UnMind 93. Bucky, Me & Zen — Atlanta Soto Zen Center

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Perfectly nat’ral,
A sitting tetrahedron —
Equilibrium!

We will continue our discussion of the influence of Design thinking on worldview, returning to one of my most influential mentors. I want to share more of my familiarity with R. Buckminster Fuller, who is perhaps the most underappreciated proponent of Design with a capital “D.” Some of the points I make will be redundant, but Fuller’s teaching, like Zen’s, bears repetition. They sink in gradually if at all.

Design itself, as a worldview, philosophy, and profession, is also largely misunderstood, I think, and has that in common with Zen. The first time I set out to develop my own design consultation business, I named it DesignScience, after Fuller’s description of his approach to solving large-scale problems in advance, a process he called “comprehensive anticipatory design science.”

Design is inherently a process of application to solving real-world problems. Science includes “pure science” or research, not directly targeted to a tangible output, such as solving mathematical conjectures or resolving seeming contradictions in physics’ Standard Model, for example. The closest approximation to pure design would be something like art, or sculpture, depending on its dimensionality. Often, experiments that look like play, or design for the sake of design, turn out to have application as an unintended consequence. In this respect, Design and Science have this dynamic in common.

I had the good fortune to meet R. Buckminster Fuller in person, to attend and listen to some of his lectures, and to be exposed to the thinking and teaching of this great, iconic American and mentor to my generation of design aspirants. Bucky’s life, philosophy and professional practice exhibited several parallels to Zen, from my perspective, and he anticipated much of the situation in which we now find ourselves, predicting many of the problems we are facing as a world-around society. Coming up with solutions is the heart of comprehensive anticipatory design science, anticipating burgeoning problems before it is too late. For example, he said over fifty years ago, that the main problem would not be energy, but access to water. Fresh drinking water was taken for granted in those days.

We are witnessing his prescience on a daily basis, especially here in Georgia, where our political leaders are tripping all over each other to solve a problem none of them apparently anticipated at all. Access to the main aquifers and rivers of the southeastern states, including Tennessee and Florida, has become a major point of contention, not likely to get better with the onslaught of warming climate.

He also had some cogent, if biting, things to say about the politicians of his time, which still hold true today. Pointing out, for example, the absurdity of our turning to our government leaders for solutions, when, if they had any solutions, they wouldn’t be politicians. Politicians’ primary role is maintaining the status quo, according to the great man. He put an edge on this by maintaining that people “blame the machines” (science and technology) for problems of modernity, and pointed out that if we turn off the machines, a billion people begin a slow death. Send the politicians a trip around the sun, however, and we’ll all keep eating, says Bucky.

I see a connection to Zen in Fuller’s cogent use of language, which is characteristic of the great Masters in Zen history. The story goes that he took a vow of silence for a couple of years, during which his wife handled all the necessary transactions, Bucky handing her written notes as needed. One wonders if this was a burden, or more of a relief, to her. He claimed that one day he realized that everything coming out of his mouth consisted of the ideas and words of others. With characteristic simplicity, and counter-intuitive thinking, he decided that stopping talking for a long enough time would allow him to find his own voice. And he had the discipline to pull it off.

After this period, which had to be very difficult, his voice emerged in a way that he used language, rather than being used by it, which is a principle of Buddhist teaching. We can see parallels to vows of silence often taken by monks and nuns, in Buddhist monasteries as well as those of other faiths. And in Master Dogen, 13th Century founder of Soto Zen in Japan, we see similar, uniquely creative use of language. Dogen is said, for example, to have used the Sino-Japanese equivalent of nouns as verbs, and vice-versa. So we can picture a “stone,” for example, in the dynamic act of “stone-ing,” or vitally being a stone, rather than as a passive object. My teacher, Matsuoka-roshi, expressed this in a similar way when he said that the stone in the garden is “alive.” A Japanese architect friend and colleague, who developed beautiful, authentic Japanese gardens to complement his buildings, once told me, “You know, you have to talk to the stones.” And in Japan, haul them down from the mountains.

When Bucky wanted to express something that transcended the dualistic nature of language, and for which the vernacular did not provide an adequate term or phrase, he would invent a new word. One that he may not have coined, but used frequently, is “tensegrity.” A portmanteau of tension and integrity, it conjoins tension and compression, but in a discontinuous connection. From the New Oxford American Dictionary, we find:

ten•seg•ri•ty
noun, Architecture
the characteristic property of a stable three-dimensional structure consisting of members under tension that are contiguous and members under compression that are not.
ORIGIN 1950s: from tensional integrity.

See the model illustrated below, with the link to its online source:

Such models built by Bucky’s students to employ the principle of tensegrity appear to be impossible. That is, you are looking at a bunch of sticks, or struts, which form a solid, spheroidal structure, but none of the struts touch each other. Instead, they are floating in a network of tensional cables, which connect to the struts at the ends. But it is counter-intuitive to grasp how the whole thing doesn’t collapse into a pile. It is as if the geometry holds itself together by some kind of magic. This reminds me of Master Dogen’s caution from his Genjokoan [Actualizing the Fundamental Point] regarding Zen insight:

Do not suppose that what you realize becomes your knowledge
and is grasped by your consciousness
Although actualized immediately the inconceivable may not be apparent
Its appearance is beyond your knowledge

Appearances can be deceiving. In the case of this model, it seems to illustrate, beautifully and powerfully, the principle of matter as energy from physics, and the Buddhist principle of form, or appearance, as emptiness. It is also challenging to the imagination — of anyone who has ever built anything with his or her own hands — to conceive of the process of building the damn thing. How in the world do you hold the elements in place, floating in space, while tying them together with string?

One connection of tensegrity to Zen is its relationship to the world-shattering equations mentioned above, namely E = mc2 and Form = Emptiness, Emptiness = Form. But also, more directly and simply, the same principle may be seen in the posture of meditation, particularly Zen meditation, or zazen.

In zazen, the classic, cross-legged posture of Buddhist meditation, the body takes the form of a tetrahedron. Bucky used the four-pointed geometry to represent the simplest form that could represent a system of any kind. A system, he defined, is fundamentally anything that exhibits an “inside” and an “outside.” This, I understand, is an engineering definition, but can apply to a building, a business, an organism, or any other isolate of our “particular case experiences,” another favorite Fullerism. Bucky defined intelligence itself as our ability to extract general principles from particular cases. Which is what we are attempting to do in this essay, if you hadn’t noticed.

Considering the principle of tensegrity applied to the human form in meditation, we can see that the skeleton supplies the compression members, while ligaments, tendons and muscle mass comprise the tensional net in which the skeletal frame “floats.” Of course, there is no absolute separation of inside and outside in the human body, nor is there in any other system.

This does not negate the utility of the concept, but simply subsumes the system in question into the larger system of its environment. Let's not quibble with philosophical entertainments while we are focusing on something practical. The relative and the absolute, in Zen, comprise a concrete reality in which they are a complementarity, not in competition. This does, however reveal the futility of trying to absolutely isolate an isolate. Hello, uncertainty principle.

This brings us to the constituents of tensegrity, which in the cases mentioned, are seen as components of differing materials and relative function, including the human body. Bucky often used the expression that they “always and only coexist,” when speaking of a pair of duals such as tension and compression. In the case of this pair, he noted that not only do they always and only coexist (never in isolation), but are also in a fixed spatial relationship. Namely, they manifest axes at 90 degrees to each other.

For example, in the struts and strings model, if one pulls on the two ends of a length of cable, it stretches to a degree, depending on its material and construction. While tension is applied to the length, the cross-section or diameter manifests compression, by becoming thinner. This is more apparent in a bungee cord, for example, or a rubber band, than in most fibrous cords. By the same token, if we compress a strut from its ends, the cross-section tends to expand, bowing out, again more apparent in certain materials, like rubber, than others. In a load-bearing column of a building, too much compression will cause it to bow and break.

On the other hand, if we attempt to compress the tensional components from their end points, or to place tension on the compressive elements, it doesn’t work. We don’t try to push a string uphill, and most compressive materials are not amenable to stretching. Thus a suspension bridge uses cable to suspend the slab from metal posts, not the other way around. Although the basic material may be similar on the molecular level. For example both posts and cables may be made of steel.

Getting back to the posture, the knees and buttocks form the three-pointed base of the tetrahedron, the head the apex. A regular tetrahedron, of course, say one built of sticks and balls as in molecular models, consists of six edges of identical length connecting the four balls. The form of the human body, while varying in size and proportion, compared to a tetrahedron, consists of three edges of relatively the same length, the thighs and calves of the cross-legged base; but the fourth strut, the spine, is longer, and upright relative to the plane of the floor. The arms, if braced by placing the hands on the knees, fill in the last two struts, as is taught in some yogic forms of meditation posture.

In zazen, however, the hands are dropped into the “cosmic mudra” or hand position, against the lower abdomen, where the wrists nest in the hip socket, so that the arms are at rest, not bracing the upright spine. The lower stomach muscles take up the slack, pulling forward and down to hold the trunk upright. When first taking the posture, we lean forward and back, swinging left and right, and ‘round and ‘round in a spiral, to bring the body into balance with gravity, centered in the weight of the body mass. Then we sit very still.

When after some time the posture has become second-nature, many report an experience of effortlessness, or even floating. The compressional elements of the skeleton have come into alignment with the gravitational field, and the tensional net of the musculature has come into equilibrium, balanced around the skeleton. No muscle group is completely relaxed, as this would place additional tension, or stress, on the complementary muscle group on the opposite side of the skeletal bones.

Thus the posture can be said to be in perfect equilibrium, or equipoise. A cautionary word from Bucky. He pointed out that an airplane’s engine is always out of balance, which is what keeps it running. And that if it ever reaches complete equilibrium, that is when it stalls, and the plane is likely to crash. But since we are sitting safely on our cushion, and close to the floor, there is no need to panic. You may, however, feel a bit of vertigo. Top of a 100-foot pole, you know. Precarious position to be in. One more step to take. Off the pole.