Existence by David Hinton

Author:David Hinton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala

9

LIKE POETRY, the visual arts also give shape to this cosmology of Absence and Presence in ways that create it as an immediate emotional experience, that engage 心 as both a full heart and empty mind. The practice of calligraphy is similar to the practice of meditation. It changes our relation to language, the medium of identity; and finally, it reweaves identity into the existence-tissue. Normally when we read, we pay attention only to the black text itself. The empty space around it is of no interest to us. It is quite different in classical Chinese, as we have seen, where linguistic Presence emerges from generative Absence. Calligraphic practice heightens this dramatically, for a gestural brushstroke (Presence) brings the empty space around it (Absence) to life, energizing it. The wilder and more artistic forms of calligraphy also animate and liberate the emptiness within the structure of each ideogram, opening and releasing it into the emptiness surrounding the ideograms, as in this quite typical moment from Huang T’ing-chien’s calligraphic scroll in Plate 2, where the form of the ideogram 銀 unfurls into:

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