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Kill the inner voice: Zen and the self-conscious anthropologist
Dr Rupert Cox, Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, University of Manchester.
‘I await the time of no speech and hear immediately’ (Tungshan (807–869) as referred to by the Dôgen
(1200-1253).
The anthropologist lies on the gravel path, places an ear to the ground and listens. It is a rainy night in
Kyoto city Japan and we are in the Zen garden of Taizoin temple. The garden is among the most famous
early examples of the dry landscape garden (karesansui) in Japan, designed by one of the most important
ishitateso or ‘rock-placing monks’, Soseki Muso (1275-1352). The object of the anthropologist’s selfconscious auditory posture is an upside down buried water jar (suikinkutsu), situated among rocks
beside the path and specifically designed to produce distinctive sounds (suikin'on). These are the
trickling, gurgling sounds of water droplets gathering at the jar’s narrow opening and the bell-like
resonances as the water strikes its base. The anthropologist places a microphone at the opening of the jar
and listening now with earphones, adjusts the levels of a recorder so as to accentuate these particular
sonic qualities. The recording will provide detail and through playback, give an affective presence to the
sounds of the suikinkutsu that is otherwise difficult to describe ethnographically. There is a Japanese
language for describing such sounds as these, which are part of a rich panoply of visual as well as
acoustic representational forms in the Japanese Zen Buddhist tradition, but it is in the form of psycholinguistic puzzles or kôan that are directed inwardly towards the dissolution of self and ‘make no
reliance on words or letters’ (furyû monji). The kôan point towards the redundancy of language and
rather than substantiate the actuality of a sound, such as that of the suikinkutsu, as the object of a selfconscious and self-affirming act of listening, allude to a mode of audition that apprehends
spontaneously, without the reason and consequences of conceptualisation, as in this celebrated example:
‘Two hands clap and there is a sound: now what is the sound of one hand clapping ?’ (Hakuin Ekaku,
1686-1768)
This kôan draws attention to the space between the audible and inaudible through silencing or killing
the inner voice by which the distinction between a listening subject and an auditory object may be
maintained. It involves what the Zen philosopher Dôgen refers to as ‘hearing immediately’ (sokumon) at
a time of ‘no-speech’ (fugowa) and can help us to understand other noted auditory features of the Zen
garden, such as the Shishi odoshi, which is a segmented, pivoted bamboo tube that periodically rotates so
as to pour out the constant trickle of water filling one of its chambers and then falls back into place
against a rock with a distinctive ‘clunk’. Originally designed for somewhat prosaic purposes, to ‘scare
away boar’, the auditory delay of this device has come to be appreciated as a contemplative moment for
visitors to a Zen garden, referred to by the concept of ma, meaning an in-determinate but
instantaneously appreciable interval in time or space, that is a ‘space between’ or ‘empty space’.
This concept has been used ambitiously, to explain various artistic endeavours like the editing of the
films of the Japanese directors Ozu, Yasuhiro and Iimura Takahiko and the composition of John Cage’s
Ryôanji music. Used in this way, as an essentialist cultural category, ma tends towards the mystification
and mythologisation of the specific audio-visual affects of these environments and like kôan has been
subjected in recent years to a radical deconstructive critique of ‘the rhetoric of immediacy’ by the scholar
Bernard Faure. This critique finds that rather than being a distraction from experiential immediacy,
mediations such as language, ritual and the symbolisation of aural devices such as the suikinkutsu and
Shishi odoshi are integral to the understanding and practice of Zen Buddhism. In this way, the inner
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voice of the listener in the Zen garden which may compel them to listen but asks ‘what is it I am
listening to’ are like the frustrating, self-conscious attempts of the anthropologist to put a frame around
auditory experience through the technological apparatus of a sound recorder; for both reveal a
dialectical tension between mediacy and immediacy that is at the core of Zen discourse.
In this sense, the anthropologist’s recorder is like the suikinkutsu and shishi odoshi and part of a desire to
hear and to sonify what cannot be heard, not because it is inaudible, but because it offers the promise of
an experience of aural immediacy that lies beyond expression. These devices are therefore necessary
distractions, because they draw attention to listening as a sensory modality comprised mutually by the
inner voices of mind and matter, and allude to the cacophonous silence of a world of ‘absolute
nothingness’ (zettai mu) which lies beyond their sonic objectifications.
For the anthropologist lying on the path of the Zen garden, these considerations mean that their attempt
at sound recording has the potential to offer an insight into the act of listening itself, not merely as a
reflection on process or positioning, but as a way of listening to their own listening. While such an
auditory realisation may not offer a path to enlightenment, for this anthropologist it offered a way to
reconcile their self-consciousness with the purpose of their investigation.
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