Abbot's Teaching
Creativity and Zen
by Michael Zenkai Taiun Elliston Sensei
March 16, 2005
Creativity in Zen is as much a matter of attitude, or experience, as of behavior. In fact, this is true of any genuine creative activity. Conventionally, creativity is thought to be linked to certain types of behavior, such as the performance arts, or the production of objects in specific, defined media. Painting, acting and stage performing, composing music, and writing (of certain kinds), are labeled “creative,” whereas other activities, such as digging ditches or crunching numbers, are not. The creativity is seen to inhere in a class of activities, rather than in the state of mind, or being, of the person engaged in any given activity.
This convention brings about a comparison and social tension between the creative “elite” and ordinary people, and evolves to the celebrity worship widely indulged in today. In the extreme, it begets an absolute division of those who comprise the consuming audience of “non-performers,” passive recipients of arts and entertainment (either not capable of performing, or waiting their turn to perform, as at the Oscars), and those who are “on.” One of the perhaps unintended results of the current vogue of “reality” shows on TV, and the “news-ification” of celebrity, is the blurring of this line. This is similar to the effect of 1960’s avant-garde experiments in street theater, intentionally erasing the line between what is the performance and what is not.
In Zen, we are called upon to discover the root source of creativity, and to apply it to the greatest, broadest and deepest medium of all—life, or existence itself. Artistic activity in Zen is simply pointing at, or documenting, a more elusive creativity, that of the mind itself.
A year or so after graduating with my Bachelor’s degree, I was hired to teach a course at the University of Illinois, and shortly thereafter also at the School of the Art Institute, both in Chicago. It looked like I was on the ideal career path, but actually it proved to be all too academic for me.
In teaching design and art courses at the university, I was exposed to all manner of group dynamics, brainstorming and other methods, in a laboratory setting with an inter-disciplinary group of colleagues from many creative fields. It was a process of complete immersion in the possibilities, and after some six years going on seven, I felt it time to get out into the “real world” of business and commerce. When I did, I was surprised at the lack of understanding of business colleagues, especially “creative” ones, of these same group processes.
As a design professional, I have spent my career engaged in what most people would consider creative activities—problem solving and innovation for a wide spectrum of clients in manufacturing and retailing, helping develop new products and approaches to marketing them.
While I have witnessed the uncreative side of the creative profession, I have also become aware of the corollary—that all activities are inherently creative. That is, that the creativity itself has little or nothing to do with the actual behavior.
Applied creativity itself, however, in particular the kind of design training in the Bauhaus method that I was exposed to in my early schooling, has a kind of integrity of process and an open-ended, scientific investigation that is akin to the attitude in Zen. I feel sure that its true value is to the individual undergoing such training, and only secondarily to those in his or her community, although it certainly has demonstrable value there as well. Same with Zen.
In creative exercises, there is a built-in duality—a subject and an object. The problem we are solving in design, the content of the work, is the object of the exercise; and we, the individual or group with the assignment, are the subjects. We apply methods of defining the problem, generating alternative solutions, and analyzing and identifying the most fitting of our choices. We then proceed to elaborate and implement the solution or solutions of choice, and repeat the above process through various levels of testing until we have attained the agreed-upon requirements of success.
But the object of the exercise for the true artist is not the resulting work of art. It is more the engagement with the process itself. Thus, it is said that good drawing is simply good seeing. The object of drawing as a creative act, in other words, is not the drawing produced, but the experience of the act of drawing. Through an intense relationship of hand-to-eye coordination, we come to see differently. We come to “re-see,” just as I did as a child affected by Disney’s animated cartoons. The act of drawing trains the eye. The training of the eye results in better drawing. The same can be said of photography, and the relevance of this principle to musical and other sense-training is obvious. It is a self-evolving process, involving feedback through the sensory, brain, and sensory-motor network, in effect re-wiring the interface for greater sensitivity. This can have a profound and lasting effect on the artist, and in fact is the hallmark of the true artist, and the work produced can have an immense impact on others as well.
Similarly, through the practice of Zen, and particularly in the experience of zazen, we re-fresh our experience of the world. We re-learn it. First, we must un-learn previous misconceptions and opinions, after which, in their stead a fresh view, unfettered by opinion, emerges. This is much like the attitude of a child, which is usually very creative, and full of potential. However, in recovering this child-like outlook as adults, we also benefit from the wisdom of our accumulated experience. Thus, the rebirth of our creativity is richer and deeper than that we experienced as children.
Ordinarily, our efforts at creativity are hampered by the idea that it is dependent upon an activity, or upon specialized pursuits. Only once we have tasted actual creativity, not limited to specific behaviors, does it become possible to express it through creative media, and even then it engenders another degree of difficulty. This explains the magic felt in the paintings and calligraphy of the Zen masters—they not only “have it”—they also have “the use of it.” This living grasp of creativity is, also, I think, in Western art. I speculate that it is what drove Van Gogh mad. When you look at his paintings, you can see that he was trying to capture his actual experience, but found it impossible to catch up to it in the maddeningly slow medium of paint. Reality is too beautiful, too dynamic, and too real. Fortunately for us, his paintings are also real, and clearly point to the vision he could not capture.
So in Zen, the most important thing is to come to experience creatively, to experience creativity directly—regardless of the particulars of our circumstances. This creativity is innate in us, and inherent in ordinariness.