Way Up There, Swinging in Your Seat and Laughing

[Image: “Hell Courtesan,” painted by Kawanabe Kyosai (1831–1889). After reading the whiskey river posts which I share below, I tried mightily to find one of the paintings described by John Tarrant. I could not — at least, not before finding this one, first… which delighted me too much not to share! (For more about the painting, see the portion of this post which follows the whiskey river excerpts).]

From whiskey river:

I have always loved Buddhist paintings in the esoteric tradition that show the sufferings of the hell realms, they are rather like medieval Christian paintings, with flames and pitchforks and horns and so on. But there is always a little Buddha sitting in the hell realm, looking exactly like all the other demons, with horns and a big smile… So if you are in hell, perhaps you can be one of those demons, a Buddha demon.

(John Tarrant, “That Great Sleeping Dragon of Joy” [source])

…and:

Hiding in a Drop of Water

It is early morning, and death has forgotten us for
A while. Darkness owns the house, but I am alive.
I am ready to praise all the great musicians.

Whatever happens to me will also happen to you.
Surely you must have realized this from hearing
The way the strings cry out no matter who hits them.

From the great oak trees in the yard in October,
Leaves fall for hours each day. Every night
A thousand wrinkled faces look up at the stars.

Still we know that at any second the soul can stand
Up and start across the desert, as when Rabia ended up
Riding on a resurrected donkey toward the Meeting.

It is this reaching toward the Kaaba that keeps us glad.
It is this way of hiding inside a drop of water
That lets the hidden face become visible to everyone.

Gautama said that when the Great Ferris Wheel
Stops turning, you will still be way up
There, swinging in your seat and laughing.

(Robert Bly [source])

I’d never heard of the “Hell Courtesan” before working on today’s post. For full details, especially about the things it depicts (vs. how they’re depicted), I refer you to this writeup about it at the site for the Art Institute of Chicago. Here’s an excerpt of that text:

The story goes that the woman at the center of this painting was a 15th-century prostitute who possessed a legendary kind of beauty. She named herself Hell Courtesan after receiving enlightenment from a venerated Buddhist monk…

This monk, named lkkyu Sojun, happened to have a taste for sake, prostitutes, and music. (That’s him dancing on top of a skull.) According to a story in a popular book from 1809 whose title translates as All Records of Drunken Enlightenment of Our Country, the Hell Courtesan encountered Ikkyu in a room in a brothel and found him dancing with a bunch of skeletons instead of being entertained by dancers and geisha. It occurred to her that he may not be an ordinary human being.

(Credited only to “The Communications Staff” of the Art Institute of Chicago)

The “Japanese Hell” to which both John Tarrant and Robert Bly direct our attention lies decidedly elsewhere, “down there,” maybe, but is in any case vastly different from our everyday world. The Hell of the Hell Courtesan, though, exists simply on the other side of a door or painted screen. She has merely stepped across a threshold — and at that, not because doing so represents a punishment, but presumably just because she’s been summoned by a customer on the other side. (“What,” we can almost hear her murmuring to herself, “what the absolute f*ck?!?”) To return to her real world of — yes — sake, prostitutes, and music, she needs only to take a step backwards.

But she doesn’t. She’s mesmerized by what she finds inside the “room.” And what fixes her attention is not really the ridiculously animated chorus line of skeletons — one playing the shamisen (maybe while humming the Japanese version of “Oh, Susannah”). Instead, she’s captivated by the laughing, dancing monk…

The “religion” of this monk seems unrelated to the stereotypical lotus-position, wu-wei lifestyle of a Buddhist monk. But it also seems unrelated to the laughing Buddhas of Tarrant and Bly; those Buddhas, positioned as they are in Hell, apparently, to welcome newcomers… well, given the torments suffered by everyone except the Buddhas, seem awfully, um, sadistic? is that too harsh, too 21st-century-moralistic a term?

I’ve been thinking about the lesson — the enlightenment, the awakening — which the Hell Courtesan of legend might have acquired from the koan presented to her by the laughing demon. I’ve been thinking in particular of how it fits in with what I — what I think — I understand about classical Buddhism…

The real world to which the Hell Courtesan has freedom to return, I think, resembles the “torments” by which her laughing demon is surrounded. They’re not identical, they’re analogues — both of these things are not like the other, yet both of them are the same. Classic representations of Buddhism emphasize the “sufferings” of the real world, but deeper readings of those texts clarify that these sufferings are not physical tortures, tortures inflicted on us by the outside world, but spiritual or psychological sufferings: indecision, slights real or imagined, resentment, worry about the future, guilt about the past, teenage angst as well as mid- or end-of-life crises or simple doubts… These sufferings bring us pain (and later, scars), just as real as the sufferings from our skin wounds and bruises visible to anyone who simply looks at our exteriors surface. They’re the frolicking skeletons of everyday life.

The Hell Courtesan has two choices: she can simply return, unchanged, to life as she’s always known it. Or she can linger, and learn from the laughing demon how best to coexist with what she suffers from.

Which will it be?