When you start a long journey, trees are trees, water is water, and mountains are mountains. After you have gone some distance, trees are no longer trees, water no longer water, and mountains no longer mountains. But after you have traveled a great distance, trees are once again trees, water is once again water, and mountains are once again mountains.
—Zen teaching
Shoshin, is a Japanese word to express a concept from Zen Buddhism meaning Beginner’s Mind. It refers to a practitioner’s attitude of openness, eagerness, and curiosity, instead of a ridged, closed-mind attitude of certainty. Even at the advanced level, Shosgin is recommend to practitioners. It is an antidote to the hubris often associated with an individual who is accustomed to doing things in a certain way, and never considers or acknowledges alternative ideas or approaches.
Beginner’s Mind is that quality of wide-eyed wonderment and surprise that we associate with our childhood memories. In that developmental state, the mind does not differentiate between important and unimportant; we can be interested in a blade of grass, caterpillar, butterfly, roar of a motorcycle, the contrail of a jetliner, or a painting.
The Zen parable is an analogy to painting and drawing. In the beginning of the painting/drawing journey mountains are mountains and trees are trees. During the journey, mountains are no longer mountains and the trees no longer trees. They have dissolved into the visual cues, touches of paint, value, color, and shapes in relationships, and the materials and methods of the artist’s process. In the process, the mysteries of the picture confront the artist. Then, when artists’ finish the painting journey, mountains are once again mountains and trees are once again trees, appearing without volition. The painting is now a picture, for others to see.
It is this faculty for making each moment fresh and new that makes Cézanne’s paintings so intensely realized, so really unlikeeach other, regardless of how many times he painted the same subject. Each of Cézanne’s paintings and drawings displays a quality of Beginner’s Mind—Cézanne’s ability to detach from what he knew and had done before, and instead to approach each stroke as a unique choice and action.
Beginner’s Mind enables artists to jettison stereotypical, judgmental inclinations, and instead to see freshly, in response to what they see. Giving up attachment and expectation are requirements that may lead to Beginner’s Mind, where the practitioner experiences everything as if for the first time.
NOTES:
Inspired by my colleague and friend, the late Charles Moone
See David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1994), 109.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin
Michael Torlen