Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists

458 Pages·2012·3.34 MB·English

by  Kay Larson

WHERE
THE
HEART
BEATS

WHERE
THE
HEART
BEATS
JOHN CAGE,
ZEN BUDDHISM,
AND THE INNER LIFE
OF ARTISTS
KAY LARSON
THE PENGUIN PRESS New York 2012
THE PENGUIN PRESS
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Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England First published in 2012 by The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin
Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Kay Larson, 2012
All rights reserved
Pages 475 and 477 constitute an extension of this copyright page.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Larson, Kay.
Where the heart beats : John Cage, Zen Buddhism,
and the inner life of artists / Kay Larson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 978-1-101-57248-1
1. Postmodernism. 2. Cage, John—Criticism and interpretation. 3. Cage, John—Influence. 4. Zen
Buddhism—Influence. I. Title.
NX456.5.P66L37 2012 2011044714
700.1—dc23
Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
DESIGNED BY NICOLE LAROCHE
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without
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ALWAYS LEARNING
PEARSON
To John Daido Loori
Who sat silently until I was speechless
And set my feet on this path
To His Holiness the Dalai Lama
To His Holiness the Gyalwang Karmapa
And to all my teachers
To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of the arts.
—Henry David Thoreau
I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m
frightened of the old ones.
—John Cage
CONTENTS
PRELUDE
I. MOUNTAINS ARE MOUNTAINS
ONE. D. T. Suzuki
TWO. John Cage
THREE. Merce Cunningham
FOUR. Four Walls
FIVE. Seeking Silence
II. MOUNTAINS ARE NO LONGER MOUNTAINS
SIX. Ego Noise
SEVEN. The Mind of the Way
EIGHT. Heaven and Earth
NINE. The Infinity of Being
TEN. Zero
III. MOUNTAINS ARE AGAIN MOUNTAINS
ELEVEN. Another School
TWELVE. Moving Out from Zero
THIRTEEN. Indeterminacy
FOURTEEN. Interpenetration
FIFTEEN. Coda
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
REFERENCES
THE MAHA PRAJNA PARAMITA HEART SUTRA
INDEX
PRELUDE
My intention has been, often, to say what I had to say in a way that
would exemplify it; that would, conceivably, permit the listener to
experience what I had to say rather than just hear about it.
—John Cage
aisetz Teitaro Suzuki was eighty years old when he set foot in New York
D
City in 1950, and was renowned around the world as an author, speaker,
translator, and living embodiment of Zen. For all that, Dr. Suzuki was
something of an anomaly.
He was barely over five feet tall, and almost invariably wore sports jackets
and slacks. He had not actually graduated from a university—the “Dr.” was an
honorary degree. He was occasionally so immersed in his thoughts that his
audiences had trouble hearing him. And he was not a Zen master, having spent a
mere four years as a young lay student practicing Zen in the renowned Engakuji,
a sprawling monastery-temple complex set within a canopy of dark trees south
of Tokyo, in the Kamakura region of Japan.
What Dr. Suzuki had in his favor was a powerful mind and a humble
demeanor, coupled with a quiet desire to transmit the way of Zen to the West,
and to all mankind. His learning was prodigious, and almost entirely of his own
doing. He taught himself Sanskrit from a book. He was fluent in Pali (a language
of the early sutras, closely related to Sanskrit), as well as Japanese, English, and
classical Chinese. He could get by in Tibetan Sanskrit (a derivative of the Indian)
and several European languages. He applied these gifts to teachings that are
upwards of two thousand years old and that, in the early twentieth century, were
in the process of being translated for a modern world.
The Japanese teachers who would arrive in America in subsequent decades
were true Zen masters, and looked like it in their black robes, their shaved heads
tanned by wind and sun. In the 1950s, though, Suzuki didn’t intimidate his
Western friends. He was probably just Zen enough, at the time.
Buddhist texts had been circulating in the West for a hundred years, but they
were a rarefied taste for a scholarly few. In the 1950s, all that was changing. An
oncoming Beat Generation of “dharma bums” was getting ready to popularize