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Performing Mind, Writing Meditation: Dogen's Fukanzazengi as Zen Calligraphy
Indiana University's East Asian Studies Center presents a talk by Charlotte Eubanks on a manuscript by Zen Master Dogen.
Where
Professor Charlotte Eubanks (Penn State) will present her paper as part of the Spring 2016 EASC Colloquium Series.
This talk will focus on the manuscript of Zen master Dōgen’s (1200-1253) Universally Recommended Instructions for Zazen (Fukanzazengi). Most analyses of Dōgen’s text have focused on its use and adaptation of Chinese source material, its place in the foundation of the new school of Sōtō Zen in Japan, and the ramifications of its doctrinal assertions for our understandings of the development of Japanese religious history. Drawing attention, instead, to the material, aesthetic, art historical and performative qualities of the text foregrounds, instead, the ways in which the visual and material qualities of this Buddhist artifact are closely intertwined with its efficacy as a religious object. In pursuing this line of analysis, this article participates in the broader ritual turn in Buddhist studies.
Through an extended visual analysis of Dōgen’s calligraphy, Professor Eubanks proposes two interventions into our current understandings of Zen calligraphy. The first has to do with definition and scope: She aims to redefine the qualities of Zen calligraphy to include deliberate, erect, stable, legible characters that are well-paired with the paper’s underlying imagery, thus extending our vocabulary of visual aesthetics beyond the spontaneous and splashy forms of composition that are typically exhibited under the sign of “Zen calligraphy.” The second intervention has to do with the materiality of the text, the very particular things that this manuscript version of Fukanzazengi performs in and through its physical substantiation. Taking a sociological approach to the material text, Professor Eubanks will argue that the manuscript does precisely what it asks its readers to do: it sits calmly, evenly, at poised attention in a real world field of objects. The brushstrokes, and the entire aesthetic layout of the manuscript, enact seated meditation.
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