Roam and Play in the Studio

Considering the connections between artistic practice and Zen

My studio, 2023.

Dear Friends,

This week I’m talking a bit about my own artistic practice, and at the same time continuing to think about the relationship of contemporary art and Zen.

You can watch me give a different version of this essay as a dharma talk on Youtube (linked at the bottom of the post).

Thanks to all who have subscribed, and welcome to new subscribers! For those who don’t yet know me, I’m writing forward from my book, The Uses of Art, with the desire to find new ways of thinking and writing with art.

—Sal

My studio c. 2015.

I’ve been back in my studio for the first time in a long time.

I’ve been there physically, but always with various goals, purposes, and urgencies in mind. It’s been many months since I had what I used to call “studio time,” and years since that was a regular part of my life.

It has felt like swimming in the ocean after being land-locked. It’s felt like being a cloud drifting in the sky. I’m really just talking about a handful of days, a handful of hours, but they were startling in the way they were simultaneously deeply familiar and almost forgotten. The experience has sent a shockwave through me, and it has caused me to think of things, think of my life in a new way.

One thing it has done is remind me of why I started Zen practice, how I came to it, which I’ll talk about in a minute. It also threaded a bright needle across several things that might otherwise seem to be unrelated: my studio, the blank page, various tabletops, the cushion, the ocean, a passage from Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, a particular meadow, my dog, the silent illumination of Zen teacher Hongzhi, and a line from the Heart Sutra.

As many of you know, I’m an artist and a writer, and these practices have part of my life for a quite a long time now. One of the things that can happen, as your work develops, is that a larger and larger percentage of what you do comes in response to deadlines and expectations. This isn’t always bad of course, deadlines make things happen. But it’s often easier to do things that other people want or need than to pause in stillness and listen deeply to your own impulses.

The summer of 2012, when I began sitting zazen, was a similar time. My studio practice had stalled out in the face of opportunities, obligations, and deadlines. I was having trouble returning to the deeper levels of what I was doing. I remember confiding this to a friend, and they essentially said, why don’t you just let it go, and put your energy into all these things that are happening. As you can imagine, I couldn’t let it go, didn’t want to let it go.

That summer I was working on a syllabus for a class I would be teaching the next spring on the topic of attention. I wanted to include something about Zen, which had always been an interest of mine, so I began re-reading many of the Zen books I had loved, and one of the books in the stack was Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. I had remembered reading it in college, but to be honest I’m not sure I actually did, because when I picked it up and started reading, it seemed like a completely new book. It’s quite possible I had just read and remembered the title! And, indeed, the title says a great deal in four short words. A world is in there.

So I was reading along in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind and I came to the line, “in Zazen, what you do is not for the sake of anything,” and I felt a little electric shock of recognition. In my studio I had been trying to teach myself to do whatever I was doing for its own sake. Suddenly, I thought: this Zen thing might help me in my studio. And I got right up from where I was reading and sat down in the position that Suzuki Roshi had described, crossing my legs in a half-lotus and putting my hands in the cosmic mudra. And a month or so after that, when I was back in New York, I walked into the door of the Village Zendo and became a student of Zen.

A few months later, I went on my first Zen retreat, and heard many of the chants for the first time—I was powerfully moved. When I left, I resolved to memorize them, and I decided to start with the Heart Sutra. I’m not a good memorizer, so it was a bit of a project. I was traveling a great deal that winter and spring, and I remember reciting it to myself in airports and on subways. I was doing some projects that really challenged and terrified me, and so a particular passage lifted out for me: “No path, no wisdom, and no gain. No gain and thus the bodhisattva lives prajna paramita with no hindrance in the mind, no hindrance therefore no fear.” I felt the import of that: no gain and thus no hindrance, no hindrance and therefore no fear. I felt it had a truth that I couldn’t quite touch, and that it was in some sense the same as “in Zazen what you do is not for the sake of anything.”

During these recent times in the studio, another phrase has risen to my mind: to “roam and play in samadhi,”

Samadhi is a word we get from Sanskrit which describes the consciousness experienced during meditation. It comes from the Sanskrit root for “bringing together” and is sometimes rendered as concentration, absorption, fixity, or unity, but more commonly samadhi is left untranslated. This non-translation gives us a bit of space to explore its possible meanings through the context offered by different teachers, and directly through our own experience.

The phrase “roam and play in samadhi” is from the “practice instructions” of the teacher Hongzhi Zenjue who lived 1091 and 1157 in Song dynasty China. He is the teacher who brought us the koan collection known as The Book of Serenity or The Book of Equanimity. Many of his other writings, including the short, poetic practice instructions are collected in a book called Cultivating the Empty Field.

Here’s one of these practice instructions in its entirety. I won’t talk about most of it, but I love Hongzhi’s writing and wanted to offer its flavor:

With Total Trust, Roam and Play in Samadhi

Empty and desireless, cold and thin, simple and genuine, this is how to strike down and fold up the remaining habits of many lives. When the stains from old habits are exhausted, the original light appears, blazing through your skull, not admitting any other matters. Vast and spacious, like sky and water merging during autumn, like snow and moon having the same color, this field is without boundary, beyond direction, magnificently one entity without edge or seam. Further, when you turn within and drop off everything completely, realization occurs. Right at the time of entirely dropping off, deliberation and discussion are one thousand or ten thousand miles away. Still no principle is discernible, so what could there be to point to or explain? People with the bottom of the bucket fallen out immediately find total trust. So we are told simply to realize mutual response and explore mutual response, then turn around and enter the world. Roam and play in Samadhi. Every detail clearly appears before you. Sound and form, echo and shadow, happen instantly without leaving traces. The outside and myself do not dominate each other, only because no perceiving [of objects] comes between us. Only this non-perceiving encloses the empty space of the Dharma realm's majestic ten thousand forms. People with the original face should enact and fully investigate [the field] without neglecting a single fragment.

What if we saw this field, this vast and spacious sky, as something simple and familiar? What if we saw it as something like the blank page, or the waiting studio, or the kitchen table? What if we saw it as the space of our own simple and native creativity and expression? And I don’t meant to limit this to art making or writing. For someone the space of that creativity and expression could be making dinner, or going on a bike ride, or walking your dog, or  playing with a child, or sitting down to zazen. It is something very simple, something we all have, something each of us has our own, unique, experience of.

I named my dog Samadhi. I know—it’s an absolutely ridiculous dog name. I don’t know what possessed me. Just picture me at the dog park telling some kind stranger her name. Sometimes I just say it’s Sam or Sammy.

Perhaps I was under the influence of a passage in Art as Experience by the philosopher John Dewey where he talks about the attention and experience of animals:

The activities of the fox, the dog, and the thrush may at least stand as reminders and symbols of that unity of experience which we so fractionize when work is labor, and thought withdraws us from the world. The live animal is fully present, all there, in all of its actions: in its wary glances, its sharp sniffings, its abrupt cocking of ears. All senses are equally on the qui vive. As you watch, you see motion merging into sense and sense into motion.

When I named my puppy Samadhi, I wanted to remind myself that samadhi, the heart of meditation, is alert and playful. It’s this kind of playfulness that I want for my Zen practice and for my studio days.

I will pause here and clarify that I’m personally kind of a Zen traditionalist or Zen minimalist. I don’t mean to say that creative practice, however widely defined, is zazen (sitting meditation), or equivalent to zazen. What I’m pointing to is that our experience of creative practice and our experience of zazen might have something to say to each other. As Dogen often says: investigate this thoroughly for yourself.

The other thing I want to add is that when you have a positive experience, like this experience of playfulness and spaciousness that I’ve had in the studio, it’s natural to want it to continue, even though we know perfectly well that it won’t and can’t. Nevertheless, I do thing there’s something we can learn from a strongly positive experience of ourselves. These kinds of experiences can remind us what we find important, can help reset our internal compass. The same thing can happen in big life experiences of grief, or loss, or fear.

Back to Hongzhi:

People with the bottom of the bucket fallen out immediately find total trust. So we are told simply to realize mutual response and explore mutual response, then turn around and enter the world. Roam and play in Samadhi.

The bottom of the bucket has fallen out. There is nothing to hold our sense of self in place. We spill out into the world the way water does, playfully encountering each thing in mutual response. The water roams and plays, we roam and play in samadhi, in the totality of our lives.

No-gain is the ground from which this experience of play naturally arises. You might even say no-gain, and play are the same thing.

A few years ago a friend came to my Shuso Hossen ceremony, and it was the first time he encountered the Heart Sutra. During that ceremony, we chant the Heart Sutra very slowly, and everyone in the audience has a copy of the text, so my friend really read it and really listened to it. A few days later we were having dinner and he asked me about it, in particular about the “no gain.” He wanted to know if we really meant that. “Yes!” I said.

And in fact, as I was writing this, I began to wonder if you condensed the Heart Sutra down to two words, or one thought, would no-gain be that thought?

Another way to put this is that we have the opportunity to approach our practice, and our creative expression, and our lives for their own sake.

With total trust, roam and play in samadhi.

You can watch a slightly different version of this essay here:

Samadhi relaxing

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Further adventures and new ways of seeing can be found in my book, The Uses of Art.

Artist Sal Randolph’s THE USES OF ART is a memoir of transformative encounters with works of art, inviting readers into new methods of looking that are both liberating and emboldening.

Dazzlingly original, ferociously intelligent.
— Michael Cunningham

A joyful, dazzling treasure-box of a book.
— Bonnie Friedman

Here’s a guide, to waking up, over and over again.
— Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara

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