"The Buddhist Queen"

"High in a palace in old Indonesia,
 There once was a Queen who practiced amnesia,
 She gave up all knowledge in exchange for her vows,
 To meditate on the Buddha without wearing her clothes."

This box is a what I call medium sized . . nine inches in length, larger than the other boxes here. More views of this piece are on Etsy.

Again the recurring theme of a woman in meditation . . . this time I exploited the flow of temoku loosely applied over Shino and wax resist to create the shimmering halo effect of a crown.

The rhymes and titles are something I write to complete the work, in my mind, in my imagination. My pots are never perfect, but by writing something about them I hustle them along towards their destination, a little like a shepherd calling out to a flock.

"Move along there!"

"The Arab Buddhist"

  "If Arabian faithful meditated,

   Would Palestine get liberated?

Another of three boxes listed on Etsy with a Buddhist theme.

This followed a period when I was mentally noting the features of different hats from around the world. I drew this kid sitting in meditation then put an Arab headdress on him . . . then I wondered, what a wonderful addition to Islam, to Christianity and Judaism would be the practice of mediation!

A young boy sits on the ground, shielded from the sun by his keffiyeh. He sits between two panels illustrating distractions, one a scene of debauchery, the other of death and destruction.

A fairly standard white Shino, fired to Cone 10, light reduction.

"Iranian Buddhist"

"A Buddhist from Iran who followed the Koran,

  Said "Violence forget.it! I'm sitting cross legged!"

Been making quite a number of these ceramic boxes lately. For me the adrenaline rush comes from drawing with a brush of oxide wash and painting rapidly on the white porous unfired Shino glaze. It's like drawing with India ink. No goofs allowed.

For you potters out there this is a Fergusen-McKenzie shino lightly reduced starting at around Cone 08 fired to finish at cone 10.

This is one of three such boxes with a Buddhist theme.

"Buddhist Primer"

"A Boddhisatva sat in lotus,

 At his altar Zen he showed us."

This is a detail of a high fire stoneware box. I wanted to paint something with a meditating figure, this was the first one of several on this theme. I just thought about the scene and the figures appeared. The ape-like qualities of the figures in front were not intentional, they just happened that way. The meditating figure is larger and has no face . . .hmmm. . . so I thought, this has to be a lesson in Zen mediation.

Later boxes from this series show the meditating figure with a distinctly Arabic or Palestinian hat, which led me to wonder, suppose the Palestinians in Gaza took up Buddhism, while at the same time remaining Muslim? I wondered, briefly, before fighting broke out again, what would happen if a meditative religious practice were grafted onto today's instincts for jihad.

Would mediation by either side, help lead to peace? One thing may be said about both sides in the conflict, neither religion has a tradition of meditation for clearing of the mind. Neither does Christianity. The monotheistic religions suffer from their own motivational myths, jihad, conquering, subjugation, being chosen. The religions of the word are ego inflating by definition. Nowhere in the core of these practices is a process of emptying the trash of the mind. If anything, they conflagrate mental debris by accentuating and emphasizing the power of the word which gets taken straight to the ego, and from there to anger.

That's it! The word has taken over! We need to clear our minds, forget our language, at least for a few minutes every day!