Yamaoka Tesshu, as a young student of Zen, visited one master after another. He called upon Dokuon of Shokoku.
Desiring to show his attainment, he said: “The mind, Buddha, and sentient beings, after all, do not exist. The true nature of phenomena is emptiness. There is no realization, no delusion, no sage, no mediocrity. There is no giving and nothing to be received.”
Dokuon, who was smoking quietly, said nothing. Suddenly he whacked Yamaoka with his bamboo pipe. This made the youth quite angry.
“If nothing exists,” inquired Dokuon, “where did this anger come from?”
“Art has been valued and given importance through the artist, regarded as the one who creates something wondrous and beautiful. At a certain point, artists within that way of thinking often distance themselves more and more from the community and society. In Thai education, this system of teaching and learning art is still being used.”
“When art is no longer the center of the universe, then artists are not either. This has been a question asked of artists since the time of Walter Benjamin. He spoke about this long ago, and it has been written about for a long time.
“In the modernist view, the artist was seen as something close to a superhuman — exalted as someone with supreme specialness, with an intuition that could not be explained. When the artist was elevated above us, above the university guard or the noodle vendor next door, the artist became like a kind of demi-god, regarded as more special than anyone else.
“In fact, in contemporary thought, the artist is like a motorcycle taxi driver — it’s just another profession. We work within a framework of knowledge that is not some kind of miracle. And art itself depends on other bodies of knowledge.”
Jiradej Meemalai Co-founder of ‘Baan Noorg Collaborative Arts & Culture’
“เมื่อศิลปะไม่เป็นศูนย์กลางจักรวาล ศิลปินก็จะไม่เป็นด้วย ซึ่งศิลปินเคยถูกตั้งคำถามนี้มาตั้งแต่สมัย Benjamin Walter เขาพูดเรื่องนี้มานานแล้ว หนังสือก็เขียนมานานแล้ว
