The Great Wave

One of the gifts I got from my family for Christmas was a jigsaw puzzle version of Katsushika Hokusai's iconic woodprint the Great Wave of Kanagawa. Of all the works of art that I have seen in my lifetime, it is the one which resonates the most with me, so I was happy to have the chance to spend some time with it each day over the last few weeks, especially since the cold and rain have been keeping me mostly indoors anyway. Took a while to complete the 1000-piece puzzle, and I was convinced at many points along the way that there were pieces missing, but no, I finished it up this morning:

The Great Wave is an image of artistic virtuosity that works both as a dramatic image and as a philosophical allegory of sorts. It's made up of essentially four elements: the sky, which takes up fully half of the picture; the three boats in the foreground, with the oarsmen—more than twenty of them—huddled against the force of the waves; the great wave itself, looming large and about to break over the boats; and—off in the distance, framed by the sky, the boats, and the water— snow-covered Mt. Fuji.

The drama of the image is explicit. It's a bad day on the water; the waves are threatening; the men—presumably fishermen out trying to wrest a living from the water—are in mortal danger. The looming blue wave itself—and its somewhat smaller echo below— is rendered in stylized detail, its myriad little white fingers reaching  out like talons as the wave begins its precipitate descent toward the sailors bowed helplessly against its power. The wave is terrifying, but it is also very beautiful: Hokusai has gone to extreme lengths to render the wave's colorations, including long curling arcs of royal blue to help define the shape of the otherwise nearly jet-black water. Even the sea-spume is rendered, thousands of little white droplets of water and mist pervading the air over the boats, frozen just before the moment of impact.

For me, this picture has always seemed an allegory the human condition. Life is always to some degree a matter of turmoil: work to be done, food to be procured, challenges to be met, dangers to be confronted. The daily vicissitudes of life can be pleasurable, but they can also be painful, and at times overwhelming. The wave is for me the emblem of imminent danger, the reminder that at any given moment failure is possible, and even total destruction not out of the question.

And yet, that's not, as they say, the whole picture. In the midst of turmoil, we are also surrounded, and grounded, by something else, something which is not usually at the forefront of our consciousness but which nevertheless exists and endures. In this picture that presence is represented by Mount Fuji, dwarfed by the wave, occupying only about one twentieth of the overall image. But we can recognize that as a trick of perspective. In reality, of course, Mt. Fuji is larger than the wave by many orders of magnitude. If the perspective were reversed and we were looking at the wave from the summit of Mt. Fuji, the waves would be barely noticeable, and humans in their boats not visible at all.

I see the presence of Mt. Fuji in the picture—Hokusai could just as easily have left it out—as being symbolic of that which is permanent, changeless, and enduring in the world, both in the physical sense (the waves will break and dissipate, the mountain will likely be there forever) and in the spiritual sense (in the midst of turmoil of human life, and even perhaps beyond the life of the body itself, there is nonetheless a locus of centeredness, of stillness, of peace.)

Mt. Fuji can thus be seen as representing a kind of spiritual ideal. Pretty much all of the many forms of Buddhism make reference to the concept of the Buddha nature: the potential we have within us to achieve absolute happiness. If we assume this to be the case, the obvious operational question to ask would be "How do we manifest our Buddha nature? How do we bring it forth?" Each form of Buddhism has its own answer to that question, its own practice. Some Buddhists meditate, some chant, some take vows of poverty, some garden, some write, some retreat from the world, some go into the world to do good works.

Hokusai himself had something to say about the nature of practice. It's one of my favorite passages of any kind in literature. (It's been on the sidebar of this blog since its inception.) I've seen various translations of it, but this is the one that I think is most relevant here.

From the age of six I was in the habit of drawing all kinds of things. Although I had produced numerous designs by my fiftieth year, none of my works done before my seventieth is really worth counting. At the age of seventy-three I have come to understand the true form of animals, insects and fish and the nature of plants and trees. Consequently, by the age of eighty-six I will have made more and more progress, and at ninety I will have got closer to the essence of art. At the age of one hundred I will have reached a magnificent level and at one hundred and ten each dot and each line will be alive. I would like to ask those who outlive me to observe that I have not spoken without reason.

The passage dates from 1833, as Hokusai indicates, he was 73 years old. He lived another 13 years, so he clearly never reached the final pinnacle of artistic excellence as he himself envisioned it. Nor—and this is perhaps not obvious, but crucially important to understanding his point—did he expect to. That's what I love about his last sentence: "I would like to ask those who outlive me to observe that I have not spoken without reason." He knew he wasn't going to live that long. And he knows we know it as well. How long one lives is not what matters. Hokusai became a master of one of the most difficult of artistic mediums* and left an archive of artworks which will continue to inspire appreciation and contemplation for as long as humans walk on this earth. That's perhaps as close to transcendence as any of us might hope to come.

* Special bonus: Here's a fascinating process-analysis video showing the work of a contemporary master of the woodcut.