Iwa ni Hana

Spatial and Temporal Space

In English, the phrase ‘time and space’ goes together. In Japanese, one word encompasses both the meaning of spatial space (ie. the distance between point A and B) and temporal space (ie. the duration between two points in time). That word is 間 [ma].

But ma also has secondary meaning, and it is ‘luck’. If you want to say that so-and-so is a lucky person, you can either use 運がいい [un ga ii] or 間がいい [ma ga ii]. (運 [Un] is the more frequently used word for ‘luck’.) Likewise, if you want to say that so-and-so is an unlucky person, you can use either 運が悪い [un ga warui] or 間が悪い [ma ga warui].

In other words, you may think of the relationship between un and ma as this: Luck is really about having the right amount of time and space in between.

When I first observed this relationship between un and ma many years ago when I was just beginning to learn Japanese, I was reminded of how the Chinese astrological concepts of 旺 [wang] and 煞 [sha] essentially echo the same idea:

A Chinese astrologer may tell you that a certain person/object ‘wang’ you. This is typically translated to mean that the person/object brings you good luck in your life. But I think another way of looking at it is that if that person/object is in the right slot in your life, then he/she/it will attract the other right pieces to fill in the remaining slots. In other words, your life will be enriched because all the pieces make room for each other and together they all fit.

A Chinese astrologer may also tell you that a certain person/object ‘sha’ you. This is typically translated to mean that the person/object brings you misfortune in your life. Similarly, I think another way of looking at it is that if that person/object occupies a place in your life, then you can be sure that i) all the other pieces in your other slots will have be pushed out just to accommodate this person/object, or ii) that person/object repels the other pieces in your life from coming to you at all, or iii) the other pieces in your life will fall apart even if they do come to you. Chinese astrology sees this as a misfortune, because your life becomes poorer than what it could have been.

This approach is somewhat in reverse to the western astrology (or at least what I have seen of it), which sees a person’s life as separate domains of love, career, family etc that do not overflow to each other; Chinese astrology sees a human being’s life as one integrated whole.

Emptiness and Non-doing

I remember watching Kurosawa Akira’s (黒澤明) Throne of Blood (蜘蛛巣城) some years ago, and my takeaway point was that the moment man learns of his destiny is also the moment he loses control over it. If you think about the story itself (which is loosely adapted from Shakespeare’s Macbeth), had Washizu not known the future that he was destined to become the next feudal lord, and therefore taken no deliberate action to make the old woman’s prophecy self-fulfilling, the same future already stood a great chance of being brought about – possibly by the existing feudal lord dying a sudden yet natural death and Washizu (who was the most capable general around) being asked to step in. The old woman told him the what but not the how, and it is the how that makes all the difference.

Taoist philosophy favours 無為 [wu wei] when it comes to the how. Wu wei has been translated as ‘non-doing’ or ‘action without action’ in English (among other things). Wu wei means that one should deliberately refrain from doing what is superfluous, because that way one is already doing all that one can do, as expressed in the phrase 無為而不為 [wu wei er bu wei].

Another thing I noticed in the setting of Throne of Blood is that the world is deliberately shrouded in a white fog so thick that you cannot see beyond a radius of three feet. The white fog functions to divide that ‘stage’ world into two levels of separate realities:

i) The world of the living and the world of the dead
ii) The material world and the cosmic void

The former is readily understandable; it is the latter that requires some explanation.

The cosmic void is known as 空 [kong in Chinese and kuu in Japanese], though I sometimes see it used interchangeably with 虚 [xu in Chinese and kyo in Japanese]. The Japanese word むなしい [munashii], for example, can be written as either 空しいor 虚しい. 空 and 虚 are near synonyms in meaning, but if you must insist on a hair-splitting differentiation, I suppose two good rules of thumb would be this:

i) 空 is used when you want to say that something concrete is empty inside. 虚 is used when you want to say that something abstract is empty of content or meaning.

ii) 空 refers to ‘emptiness’ in Buddhist discourse, as in the saying 空即是色 [kong ji shi se] or ‘emptiness is form’ , whereas 虚 refers to ‘emptiness’ in Taoist philosophy, as in 太虛 [tai xu], which refers to the great void in Taoist cosmology.

Interestingly, when the two words combine to form the below Chinese words:

空虚 [kong xu], it means a negative spiritual emptiness, somewhat similar to the idea of acedia (though it would take me at least a thousand words to describe what I believe are the exact differences between the two).

虚空 [xu kong], it means the empty sky or empty airspace.

The Deliberate Blank

In Chinese traditional painting, there is the technical concept of 計白當黑 [ji bai dang hei] that is not readily translatable into English. The idea is to leave blanks in a painting, and yet the blanks do not mean that the painting is incomplete. On the contrary, the blanks are part of the completed painting. Thus not only the material world of touchable things is depicted, but also the immaterial world of void.

This is the opposite of western painting where one gets the sense that the artist feels the itch to colour in every corner of a painting. The western mind sees completeness in reproducing the material world in painting. The Chinese mind sees completeness in reproducing not only the material world in painting but also the cosmic void that exists alongside the material world.