The View from a Ten-Foot-Square Hut

     The title of Kano-no-Chomei’s Hojoki, an early thirteenth century work in cadenced prose rich in figures of speech, might be translated "writings from a ten foot square hut.” It belongs to the genre zuihitsu or "pen at will," suggesting something of an informal subjective essayistic sketchbook. The profound sonority of the opening words survives in the translation by Yasushiko Moriguchi and David Jenkins.


The flowing river
never stops
and yet the water
never stays
the same.

Foam floats
upon the pools
scattering, reforming,
never lingering long.

So it is with man
and all his dwelling places
here on earth.


     The rest is an explication, providing vivid images to reinforce this generalization. First, the author recounts numerous disasters that befell Kyoto during his lifetime: fire, flood, hurricane, disease, earthquake, and the human upheaval caused by the relocation of the capital to Fukuyama (now part of Kobe). The implication is that such cataclysms are particularly dramatic incidents of the constant instability that Buddhism teaches characterizes all things. Though Chomei had been a prominent official from an important family and had achieved success, for instance in placing his poems in the collection issued by the emperor himself, he had also suffered the sort of reversals common to the less aggressive or less fortunate in the highly competitive courtly society of Heian Japan. In his fifties, he became a monk and retired to a hermitage, eventually occupying the "ten foot square hut" of the title. Remarkably, his consciousness continued to turn upon itself, and even in the first portion of the essay, he looks directly at our common human portion, devoid of supernatural consolation, and at himself, and declares his uncertainty with candor, noting in an early passage:.


People die
and are born –
whenc e they came
and where they go,
I do not know.


     More dramatically, at the very conclusion, rather than suggesting his sage serenity, Chomei radically questions the trajectory of his life. He contemplates his own attachment to his shack and even asks himself, “Has your discerning mind/ just served to drive you mad." Suddenly this medieval East Asian writer seems very intimate and modern.
     In Moriguchi and Jenkins’ edition Chomei's prose has been broken up into scattered free verse phrases which seem almost justified by the ephemeral impressionistic tone of the content. Less happy, though less important, are Michael Hoffmann's illustrations meant to be reminiscent of sume-i. I confess, though, that these, as well as the wide open poetic style, seem designed to appeal to today's Western quasi-Buddhists and to me as one of them and thus I suppose it is that I write this essay. One may suspect, though, that both the editorially introduced verse form and the washy illustrations evolved at editorial meetings with the primary purpose of plumping the insubstantial book up to the point it could be perfect bound.
     In the moralizing middle portion the writer wonders how and where to live if one wishes peace. Here is the same philosophic ideal pursued in ancient Greece, wisdom defined as how to live a good life. The point about time’s unceasing Heraclitean flow is simple and straightforward, one of the most familiar topoi in East Asia as in Europe. The opening of the roughly contemporaneous Heike Monogatari which traces the warfare of the Taira and Minamoto clans, the very sort of struggle that upended Chomei’s world, uses a four-character expression from the (apparently Chinese) Humane King Sutra that became proverbial and which applies well: "the prosperous inevitably decline,”
     In this same section Chomei raises political complaints on behalf of the poor but his motive may be more personal disappointment than compassion for all sentient beings. His own career frustrations doubtless influenced his views which often seem to reflect more the jaundiced view of the disillusioned member of the higher echelons than a righteous crusader for justice. The author does not suggest any possible reform or solution. The ruling class’s oppression of the less powerful is merely an example of how life is fundamentally unfair, all but unlivable. Here is less a radical social justice critique than a recognition of suffering that leads as it did for Buddha to the quest for enlightenment
     Yet the author remains, after decades of meditation, suspended over the existential abyss. Among his dark thoughts, he declares his "heart is soaked in sin." In what way does he differ from a seventeenth century Puritan agonizing over the uncertain state of his soul? Perhaps less than we expect. If it seems less profound and poignant to imagine Jonathan Edwards wondering if he had lived a good life and admitting, "To these questions of mind/ there is no answer," it may be that we are selling Jonathan Edwards short.
     At any rate Hojoki provides contact with a view with which many today are sympathetic, though I have yet to hear of members of the ruling class living in a single room with a dirt floor. The fact that such renunciation did happen in China and in Japan is one measure of the sophistication of those cultures, and the fact that one such moderate ascetic felt no more confident about his pursuit of enlightenment than the reader may indicate that certain human problems are insoluble, though they reward such precise exploration as Chomei has left us. In his Hosshinshu, a book of stories of recluses, Chomei distinguishes the hijiri, the true holy men, from tonsiesha, those who aspire but in some degree fall short, as well as from the inja who withdraw from society but pursue art as semi-secular aesthetes rather than single-mindedly seeking enlightenment. If this last category proved to be the highest the author reached, surely the vast majority of his readers will be, if anything, even less ambitious, yet even a dilettante at both poetry and meditation may still admire the beauty and drama of the record of Chomei’s life.

Walking the Via Negativa

     The believer in nothing may find that nothing can be as substantial a deity as old Jehovah or bright Apollo. Though many sensibilities seek the warm (but sometimes frightening) anthropomorphic god provided by myth, others, miraculously, perhaps, find a secure foundation in a lack.
     For the spiritually inclined unbeliever to whom the deity of childhood is inconceivable and indeed who cannot even understand how any contemporary educated person can continue loyal to institutional religion, the data reporting mystical experience retain a different sort of truth value. There can be no denying experiences of unity with the divine throughout history and around the world. Apart from the mystics, some theologians have laid out a theoretical basis for a faithless faith. The skeptic will take particular interest in the apophatic tradition, the via negativa, which eschews positive assertions about god, describing the divine in terms of what the godhead is not and basing an authentic spirituality in what we do not know.
     Hinduism and Buddhism have been more hospitable to apophatic theology than Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. In Asia the phrase “neti, neti” (“not this or that”) is the definition of Brahman in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad and the Avadhuta Gita. [1] For the eighth century philosopher Adi Shankara the highest concept of the divine was Nirguna Brahma, a Brahma without qualities. In general Advaita (non-dualistic) schools of Vedanta and Jnana Yoga employ such language. Jainism, Buddhism, and Daoism, have in fact no god, though devotees have not been slow to invent quasi-divine figures such as the Jain Tirthankaras and the many godlings of popular Buddhism and Daoism. Though the Abrahamic religions are by comparison resistant to a truly agnostic theology, their more philosophic and mystical practitioners have regularly condemned anthropomorphism.
     Buddhism is notoriously receptive to agnostic or atheist ideas. When the Buddha was asked about the nature of the divine and the afterlife, he responded that one should attend no more to such matters than a man injured by a poisoned arrow need learn all the details about his attacker before tending to his wound.


And why are they undeclared by me? Because they are not connected with the goal, are not fundamental to the holy life. They do not lead to disenchantment, dispassion, cessation, calming, direct knowledge, self-awakening, Unbinding. That's why they are undeclared by me. [2]


     Likewise in the works of Nagarjuna, founder of the Madhyamika school of Buddhism, all phenomena, including acts of cognition, are empty. Even the deity is a sort of Kantian noumenon inaccessible to the human mind. The Aïguttara Nikàya and the Jataka stories both deny a personal all-powerful god. [3]
     Buddhism regularly teaches, in contrast to the notion of a savior, that one must not look for aid from some supernatural being. In the pursuit of Ultimate Reality one can depend only on individual effort.


By ourselves is evil done,
By ourselves we pain endure,
By ourselves we cease from wrong,
By ourselves become we pure.
No one saves us but ourselves.
No one can and no one may.
We ourselves must walk the path:
Buddhas only show the way. [4]


For Buddhism what is significant is ridding oneself (and for Mahayanists other sentient beings as well) of suffering. Inquiries about the afterlife, the eternity and infinity of the creation and other issues are dismissed as “the fourteen unanswerable questions” (though the numbers differs in different texts) which are fruitless to pursue. [5]
     The most significant source of apophatic theology in Christianity is pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, in particular his Divine Names and Mystical Theology. Dionysius built on his Platonic and neo-Platonic predecessors [6] when he concluded that the description of Ultimate Reality is impossible. For Dionysius the contemplation of God leads to “a divine silence, darkness, and unknowing.” The truths about God are "unspeakable and unknowable,” they surpass "our logical and intellective power and activity" Thus one may not predicate anything whatever of the deity without falling into error. Dionysius did make allowances for some scripturally based epithets and nodded to tradition, saying "we must praise the providence of divine dominion, the source of goods, [in terms taken] from all the things that are caused.” According to Dionysius human reasoning which takes place in time cannot access the divine, while what he called our “intellective” faculty can grasp truth in an instant. This sort of knowledge, similar to what Augustine called illumination and Boethius “intelligence” is capable of a vision of God.
     The notion that God may be apprehended in a transformative realization leads naturally to an openness to the experiential data of mystics: those who enter into union with it [God], "according to the ceasing of all intellectual activity, . . . praise it best of all by denying all beings of it.” [7]
     For Gregory of Nyssa, the fourth century bishop, a necessary consequence of the infinity of God is his belief that God, as limitless, is essentially incomprehensible to the limited minds of created beings. To him “every concept that comes from some comprehensible image, by an approximate understanding and by guessing at the Divine nature, constitutes a idol of God and does not proclaim God."
     This concept of the divine, with its close links to Plato and Proclus, was brought forward in a tradition including Maximus the Confessor and Johannes Scotus Eriugena to the high Middle Ages when it proved fundamental to the mystics of the fourteenth century such as Richard Rolle and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing. Later Meister Eckhart declared, citing Dionysius, “God is naught. Meaning that God is as incomprehensible as naught.” For him “the height of gnosis is to know in agnosia.” [9]
     Likewise, while popular Judaism can be thoroughly anthropomorphic, more sophisticated thinkers have outlined an apophatic deity as well. To Philo Judaeus the anthropomorphism of a literal reading of the Bible was impious as well as mistaken. He considered it manifestly absurd to ascribe to God purely human attributes. [10] His most distinguished successor was Maimonides who in his Guide for the Perplexed insists that “the negative attributes of God are the true attributes.” [11]
     This smattering of theologians of widely varying views is hardly meant to indicate that I accept the view of godhead proposed by any one of them or even that I fully understand their positions. Rather it is excellent evidence that I and perhaps you are not wholly idiosyncratic in the attempt to save spirituality from the supernatural. The experience of people as far back as records exist has included experiences of what Romain Rolland in a 1927 letter to Freud, called "oceanic feeling." [12] Whatever one may make of it, the records of such sensation s are clear and consistent throughout human culture. There can be no doubt that people, often using one of a variety of mind-altering techniques such as fasting and meditation, have through the cultivation of cosmos-connected consciousness, achieved an enviable level of serenity and satisfaction. These empirical data carry far more weight than the theories of thinkers seeking to justify such spiritual endeavors, yet they imply the need for each individual to pursue enlightenment anew. The words, even of Gautama Buddha, are, "like a man pointing a finger at the moon to show it to others who should follow the direction of the finger to look at the moon. If they look at the finger and mistake it for the moon, they lose sight of both the moon and the finger." [13] And this orientation to the lunar sphere, which is to say to the sublime, persists in spite of the fact that the liberated mind perceives the hollowness of all phenomena, “all construings, all excogitations, all I-making & mine-making & obsessions with conceit.” [14]



1. See the Avadhuta Gita 1.25 and the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 2.3.6.

2. Majjhima Nikaya 63 MN 63, called the Cula-Malunkyovada Sutta.

3. Aïguttara Nikàya A.I.174, Jataka VI,208.

4. Dhammapada 165, here in Paul Carus’ translation.

5. Of course, many Buddhists reverted to the Hindu belief in reincarnation as well as to the apotheosis of Buddha and other figures.

6. See Timaeus 28c.

7. All references to pseudo-Dionysius may be found in Mystical Theology I, 1-3 and Divine Names cols. 585-588, and 593 and in Harrington and Corrigan’s article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

8. The Life of Moses; translation, intro. Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson ; pref. by John Meyendorff , p. 81.

9. The Divine Being, Sermon XV.

10. De Confusione Linguarum, 27 [i. 425].

11. In Chapter 58.

12. Discussed by Freud in Future of an Illusion (1927) and Civilization and Its Discontents (1929).

13. Surangama Sutra trans. by Charles Luk.

14. Aggi-Vacchagotta Sutta: To Vacchagotta on Fire, translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu.

Tristan Tzara, Poet of Manifestos

Numbers in parentheses refer to Tzara’s manifestos listed just following the essay. I used Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries translated by Barbara Wright from Riverrun Press, New York to avoid quoting in French and including translations. The originals are readily available.
Numbers in brackets indicate endnotes.


Tristan Tzara pioneered the development of the manifesto as a literary form, [1] a movement across movements that persisted throughout the twentieth century and, in a quieter form, into the present. To me his poetry and drama generally work best in performance. While on the printed page the appeal of much of his work is less apparent, his manifestos retain their lively and likable energy.

The invention of this new genre, as well as the reinvention of performance poetry, was, perhaps, natural given Dada’s profound and polemical skepticism. For Tzara, Arp, and others a fiercely radical questioning approaches nihilism like an asymptote, yet their political, aesthetic, and spiritual idealism remains always a flicker, peyrceptible to the discerning reader. In the realms of conceptual art, chance, and the privileged valuation of the ephemeral, Tzara’s early twentieth century pronouncements are groundbreaking.

To be sure, Tzara could not have been clearer about his manifestos being anti-manifestos. In his seminal “Dada Manifesto” he notes the paradox and readily admits his self-contradiction: “I am writing a manifesto and there is nothing I want, and yet I’m saying certain things, and in principle I am against manifestos, as I am against principles.” He later writes under the guise of Monsieur AA, the Antiphilosopher. Dada, he says, “doubts everything.” “Everything we look at,” he insists, “is false.” “We don’t accept any theories.” Dada is “a word that throws up ideas so they can be shot down.” (2)

Playing up the destructive potential of his position in dramatic form, he proclaims ”there is great negative, destructive work to be done.” Dada is “like a raging wind that rips up the clothes of clouds and prayers, we are preparing for the great spectacle of disaster, conflagration, and decomposition.” (2) Anticipating Jimi Hendrix, he calls for musicians to smash their instruments on stage. (3)[2] “Every act,” according to him, “is a cerebral revolver shot.” (6)

If nothing whatever can be known, making everyone an "idiot,” as Tzara calls himself and his readers alike (5), what then? If the poet is a mere “fart in a steam engine,” (7) what more can be said? Avoiding as Gorgias had done millennia before, the desolate and boring aporia that might result from a conviction that Truth is altogether inaccessible, Tzara turns to his own subjectivity. This is essential because, “a work of art is never beautiful, by decree, objectively, for everyone.” (3) Since every consciousness is unique, the individual must shed “the pursuit of I worship you.” (4) Authority, including Tzara’s authority, is illusory. Thus the manifesto reader must not be “led astray by Aaism,” (4) that is to say, by the very document he is reading. Tzara rejects the very possibility of discursive thought. Some explain, he says, while others learn, but both deceive themselves. Abolish both the teacher and the learner and you have dada. (7) He calls, in fact, for “NO MORE WORDS,” though he cannot avoid using words as he does so. (5)

Only by entering into his own mind can the poet make progress: “With the words I put down on paper I enter, solemnly, into myself” (6) Tzara refers to this inward turning as “selfkleptomania.” (7) To him he is simply making explicit what is inevitable in any case. As he says, one may try to write a manifesto, but “it’s your autobiography that you’re hatching under the belly of the flowering cerebellum.” (7)

The dominant result of this introspection is an extraordinary ebullience, irrational exuberance and high spirits arising from some unquestioned, unquestionable base in a pyrotechnic display of excited language. Delightful little verbal displays pop off here and there. He maintains, for example that art is to be identified not only with Dada, but equally with plesiosaurus or handkerchief. (3) He renews the reader’s subscription to “the celluloid love that creaks/ like metal gates” (4) The phrase “for the saxophone wears like a rose the assassination of the visceral car driver” occurs in the middle of a passage as scintillating and fast-moving as the world of subatomic particles. That passage ends “thus drummed the maize, the alarm and pellagra where the matches grow.” (6) At times, Tzara’s manifestos are so rich in this pure poetry that one feels as though one is eating bonbons. “Dada is a dog – a compass –the lining of the stomach – neither new nor a nude Japanese girl – a gasometer of jangled feelings.” (7) And so it goes, infused with wild unpredictable imagination and passionate enthusiasm.

In the end, “Dada is our intensity.” Spectacle rules: “We are circus ringmasters.” “It’s still shit, but from now on we want to shit in different colors” (6) the cosmos then becomes a marvel, “the spermatozoon ballet” (4), at which one can only look on in wonder.

Yet, Tzara sounds a word of warning. Significance is lurking in the shadows. “While we put on a show of being facile, we are actually seeking for the secret essence of things.” (1) Tzara’s pseudonym on top of a pseudonym for several of his manifestos is M. Antipyrine, a name suggesting a healing nostrum. The psycho-aesthetic-spiritual solution suggested by Tzara (and other Dada artists) has much in common with Zen Buddhism. [3]

Tzara’s pseudonym with its associations with the French word triste draws attention to the universal suffering that motivates the Buddhist search for enlightenment. [4] He repeats the line “You’re all going to die,” (7) as if this fact poses the essential problem of life. The solution to this problem is in both cases experiential rather than logical. Tzara insists that “logic is always false,” (2) a contention that, were it not so baldly stated, could be a portion of a Zen sutra. He speaks nearly explicitly about enlightenment: “We really know what we are talking about, because we have experienced the trembling and the awakening.” (7) Dada arises not from intellection but from living: Dada, Tzara says, is “the roar of contorted pains, the interweaving of contraries and of all contradictions, freaks, and irrelevancies: LIFE.”(3) The twentieth century artist recalls Nagarjuna and Advaitist Vedanta when he proclaims that dualities are a fraud, specifying “order=disorder; ego=non-ego; affirmation=negation.” (2) [5]

Finally, and most dramatically, Tzara agrees with the sages that we are really liberated all along, though unconscious of the fact. Nothing really changes with sublime knowledge. One returns at last to the point one had occupied all along. The “three laws” of God are “eating, making love, and shitting.” (6) The story is told of Baizhang Huaihai among others that, when asked how he pursued enlightenment, replied “When hungry, I eat; when tired, sleep.” Yet somehow, in both cases, everything is transfigured.


1. Monsieur Antipyrine’s Manifesto 1916
2. Dada Manifesto 1918
3. Unpretentious Proclamation 1919
4. Manifesto of Monsieur AA the Antiphilosopher
5. Tristan Tzara
6. Monsieur AA the Antiphilosopher Sends Us this Manifesto
7. Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love


Endnotes

1. The word manifesto had earlier been used for many political declarations such as Bolivar’s “Cartagena Manifesto,” Peel’s “Tamworth Manifesto,” and, most notably, Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century several anarchist manifestos appeared. Very likely the move from the social realm to the aesthetic was facilitated by the military analogy suggested by the term avant-garde.

2. Hendrix did this at Monterey in 1967, but he had been preceded by Jerry Lee Lewis destroying pianos in the 1950s as wel l as by Pete Townshend, Jeff Beck and others. In the realm of avant-garde art, Nam June Paik smashed a violin in 1962 as part of his "One for Violin Solo" and the gesture had become enough of a convention that a Destruction in Art Symposium was held in London in 1966 which involved a number of “destruction events.” Two years later a similar event was held in New York City. Oddly, Townshend had studied with Gustav Metzger who was the central figure in the London symposium.

3. I am hardly the first to note the similarities. See, for instance, Won Ko’s Buddhist Elements in Dada: A Comparison of Tristan Tzara, Takahashi Shinkichi and Their Fellow Poets.

4. In fact the name Tristan is Celtic meaning noise, and is not derived from the Latin tristis, though the association is prominent in Tristan and Iseult as well as with Tzara, who, according to Paul Cernat’s Avangarda românească și complexul periferiei: primul val, said that it was meant to recall the French phrase “triste âne tzara” ("sad donkey Tzara"). According to Serge Fauchereau's report (also recorded in Cernat), Colomba Voronca recalled Tzara’s explaining it as a play on the Romanian phrase trist în țară, meaning "sad in the country." In 1925 he legally changed his name from Samy Rosenstock to Tristan Tzara.

5. Tzara reinforces the point while incidentally anticipating Derridean deconstruction in section IV of 7.