by Parmjit Singh

What is the sound of one hand clapping?

Pose this question to a scientist and he/she will rake his/her head over it by deploying all the intellectual resources that can be mustered. They might end up offering a fairly sensible answer to this question. But they will still miss the point. That is where Zen comes in.

It is simple, yet it is beyond description because it is experiential. It is natural and closer to the rhythm of life. It is the state of being beyond the reach of intellectual coherence—indeed it is a state of paradox, co-existing in a striking harmony.

Humans, however, live a paradoxical life; we set out to be happy and end up being unhappy. Our pursuits are locked in existential schizophrenia as there is always a division between the ‘seeker’ and the ‘sought’. Frederick Franck echoes this sentiment, “We do a lot of looking: we look through lenses, telescopes, television tubes… Our looking is perfected every day—but we see less and less” (pg 3). We might seem to know a lot but this knowledge remains very superficial.

The knowledge where both the seeker and the sought or the object and the subject disappears is the highest, the transcendent. Frederick Frank’s “The Zen of Seeing” is a visual summary of these glimpses. Vision has worked as a meditation in this book where the eyes have tried to peer into the actual non-intellectual ‘seeing’ of the scene or object. In this book, Frank has used the impulses of the hand as strings of the self to sketch out that mystery of drawing. He does not teach but shows, like the finger pointing to the moon or the lake reflecting the flying birds.

It does what it should—it becomes a witness to the act of drawing and objects and scenes sketch themselves through him. He does not teach because Zen can not be taught. As Lao Tzu said, “He who knows, speaks not”, Frank hardly says anything about the mechanics of drawing because, “nearly all hints on this how-to are fraudulent, teach one at best to imitate other people’s drawings, to 'manufacture' pictures…” (pg. 21).

Zen of seeing is seeing beyond the seen (scene) and experiencing directly the object that is being seen. It is as Gurdjieff says, “when nothing remains between you and the object you are seeking to know” that is when you can see beyond the scene—that is when you become the ‘seen’, like a lake reflecting existence itself. At that moment, you become pure emptiness, the quantum void—a silence through which the bubbling multitude of pure emptiness expresses itself.

Drawing and painting is not a ‘learned’ art—it is the expression of that quantum void, the pure emptiness which bubbles into being only when the emphasis on the mechanics of art gives way to the silence of witnessing the world in “both its Oneness and its Manyness”. (pg.111).

If you let that silence speak through you, you become an artist. Frederick Franck shows that admirably.

The Zen of Seeing: Seeing/Drawing as meditation
Drawn and Handwritten by
Frederick Franck
1973
Vintage Books (Random House)
Pages 129, Can $ 27.50

Reviewed by Parmjit Singh, ZEN OF LIVING