Dave Lowry: To Blossom and Scatter...
The colors bloom and scatter. In this world, who lasts
forever?
--the Lotus sutra
To find analogies between the budo and kado doesn't require
much digging. Sussho, a term from ikebana, refers
to the most natural form of a flower or plant and it is
this the arranger attempts to capture in his floral
compositions. The budo sensei ("teacher") has much
the same regard for sussho in the dojo, where he looks for
it in his students. He sees it in them, in their own,
uniquely individual natures, and it is this sussho that
he must bring out in each person as that person progresses
in the art. In and yo (better known by the
original Chinese terminology of yin and yang)
are qualities of every good ikebana arrangement. One stem
or branch or bloom will dominate while another will recede.
Precisely the same sense of in and yo merge and emerge in
many budo waza ("techniques") like punching, where
one side of the body extends while the other contracts.
There is in ikebana as well as in the martial Ways, a
struggle for unity and harmony of elements, for the
interplay of hard and soft, for a moment of spontaneous
creation based upon the foundation of a fixed form.
Interestingly, many of the same problems afflicting the
budo today--abuse of power by teachers, petty political
squabbling, the manipulation of the ranking system and
the failure of practitioners to comprehend the ethos of
the Do--are exactly the same problems faced in the world
of ikebana. Chat with a kadoka sometime and you will
be amazed how much you, as a budoka, have in common with him
or her.
Analogies, yes. But what is the importance of ikebana
in the dojo? The author Kenji Nishitani, in his book,
Kaze no Kokoro ("Spirit of the Wind"), has explained
it well, I think. The flower of ikebana, he said, is "in
the world of death, poised in death. It has become
severed from the life which denies time and in doing so
it had entered time and become momentary." While
"ikebana" means literally, "living blossoms,"
paradoxically, the materials used for flower arranging
are not "living" at all, of course. They are, as
Nishitani notes, dead. They have been deliberately cut
from the roots that nourished them and gave them life.
Left alone in nature, their demise would scarcely have
been noticed. Fading away in the garden outside, we are
barely aware of their passing from our busy world.
Once they are cut, the flowers do not wither slowly;
their death is rendered imminent. It is the beauty of
a master's flower arrangement that we appreciate,
certainly. Yet their poignance is found in the
ephemerality that has, through their arrangement,
been brought to our attention. We pause at the beauty
of ikebana. We linger at the thought of the impermanence
it represents. Nishitani's book makes the case for two
distinctive approaches to art: there are those, he says,
which attempt to deny temporality, and there are those
which celebrate it. Arts like sculpture and architecture
are among the former. They are mediums that strive to
step out of time and remain as enduring monuments. The
opposite approach to art, according to Nishitani, is
though those which enter into time, which exist and
flower but for a flickering moment. This art of transience
is one Nishitani finds particularly conducive to Japanese
forms of expression. The tea ceremony, Noh drama,
haiku poetry; all last for an instant, for the
briefest span of time. (As a young man training in
chado, the art of the tea ceremony, I must admit
there were times, sitting interminably in an unheated
room in winter while trying to learn the protracted forms
of the tea art, when "brief" would not have been among my
choice of adjectives to describe the goings on.) Nishitani
adds to this list of evanescent arts the Way of flowers,
kado. I would add to it the budo.
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