John Tarrant is a poet and calligrapher and also Director of the Pacific Zen Institute, a venture in meditation and the arts. John has studied and taught koans for over thirty years. Born in Tasmania, he worked in the antiquated copper smelters there, writing poetry after his shift. Later he was a fisherman on the Great Barrier Reef and a lobbyist for Aboriginal land rights before graduating from the Australian National University. John has been working with Brian Howlett on the Calligraphy Series for the last several years, bringing the lively spirit of Zen into these collaborative works. John is interested in transformation through imagination and teaching culture change in organizations. He lives among the vineyards near Santa Rosa, California. You can hear John speak in various forums throughout the country. PZI holds retreats and seminars in Sonoma County and weekly talks in Santa Rosa, California on Zen, koan practice and creativity.

John is the author of Bring Me The Rhinoceros and Other Zen Koans to Bring You Joy and The Light Inside the Dark: Zen, Soul & the Spiritual Life.

            The first time I saw Zen calligraphy it blew me away because of its freshness and also because I am a poet and Chinese calligraphy combines art and writing, image and word. Writing is one of the most amazing things humans do, and linking writing and images connects us with our remote ancestors who painted and made signs on cave walls. Chinese characters are an ancient form first practiced thousands of years ago on stone, tortoise shells and clay. They are usually drawn in ink on paper. Sometimes I use acrylic paint to give the characters texture, depth and color.

            Collaboration is interesting in a similar way. When we collaborate we can’t completely control the work, we have to listen and let it speak for itself. In these works the calligraphy and painting were done in any order. The words were usually done last.

            The writing is made up of poems and old Chinese questions and koans that relate in some way to the central calligraphy and image of the work. The words also connect to the moment the work was being done, and what was happening then. They are an expression of that time, of what that time asked me to write.

            There is a Zen koan that goes,

“Quickly without thinking good or evil, before your parents were born, what is your original face?”

This koan touches on the thought before the thought, the thought before you make life acceptable and careful, the thought when the universe has just been born. Zen calligraphy can be an embodiment of this thought without thought, doing without doing.

            The idea behind Zen calligraphy is to forget who you are. You become transparent, so that in some sense the universe speaks through you. Every tremor in the brush is the universe speaking.

—John Tarrant