Shinto

The sound of one hand clapping and David Lynch

The question, "what is the sound of one hand clapping?" is perhaps the most famous Zen Koan. The gist is that if you know the answer then you get a bit of enlightenment. I have heard someone suggest that it is the sound of fingers slapping a palm! No, surely not.

Or again that it is simply un-thinkable, beyond the bounds of that which a human mind can frame, and so, to frame the answer, requires that one takes a step back, into the chaotic, emptiness of the flowing, floating world. That sounds more likely, and more difficult.

Shinto.... I don't find to time to go to a Shinto shrine often. Shrine visiting for me has always been part of my jogging. I am more of a joggist than a Shintoist. Lately, or for the past several years, my jogging route does not end, or turn back, at a Shrine. It ends instead by the side of a river and there I pray, Shinto style, by bowing twice, clapping twice and bowing once again.

I have feelings for the river! It is quite magnificent. In flood it threatens to overun its banks, and the first floor of our house. It is a powerful little, and sometimes big, river. I try to see it as god or a Spirit or at least at the end of my run in my slightly befuddled, adrenalined state to feel the awesomeness of the place, and I clap, to the river, as earnestly as I can, "clap clap." First, an aside about hats. Someone opined that in Shinto it is more polite to be hatted than to be hatless. I remember ages ago I went into the cathedral in Bath (UK) with my hat on a member of the congregation 'tsk-tsked' me to take my hat off. I am sorry.

In Christianity it is polite to be hatless, but perhaps in Shino it helps to be wearing a hat. Anyway, in these winter evenings, when I stand at the end of my jog, I look out of the gun emplacement of my hatted mind at the river. I would like you to imagine a photo taken not from a camera at my brow, but from a camera shooting from behind my eyes, that sees the band of hat framing the river. And I clap. I hear the two clapping sounds. Then sometimes it seems to me as those my clapps are my speach, they, "pachi, (clap)" "pachi (clap)" are my prayer to the river. They are my greeting, my "thank you," my "yoroshiku (be nice to me)."

Normally I think that I identify with the presumed origin of my speach, especially my self-speach in the worded silence of my mind. "God be good to me, yoroshiku" "There goes someone with a saxaphone," whatever, I figure myself to be the thing that says the words, a thing inside my head. But when I do the Shinto clap, clap praying bit, it is like the center of myself moves from within my head to my hands. Out out damn self!? Well, I don't achieve enlightenment, but I do get this feeling that I am the clapper, not the speaker. And yet I can see my hands, and see that there is nothing between them.

Now for a bit of David Lynch! (Can this have any relevance at all? I would not blame you for wondering.) In two David Lynch films ("Blue Velvet", and "Mulholland Drive") the protagonists have a powerful, rather painful it seems from their expressions, experience before a mime artist. In both cases the singer sings a Roy Orbison song. Blue Velvet (particularly at 1:23)

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-DjluKLY14

or Mulholland Dr. (particularly at about 6:00)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoBUe-A2RkM

In the latter there is greater emphasis on the deception of mime, on the fact that in mime, it really looks like someone visual is making a noise, when in fact the noise and the vision are not linked. Well, going back to the clapping, at the river, it seems to me that there is the river, and there are the hands, and the hands come together and there is a sound and yet, does the sound really come from the same place, that place where the hands meet?

The sound track of my clapping and the visible act want to be together. They clap a love song to the river, but from different places. What is the opposite of mime? When is it ever the case that sound comes from vision? And, to return to the question, "what is the sound of one hand clapping?" I can't answer. But, first of all, it makes better sense to me to understand the question in the context of Shinto prayer.

And further, I wonder whether the sound of one hand clapping is any different to the sound of two hands clapping. Did two hands ever clap? Did they ever make a sound? Thanks to Christine and Mr. Tachibana for the inspiration to write this post.