SURREALISM FACING ZEN
It seems that the first allusion to Zen appears in Medium n° 2 of February 1954, a review subtitled Communication Surréaliste and directed by Jean Schuster. Under the title "Limits of Two Extreme Experiences", two portraits are placed side by side. On the left, that of Doctor Petiot, executed murderer in 1946, and on the right, under the figure of Dharma, the founder of the Zen sect, Soga Yasokou, who died in 1483 in Japan. Under Dharma, a citation from a book by E. Grosse, Le Lavis en Extrême-Orient, Crès editions: "The figure of Dharma is certainly not the faithful portrait of the founder of the Zen sect, as the multiple variants that exist prove; they themselves moreover represent only an ideal image of the perfect zen man". The second allusion is in Bief n° 1, of November 15, 1958, a review subtitled Jonction surréaliste, and directed by Gérard Legrand. Under the title East-West, Brief signals the existence in Tokyo of a "Surrealism Study Group" under the auspices of Shuzo Tokigucchi. Among the members of this group, Shin Oka, Jun Ebara, Koichi Ejima, Vémura Misaé, Yoshiyaki Tomo, Roger van Hecke. The last named became a Scottish freemason in the Thebah lodge in 1960-1961. He had married in Japan Vémura Misaé with whom I was very close when I was in Paris in 1959-1960, Paris where the couple had settled. In the same issue, an article titled From a Letter by Guy Cabanel. Citing some replies from masters to disciples of the Zen tradition, Guy Cabanel comments on them in these terms "these dialogue collages have a ready-made correspondence in beauty considered as the fortuitous encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella, Max Ernst's procedures, poetry as defined by Reverdy, and in particular the game of questions and answers (the question not being known to the respondent). Such methods obviously do not address an intellectual understanding, their highly irrational character aims to create a psychological shock, often doubled by a violent external shock (see the volleys of stick blows from Zen masters and the call to violence of the Second Manifesto of Surrealism [by André Breton] which itself will determine the attainment of the supreme point". Adjacent to this article, another article signed by Adrien Dax, Rhetoric of the Eclipse, comments on Guy Cabanel's book of poems, A l'animal noir and brings them closer to "Zen dialogues by reason of the equally unforeseen possibilities of speech that are affirmed there" (Adrien Dax was a painter and calligrapher-draftsman originally from Toulouse, who made at my request the drawing of the phoenix for the first cover of Renaissance Traditionnelle in 1970. One of his phoenixes was on the first cover of one of our old Cahiers).
These lines had an echo in Japan, since Bief n° 2, of December 1958 reported a letter from Tokyo unsigned, but which I know emanated from Roger van Hecke, dated November 19, 1958:
"Meanwhile our beautiful Parisian minds make leg circles while gargling with 'Zen' and other 'spiritualisms'. Zen, in Japan, is Bushido, Bushido is Nationalism, Militarism, police regime, and what follows!" This judgment, very reductive, shocked several members of the surrealist group in Paris, and Guy Cabanel continued to be interested in Zen, without renouncing the subtle rapprochements he had made. Now, forty-eight years after these lines (almost half a century!) and the brief controversy that ensued, Guy Cabanel has had the kindness to address me his reactions to Daniel van Assené"s article in n° 38 of our Cahiers d"Occitanie (let us note, in passing, that our friend Daniel van Assche, like Roger van Hecke, and Alain Jouffroy, each married a Japanese woman). Let us remind our readers that Guy Cabanel, secret poet, lives in Couserans, where he is, to take up a word from Mallarmé, not a "passerby", but a "considerable sojourner". Here then is his reaction.
Letter from Guy Cabanel to Jean-Pierre Lassalle dated August 31, 2006:
"I find your letter with the Cahier d'Occitanie of June, and I thank you for asking my opinion on Daniel van Assche's study.
This article that my ignorance of ideograms does not allow me to appreciate in its entirety appears to me however rather just when it treats the specificity and ways of Zen but very incomplete or even partial concerning the historical part and frankly tendentious on the relations of zen with bushido.
– On the historical part: the author seems to make little of the Chinese tradition. I think it is incorrect to claim that zen is an adaptation of Buddhism to Japanese sensitivity. Zen, a denomination that translates the Chinese term Chan, was an adaptation of Buddhism to the Chinese turn of mind, result of its encounter with Taoism with which it found itself very close. The determining fact was the arrival in China, around the year 500, of Boddhi-Dharma (Pou-taï for the Chinese, Daruma for the Japanese) considered as the first patriarch of Chan Buddhism. But it is to Houei-Neng (638-712) his sixth patriarch that we owe the true and still current specificity of chan: "do not think of good, do not think of evil, but see at this moment your original face that you had before even coming into existence".
Chan was introduced quite late to Japan, about five hundred years after Houei-Neng, in any case well after its other great masters: Ma-Tsou, Lin-Tsi or Mou-Tcheou, that is in the course of the 12th century, where it took the name of Zen and pursued a diversity already announced in China which produced the Honen, Soto (with Dogen) or Rinzai (with Mysam Eisaï) tendencies. It is very important I believe to note in this regard that the Japanese does not invent, he exacerbates.
– On doctrine and methods. Throughout his chapter on the initiatory way, the author emphasizes the close relationship that exists between Taoism and zen (yin-yang, non-action...) thus implicitly recognizing its Chinese origin.
Moreover, how not to think, reading these lines, of this point of the mind evoked by André Breton where opposites cease to be perceived as contradictory? On the other hand, the phrases taken from the Gospels, which all have a rational meaning, have nothing to do with the Koan, unlike surrealist games and collages.
– On bushido. For my part I do not see the relationship between Zen and bushido [Guy Cabanel places here a footnote call and, in postscript specifies: "I feel very well that in theory it is zen that inspired bushido and if I claim not to see any relationship between them, it is that it is only in my opinion an exoteric aspect of Zen. As for the amazon who would represent the feminine ideal, I have some doubts, precisely in a country where poetesses like Onon-no Komachi or Minasaki Shokotu held the high ground. But it is true that Japan is a land of contrasts']. If one can indeed bring closer the behavior of European and Japanese knights, one must not see the same religious implication. While the European knight poses as champion of Christ, the Samurai does not act on behalf of any religion. Moreover, you will tell me that this is perhaps only a question of words, but it seems embarrassing to me to assimilate zen to monotheism. There is no true god in Far Eastern religions.
– Finally I am surprised that the author does not mention in the bibliography the Essays on Zen Buddhism in three volumes by D.T. Suzuki, by the same author The Non-Mental According to Zen Thought, and by Hubert Benoît The Supreme Doctrine".
This so important fragment of Guy Cabanel's letter shows that Daniel van Assche's remarkable work has not gone unnoticed. Let us bet that doors have opened onto new articles that we await impatiently.
Jean-Pierre LASSALLE
Cahiers d'Occitanie, n. s. n° 39, December 2006, p. 116-118.