The story that John Cage told was that he studied Zen with D. T. Suzuki. For Cage, as for most in the English-speaking world, Suzuki was the ultimate source of insight into Zen. “I didn’t study Zen with just anybody: I studied with Suzuki,” Cage said in an interview. “I’ve always gone, insofar as I could, to the president of the company.” He sat in on Suzuki’s classes at Columbia University in the early 1950s; he conversed and socialized with him to some degree outside of class. Cage was an enthusiastic student and talked endlessly about Suzuki and Zen in the 1950s; some of that enthusiasm showed up in his writings. When we think about Cage and Zen, we think first of his study with Suzuki. There is a tendency in writing about Cage to identify Suzuki as the source of John Cage’s Zen.
But if you look at Cage’s writings, Suzuki is not the first source on Zen that Cage mentioned. That distinction goes to R. H. Blyth, the expatriate English authority on Zen and haiku. If Blyth’s work is not familiar to you, that’s not unusual: he has remained relatively invisible in writings about Cage. Cage himself never mentioned him after his first references in 1950–51. It seems that once he’d met Suzuki, Suzuki was all that he could talk about and Blyth disappeared into the background. But as it turns out, Blyth was probably the more important influence on Cage’s music, the true origin of his application of Zen to his work.
Cage’s references to Blyth
Cage first referenced Blyth in a letter dated 22 November 1950 to the magazine Musical America, in which he complained about a recent article on Erik Satie. The author had criticized Satie for having written only miniatures and no grand works. Cage responded that “the length of a work … is no measure of its quality,” and quoted “a statement made by Blythe [sic] in his book Haiku”:
Haiku thus makes the greatest demand upon our internal poverty. Shakespeare (cf. Beethoven) pours out his universal soul, and we are abased before his omniscience and overflowing power. Haiku require of us that our soul should find its own infinity within the limits of some finite thing.
The reference to Beethoven was Cage’s insertion, turning Blyth’s opposition of Shakespeare and haiku into his own antithesis between Beethoven and Satie.
Blyth appeared again a few months later in Cage’s “Lecture on Something.” He quoted Blyth in service of his argument that art should not be considered as a set of great masterpieces enshrined high above everyday life. Cage attributed this statement to Blyth: “The highest responsibility of the artist is to hide beauty.” By this, Cage appears to have meant that the artist must not try to set up some special kind of beauty that is apart from life.
Later in the lecture, Cage gave a list of readings that emphasize the relevance of so-called Oriental philosophy to discussions of Western music. He named Blyth’s book Zen in English literature and Oriental classics along with unspecified books by Alan Watts, Joseph Cambpell and Meister Eckhart. Note that Suzuki was not mentioned here, or anywhere else in “Lecture on Something.” Cage’s reading list was not about Zen per se, only about the connections between “Orient and Occident,” and so the inclusion of only Western authors makes sense. Still, Cage would have read at least some of Suzuki’s writing by 1951, and Suzuki’s absence in “Lecture on Something” leads me to believe that his real impact was only felt by Cage when he attended the Columbia classes in 1952. These early references to Blyth show that by 1950 Cage had read Blyth’s books and saw him as an authoritative voice, before he began casting Suzuki in that role. As such, Blyth’s writing deserves a closer look.
R. H. Blyth and “the poetry of things”
R. H. Blyth (1898–1964) was an Englishman who, from 1925 onwards, taught English at universities in Korea and Japan. He studied Zen Buddhism while in Korea. Later, D. T. Suzuki became his friend and mentor, and they cited each other in their writings (Suzuki’s essay on haiku in his Zen and Japanese culture relies heavily on Blyth’s work). Blyth wrote his Zen in English literature while in a Japanese internment camp during the war, and then followed up with his four-volume Haiku. The first volume of this—Eastern culture—appeared in 1949. In the 1950s, his books were read by the Beat poets and other Americans interested in Zen—including John Cage.
Blyth’s writings were a natural introduction to the world of Zen for Cage, even more so than Suzuki’s. Where Suzuki was primarily concerned with philosophy and religious questions, Blyth’s work was completely focused on literature and poetry. Blyth was very attuned to the creation of haiku, to the relationship of the poet and the poem’s subject. Like Suzuki, he wrote extensively about Zen in his books, but almost entirely in the context of poets writing poetry.
Blyth’s approach spoke to Cage’s concerns of the late 1940s. In his 1948 lecture “A Composer’s Confessions,” Cage asked the question “to what end does one write music?” and ultimately came up with the answer “to sober and quiet the mind.” Cage saw this as requiring a quieting of the composer’s ego as well. Blyth wrote about the same issues in the context of poetry; his insights were directly applicable to Cage’s search for meaning. He wrote most directly about this in the section of Haiku: Eastern culture titled “Haiku and Poetry,” which is the part of the book that Cage quoted in his letter to Musical America. This section is an excellent source for understanding Blyth’s impact on Cage’s work.
Both Cage and Blyth started from the same premise that poetry and music ultimately serve spiritual ends. Blyth equated religion and poetry, describing a haiku as “the expression of a temporary enlightenment.” What Blyth added to this via Zen was his idea of “the poetry of things.” In his view, concrete things are expressive in themselves and need no further elaboration or commentary by the poet. The poem should be a mirror, adding nothing to the subject it reflects: “The aim of haiku is to bestow on things the poetic life which already they possess in their own right.” Haiku are thus doorways to momentary enlightenment:
A haiku is not a poem, it is not literature; it is a hand beckoning, a door half-opened, a mirror wiped clean. It is a way of returning to nature, to our moon nature, our cherry blossom nature, our falling leaf nature, in short, to our Buddha nature. It is a way in which the cold winter rain, the swallows of evening, even the very day in its hotness, and the length of the night become truly alive, share in our humanity, speak their own silent and expressive language.
For Blyth, the role of the poet is to be one who puts us in touch with this “silent and expressive language” of things, a kind of spiritual medium between things and the reader: “a poet is a spirit speaking to spirits.” As a result, he came to the same conclusion that Cage did: the creator—poet or composer—must quiet or even silence their sense of ego or self. Both Blyth and Cage celebrated “poverty of spirit,” with Blyth stating that “a poet sees things as they are in proportion as he is selfless.” One of the most striking connections between Blyth and Cage is in the way that they associated silence with this selflessness: an inner silence, not an outer one. Where in 1949 Cage talked of “praising silence” in his string quartet, Blyth asserts that the haiku poet should aspire to say nothing at all:
Haiku is the result of the wish, the effort, not to speak, not to write poetry, not to obscure further the truth and suchness of a thing with words, with thoughts, and feelings.
The poetry of things is the key to understanding Cage’s connection to Blyth. It was the direct analog of Cage’s dictum that the composer should let sounds be themselves. The idea that sounds are expressive in themselves manifested itself in Cage’s work as a focus on concrete materials—specific sounds—as a precondition for composition. This is something that was latent in his work for percussion and prepared piano, where the initial selection of instruments and preparations determined the sonic world of the piece. It became more explicit in 1949 with the gamut of sonorities chosen for the String quartet in four parts, and became even more formalized in the charts used in the Concerto for prepared piano.
I have always considered Cage’s turn to sounds being themselves as the result of a natural evolution of his musical thinking and practice: choosing percussion/prepared piano sounds led to choosing sonorities in the string quartet, which in turn led to the charts of the concerto and Music of changes. But why did this practical musical development happen as it did in 1950–1951 and become so dominant in Cage’s thinking? That this change happened at exactly the same time that he read Blyth’s work on the poetry of things begs the question: was R. H. Blyth the Zen influencer who helped shape Cage’s music? Did Blyth’s model of a haiku as being built upon “the truth and suchness of a thing” suggest to Cage composing music where “a sound is just a sound?”
Blyth’s impact on Cage
The most obvious evidence that Cage applied Blyth’s ideas to his own music is a set of unfinished compositions started at the same time that he was reading Blyth. In October 1950, Cage sketched a piano piece he called “haiku.” He started a handful of similar “haikus” a few months later, in March 1951 (none of these pieces were completed). Even as unfinished experiments, it seems inescapable that they were direct compositional responses to Byth’s writing on haiku. They were, perhaps, Cage’s initial attempt to compose in a way parallel to the way Blyth’s ideal poet wrote haiku.
Blyth had a deeper impact on Cage’s ideas and writing about music. Comparing Cage’s article “Forerunners of Modern Music” (1949) and his “Lecture on Nothing” (1950) reveals changes in both style and substance that can be credibly linked to Blyth. Both “Forerunners” and “Nothing” present Cage’s fourfold model of music: structure, method, material, and form. This model was introduced in his lecture “Defense of Satie” in 1948. In both “Defense” and “Forerunners”, of particular interest is Cage’s mapping of these against the duality of mind and heart, thinking and feeling. The diagram that accompanied the original publication of “Forerunners” depicts this.
For Cage in 1949, structure was totally rational and mind-controlled, while form (by which he meant what is more commonly called “content”) was totally felt and comes from the heart. As put into practice in a composition like Sonatas and interludes (1946–48), this meant working out the phrase structure of a piece using various proportional schemes and then improvising the musical continuity within that structure. Even the String quartet in four parts followed this model, with the content consisting of a freely composed single melodic line.
Only a year later, “Lecture on Nothing” abandoned this polarization of structure and content, mind and heart. Cage’s attitude towards structure had not changed—he still described it as “thought out, figured out, measured”—but he no longer held that musical continuity was heart-based. Instead he wrote that “Continuity today, when it is necessary, is a demonstration of disinterestedness. That is, it is a proof that our delight lies in not possessing anything.” Cage was describing a more objective approach to treating musical content, which would align with Blyth’s model for an ideal haiku. Once again, it seems highly coincidental for Cage to drop his ideas about the purely subjective approach to content at exactly the same time that he encountered Blyth’s writing.
But beyond Blyth’s impact on the ideas in “Lecture on Nothing” is his impact on the way Cage expressed those ideas. As quoted above, Blyth wrote that “Haiku is the result of the wish, the effort, not to speak, not to write poetry.” This is remarkably close to Cage’s famous statement in “Lecture on Nothing”: “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it.” Blyth’s writing is full of descriptions of the haiku poet saying nothing and remaining silent. There is no precedent for this “nothing” in any of Cage’s earlier writings, but it permeates “Lecture on Nothing” (including even the title).
The ubiquity of the word “poetry” in “Lecture on Nothing” is itself a telling sign of his engagement with Blyth’s writing. Prior to reading Blyth, Cage described what he was doing as “music” or “composition.” In “Lecture on Nothing,” written at the same time that he was reading Blyth, Cage instead used the word “poetry.” He uses the term in the same way that one might use the term “art” to refer to all art forms.
“Lecture on Nothing” also stands apart stylistically from Cage’s earlier writing in its embrace of concrete imagery. Where “Forerunners of Modern Music” and “Defense of Satie” were primarily concerned with ideas, the world of “Lecture on Nothing” is utterly different. It is full of vivid images, especially of nature or everyday life. In its pages we find: a glass of milk, a snail, a ringing telephone, an airplane in a vacant lot, a piece of string, a sunset, sugar loaves for horses, blackbirds rising from a field, a cardinal, a woodpecker. These suggest Blyth’s haiku world of the poetry of things. The sudden production of this kind of poetic writing by Cage points to his immersion in Blyth’s work on haiku.
Read with Blyth in mind, “Lecture on Nothing” reveals other such flashes of possible influence. When Cage notes that “each moment presents what happens,” one thinks of Blyth’s presentation of haiku as moments of “temporary enlightenment.” This is another key Cage idea—music as a series of moments—that appeared for the first time in “Lecture on Nothing,” with no apparent antecedent in his earlier writings.
We also can see here the very first glimmer of the idea that the composer should let sounds just be themselves. In the section of the lecture on material, Cage described a student composer who was having trouble working with limited material. The problem, Cage wrote, “was all in her mind, whereas it belonged in the materials.” By this he means that she should have let the sounds be expressive in themselves and then she would have felt no sense of limitation. This is the first time Cage made this claim about material being self-sufficient in itself, and the connection to Blyth’s poetry of things is self-evident.
Blyth vs. Suzuki
Looking at the whole picture, it seems clear to me that R. H. Blyth was the one who, through haiku, first introduced Zen into John Cage’s musical work. With his emphasis on artistic creation, Blyth would have provided Cage the easiest introduction to Zen. Blyth’s model of treating the poem’s subject objectively, in silence, may have sharpened Cage’s own thinking about letting sounds be themselves in his music. And the style and language of haiku and Blyth’s commentary show up throughout “Lecture on Nothing,” a lecture that marks a sharp change in Cage’s writing style.
Blyth was positioned to be an influence on Cage’s music in a way that D. T. Suzuki was not. There is no clear connection between anything Suzuki wrote and the practice of musical composition. And given the timing, there’s no reason to believe that Suzuki was a significant influence on Cage’s changing musical practice in the critical period from 1948 to 1951. It was only after Cage made the decisive move to embrace chance operations in early 1951 that he began sitting in on Suzuki’s classes. The Zen figure Cage actually engaged with during the time leading up to chance composition was R. H. Blyth.
Suzuki’s connection with Cage is not one of musical influence; it is a different question. From everything he said and wrote about him, we know that Cage had a strong personal connection to Suzuki. He saw him as a figure of spiritual authority. As such, starting in 1952, Cage’s writings are full of references to Suzuki, Zen stories, and the Zen writings (such as Huang Po’s Doctrine of Universal Mind) that Suzuki introduced him to. Suzuki was the authoritative Japanese voice that validated Cage’s connection of his work to what they both saw as the universal spiritual truths of Zen. Suzuki thus makes for a good origin story of John Cage’s Zen, and his influence certainly shaped Cage’s more abstract and metaphysical ideas. But R. H. Blyth, the Englishman who provided a practical guide to creating poetry while remaining silent, deserves the credit for actually connecting Zen to Cage’s musical practice.
Sources & notes
The quotation about studying with Suzuki as “the president of the company” is from William Duckworth’s interview with Cage: “Anything I Say Will Be Misunderstood: An Interview with John Cage,” Bucknell Review: John Cage at seventy-five (1989), p. 27.
There’s not a lot of secondary literature about Cage and Blyth. Kyle Gann is the only writer I’ve encountered who has read and digested Blyth’s work, which Gann weaves into his account of Cage’s interest in Zen (No such thing as silence, pp. 124–25 and elsewhere). Other writers mention Blyth briefly without going into much detail about his work. Surprisingly, Kay Larson’s book recounting her version of Cage’s transformation by Zen (Where the heart beats) doesn’t mention Blyth at all, not even in her very extensive bibliography.
The full 1950–51 correspondence between Cage and the editors of Musical America is reprinted as “Satie Controversy” in John Cage, edited by Richard Kostelanetz (pp. 89–94). Cage pitted Beethoven against Satie most extensively in his 1949 lecture “Defense of Satie” (reprinted in the same collection, pp. 77–84). “Lecture on Something” can be found in Cage’s book Silence (pp. 128–145); the reference to Blyth is on p. 131. Both early Blyth quotations are from the first volume of his four-volume work on haiku. The quotation on “internal poverty” is on p. 242 (not 272 as given in the letter); the quotation on hiding beauty is actually a paraphrase of a statement on p. 149: “The highest art of the artist is to hide rather than to reveal beauty.”
An interesting account of Blyth’s life and his friendship with the American Zen teacher Robert Aitken is in Rick Fields’ How the swans came to the lake: A narrative history of Buddhism in America (p. 201). Suzuki’s chapter on “Zen and Haiku” appears on pp. 215–267 of his Zen and Japanese Culture. He uses Blyth’s translations of several poems and identifies him as “an authority on the study of haiku” (p. 228). Cage’s spiritual seeking is described by him in his 1948 lecture “A Composer’s Confessions,” published (among other places) in Musicworks No. 52 (Spring 1992), pp. 6–15.
Blyth’s Zen in English literature and Oriental classics was originally published in Japan by The Hokuseido Press in 1942. There is a reprint edition from Angelico Press that was published in 2016. The four volumes of Haiku were also published by The Hokuseido Press between 1949 and 1952. The first volume, Eastern culture, is introductory. The other three volumes are collections of poems arranged by season: Spring (vol. 2), Summer–Autumn (vol. 3), and Autumn–Winter (vol. 4). The section “Haiku and Poetry” that I quote from extensively is found in the first volume, pp. 241–289. My citations are from the first part of that, pp. 241–255.
I wrote more extensively on Cage’s fourfold model for music in the “Law and Freedom” post of my series on Cage’s spiritual journey, Opening the door into emptiness. That series also describes Cage’s musical journey from 1948–1951. This trajectory is described in much more detail in Chapter 2 of my book The music of John Cage (pp. 36-73). Cage’s book Silence contains both “Forerunners of Modern Music” (pp. 62–66) and “Lecture on Nothing” (pp. 109–126). The diagram of the fourfold model for music in “Forerunners” does not appear in Silence, but in its original publication in the journal The tiger’s eye (No. 7, March 1949, pp. 52–56).
Cage’s 1950–51 Haiku were never completed, but they have been published nevertheless (Edition Peters EP68395). In editing this publication, Don Gillespie felt that the pieces only had “a few minor rhythmic details open to speculation.” I disagree with the publication: just because the manuscript is readable does not mean that the pieces were finished or that Cage wanted them out in the world. Sadly, Gillespie’s editor’s note traces these pieces to the influence of Suzuki, not Blyth.
More from Blyth
Blyth’s writing is full of lovely, insightful, quotable statements about Zen, poetry, and haiku. Rather than overstuff my essay with them, I’ll put some of my favorites here as an appendix.
From Haiku: Eastern culture
- In one section of the book, Blyth discusses thirteen aspects of “Zen as it is related to the mind of the haiku poet” (154–238). To me, they are all wonderful jumping-off points for considering Cage’s work: Selflessness, Loneliness, Grateful acceptance, Wordlessness, Non-intellectuality, Contradictoriness, Humor, Freedom, Non-morality, Simplicity, Materiality, Love, Courage.
- On Freedom: “It is freedom from likes and dislikes, not in the sense that we become indifferent or insensitive, but that likable things are not sentimentalized or falsified . . . [and] in the same way dislikable or ugly or disgusting things are found interesting and meaningful.” (204)
- On Love: “Haiku are an expression of the joy of our reunion with things from which we have been parted by self-consciousness.” (232)
- On Courage: “Courage it is that endows us with the power to accept gratefully all that happens; Bashō says: ‘There is nothing you see that is not a flower; there is nothing you can think of which is not the moon.’” (237)
- More on the poetry of things and the need for self-negation: “This is the work of a poet, to hide nothing from us. When he does so, the Buddha nature of a thing is clearly seen. Each thing is preaching the law incessantly, but this law is not something different from the thing itself. Haiku is the revealing of this preaching by presenting us with the thing devoid of all our mental twisting and emotional discoloration; or rather, it shows the thing as it exists at one and same time outside and inside the mind, perfectly subjective, ourselves undivided from the object, the object in its original unity with ourselves.” (242)
- In regard to the subject of a poem, there is no high or low: “Again we say, God loves all things equally, the mouse that the cat catches, the water that engulfs the mariner, the man who beats his mother to death. Replace the word ‘God’ by the word ‘poet,’ and the above statements are equally true. If you think the universe is inimical to you, that is simply a reflection of your enmity to the universe.” (246)
- “This poetry of things is not something superimposed on them, but brought out of them as the sun and rain bring the tender leaf out of the hard buds. There is a poetry independent of rhyme and rhythm, of onomatopoeia and poetic brevity, of cadence and parallelism, of all form whatsoever. It is wordless and thoughtless even when expressed in words and notions, and lives a life separate from that of so-called poetry.” (255)
- On poetry as a way of life, a process:
- “Poetry is a return to nature: to our own nature, to that of each thing, and to that of all things.” (281)
- “Poetry is not the words written in a book, but the mode of activity of the mind of the poet.” (282)
- “Poetry is Zen. It is our living. When we are really alive, when we are really seeing, when the thing seen sees itself with our eyes, sees itself in the mirror of our minds, whatever comes before it, vice or virtue, beauty or ugliness, glory or squalor, all has that meaning which is a no-meaning, for it can never be expressed but only experienced.” (283)
From Zen in English literature and Oriental classics
Here is a great example of Blyth’s analysis of haiku and his insistence on the silence and invisibility of the poet. Of this poem by Bashō:
By the roadside,
A Rose of Sharon;
The horse has eaten it.
Blyth writes: “There is colour, there is movement; the horse’s strange, rubber-like nose nuzzling the flower; no poet anywhere to be seen.” (73)