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This article was written by Mr. Peter Hershock, who has been a student of Ji Kwang Dae Poep Sa Nim for seventeen years now and is one of her disciples. Mr. Hershock has earned degrees from Yale University (B.A., Philosophy) and the University of Hawai'i (Ph.D., Asian and Comparative Philosophy). He is Coordinator for the Asian Studies Development Program at the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawai'i, and a professor of philosophy.
Statement on Energy Spiritual Writing Paintings
The paintings of Ji Kwang Dae Poep Sa Nim, the Supreme Matriarch of the Lotus Sangha of World Social Buddhism, embody distinct patterns of relating that are healing and illuminating. They are paintings that, through their presence and our attention to them, directly change the meaning of things. Put another way, they are not static works of art, the same for everyone in every situation, but artistic events that allow things to work for the benefit of those fortunate enough to encounter and enjoy them.
Most artists paint in order to express themselves or to make a statement about some aspect of the world that they feel deserves the attention of others. Especially in contemporary art, there is often a conscious attempt to do so in ways that raise questions about the meaning and history of art, as well as about the viewers relationship to them. Such works of art, even though they may be abstract, surreal, or highly conceptual, still serve to represent some understanding or experience of the artist. They place something before the viewer who must then take in, decode, and understand its message. In postmodern language, most works of art function as signs. In a common phrase from Zen Buddhism, they are like fingers pointing at the moon.
Of course, this is nothing new. Especially in the West, art works have long been understood as symbolic in nature. And, indeed, it was for this reason, nearly 2,500 years ago, that Plato dismissed the art of painting as irrelevant or misleading for those intent on realizing truth and beauty. With the irony so characteristic of postmodern life, this is a claim that has come to be embraced by many artists today who see art as a way of explicitly challenging the meaning of truth and beauty and even meaning itself.
The paintings of Ji Kwang Dae Poep Sa Nim have their roots in a very different tradition. Although it is possible to see her paintings as evocative of primitivist, impressionist, and even surrealist sensibilities, they seem to me to have greater affinity with the East Asian traditions of calligraphy, landscape painting, and the practices associated with sacred icons and mandala or meditative devices.
From earliest times in China, and later in both Korea and Japan, writing was associated with mediating between the human realm and that of the sacred or spiritual. Writing was not originally for the purpose of mundane communication, but served to bring about community between the celestial and the human through the manifestation of shared meaning. In part, this is why calligraphy came to be regarded as the preeminent form of art in East Asia. Calligraphy was understood to be a direct demonstration of spiritual force and virtue a demonstration of a person’s profound capacity for harmonizing with their situation, but also for bringing about harmony within a situation. For this reason, all great leaders in East Asia have traditionally been expected to demonstrate calligraphic skill.
In East Asian calligraphy, the written word becomes a vehicle for bringing into direct presence both transformative energy and insight. The calligraphic work is thus not an artistic representation of a particular word with a particular meaning. It is the live recording of performative realization occurring in a specific place, at a specific time.
This sensibility came to inform the canons of Chinese landscape painting in the Tang and Sung dynasties. Influenced by both Buddhism and Daoism, landscape painters strove to so fully and clearly relate to the natural scenes they painted that the energy (or qi) of the mountains, streams, valleys, trees, and rocks would literally be recorded on silk with ink. Instead of resting primarily on representational skill, masterful landscape painting was understood as arising through an artist’s ability to establish clear and open sympathetic resonance (ganying) with nature. The importance cannot be overstated of sympathetic resonance in traditional Chinese culturein correlative cosmology, medicine, theories of governance, and social harmony, for instance. But it was also crucial to Chinese understandings of religion and the efficacy of sacred art and ritual.
Sacred art in East Asia generally served two interwoven purposes. As evident in Buddhism, the first was to embody or make present spiritually significant figures, the most common of these being particular Buddhas or bodhisattvas who had vowed to help all those who would call upon them in sincere need. The second purpose was to provide a vehicle for meditative training and a means for realizing attentive virtuosity (known in Buddhism as samadhi) and wisdom.
The paintings of Ji Kwang Dae Poep Sa Nim bring together all three of these East Asian artistic tradition and extend them in a way that is, to my knowledge, utterly unique. To begin with, although her paintings are often figurative, in the strict sense of the word, they do not represent anything. They do not place before us an image of something. They are not signs or indications of something lying beyond the canvas in the usual sense. To shift metaphors, these paintings are not like recipes. They are feastsorchestrated by a master chefinto which we can enter and actually taste the meaning of true virtuosity and wisdom. Ji Kwang Dae Poep Sa Nim’s paintings place before us live recordings of her own attentive mastery, great compassion, and unlimited capacity for skillfully unblocking relational patterns that have become conducive to suffering.
In this sense, although the paintings are in many cases explicitly figurative, their function is not to represent some individual person(s), some ideal, or some archetypal relationship. Instead they serve to actively restore the originally pure and clear meaning of the relationships through which we have come to be as we are. They are vehicles for healing and illuminating patterns of sympathetic resonance.
The characters ji and kwang can be translated as the effulgence of wisdom or brilliantly shining realization. The paintings of Ji Kwang Dae Poep Sa Nim, the Supreme Matriarch of the Lotus Sangha of World Social Buddhism, allow ji kwangeffulgent wisdomto enter our own lives and do there the healing and compassionate work of transforming this world into a Buddha-realm in which all things may do the great work of enlightenment.
Peter Hershock, Ph.D.
Honolulu, U.S.A
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