Jizi and His Art in Contemporary China by David Adam Brubaker & Chunchen Wang

Author:David Adam Brubaker & Chunchen Wang
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg

Here Huineng suggests that tathatā is necessary for observing one’s own a sense organ or for having any experiences whatsoever of natural phenomena; for example, the observation of tathatā is necessary for the perception of a visual phenomenon that one witnesses by eye. Moreover, the awareness of tathatā gives rise to an idea of tathatā, even though this idea denotes some element that is never perceptually experienced as an object. Huineng suggests that the gateway of the sense organ of the eyes need not be tainted all the time—it remains a doorway for the wisdom of enlightenment—because one can at times observe it differently. The individual person has the capacity to observe that the organ of the eye manifests tathata and not merely particular phenomena and things in visual experience. The hypothesis for consideration is this: once the appearing of tathatā gives you the idea that tathatā is a basic element essential to the actual practice of seeing phenomena, you can think of your own nature as a sentient being as always manifest, no matter what kind of phenomena you may happen to experience. When one is aware of one’s own sense organ of the eye and has an awareness of tathatā without thought for experiences of sense objects or events, one moves from tranquility to awareness of one’s own nature and enlightenment. Yet, this help from Huineng still leaves a person of today wondering: what is the element on display in one’s own sense organ of the eye that reveals one’s own nature freed from experiences of visual phenomena and events?

One more step by Huineng must be outlined, so that the account here of tathatā and 真如 ( zhenru) can be applied by the critic or art historian who seeks to assess Jizi’s remarks on painting and the intuiting of immanent roots of what is called “religious experience.” What remains is to interpret “suchness” or tathatā in Huineng’s sense—or the display of the sense organ of one’s own eyes—with the language already developed here for describing the sensuous field of the visible as an element privately displayed. To give meaning to Jizi’s suggestive reflections on tathatā (真如, zhenru; suchness) and on intuiting one’s own nature as a sentient being (or one’s buddha-nature), it is a start to suggest that “the visible”—the same term already inserted experimentally to explain zhi ( substance)—be applied with the same meaning, so that awareness of tathatā with respect to the sense organ of the eye is interpreted as an awareness of the texture of the visible. In short, an observer’s awareness of the emptiness of all visual phenomena causally produced comes with the awareness that all such phenomena are appearances within a relatively stable visible texture or suchness that is one’s own nature. The field of the visible interpreted experimentally as tathatā (真如,zhenru) is an elemental source for all of one’s own experiences of visual phenomena. At the same time, it is a persisting and unchanging source of one’s own nature as a sentient being that contrasts with all phenomena experienced as events causally dependent on each other.

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