The Great Master Hokusai of Japan, who influenced Van Gogh and Monet, did the monumental polychrome woodblock print series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, including The Great Wave off Kanagawa ca. 1830–32. Hokusai shrinks Japan’s Mount Fuji, to a small triangle in the distance, framed by and beneath a cresting wave—nature’s engulfing power. He used imported Prussian and indigenous indigo to achieve the dramatic gradation of blues.
The wave
Rises
Remains
Recedes
The wave that you see is, like in still photography, freezing a flow into an illusory form when the form itself was on a journey from formlessness to formlessness.
Waves rise and fall.
The wave that rears its majestic head in the ocean and the one that slides humbly onto the shore are both different manifestations of the same water. A Buddhist sutta, Anguttara-Nikaya, asserts, “Arising (uppada) is revealed, duration (thita) is revealed, and dissolution (bhanga) is revealed. These are the three marks of the compounding nature of things (saikhata).”
The rising, hovering and falling does not relate to past, present and future as those categories belong to consciousness’s attempt to catch up. We remain behind the wave basking in the afterglow of the already occurring phenomenon. By using the past tense, one has already fallen into the topological trap of dissecting time into Past, Present and Future: a fiction that hinders grasping the fact of being.
Hence the art of Kintsugi – repairing cracks in a cup with gold –cherishes imperfection and celebrates impermanence. Hence too Hory-ji – the 5-story pagoda in Japan: the oldest building in Japan belongs to the worldview that emphasizes the impermanence of everything.
Impermanence is lasting.
What is the Great Waves framed by? What is it framing? Fractal waves of different duration and the slow wave of Fuji Yama; mountains themselves are the mother of all tsunamis in slow motion. Himalayas continue to rise by more than 1 cm each year, and each year, weathering and erosion lower Everest at the same rate. Waves in the ocean and on land continue to rise and fall as the colliding of continents, and the swirling of winds continue.
Hokusai once said, “at ninety, I shall even further penetrate their secret meaning, and by one hundred, I shall perhaps truly have reached the level of the marvelous and divine.”
He died at age 89.
Domino
We come and go in waves
Those who saw us grow
Have gone
Those we see grow
Will see us go
Spectators turn players
When death dominoes.
While the timescale of the waves in the ocean and the mountains on land are momentary and momentous, they both are ephemeral. That wave is no longer there; neither will one day you nor I as generational waves ebb and flow. Mountains, too, will one day be erased. One day there will be no life on Earth, and then one day no Earth or Sun. Our Solar System and Milky Way, along with all galaxies will all disappear. One day there will be no Universe as once there was no Universe.
Author’s Note: The above calligram Everything is perishing can be downloaded from Academia. The Buddhist sutta is from Time and Temporality: A Buddhist Approach by Kenneth K. Inada; Philosophy East and West 24:2, 171-179 Ft note 2; the Hokusai quote is from “Hokusau: A Universe” by Gian Carlo Calza in Hokusai, p. 7. Phaidon. The image of the Great Wave Kanagawa oki nami ura is courtesy The Great Library of Congress.
H Masud Taj taught Art History at IADT, Ottawa, working with the Renaissance collection of the National Gallery of Canada. He is the recipient of the Capital Educators Award.
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