Tetsunori Koizumi, Director
“The Great Wave off Kanagawa” by Hokusai (1760-1849) is arguably the best known among the works of art created by Japanese artists. Created as one of a series of 36 woodblock prints collectively known as Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, “The Great Wave”, as it is popularly known today, is a masterpiece of composition, contrasting the relentlessness of natural forces represented by an immense wave with the helplessness of humans represented by the people precariously clinging to swaying boats. We are also struck by the tension Hokusai skillfully creates by depicting a motion temporarily frozen and a drama momentarily halted, reminding us of the unsettling condition of our existence in the world of impermanence and mutability.
It is well known to students of art history how Hokusai’s “The Great Wave”, along with works of his fellow artists in Edo Japan such as Utamaro (1753-1806) and Hiroshige (1797-1858), sent a great shock wave through the European art scene in the middle of the nineteenth century. In fact, European artists were so shocked and amazed by the novelty of composition, lines and colors used by the Japanese masters that they went on to produce Japonism, an artistic style that mimics, interprets, and translates the style used by these masters. Van Gogh (1853-1890) and Monet (1840-1926) are among the many European artists who, inspired by artists in the far-off land in the East, tried to recreate the scenes they saw in Japanese woodblock prints on their canvases.
The idea of depicting different views of the same object, as exemplified by Hokusai’s Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, also turned out to be a source of inspiration for Henri Riviere (1864-1951), a French artist who published a volume containing 36 lithograph prints titled Thirty-six Views of the Eiffel Tower in 1902. Unlike Hokusai’s Thirty-six Views, in which a natural object—a mountain that is greatly revered by the Japanese—is depicted, Riviere’s Thirty-six Views depicts a work of human engineering, a majestic tower constructed in commemoration of the 1889 Exposition Universelle held in Paris.
Some prints depict the actual process of constructing the Eiffel Tower from the ground level up. One showing the workers assembling materials at the foundations does not give any hint that these foundations would soon become the great tower that we know today. Another showing the foundations beginning to take the shape of a tower actually resembles Hokusai’s “The Great Wave” in its composition, with the soon-to-be massive structure on the left towering over the people on the ground. Riviere also includes scenes of the workers doing the job of constructing the great tower at dizzying heights above the ground. In addition to these prints showing the Eiffel Tower in the foreground, suggesting its majestic scale, there are other prints showing the Eiffel Tower in the background, with other famous landmarks of Paris such as Jardin du Tracadero, Place de la Concorde, and Notre Dame placed in the foreground. As a matter of fact, some of these other prints show the Eiffel Tower only as a tiny speck in the distance, almost disappearing from the scene.
Just as Mount Fuji is only one element in each of the 36 composite sceneries Hokusai creates in his Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, the Eiffel Tower in Riviere’s Thirty-six Views of the Eiffel Tower is also only one element in each of the 36 composite sceneries. The message is that the Eiffel Tower is not a thing that exists by itself apart from other things depicted—humans, buildings, trees, streets, rivers, ports, clouds, and the sky. The Eiffel Tower, in other words, exists only in the context of relationships among all these things and becomes visible only when conditions are right. Or, as Thich Nhat Hanh would say, the Eiffel Tower—every one of some 15,000 pieces of iron, every one of some 7 million nails that were used—is an “interbeing”. As such, it is made up of non-Eiffel Tower elements—those things depicted as well as those things not depicted by Riviere—and is inherently empty.
If the Eiffel Tower is inherently empty from the perspective of Buddhist thought, it is also empty from the perspective of quantum mechanics. Saying that it is empty does not mean that the Eiffel Tower does not exist, for it surely does as an “empirical reality”; it is Paris’ most visible landmark and attracts millions of visitors every year. However, to a French physicist like Bernard d’Espagnat, an advocate of quantum field theory, the Eiffel Tower is not an independent object but a composite of properties such as its height, weight, size, and shape, expressible by a vector representing these properties. What is it, then, that these properties represent? “The only answer I am able to provide is that underlying this empirical reality is a mysterious, non-conceptualizable ‘ultimate reality,’ not embedded in space and (presumably) not in time either,” writes d’Espagnat in his blog piece published in The Guardian on March 17, 2009. In distinguishing between “empirical reality” and “ultimate reality”, we can see that d’Espagnat comes very close to the Buddhist distinction between “conventional reality” and “ultimate reality”.
Whether we look at the Eiffel Tower from the perspective of Buddhist thought or from that of quantum mechanics, we are thus led to the conclusion that it is devoid of intrinsic existence. The Eiffel Tower only exists as a potentiality in the latent world, or the realm of “veiled reality,” which is another term d’Espagnat uses. It comes into existence in the manifest world of “conventional reality,” thus becoming visible as an “empirical reality” when we choose to view it—on a clear day, that is, when Paris is not covered with a thick fog.