An Artist of Life
By D.T. Suzuki
We cannot all be expected to be scientists, but we are so constituted by nature that we can all be artists—not, in deed, artists of special kinds, such as painters, sculptors, musicians, poets, etc., but artists of life. This profession, “artist of life,” may sound new and quite odd, but in point of fact we are all born artists of life and, not knowing it, most of us fail to be so and the result is that we make a mess of our lives, asking, “What is the meaning of life?” “Are we not facing blank nothingness?” “After living seventy-eight, or even ninety years, where do we go? Nobody knows,” etc. etc. I am told that most modern men and women are neurotic on this account. But the Zen-man can tell them that they all have forgotten that they are born artists, creative artists of life, and that as soon as they realize this fact and truth they will all be cured of neurosis or psychosis or whatever name they have for their trouble.
What then is meant by being an artist of life?
Artists of any kind, as far as we know, have to use one instrument or another to express themselves, to demonstrate their creativity in one form or another. The sculptor has to have stone or wood or clay and the chisel or some other tools to impress his ideas on the material. But an artist of life has no need of going out of himself. All the material, all the implements , all the technical skill that are ordinarily required are with him from the time of his birth, perhaps even before his parents gave him birth. This is unusual, extraordinary, you may exclaim. But when you think about this for a while you will, I am sure, realize what I mean. If you do not, I will be more explicit and tell you this: the body, the physical body we all have, is the material, corresponding to the painter’s canvas, the sculptor’s wood or stone or clay, the musician’s violin or flute, the singer’s vocal cords. And everything that is attached to the body, such as the hands, the feet, the trunk of the body, the head, the viscera, the nerves, the cells, thoughts, feelings, senses—everything, indeed, that goes to make up the whole personality—is both the material on which and the instruments with which the person molds his creative genius into conduct, into behavior, into all forms of action, indeed to life itself. To such a person his life reflects every image he creates out of his inexhaustive source of the unconscious. To such, his every deed expresses originality, creativity, his living personality. There is in it no conventionality, no conformity, no inhibitory motivation. He moves just as he pleases. His behavior is like the wind which bloweth as it listeth. He has no self encased in his fragmentary, limited, restrained, egocentric existence. He is gone out of this prison. One of the great Zen masters of the T’ang says: “With a man who is a master of himself wherever he may be found he behaves truly to himself.” This man I call the true artist of life.
His self has touched the unconscious, the source of infinite possibilities. His is “no-mind.” Says St. Augustine, “Love God and do what you will.” This corresponds to the poem of Bunan, the Zen master of the seventeenth century:
While alive
Be a dead man,
Thoroughly dead;
And act as you will,
And all is good.
To love God is to have no self, to be of no-mind, to be “a dead man,” to be free from the constrictive motivations of consciousness. This man’s “Good morning” has no human element of any kind of vested interest. He is addressed and he responds. He feels hungry and eats. Superficially he is a natural man, coming right out of nature with no complicated ideologies of modern civilized man. But how rich his inward life is! Because it is in direct communion with the great unconscious.
(Reprinted in "The Gospel According to Zen," New American Library, 1970, from "Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis," , Eric Fromm, et al,Harper and Row, 1960. The New Hope Journal Library contains copies of both books.)
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