Kire: Cutting

A distinctive notion in Japanese aesthetic discourse is that of the “cut” (kire) or, “cut-continuity” (kire-tsuzuki). 

The “cut” is a basic trope in the Rinzai School of Zen Buddhism, especially as exemplified in the 

teachings of the Zen master Hakuin (1686–1769). 

For Hakuin the aim of “seeing into one’s own nature” can only be realised if one has “cut off the root of life”: “You must be prepared to let go your hold when hanging from a sheer precipice, to die and return again to life” (Hakuin, 133–35). 

The cut appears as a fundamental feature in the distinctively Japanese art of flower arrangement called ikebana. The term means literally “making flowers live” by initiating their death. 

There is an exquisite essay by Nishitani Keiji on this marvellous art, in which organic life is cut off precisely in order to let the true nature of the flower come to the fore (Nishitani, 23–7). 

There is something curiously deceptive, from the Buddhist viewpoint of the impermanence of all things, about plants, which, lacking locomotion and by sinking roots into the earth, assume an appearance of being especially “at home” wherever they are. 

In severing the flowers from their roots, Nishitani suggests, and placing them in an alcove (itself cut off from direct light, as Tanizaki remarks), one is letting them show themselves as they truly are: as absolutely rootless as every other being in this world of radical impermanence.