this” or “I am like that.”  Not knowing, or fue is to move in the absence of such thoughts.  It is to reach into the dark.  The Zen teacher Koun Yamada said that by sweeping the mind, meditation takes away false blindness and gives us true blindness.

If you arrive at a meeting and assume you know in exacting terms who you are meeting, you may have very well sabotaged the encounter before you’ve even begun. Creating assumptions about who you are meeting (and who you are that moment) limits the possibility for intimacy. True intimacy is not based upon knowing--rather, upon discovery. It is being in the dark, not knowing who you are, or who someone else is, allows you to meet an event without imagining it is something else—something that happened before.

To say, for example,  that someone is to “interesting” or a “jerk” is assign the selfhood of “interesting” or “jerk” and obligation of those associations. To imbue something or someone with a specific characterization is to levy the selfhood of those characterizations on a vastly open, fluid and complex formation. The emptiness, or lack of inherent, self-existence, does not refute or diminish that individual or event—rather, it opens and enlarges significantly. The person, place or thing is empty of self-existence, but full of all being.

A story illuminates this point: Each afternoon a Zen teacher would tea a rice cakes with two of his students. The teacher pointed to his fan and asked the monks what it was. One monk picked it up and fanned the teacher, who admired the answer for its directness and lack of conceptualization. Then, the other monk took the fan a placed a rice cake on it and offered it to the teacher, who smiled at the response. The fan was now a serving tray. Because the fan lacked inherent, self- existence, it was free to become a serving tray or serve as sun shade. “Knowing” limits it to being a fan.

Having the willingness to be in the dark keeps us exposed, off-balanced and alive to the world—to each other, to streets at dusk, to the bending sky, to teenagers on cell phones, to green tendrils uncurling in April and thrush in the afternoon breeze