About the Aro logo

About the Aro logo

There is a koan concerning the carved wooden calligraphy over the gate of the Obaku temple in Kyoto. It reads ‘The First Principle’. Those who appreciate Japanese calligraphy regard it as a masterpiece.

The Zen master Kosen designed it 250 years ago. He drew the characters on paper with a brush, in the traditional way. A craftsman then duplicated them in wood.

Kosen gave a particularly bold—or more likely clueless—student the job of mixing the ink. Peering over the master’s shoulder at Kosen’s first attempt: “That is not good”, he opined.

“How is this one?”

“Poor. Worse than before.”

Kosen patiently wrote out one sheet after another. Eighty-four First Principles accumulated, still without the approval of his pupil.

The student excused himself briefly to answer the call of nature, which had become pressing. Kosen saw his opportunity. Quickly, with a mind free from distraction, he wrote ‘The First Principle’.

The student returned and saw his latest attempt. ‘A masterpiece’, he proclaimed.

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I worked closely with Ngak’chang Rinpoche on the graphic design of arobuddhism.org. I would visit him in his office with a long list of tasks and we would spend the day sitting at his computer working through them.

One morning when I arrived Rinpoche was alarmingly ill, with a high fever. I apologised and suggested that we meet another day when he had recovered, but he cheerfully insisted on proceeding.

The major job of the day was to design a new Aro logo, to appear in the masthead of the web site. I liked the calligraphy ‘Roaring Silence’ that Rinpoche had executed for the book cover, and wanted something similar. I had, in fact, quite a clear idea what it ought to look like, and described it to him.

Rinpoche thought for a moment, and began working on it in Photoshop (a computer image editing program). He said it would come out better that way than if he used a brush and ink. I watched over his shoulder as he worked, biting my tongue a bit, because what he was doing was not quite what I had in mind. Also it was obvious that he was so ill that he could barely sit up and was probably seeing double.

Half an hour later he hit the Save button and sat back. “How about that?” he asked.

“Well . . .” I said doubtfully. “It’s very nice. But it’s not quite calligraphic. I had in mind something rougher looking, so you could see the texture of the paper.”

“Hmm . . . yes . . .” he said, and spent fifteen minutes applying rough-paper textures with Photoshop. After saving it to a new file, he asked: “Is that more what you had in mind?”

“Well . . . yes . . . but the initial swash, it’s rather thin, don’t you think?”

“I see . . .” he said, and thickened it. “Like that?”

“Actually,” I said, “I think it could be a little thicker even than that.” So he made it so.

“And the serif on the ‘r’. That might get lost, I think.”

“Wouldn’t it be better if the ‘A’ were angled less forward?”

“Could the blob on the ‘o’ be a bit globbier?”

After about four hours, Rinpoche appeared tired for the first time. Very gently, after carrying out my last suggestion, he said: “I think that might be the best I can do.”

“Yes . . . it’s wonderful”, I said, and we left the computer to have a greatly delayed lunch.

However, the final result was, I secretly thought, most unfortunately hideous. When I got home, I looked at it again unhappily. This was quite a quandary. What to do?

For some reason, I started flipping backward through the successively ‘improved’ versions of the logo—until I reached his first quick sketch.

It appears now at the top left of every page on all the Aro web sites.

It’s a masterpiece.

—David Chapman

 
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