In the Garden room at KSD a small group of us began Shakyo – copying sutras – by chatting about the history and styles and looking at some examples of the characters such as mu – dream and ku – space. Then we slowly and quietly worked on the tracing itself.
We used transparent Japanese paper laid upon the example piece (by Blair) so we could see the Chinese characters coming through, and meditatively worked on one character at a time.
The group found the Shakyo method of working on a tracing to be quite different, for instance we used small brushes and ground our own ink with the hard ink blocks, which was a nice thing to do noticing the darkness of the ink and even the sound of the grinding, and we were tracing the old characters passed on to us over many centuries in the example sutra.
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