SHODO

 by Phillip Starr

A friend of mine recently posted this anecdote. I find a lot of truth and value in it... Shodo, by the way, is the art of writing Chinese/Japanese characters with a brush...It pertains to traditional martial arts as much as it does shodo...

___________________________A woman who had practiced the art of shodô for more than 40 years came to speak to a group of beginners attempting to learn the fundamentals in a local class. She told them that they were going learn a little bit about the art by trying it. “But first,” she explained, “it is important that you understand that shodô is more than writing. It requires a very deep practice.”

Deep practice . . .

So to begin, she held up a brush and asked the group of students to do the same.  “This is called a 'fude',” she said. “You can’t hold it like you would hold a pencil or a pen for writing.” Demonstrating for them, she then held the brush in the center of the handle and turned it so that it was pointed down at a ninety-degree angle from the paper below. “This is how the brush is held,” she explained, “and this is how it will be used.” Placing a long, thin paperweight (a 'bunchin', she called it) at the top of the white page, she then gently placed her left hand on the lower corner of her paper and dipped the brush into the black ink, and held it in her right hand exactly perpendicular to her paper. “This is the form. When you brush, you must keep this form.”

The students were then each given a few sheets of old newspaper and she encouraged them to practice brushing a single vertical line. She asked the young group of students to pay attention to how the shape of the brush, the density of the ink, and the pressure from their fingers changed the line. “Do not rush,” she said. “You must go very slowly and very smoothly.”

Although she had just mentioned the importance of form, more than half of the group gradually slid their fingers down the handle and began to tip the brush into a deep angle as if for writing with a pen. She didn’t say a word, but the look in her eyes was very clear!  These were the students who could not copy.

They looked, but then (consciously or unconsciously) deferred to what was their habit. Then she showed them how to brush a single horizontal line – ichi – and asked them to do the same. “Please do this,” she said. “And please try brushing only one stroke for each page this time.” While some of the students started out this way, more than a few began to fill the page with doodles, or go back to working on the vertical stroke, or even tried to jump ahead to draw a kanji (Japanese/Chinese character) we had just learned in school, like the one for “Tiger” or “Nihon.”

As she walked around the room, her look was subtle - but there it was again…these were the students who would not practice.  Eventually, an aide brought the students each a few sheets of very delicate white paper to practice the kanji “川” for river/flow and while these sheets were being distributed, she said to them; “It is important that you brush each stroke of this idea in a very specific order. You need to brush these three lines from left to right. Brush one…then, two…then, three.”

By now, being much more comfortable with the tools, almost all of the students were using only the base of the brush to paint and many had pushed aside the paperweight so that it wouldn't be in their way. Some even whispered to each other that they didn’t see the point. “After all,” one said out loud, “you can draw the lines out of order and they still look the same.”

At this, she smiled and the other students could hear her tell him that she admired his creativity. These were the students who had discarded the form for their own ideas.

As the lesson went on, it was interesting to see that some abandoned the project because they ran out of paper and a few even decided that their work was no good because the flimsy school brushes were not as nicely made as the “real” ones. There were those who managed to get ink all over their hands, and then there was one or two who avoided brushing on the white paper altogether for fear of messing up. Some brushed so quickly that the characters ended up being unrecognizable, and some were so tense that each stroke had a worried-looking edge and the ink soaked through to the tablecloth from the pressure of their fingers. There were even a few who managed to watch and to copy as best they could, but when they finished they attempted to re-dip the brush and correct the angle of a completed stroke.

“You’ve made a mistake,” the Sensei said. "But you cannot stop and start over in the middle. The beginning has left already. You can’t re-brush the same line.”

Out of the sixty or so students who began the class, there were maybe three that caught a mild look of interest from the Sensei’s critical eye.

And at the end of the lesson, as the group of beginners began to put their brushes away, it was only to one that she leaned over and asked, “maybe you would like to begin to practice shodô?”

⊙ ÔTAGAKI RENGETSUNI (太田垣 蓮月), 1870