Miksang
HEIAN SHRINE • OKAZAKI PARK • TENJU-AN
A when there is no sense of solidity of self or other. The experience is like space meeting space, red meeting red, heart meeting heart. Like the freshly fallen snow illuminated by the first morning light, perception beyond condition arises in the space of our mind, appearing suddenly out of nowhere. This experience of seeing becomes a graceful meeting, a graceful dance.
– Michael Wood, Graceful Appearance
The oldest surviving photograph, the view from his chateau window captured by the French inventor, Nicéphore Niépce, two centuries ago, is a far remove from the increasingly constructed or manipulated depictions we see today. Seeking to illustrate, sell, and inform, photography has come to exert an ever-stronger influence on how we see the world, and ourselves.
Based on Buddhist analysis of perception, Miksang contemplative photography was founded by Michael Wood and Julie Dubose nearly 40 years ago as an approach to seeing that flies in the face of standard conceptions of photography. It foregoes all agendas, constructs, and goals, instead focusing on seeing, on direct experience of the world in the moment. The name Miksang comes from a Tibetan word meaning “Good Eye.” As a practice it offers respite from the relentless need to rush, opening a path to the fresh and direct recognition of everyday beauty, and interaction with raw, real moments.
In a KJ interview upon the occasion of a workshop they gave in Kyoto in 2017, Wood and Dubose told Kyoto Journal, “Being where we are and seeing that—seeing the ordinary as extraordinary—is the foundation of Miksang.”
This philosophy has had a profound influence on the photographic practice of the founding editor of Kyoto Journal, John Einarsen, for the past 15 years.
JA