JAMES ULAK (Senior Curator of Japanese Art, Smithsonian Institution’s Freer and Sackler Galleries): These are the designated closest disciples of the living Buddha in the time in the fifth century before the Christian era when he preached his message in what is now northeast India.

These close followers who later received the canonical number of five hundred became known as “the worthy ones.” In Sanskrit, the language of the day in India, Sanskrit calls these people arhats. You hear different names applied to these five hundred. The point of Buddhist fascination with these five hundred followers is that they take the role of intercessors and messengers from the Buddha, teaching compassion, showing that the Buddha’s life can be lived on earth, and they take on the role of supermen. The idea was that they were enlightened but yet living among us. And so they were able to show us how to live but yet also conduct these intercessory miraculous acts to save us from our sufferings.

Kazunobo created this ensemble of one hundred paintings between 1854 and 1863. The ancient purpose of painting these one hundred paintings of the five hundred followers was to give a kind of approachable, easy to see Buddhist catechism. Now I use that phrase very loosely, but it became a vehicle to show to people the basic modes for living a good Buddhist life.

The Buddha’s message, of course, was that to achieve enlightenment one has to tear away from the bonds of any attachment to essential experience. The notion in Buddhism is that everything is changing, everything is in transition, nothing is permanent, and everything we see, everything we grasp for in the material world is ultimately deceptive.

The primary question at least for the general population of his day who were viewing them was that in the midst of all of this we can have hope that there is, that the Buddha dwells among us and in us. You see that in all of the paintings.

He attempts to show you how these five hundred worthies lived their life in a monastery. There’s a wonderful pair of paintings that shows the masters of mercy as they take part in the daily communal bath. It was not just a question of hygiene, but a question of gathering together in a communal way to underscore the idea of the Buddhist community. My guess is that Kazunobu actually went down the street to his local public bath, looked at different people doing different things—a man shaving, a man clipping his toenails.

You get a real sense of compassion extended to all living things. There’s a great painting done of the arhats interacting with the animal world, the natural animal as we know it and the mythical animal world, and they’re at comfort with these creatures. There’s a painting where a unicorn-like animal is crouching in front of a seated arhat, and the arhat is cleaning his ear. Next to him is a little, another monk, and on his shoulder perched like a house cat is what seems to be an ocelot.

You see, if you will, natural history borrowings from other information they have from outside, but you also see the Buddha through the vehicle of these masters of mercy embracing everything, telling everyone everything’s all right. We care for you. We’re like you, but we’re not like you. We have this toggle role within your universe.

There’s a wonderful painting where one sees in the pair of paintings in the foreground what was a dry stream bed or river bed, and you see in one painting water spurting out of the head of one of these monk-like characters, endless stream of water filling the dry stream bed. And in the other painting you see water pouring out of a pitcher that also seems to be an endless source of water.

When we look at the paintings we see a significant amount of narrative drama that involves murder, war, pillage, suicide, earthquakes, fires and these elements alone appearing in the five hundred worthies’ paintings I think is a bit unusual. And Kazunobu in his paintings was reflecting the tumult of the day. I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that he was an eye witness to certainly physical catastrophe and tried to depict that and to let his audience know that the mercies of the Buddha were there even for the suffering.

You see interventions. There’s a wonderful pair of paintings showing the worthy ones descending on clouds and hovering over the pits of hell where flames are licking at the damned and demons are poking at those who are condemned, and they come down to give mercy and in essence rescue. You see people condemned in hell climbing out of their terrible pit of torture and reaching up to a staff which one of the worthy ones is extending to his hand.

These would not be paintings you would sit in front of and meditate on. These are paintings that entertain and engage the eye. The eye cannot stay still. Every square inch of these paintings shows color, activity, detail that leave you constantly searching.

These humble looking gentlemen, these gnarled and whimsied old monks are really the embodiment of layers and layers of power inside of them. So there’s no need to show a central or overall dominant Buddha figure. The message is that the Buddha is within and moving about in very mysterious ways.

VIRGINIA RAGUIN, Professor, College of the Holy Cross: Pilgrimages are undertaken because people want to move beyond their normal, mundane life. They can be a one-day pilgrimage, from one town to another town, on a particular feast day. They can be a weekend. They can be actually years.

In the past, pilgrimage really was vital in Christian religion, certainly in Muslim and in Buddhist. Only Islam requires the pilgrimage — the Hajj — so that it is one of the five pillars of Islam. However, that is nuanced: only if you are financially and physically able.

On pilgrimage, people experience the same activities; therefore, it produces a sense of camaraderie, a sense of sharing.

Constantly we see that the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. So that all three religions use handy objects to help focus people’s thoughts; and prayer beads are some of the most ubiquitous. Prayer rugs that were brought by people, especially on the Hajj, where they could kneel down and then pray during the days of their journey. Qur’ans, small ones, were often carried with people.

One of the most common kinds of souvenirs is absolutely the simplest: stones. Stones or dirt from the ground. People who have been on the Hajj and who have engaged in one of the rituals — which is the ‘stoning of Satan’– invariably, they bring some of those stones home with them. You also have Muslims with clay from Karbala, or other holy places, pressed together, that they then use in prayer.

Although the doctrinal core of these religions differ, the practices that they use to help focus believers onto what is important, they are the same.

Often in these three religions, you have an experience of circumambulation, walking around a site. The Ka’ba is circumambulated during the performance of the Hajj — people walk seven times around this small building. Circumambulation, either of mountain or of a Stupa or another holy site in the Buddhist religion is one of the most common ways of making a pilgrimage. And, for Christians, certainly they’ll circulate around the icons sometimes, or the statue, that they are venerating. People look for this physical activity that helps them find an interior focus. Physical hardship can be transformative.

One of the things the Christians, the Buddhists, and the Muslims constantly come back to is humility. They make the effort, but God grants the grace.

KAREN HUMPHRIES SALLICK (Tibetan Buddhist Practitioner): The mandala is a teaching and meditation tool so that we can focus on evoking in ourselves the Buddha nature that we Buddhists believe you have inside you.

A sand mandala is made typically from precious stones that have been hand-ground and then hand-dyed. The sand goes in a funnel. They’ll rub it and the sand will come out. That’s how they put these layers of sand down to create these beautiful, spiritual forms of art.

One can use the mandala as an aid to meditation helping you through the process of eliminating emotions that are unhelpful to you so that you can then uncover and evoke what’s in the center.

There are thousands of mandalas, and, in fact, even for one type of mandala there are several ways to do it, depending on how much time the monks have. You can take five days. You can take a month to build a mandala. Every aspect of the mandala has meaning.

The very center is the representation of Chenrezig, the Buddha of compassion. Tibetan Buddhists actually believe that His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama is the reincarnation of Chenrezig.

The next ring outside of the central figure of compassion are representations of four different Buddhas. The Buddha for eliminating hatred is represented by a thunderbolt. Then we have a jewel that represents the deity that can eliminate suffering. Then we have a wheel of knowledge or dharma, the deity that represents the elimination of ignorance. And then the last is a green sword that cuts through jealousy.

The next circle are lotus leaves. If you’ve ever seen a statue of a Buddha, they are often sitting on a lotus flower, so the family of Buddhas that are represented in the center are sitting in a ring of lotus.

Then outside of that is the vadra ring of protection from negative thoughts.

Finally, in the very outside ring — fire, and that fire is to burn through ignorance to enlightenment.

The dissolution is actually a very important part of the mandala process, because it really is showing the nature of impermanence. As Westerners, we get so attached to things. So here’s this beautiful mandala that these monks have worked five days on. And, with no emotion whatsoever, they reach their hand into the middle and just mess it up. And then they’ll sweep it up with brushes, and they’ll place it into a vase.

The mandala will be brought to the water. The deities in the mandala will then go into the water as a blessing, back to the Earth.

The Tibetans believe that anyone who watches the building and dissolution of a mandala actually accumulates merit and can begin to evoke that Buddha nature, being the most compassionate we can be.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: It has been described as a piece of heaven on earth, tucked in the foothills of the glacier topped Mission Mountains in northwestern Montana, a place where cows and farmers manicure the green grass. It is not a place you would expect to see a 24-foot-tall Buddhist statue of Yum Chenmo, the Great Mother of Wisdom and Compassion—certainly not in a land that has been sacred to Native Americans for centuries.

STEPHEN LOZAR: This is where we live. This is where we were born and where the bones of our ancestors reside, so this is our home.

SEVERSON: Steve Lozar is a council leader for the Salish Tribe. Julie Cajune heads the Center for American Indian Policy at the Salish Kootenai College.

JULIE CAJUNE: The land around us, you know, is part of our creation story. The geography, the place names go back to our creation stories when coyote and fox went through this area and got this place ready for human beings.

SEVERSON: One of those human beings turned out to be Tulku Sang-ngag Rinpoche, the highly respected Tibetan lama who says he saw this exact place in a dream when he was eight years old in Tibet.

TRANSLATOR FOR TULKU SANG-NGAG RINPOCHE: And he says when he came here to this very site – little bit that site also – he says there was such an overwhelming sense of déjà vu, and it was as if he had seen it before, as if he had really known this place, and he talked to his acquaintance about it, and of course they convinced him that he had never been here before. Then he realized that this was the exact visualization that he had of America when he was a child.

SEVERSON: So this is where Rinpoche supporters bought a 60-acre sheep ranch. It’s inside the confederated Salish-Kootenai-Ponderai Reservation. Because of a unusual hundred-year-old federal law, non-natives can acquire land within the reservation. Guided by his vision, the Rinpoche determined that this was where he should build a Garden of 1000 Buddhas to promote world peace.

Workers have been busy casting Buddhas for months, but it’s a slow process, and each Buddha must be perfect before it’s blessed.

TRANSLATOR FOR RINPOCHE: This is the spine of the statue which has been cast. All these are scrolls which contain sacred Tibetan power syllables or mantras all with healing prayer, all that goes right in the cast.

SEVERSON: Sitting in this old barn are hundreds of Buddhas waiting to make their grand entrance.

The site is still under construction, but when it’s completed it will resemble the shape of a dharma wheel, which symbolizes the basic teachings of Buddha. At the center of the eight spokes is the statue of the Great Mother packed inside with sacred texts. But before the Rinpoche did anything, he wanted to make sure the garden of Buddhas was acceptable to the tribes.

TRANSLATOR FOR RINPOCHE: And so he extended his hand to the tribal elders to come and bless the land.

SEVERSON: Dan Decker is the lead attorney for the Salish Tribe.

DAN DECKER: And they didn’t come to the reservation saying you have to think like we do, which has been our history. Our history has been that newcomers come in, want us to welcome them, and then immediately tell us how we need to think. That’s not the experience here. The experience is “share with us.”

LOZAR: I actually was so excited I yelled out in the tribal council meeting, I think it’s a spectacular opportunity for cross-cultural associations that are peace-based, that are based in the holiness of this land. I can’t think of better possibility for neighbors.

SEVERSON: It turns out that Tibetan Buddhists and Native Americans have quite a lot in common.

TRANSLATOR FOR RINPOCHE: He gets a sense that, you know, there are similarities in our experience as oppressed people. He understands that once these particular areas were numerous with the natives, and their numbers have dwindled so much so that now they’re in the minority—a similar situation we may be facing in Tibet also.

SEVERSON: In Tibet, the Rinpoche was revered as the sixth incarnation of one of the great Buddhist teachers. He was imprisoned for nine hard years, and he says he was tortured. His prominence did not sit well with the Chinese.

TRANSLATOR FOR RINPOCHE: That’s what got him into trouble, because he says, from the Chinese perspective, number one they look upon religion as poison, something that is totally undesirable, and so if you were a religious person it’s almost the same as if you were like a drug peddler or somebody wh’os peddling something really terrible.

CAJUNE: Another thing that we share with the Dali Lama and the Tibetan people is nonviolent resistance, and if you knew the history of our people, we have really been engaged in nonviolent resistance for hundreds of years. We’re still engaged in nonviolent resistance.

SEVERSON: They also discovered a shared belief, that all natural things—the earth, trees, animals—have spirits dwelling within them.

TRANSLATOR FOR RINPOCHE: In the Tibetan tradition, suppose you were embarking on a journey, and you saw an eagle overhead. You would celebrate, and you would look upon it as a good omen, that success is on the way, and he was amazed that the Native Indians have such a similar belief.

SEVERSON: Now they share another tradition, an annual peace festival at a time when peace seems almost unattainable. Originally the Rinpoche planned to put a statue of Buddha at the center of the wheel, but after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, he decided instead to build a statue of the Great Mother with guns and swords buried underneath, symbolizing the victory of peace over violence.

TRANSLATOR FOR RINPOCHE: He sensed that 9/11 may have planted a seed of conflict, enmity, hatred, and according to the scriptures, and according to his religious training, the Great Mother has that unique blessing to bring about peace, to reduce conflict.

SEVERSON: And so now they dine together and share a dream that the Buddha garden will one day contribute to peace.

CAJUNE: There’s that old saying that says never underestimate what a single act of integrity can accomplish, and I really believe that that is what Rinpoche has done here. Something very good is going to come from it.

SEVERSON: The Rinpoche says the Garden of 1000 Buddhas will be ready for visitors by 2014 and that the Dalai Lama has agreed to personally consecrate it.

For Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Arlee, Montana.

Since its “opening” in 1854 by U.S. Navy Commodore Matthew Perry, Japan often has been defined in the West by a single, simple image.

Sometimes that image has been one of exotic, romantic tradition (a samurai or a geisha); sometimes it has been the image of technophilic hypermodernity (a bullet train or a robot). Over the past week, Japan has been visually defined in television and online news accounts by the imagery of disaster: flooded fields and streets, bodies and vehicles washed ashore, nuclear power plants exploding, and houses afire.

Disaster looms large in the Japanese cultural imagination. Even casual consumers of Japanese media are aware of the nation’s appetite for apocalypse, as seen in films from 1954’s Gojira (Godzilla) to 2006’s Nihon Chinbotsu (Japan Sinks), not to mention anime (cartoon) and manga (comic book) series such as Akira and Sunabōzu (Desert Punk). What the average Godzilla or anime fan may not realize, however, is how deeply rooted Japanese perceptions of disaster are in traditional Japanese religious culture.

In traditional Japanese religion (not only Shintō but also forms of Buddhism as well as hybrid and new religious movements), kami (deities) are entities of great power and unpredictable, even nonexistent morality. As the influential religious thinker Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801) wrote:

The changing of spring and fall, the falling of rain and tempest of wind, all things good and evil which may befall men and lands, one and all are the doings of the kami…. Among the kami are good and evil, and their doings are likewise in accord with that nature…. When provoked, a good kami may erupt in rage, while evil kami may soften their hearts when happy, and it is not entirely inconceivable that they might even bestow blessings on humans. And although people may not realize it, the actions [of a kami] which may at first be thought evil, in fact turn out good, while those first thought to be good, may in fact turn out evil.

Many a Japanese apocalyptic drama or disaster movie has perpetuated this ambiguous concept of the sacred. Much like kami, Godzilla has been depicted as both an agent of destruction and a powerful protector who both menaces and saves Japan, depending on the film in question. Interestingly, in the original Godzilla film, nuclear radiation is said to have been responsible for creating the mutated prehistoric menace that is Godzilla, while in Japan Sinks, nuclear warheads are used to detonate portions of sea floor, thrusting the flooded Japanese islands back up above sea level. Thus, whether one speaks of supernatural figures, fictional monsters, or contemporary technology, power in Japan is cloaked in moral ambiguity, and it ultimately teaches human beings important lessons about the limits of their own power as well as their own hidden resources.

Unlike practitioners of Western religious traditions such as Christianity, Islam, or Judaism, who may struggle with why a good God would permit evil to exist, traditional Japanese religious communities have tended to turn such moral reflection inward. Instead of asking why disaster occurs or whether it confirms divine justice, one often hears those influenced by Japanese religious traditions asking how they should respond to disaster and how that disaster might lead to self-cultivation and self-transformation. Phrases customarily uttered by Japanese during moments of crisis, such as gaman (“putting up with it”) and ganbatte (“do your best!”), reveal the faith that they often place in the healing and redemptive power of suffering as an occasion for both the strengthening of collective bonds and the development of personal character.

The ideas, institutions, and practices associated with Confucianism and Buddhism, in particular, reinforce the notions that individuals exist interdependently with others as members of a group and that people carry within themselves deep wellsprings of spiritual potential that can be actualized through self-effacing behavior and collective discipline. In medieval Japan, the experience of disaster both confirmed people’s sense that they were living in the era of mappō (“decline of the Buddhist teaching,” a degenerate period in which salvation was increasingly difficult to attain) and encouraged them to seek relief in either the tariki (“other-power” of merciful beings such as Amida Buddha) or the jiriki (“self-power”) of their own latent Buddha-nature. Either way, disaster could be transformed into an opportunity for cultivating one’s gratitude and fortitude in service to others.

In many ways, Japan is one of the world’s most secular societies. By Western standards of religiosity (personal belief, individual membership, embrace of doctrines and scriptures), most Japanese do not appear to be very “religious.” But when monstrosity strikes, the character of a culture is revealed. In the case of Japan, the imagery of disaster also includes the visage of a Buddha, reflected in the faces of millions of ordinary Japanese standing in line for aid, searching ruins for loved ones, and lending a helping hand to others: calm, compassionate, and concentrated. Such an image still inspires Japanese and others who cope with the inevitable loss and suffering that living and dying as impermanent, interdependent beings entails.

Jeffrey L. Richey is director of the Asian studies program and associate professor of religion at Berea College in Kentucky.

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ROB BUNDY (Buddhist Chaplain Trainee, speaking to patient): Instead of pushing that pain away, just let it be. You are not the pain. That pain is something that doesn’t have to be who you are. Just let your breath take that pain away from you. Beautiful.

BETTY ROLLIN, correspondent: Rob Bundy is one of 24 Buddhist chaplains-in-training at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York.

BUNDY: Just breathe down into that pain.

ROLLIN: Audrey Alasia has multiple diseases of the spinal cord and is in constant pain. Rob uses the Buddhist techniques of meditation, visualization, and a focus on breathing to help ease Audrey’s suffering.

BUNDY: The pain comes and goes, right?

AUDREY ALASIA: Yes.

ROBERT CHODO JUSSEI CAMPBELL: In our practice as contemplatives, as Buddhists, as many other contemplatives do, it’s to come back to the moment. What’s happening right now? Come back to your breath. Can you breathe right now? Everything else is going on, but can you come back to the breath? Can we slow it down a little? Can we start to relax?

KOSHIN PALEY ELLISON: I think one of the most important things you can do for someone is to hear their pain and how miserable they are.

CHODO CAMPBELL: Rather than “You’re going to be fine, Mom. You will be home in a couple of days, the operation was a success, bought some flowers, you know, you are going to be great. You will be back on your feet again soon.” That’s not addressing what’s happening to me right now.

ROLLIN: Chodo Campbell and Koshin Ellison, both Buddhist monks, are co-founders and directors of the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care, which runs Beth Israel’s Buddhist chaplaincy program, the only accredited clinical program of its kind. Chodo and Koshin minister to patients themselves and train others, who are both Buddhists and non-Buddhists. Chaplains may also provide their special kind of care to patients’ families and staff. Part of the chaplain’s training consists of learning about other faith traditions. Sister Maureen Mitchell is there to answer questions about Catholicism.

BUNDY (speaking during training seminar): Is it inappropriate for me as a Buddhist to make the sign of the cross as I am helping a Catholic or praying with a Catholic?

SISTER MAUREEN MITCHELL (Clinical Pastoral Education Supervisor, Veterans Affairs Hospital): No, it’s not inappropriate. For you to join with the person may give them great joy. They also might think they are converting you.

ROLLIN: Rabbi Jeffrey Silberman is one of the Jewish instructors.

RABBI JEFFREY SILBERMAN (Clinical Pastoral Education Supervisor, Norwalk Hospital): When do you offer direct prayer to people that you are working with?

ANNE REIGELUTH (Buddhist Chaplain Trainee): Most patients you can ask them just would you like prayer, and they will tell you.

(Praying at patient’s bedside): Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, may Anne be at ease. May she be free of all pain and suffering.

ROLLIN: As part of the medical team, chaplains often provide insight about the spiritual needs of patients. Buddhists relate to patients in a non-theistic way.

CHODO CAMPBELL: Many chaplains coming into a hospital, they are coming from a theology, and they are coming from a doctrine, that this is what you do, this is how you tend to the sick. You give them the sacraments; you give them the last rites, whatever it is. For us, we are coming in from a place of just being present to whatever is arising in the moment.

KOSHIN PALEY ELLISON: I was training with other seminarians of Christian or Jewish tradition and sometimes their theologies would be an obstacle in connecting to a patient, because they had ideas about, and moralistic views from their tradition.

ROLLIN: Patients usually request chaplains of their own religion, but Buddhists tend to go everywhere, although Chodo has found that not every patient welcomes him at the start.

CHODO CAMPBELL: I knocked on the door, and I said, “Hi, Mr …. I’m the chaplain on the floor.” And then, “Are you a Jew?” I said, “No.” He said, “Get out!” And I said, “Okay.” He said, “Where are you going?” “I’m leaving. You told me to get out.” “He said, “Get back in here,” and I sat down and he said, “So what are you?” And I said, “I’m a Buddhist,” and he said, “Really? Tell me,” and this was the beginning of the most wonderful relationship I had with many patients in this hospital.

BETTY ROLLIN: Chaplain services of any kind are not covered by insurance. Hospitals usually pay for them, but they do not pay for Buddhist chaplains, who are privately funded. Buddhist interns are not paid at all. Paid or not, the Buddhist chaplains get a lot of appreciation not only from patients, but from staff.

SHIRLEY ESCALA, RN (Patient Care Services, Oncology, Beth Israel Medical Center): When you have nurses who are so busy and who are taking care of cancer patients, or even in the CCU, patients who have just had heart attacks or are in hypertensive crisis, and sometimes you have a patient who just wants to sit and talk, and my nurses do the best they can, but they don’t always have the time. So this is another way to support a patient that’s just incredibly valuable, and they’re able to make them look at things in a contemplative way, being present in the moment, and that helps calm, relax. It brings peace.

ELAINE MESZAROS, RN (Clinical Nurse Specialist, Oncology, Beth Israel Medical Center): If they are calm as we are trying to treat them, they actually get better sooner in terms of their outlook.

CHODO CAMPBELL (praying with patient): I pray that you watch over him…

ROLLIN: Hospitals don’t need Buddhists, but they provide something that more and more hospitals are unable to give to patients—time and loving attention.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Betty Rollin in New York.

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KATE OLSON, correspondent: It’s early morning along the Pacific Coast. Norman Fischer, a Buddhist priest who’s been teaching meditation for over three decades, opens a day of silent meditation for practitioners of Zen Buddhism.

NORMAN FISCHER (speaking to group): Thank you all for coming, and I hope that everybody has a good day, a peaceful day, a day in which whatever needs to arise in your heart will do so.

OLSON: Other days, Fischer is at Google in Silicon Valley offering the same meditation practice to employees participating in a class called “Search Inside Yourself.”

FISCHER (speaking to class): Lengthen the spine, open the chest, and let your body pull itself up.

OLSON: Or he may be at a Jewish contemplative retreat sharing the practice with Jews seeking to experience their own faith tradition more deeply.

FISCHER (speaking to retreat): The practice that we’re doing on our cushions is fundamentally the practice of just feeling our life.

OLSON: The various hats that Fischer wears are part of his effort to help enrich everyday life experience by sharing the spirit and practice of Zen with the world.

FISCHER: If you really do the meditation practice and you continue that over time, your life really changes. You really have a sense of purpose, you really have a much greater sense of connection to other people, and loving kindness and interest in others and wanting to help others. Nothing makes us feel better about our own lives than that.

OLSON: At Google, Fischer is helping employees increase their so-called emotional intelligence on the job. Since the class began just over two years ago, close to 600 employees have taken it with the full blessing of management.

FISCHER: At Google it’s very explicit. Our brief is let’s get smarter about our feelings and emotions. Let’s go deeper than we usually go for the purpose of getting closer to ourselves and being able to be more empathetic and more understanding of others, and that’s the whole realm of emotional intelligence. There is no better technique or practice for going into and working through and really understanding our heart and the hearts of others than meditation practice.

OLSON: Developing emotional intelligence is not a cognitive process, Fischer says. Understanding the heart calls for another way.

FISCHER: This doesn’t work by thought and will. It doesn’t disregard thought and will, but thought and will are not the engine that makes this go. The engine that makes this go is taking a step back and trusting the body, trusting the breath, trusting the heart. We’re living our lives madly trying to hold onto everything, and it looks like it might work for awhile but in the end it always fails, and it never was working, and the way to be happy, the way to be loving, the way to be free is to really be willing to let go of everything on every occasion or at least to make that effort.

So the practice really works with sitting down, returning awareness to the body, returning awareness to the breath. It usually involves sitting up straight and opening up the body and lifting the body so that the breath can be unrestrained. And then returning the mind to the present moment of being alive, which is anchored in the breath, in the body.

Then, of course, other things happen. You have thoughts, you have feelings. You might have a pain, an ache, visions, memories, reflections. All these things arise, but instead of applying yourself to them and getting entangled in them, you just bear witness to it, let it go, come back to the breathing and the body, and what happens is you release a whole lot of stuff in yourself. A whole new process comes into being that would not have been there if you were always fixing and choosing and doing and making. This way you’re allowing something to take place within your heart.

OLSON: Fischer says the meditation practice, which includes meditative walking, is not an escape from difficult or painful emotions and negative thoughts, but a way to be present, and not attached, to whatever arises. This opens a whole new way of seeing oneself and others.

FISCHER (speaking to class at Google): I begin to notice others are rather like me and I’m rather like them. There’s not so much difference, you know. I’m scared. Well, probably they are too. I have yearnings or longings. Well, maybe they do too. So maybe there’s more of a felt sense, not a theoretical sense, but a felt sense of actual kinship.

OLSON: And this has implications that go beyond working more effectively for a company.

FISCHER: You end up coming to a place where it becomes more and more difficult to be harmful to others. It becomes more and more difficult not to be kind, more and more difficult to push for a result and not notice the consequences.

OLSON: At the Jewish retreat, Fischer teaches meditation to help Jews experience their own faith more deeply. He draws on traditional Jewish language and imagery in his teaching, such as Jacob’s ladder.

FISCHER (speaking to retreat group): A ladder rooted in the earth and stretching up toward heaven—that’s the human body. That’s the spine is that ladder.

OLSON: Fischer, who is a practicing Jew, feels much of the teaching about Judaism today doesn’t do enough to support a personal connection with God. Meditation not only deepens this relationship but helps one see God in everything, as he says the Torah teaches.

FISCHER: When we sit we recognize the crucial, divine importance of absolutely everything that arises—every thought, every feeling, every breath, every unspeakable, unnameable impulse. But also we recognize the ultimate importance of the others—of the sky, of all the sounds inside and outside the room. As the mind becomes a little more quiet the sacredness of everything within and without becomes clear to us.

OLSON: So how can a practice from Zen Buddhism, a tradition that does not speak of God, help practitioners from a tradition where God is central?

FISCHER: Buddhism in general is not committed to God or no God. It’s committed to awakening. So taking this practice from Buddhism and applying it to Judaism, it’s a way to go deeper into our heart, our mind, our consciousness and in a Jewish context, when you do that I think, at the bottom, you find the divine. You find God, and there’s nothing in this practice nor is there anything in Buddhist or Zen thought that would deny this possibility.

OLSON: Fischer, who has served as abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center, says it’s important on the spiritual journey not to ignore the emotional realm, which is sometimes overlooked in religious practice.

FISCHER: When we think we’re going to go from, you know, everyday life straight through to the divine, leaving out maybe all the many needs and feelings and human foibles and frailties that are actually there, they need to be processed and dealt with.

(speaking to retreat group): The thing about this practice that is, to me anyway, so sweet is that we are doing it together. We’re walking the big long line all together, like one person walking.

OLSON: Wherever Fischer teaches, he says the practice is an ongoing contemplation that leads beyond the self to a deep connection and compassion for others and all life.

FISCHER: And if you stay with this practice long enough, you basically will work through all the knots and confusions that your life has sort of set up within you. The practice will help you work through that and see below, below, below, below all of that to the place where you see what’s really important to you, and what really matters to you is that you are alive, and you are alive in a world with others. You really feel like my life is a life of complete connection, and it’s a life of joyful connection and concerned connection, and then you have to act on that.

OLSON: Fischer says the practice he teaches doesn’t conflict with other faith traditions, but can be helpful to anyone on the spiritual journey, a journey he calls “to the bottom of the heart.”

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Kate Olson in San Francisco.

The poet Stanley Kunitz once told artist Mark Rothko he was “the last rabbi in Western art.”

Critic Robert Hughes described Rothko as belonging to the “theological” wing of the New York School of abstract artists in mid-twentieth-century America, while the headline of a New York Times review by Hilton Kramer of a major Rothko retrospective in 1978 read “Rothko: Art as Religious Faith.”

As curator and editor Glenn Phillips notes in Seeing Rothko, a collection of essays on the artist and the act of seeing, “Rothko’s work has variously been described as transcendental, tragic, mystical, violent, or serene; as representative of the void; as opening onto the experience of the sublime; as exhilaratingly intellectual; or as profoundly spiritual—to mention just a few examples.”

At the very least, Rothko and his paintings beg to be seen to some degree in religious or spiritual terms. This isn’t always easy for many viewers, especially with his signature paintings of stacked rectangles and pure abstractions that, while so easily identified as “a Rothko,” eschew all painterly narrative, even in their titles. They are simply called “No. 18” or “Untitled (Violet, Black, Orange on Gray).”

Alfred Molina (as Rothko) and Eddie Redmayne in Red

Forty years after his death by suicide in 1970, Mark Rothko seems to be everywhere. Recent exhibitions of his work have been mounted in Moscow and at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. “Red,” the John Logan play that explores an especially tumultuous period in the artist’s life, is currently on Broadway and received six Tony Awards, including one for best play. In September, Yale University Press will publish The Rothko Chapel: Writings on Art and the Threshold of the Divine by Dominique de Menil, a Rothko patron who commissioned him to create the paintings for the famous interfaith chapel her family established in Houston.

Mark Rothko was born Marcus Rothkowitz in 1903 in Dvinsk, now Latvia but then a part of imperial Russia. He was the youngest of four children. His father, a pharmacist, and two older brothers immigrated to the United States in 1910 and settled in Portland, Oregon. The rest of the family joined them in 1913, and Rothko’s father died less than a year later.

In 1921, Rothko entered Yale on a scholarship but left in 1923 without a degree and moved to Manhattan, drawn both to the theater and to art. He joined the Art Students League, began taking classes, and in 1928 was selected by a League instructor to show some of his work, mostly landscapes, in a group show—his first exhibition.

At the same time, Rothko did not give up his interest in the theater and continued to see and speak of his painting in dramatic terms. He made it clear over the years that even the most abstract works of his classic period should be understood in terms drawn from the stage, especially tragedy. An intellectual among the painters of his time, he was well versed in the Greek tragedies, especially Aeschylus, and later in Shakespeare. Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy was an early and important influence. Rothko would speak of the subject matter of his paintings as “the human drama,” especially that part of the drama involving death. All art, he said, “deals with intimations of mortality.”

In the mid-1950s, Rothko discovered and read the Christian existentialist Soren Kierkegaard, especially Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard’s interpretation of the sacrifice of Isaac story in Genesis 22. Rothko told one friend he “completely identified” with Kierkegaard’s portrait of Abraham as an artist. “Abraham’s act was absolutely unique,” Rothko said in a 1958 address to the Pratt Institute. “What Abraham did was understandable; there was no universal law that condones such an act as Abraham had to carry out,’’ adding that “as soon as an act is made by an individual, it becomes universal. This is like the role of the artist.” Art critic Dore Ashton, Rothko’s friend and biographer, has argued as well that Dostoyevsky’s struggle between faith and doubt helped the painter in his own struggle to maintain his faith in art.

Painting from the Seagram series

Rothko was a complex and contradictory human being, at times shy and reserved, at other times gregarious and arrogant. He could be charming or brusque, accessible or remote. He seemed deeply affected by his sense of being an immigrant, yet he did not become a US citizen until 1940, at about the same time he changed his name. He also seemed to regard his Jewishness as giving him outsider status. He vigorously resisted being categorized as a Jewish painter and would not, unlike some of his colleagues, accept synagogue commissions. He both scorned and longed for commercial success. The emotional agony he endured in accepting and then rejecting the commission for the so-called Seagram murals at the Four Seasons restaurant in New York’s Seagram Building—the episode around which Logan builds his play—is only the most extreme example of Rothko’s ambivalent attitude toward his paintings’ place in the world once they left the studio and in what kind of environment they should be viewed.

Equally complex and contradictory are the religious and spiritual threads that run through Rothko’s commentary on art and life, as well as the response of critics and lay viewers to his work and words.

It is impossible to speak with comprehensiveness about Rothko’s personal religious views or to precisely impute particular religious narratives to his classic abstract works. He would, at different times, both affirm and deny their religiosity or spirituality, just as he denied that he was either an abstract or expressionist painter.

While still in Russia, his father sent him to a cheder, a traditional Jewish school where Rothko was subject to a strict religious regime of instruction, prayer, translation, and memorization of Talmudic law. In his later life, he would speak angrily about his father imposing this on him. It seems he probably broke with organized religion sometime after his father’s death, and critics have described his work as “religious art without the religion, Judaism without the Torah.” But as Dore Ashton has observed, “He also was a child of his age, assailed by doubt and hungering for faith.”

Rothko’s rectangles developed after a long maturation process, in which his painting moved from an expressionist-grounded realism, through a surrealism in which classical, mythological, and Christian subjects provided the ground for exploring the unconscious, to the final form he arrived at with his breakthrough work in 1949 that culminated in the dark murals for the Houston chapel, painted between 1964 and 1967—“imageless art that sought great religious and moral depth,” as John Cook, now professor emeritus of religion and the arts at Yale University, has written.

While Rothko was concerned about the moral and religious content of his work from the beginning, his classic period arrived a moment in the history of art and religion in American culture when both were in crisis. Post-war America, in its burst of affluence, was going through what many saw as a secularization process, while art was experiencing a crisis of representation following the exhaustion of Social Realism (William Gropper) and American Scene painting (Thomas Hart Benton).

The poet Wallace Stevens, in a 1951 lecture at the Museum of Modern Art on “The Relations between Poetry and Painting,” pointed to one element of the crisis: “that in an age in which disbelief is so profoundly prevalent or, if not disbelief, indifference to questions of belief, poetry and painting and the arts in general are, in their measure, a compensation for what we have lost.”

But the other side of the crisis was that, with the waning of belief, art no longer had recourse to a pictorial language or subject matter with which to respond to contemporary life. Rothko acknowledged as much in a brief 1947 essay, “The Romantics Were Prompted”: “Without monsters and gods, art cannot enact our drama: art’s most profound moments express this frustration. When they were abandoned as untenable superstitions, art sank into melancholy.”

As one Anglican vicar told the Times of London a few years ago when the Tate Modern mounted an exhibition of Rothko’s late work, “For me the paintings are the tablets of stone of Mount Sinai, but with the commandments lost. They are icons of the absence of God.”

Rothko’s response was to try to figure his sense of the discomforting of transcendence without figuration, in the pure abstraction of luminous rectangles and their sensuous suggestion of portals, their hint that something existed, perhaps a kind of light, behind the surface. By emptying the canvas of obvious story Rothko could paint a more emotionally accurate “portrait of the soul,” as he sometimes called his paintings.

The Rothko Room at The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Photo © Robert Lautman

Like listening to a John Coltrane solo, seeing Rothko’s rectangles is always surprising. They may appear calm, even serene, inviting restful contemplation, but they are far more demanding. They require sustained attention, and what at first appears to be stillness is actually very alive, almost pulsating in the soft, undefined borders between the colors and the edges of the paintings. In his “Green and Tangerine on Red” at the Phillips Collection in Washington, the blocks of color invite you into an intimacy that draws you out of yourself, but at the same time the size of the painting requires you to keep your distance. There is the sense of a presence—beyond, behind, within—but it is invisible, ineffable. The paintings seem to be declaring, at least in part, the spirituality of sensuality—that materiality can glow with a transcendence that gives it a meaning without denying its physicality. Repeated encounters with what seems a repetitive motif are, in fact, different, and one’s response is altered every time. It is not true that if you’ve seen one Rothko you’ve seen them all, for each one offers a varying degree of the knowable but unnameable experience.

While the paintings are completely emptied of narrative content, Rothko insisted they were not formally abstract. “I’m not an abstractionist,” he said in an interview in 1956. “I’m not interested in relationships of colors or forms or anything else.…I’m interested in only expressing basic human emotions, tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on—and the fact that lots of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate those basic human emotions.”

“The people who weep before my pictures,” he added, “are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.”

Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1964, National Gallery of Art

His art, Rothko wrote in a personal statement for an exhibition in 1945, “is an anecdote of the spirit, and the only means of making concrete the purpose of its varied quickness and stillness.”

For some viewers, the shimmering rectangles and ambiguous relations between foreground and background, as well as the tensions among the blocks of color, suggest a mystical dialogue between absence and presence. Among intellectuals at the time, Zen Buddhist mysticism, best expressed in the work of D.T. Suzuki and Alan Watts, was increasingly popular. But Rothko resisted any such labeling. “People ask me if I am a Zen Buddhist,” he said during the Pratt Institute address. “I am not. I am not interested in any civilization except this one. The whole problem in art is how to establish human values in this specific civilization.”

As art historian and Museum of Modern Art curator John Elderfield argues in his Seeing Rothko essay, Rothko’s pictures are “designed to deliver transcendence, to provide access to hidden but immanent truths of the universe—not merely to struggle with that transcendence, those truths (that would be a doubter’s way) but actually to convey them. For Rothko, in an interpretation we can scarcely fathom now, a picture could offer immediate access to the divine.”

Contemporary art professor Anna C. Chave goes so far as to see in Rothko’s classic abstracts the coded forms or traces of traditional religious conventions used in painting pietas, crucifixions, or entombments: “I do not mean to suggest that Rothko deliberately recapitulated his entombments…five or 10 years after painting them (in his surrealism period) but rather that the pictorial codes he used and adapted in the 1940s continued to serve him in the 1950s and ’60s.”

“Religious imagery—which had attracted Rothko for the themes it addressed—especially lent itself to being transposed into abstract emblematic forms, because sacred art is particularly tradition-bound or prone to formal conventions,” Chave suggests.

Rothko Chapel

Rothko once described the ideal display situation for his paintings as one work alone in a “kind of wayside chapel, not one in the city where you could just drop in, but more out of the way, a destination, outside the city.” His culminating work was, indeed, meant for just such a place. Originally intended to be a Roman Catholic chapel on the grounds of the University of St. Thomas in Houston, the sacred space now known as the Rothko Chapel is independent and ecumenical. For the octagonal plan designed by Philip Johnson, Rothko created a suite of 14 paintings, including three triptychs. Chave reads Rothko as using the conventions of the Stations of the Cross, altarpieces, and the architecture of a Christian Orthodox church. Seven of the paintings are a dark, mottled blackish purple color; four—a triptych and a single painting—hold a greenish black rectangle set against a reddish black background, and three involve a black background and green rectangle with a darker green form inside it.

Dore Ashton says Rothko told his friend and fellow painter Robert Motherwell that “at first he had thought of his murals as pictures, but then had not wanted to distract visitors to the chapel with images; what they needed was ambience. He wanted, he said, to paint both the finite and the infinite.”

When Stanley Kunitz made his “last rabbi” comment, he said he meant there was in Rothko “a rather magisterial authority, a sense of transcendence as well, a feeling in him that he belonged to the line of prophets rather than to the line of the great craftsmen.” Rothko himself acknowledged he was “a prophet perhaps—but I don’t prophesy the woes to come. I just paint the woes already here.”

David E. Anderson is senior editor for Religion News Service.