Books |
The Zen of Seeing
Frederick Franck
By
Published: Jan 01, 2008
Category:
Spirituality
The Zen of Seeing: Seeing/Drawing as Meditation
Frederick Franck
My friend J. can meditate at will. He sits, closes his eyes and off he goes. Anywhere. Anytime. I’m jealous. All I can do is read about meditation. Pore over the teaching stories and the chronicles of inner travel, inhale the biographies of the great monks. But when I sit? My mind makes to-do lists.
So I was pleased to discover — 35 years after it was published, with more than 300,000 copies sold — a book that hardly asks me to read it. In The Zen of Seeing: Seeing/Drawing as Meditation, what Frederick Franck wants is for me to put a pen or pencil in my hand, to look hard, and to start drawing. And here’s the fun part — quality and accuracy don’t matter. Losing myself in the pleasure of drawing does. And that, in turn, becomes my meditation, my Zen.
How does this work? Here’s Franck:
Let your eyes fall on whatever happens to be in front of you. It may be a plant or bush or a tree, or perhaps it is just some grass. Close your eyes for the next five minutes . . .
Now open your eyes and focus on whatever you observed before – that plant or leaf or dandelion. Look it in the eye, until you feel it looking back at you. Feel that you are alone with it on Earth! That it is the most important thing in the universe, that it contains all the riddles of life and death. It does! You are no longer looking, you are seeing.
This may seem airy — the sort of enrich-your-life exercise often found on websites aimed at stay-at-home moms. But Franck shares some experiences that…well, let him narrate his own story:
…when I was eleven, on a country road, I saw a snow flurry approach from afar. The first few snowflakes fell around my feet from the dark wintry sky. I saw how some of the flakes melted immediately on impact, others stayed. ‘Me’ disappeared, melted with snowflakes, became one with road and sky and snowstorm. It has happened often, always when least expected.
If we are lucky, we have had similar experiences. But we compartmentalize them; what else could we do with them? In his book — laboriously written by hand and illustrated with pen-and-ink drawings — Franck makes a familiar case: We are all born ‘creative’. Where he differs from so many others is how easily and directly he believes we can reconnect to our creativity. For him, armed with just a sketchbook and pencil, we can discover that we are not making a drawing but making the thing itself — our hand can produce, on paper, the literal vibration of life. We can be on that country road, drawing snow, until we become snow.
Of course that can’t be expressed. And yet, he insists, you do it. That’s where the Zen comes in. First there is a drawing, then there is no drawing….
Who was Frederick Franck? Born in the Netherlands in 1909, he became a dentist, and then, in his 20s, began to study art. He moved to America, where he limited his practice to two days a week. The rest of the week, he wrote and painted. In the late 1950s, he worked at the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Gabon; later, he went to Rome and documented the Second Vatican Council. He created a personal museum in upstate New York, produced two dozen books, and died peacefully at 97.
Franck had no religion. But through reading and art — mostly art — he had a deep sense of life’s spiritual core. Typically, he relates that as a story about seeing what’s right in front of us:
The ninth century Zen master Siubi was asked: ‘What is the secret of Zen?’ He replied, ‘Come back when there is nobody around and I shall tell you.’ The inquirer returned. Siubi took him to a bamboo grove, pointed at the bamboos and said: ‘ See how long these are. See how short these are!’ Suddenly the questioner saw…’had a flash of awakening.’ What did he see? He had a revelation of sheer existence. And where there is revelation, explanation becomes superfluous.
By sheer coincidence, last night was the yearly fall meeting with new teachers at our daughter’s school. There, I learned how the first graders go into the park and just draw. The teachers don’t call it art. They certainly don’t call it religion. It’s all about the falling leaves, they say. And whatever the kids draw, they call it a leaf.
When I was in first grade, I sat at a desk and ate what I was served. No one ever asked me for anything except the right answer. Maybe that was your childhood as well. If so, there’s no time like the present to be as creative as a child.
To buy “The Zen of Seeing: Seeing/Drawing as Meditation” from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy “What Matters: Spiritual Nourishment for Head and Heart” from Amazon.com, click here.
