Ensō

What Zen teachers say the circle means

For Stevens, “an enso defines the Zen state of mind”. The Japan Society guide calls it “simultaneously full and empty” and “an important Zen symbol of nonduality and wholeness”; the National Gallery of Victoria calls it “perfectly empty yet completely full, infinite, shining brightly like the moon-mind of enlightenment”. The Nihon Kokugo Daijiten gives the Zen meaning as a circle drawn as a symbol of the enlightenment already present in every person’s mind, and adds that characters or signs are sometimes written inside it to show the workings of the mind or the stages of awakening. Sherry Chayat, writing on Tanahashi’s circles in Tricycle, puts it in terms of the empty paper: the form “emerges from emptiness, holds emptiness”, and looking at it, “we become aware of the space within and around the line”.

Teachers often leave the meaning to the viewer. Stevens writes that the commonest inscription on an ensō is simply “What is this?”, and that one master, after asking it, added “I don’t know either!”

Painted in one breath

The Japan Society guide describes the ensō as “typically made with a single brushstroke”, and the National Gallery of Victoria notes that Nakahara Nantenbō’s ensō of 1922 is “accomplished in one continuous brushstroke”. Chayat describes the stroke itself: “With one breath, one continuous stroke, it arcs upward”, pauses at the top “like the subtle moment when inhalation becomes exhalation”, and turns down towards where it began.

There is no single correct shape. Stevens writes that each master’s style shows in the circle: some are perfectly symmetrical and others lopsided, some are one bold stroke and others two half circles, some thick and some thin, and most begin in the left-hand corner of the paper.

The words beside the circle

Most ensō carry an inscription, which Stevens calls a “hint” to the circle’s meaning. Common ones, in his list, are the Buddha’s declaration at his birth, “In heaven and on earth I am the Only Honored One!”; Mu (“nothing”) and “Originally not one thing!”, because the circle can stand for zero; and the Chinese poet Hanshan’s line “My heart is like the autumn moon”, which makes the circle the moon-mind of enlightenment. Another verse, about the ever-revolving circle of human passions, makes it a wheel. Some are koans (“This is your parents’ face before they were born”), and some are jokes: “Is this the moon? A rice cake? The top of a bucket? Or maybe just the bald head of a monk!”

Tōrei used the Buddha’s birth declaration; the Japan Society guide reads it as saying that we all contain the Buddha nature and, like the ensō, are whole within ourselves. Nantenbō’s circle in the National Gallery of Victoria is inscribed “If that moon falls, I will give it to you. Now try to take it”, and Tengen Chiben’s, in the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, “Why don’t Buddhas of the past, present, and future come leaping out?” The Asian Art Museum’s Zen glossary retells a story of a master who, pressed by a monk for something on paper, drew a circle and wrote: “Thinking about this and understanding it is second best; not thinking about it and understanding it is third best.” He did not say what was first best.

The empty circle of the oxherding pictures

The Chinese oxherding pictures show the stages of Zen discipline as a man herding an ox. Suzuki records that an earlier, five-picture series by the master Seikyo (Ching-chu) whitened the ox picture by picture until the whole being disappeared, ending in an empty circle. The Song-dynasty Rinzai master Kaku-an (Kuo-an Shih-yuan) thought this misleading, since some might take mere emptiness as final, and his Ten Oxherding Pictures go on past it. His eighth, “The Ox and the Man Both Gone out of Sight”, reads: “All is empty, the whip, the rope, the man, and the ox”, and the tenth and last is “Entering the City with Bliss-bestowing Hands”.

Sengai’s circle, triangle and square

Another circle famous in Zen painting is in Sengai Gibon’s “Circle, Triangle, Square” (○△□). Sengai (1750–1837), a Rinzai master, left no inscription on it, and the D. T. Suzuki Museum notes that it is open to various interpretations. Suzuki read it as the whole universe: the circle the Absolute, the triangle form, the square phenomena. It moved him to write △□不異○, mixing Sengai’s shapes with Chinese characters to say the Heart Sutra’s “Form is no different than emptiness”. Sengai’s round-bellied Hotei plays on the same shape: the Japan Society guide reads the belly as an ensō, a sign of the monk’s spiritual wholeness.

Ensō today

Zen teachers in the West brush ensō as their Japanese teachers did. Stevens singles out Nakagawa Sōen (1907–1984), whom he calls one of the fathers of Zen in the West, who “loved to brush enso” and painted a “sun enso” as well as the more orthodox moon. Tanahashi links the circle to the present day: in a time of crisis, he says, it “can shape our consciousness and inspire our actions”.

The word has other meanings in Japanese. The Nihon Kokugo Daijiten also gives it for the ring that circles a buddha or bodhisattva in a mandala, for a family crest drawn as a thin circle, and, among the monks of Kyoto’s Five Mountains temples in the Muromachi period, for a string of coins worth one kanmon, said to come from the coins’ round shape.