Zen practices are at the core of many arts of the East, and the principles of teaching permeate both traditional and modern culture. Clarification of the specifics of the sacred and the experience of its survival with aesthetic Buddhist practices is a theoretically significant moment that allows you to focus on the means of achieving enlightenment, using the tools that are available to an ordinary person.

Currently, the enthusiasm for Japanese culture and specifically Japanese, essentially Buddhist art, testifies to the importance of the aesthetic experience obtained through Zen practices, which allows us to expand our ideas about the properties and potential of Buddhist culture in general, and Japanese in particular.

Aesthetic experience is the most important part of a human being and characterizes him as a creative and contemplative person. The main content of aesthetic experiences obtained in Buddhist practices is the harmonization of a person with himself, with the surrounding nature, other people, with the universe. The one who practices Zen lives by it, perceives the world through the prism of the sacred. The sacred – is a kind of bridge between the objective, material world and the spiritual world. Zen offers a number of aesthetic practices that promote hierophany, that is, the manifestation of the sacred in human existence. These include the art of the Japanese tea ceremony, the art of creating a picturesque scroll, the art of archery, the art of wielding a sword, etc.

The practice of the Zen school can be divided into two types: “internal”, when work with consciousness is carried out through concentration and self-control, and the main means here are the possibilities and abilities of the adept; “external”, when the adept achieves the necessary internal state through interaction with surrounding objects and subjects. The Japanese tea ceremony and the act of creating a picturesque scroll are specific “external” practices. Both practices are quite complex systems that include: 1) external, visible actions (ritual manipulation of objects); 2) internal work (contemplation, experiencing the sacred). External actions create the basis for internal work, and also give an idea of ​​​​the internal state of the participant in the practice, since each stage of external activity corresponds to a certain stage of internal work. After reaching the desired state, a climax comes, immediate enlightenment.

The sacred in Zen practices is not obvious, since it was originally used not as a goal, but as an aid. When describing the experience of experiencing the sacred in aesthetic Zen practices, it should be emphasized that this experience is a means to gaining enlightenment, and not the purpose of the practice or its side effect, as it might seem at first glance.

Zen practice here is a system for reconstructing a sacred environment in which key stages and levels of experience of experiencing the sacred are correlated with the stages of change in the practitioner’s consciousness. The task of practitioners is to prepare and purify human consciousness, to create conditions for gaining enlightenment.

The properties of the sacred correspond to the basic ideas of Zen. First, the sacred allows you to touch the truth, the foundation of the foundations, and the primary causes of all things. Immersion in it allows you to look beyond the artificial bonds created by man in the profane world, overcome attachments, including his own life, and “return to the ultimate state of being”, the “original abode”. Secondly, the entire completeness of the sacred, like the essence of Zen, cannot be understood rationally. Zen “struggles with intelligence, because, despite all its practical advantages, it hinders our efforts to plunge into the depths of being.” Enlightenment cannot be achieved only by understanding, assimilating verbal information received from a mentor. Thirdly, the sacred is experienced individually, internally, intimately. Zen is also “very personal, very subjective in the sense that it has an internal, creative character”. According to Zen, satori is achieved solely by one’s own efforts, it is unique and individual. And it is precisely spiritual readiness that reveals the path to the sacred; the strength with which the sacred is experienced determines the necessary result – the purification of consciousness and then the attainment of enlightenment. The sacred belongs to the highest levels of reality, but it is able to manifest itself through the objects of the profane world. Mircea Eliade called this phenomenon “hierophany” – the sacred, which appears before us.

The sacred, in its manifestation, gives an object or action a special power that has an exceptional meaning. Hierophany distinguishes a sacred action from a profane one, a sacred image from a secular image in a religious plot. If a hierophany is hidden from a person, the object remains for him an ordinary object of the profane world. In other words, what is sacred for some initiates may not have meaning for others, the uninitiated. For example, the act of creating a sacred painting is, on the one hand, a special action that supports the hierophany, on the other hand, a set of manipulations aimed at creating a picturesque image.

It is especially worth emphasizing the phase of practice, when the sacred environment is created by an action or object – the conditions for the occurrence of hierophilia. “Divine revelation itself is beyond the scope of human creativity,” but a person who wishes to touch the power of the sacred can create the conditions for the manifestation of the sacred. The sacred environment can be recreated through ritual – a sacred action, which is based on endowing things with special (symbolic) properties. The ritual assumes a strict sequence, certainty of manipulation, all ritual movements are equally important and obligatory, since the exact reproduction of the “pattern” guarantees the expected result. M. Eliade writes that “by repetition, the ritual coincides with its “archetype” and profane time is abolished.”

Ritual movements differ from profane ones, they contain a special meaning known only to the initiated, which helps to create an atmosphere of solemnity and special significance. Having mastered all the elements of the ritual, a person reproduces rhythmically verified movements without hesitation, relying on the memory of the body. Rhythm “frees consciousness from logic, that is, phenomenologically leads it to a meditative state”. It is as if the action takes place by itself, the personal recedes, the feeling of participation in the eternal, unchanging comes to the fore – the sacred manifests itself.

In Zen practices, sacred space and sacred environment are usually created simultaneously by objects that are endowed with sacred properties and ritual actions. Sacred practices are carried out according to a single algorithm, but acquire their specificity depending on what kind of action lies at their core. Let us follow this on the example of aesthetic procedures for creating a picturesque scroll and a tea ceremony.

Source “Sacred in Aesthetic Practices of the Earth”

N.A. Subangulova, N.P. Konovalova

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