ABSTRACT
In the last four chapters I have argued that the aesthetic code and iemoto structure of training in the Zen arts have no essential orthodoxy in practice. These features are remade in the experience of practitioners in particular contexts. The question which this argument raises is whether as an idea and an ideal of Japanese national culture the orthodoxy of the Zen arts is similarly susceptible to the intervention of the individual. Approached as forms of Japanese culture, can the Zen arts be refashioned in the image of each practitioner? This argument cannot ultimately be sustained because it suggests that collective entities like ‘culture’ and the ‘nation’ can be fragmented to the level of individual consciousness in just the same way as features of the Zen arts orthodoxy. The social and embodied experiences of practitioners are important for an investigation of the culture of the Zen arts but cannot explain the Zen arts as ‘Japanese culture’. What I shall argue in this chapter is that the idea of Japanese culture which is expressed by the aesthetic forms of the Zen arts does not occur naturally or spontaneously, but is constructed at particular historical moments. In the modern period (post-Meiji) for example, scholarly discourses focused on aesthetics to formulate a response to the social changes taking place, and in the process helped shape a growing nationalist movement.
