An essay by Nirbija and Bhagawati. While Nirbija read Osho speaking well-nigh a Zen carpenter asking a tree if it wants to go a table, he remembered his woodworking beginnings and a surprising volume Osho put into his toolbox.

Resurrecting the "table salt of the globe" – people

Osho not just shared his enlightenment with united states, but also exposed us to the exemplary lives of a great legacy of realized souls and artistic people from all over the earth. He put a fresh seal of authenticity on those he called "the table salt of the globe", just were – alas – already forgotten.

Mentioning them in discourse, he nourishes us with spiritual nutrient of the finest quality. E.g., while talking on the tenth century Indian mystic Tilopa, he explains:

"Scriptures cannot atomic number 82 you. In fact, they are dead without you. When you lot achieve to truth, life suddenly comes to all the scriptures. Through you they get once again alive, through you they are reborn.

That is what I am doing, giving rebirth to Tilopa. He has been dead for many hundred years. Nobody has talked most him, nobody has given him once again a birth. I am giving him a rebirth. While I am here, he becomes once more alive. You can meet him if you are capable. He is over again near here. If you are receptive, you can feel his footsteps. He is over again materialized.

Through me – I volition requite birth to all the scriptures. Through me, they tin once again come to this world, I tin become an anchor. That's what I am doing.

And that'due south what I would similar you to practice in your ain life, some day. When you realize, when you come to know, then bring all that is beautiful in the by dorsum and requite it rebirth, renew information technology, and then that all those who have known can exist again on the earth and travel here, and help people." 1

The Soul of a TreeIn the early 1990s I spotted a rather unexpected book in Osho's Lao Tzu library. Information technology was the biography of the famous American woodworker, furniture maker, and architect George Katsutoshi Nakashima, entitled The Soul of a Tree. He was a world citizen and rebel travelling between east and w; samples of his furniture are displayed at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Not surprisingly, Osho speaks near trees and Zen master craftsmen in many discourses and as early every bit in 1976. ii

George Nakashima, one of the master craftsmen

Born in 1905 in Spokane, Washington, U.s., to Japanese parents, Nakashima first studied forestry and then switched to compages at the Academy of Washington, graduating with a Bachelor of Compages ca. 1929. 2 years later on, after earning a primary's degree in architecture from MIT, he sold his automobile and purchased a round-the-world tramp steamship ticket. He spent a year in France living the life of a bohemian, and and then went on to North Africa and eventually to Japan. While there, Nakashima went to work for Antonin Raymond, an American architect who had collaborated with Frank Lloyd Wright on Tokyo's Imperial Hotel.

While working for Raymond, Nakashima toured Japan extensively, studying the subtleties of Japanese architecture and design too as working every bit the project architect for the Golconde Dormitory in Pondicherry, India (now known equally Auroville), supervising structure from 1937-39. He became a disciple of Sri Aurobindo receiving the proper noun 'Sunderananda' – ane who loves dazzler. He renounced his salary and became part of his spiritual commune. It was here that Nakashima congenital his first furniture.

In 1940, Nakashima returned to America, and began to make furniture and teach woodworking in Seattle. Like others of Japanese ancestry, he was interned during the Second World War and sent to Campsite Minidoka in Hunt, Idaho, in March 1942, where he met Gentaro Hikogawa, a man trained in traditional Japanese carpentry. Under his tutelage, Nakashima learned to master traditional Japanese paw tools and joinery techniques. Perhaps more than significant, he began to approach woodworking with discipline and patience, striving for perfection in every stage of structure.

In 1943, Antonin Raymond successfully sponsored Nakashima's release from the military camp and invited him and his family to his farm in Pennsylvania. In his studio and workshop at New Hope, Nakashima explored the organic expressiveness of forest, choosing boards with knots and burls and figured grain. He designed furniture lines for Knoll, including the Straight Back Chair (which is still in production), and for Widdicomb-Mueller as he continued his private commissions. The studio grew incrementally until Nelson Rockefeller commissioned 200 pieces for his house in New York, in 1973.

Drawing on Japanese designs and store practices, likewise every bit on American and International Mod styles, Nakashima created a body of piece of work that made his name synonymous with the best of 20th century American Art piece of furniture.

Earth peace and peace with nature

The Nakashima Foundation for Peace, currently housed in the Minguren Museum in New Promise, had its beginnings in 1984. In that year, George Nakashima had the opportunity to buy the largest and finest walnut log he had ever seen and sought to utilize the immense planks to their fullest potential.

He envisioned that if Altars for Peace were fabricated for each continent of the world, as centres for meditation, prayer, and activities for peace, the world would exist a amend place and come closer to peace. He was convinced that people could resolve their differences communicating at an altar.

The first chantry peak he made consisted of large slabs of finely grained and polished walnut planks connected by butterfly joints with edges in the original shape they had been cut from the tree.

It was one of his last projects, before he died in 1990. Today, there are three peace altars in existence: in New York Metropolis'south St. John the Divine Church, the National Academy of Fine art in Moscow, and in Auroville, Bharat.

The Nakashima business organisation with its crew is now run by his daughter Mira and his son, Kevin. She studied nether her father and is an builder who graduated from Harvard. Mira designs wooden furniture with her own touch on and continues to create more peace altars, to consummate Nakashima's legacy. For this purpose, the company managed to procure still some other extremely valuable walnut log that about matches the size and magnificence of the original.

Mira Nakashima states: "In India they believe that dazzler is considered man's connection with the divine. Dad's whole operation hither has been… he called it his karma yoga, his fashion of being, which is a form of meditation. Some people get it, some people don't, but I hope that that tradition can continue somehow because information technology is very meaningful, it is very important in our world today."

Nakashima had immense respect for nature, trees and wood, the importance of which has go quite forgotten in today's globe. Mira says, "Dad really believes that at that place are spirits in the wood that enhances people'south lives and, you know, not everyone can live in the woods, merely y'all can alive with wood and stay connected to nature and to the divine in that way."

In a video interview Nakashima said, "In that location is a spirit in trees that is very deep and in order to produce a fine piece of furniture the spirit of the tree lives on and I can give information technology a 2d life."

Unfortunately, today homo does not even protect the first life of copse. Deforestation, industrial employ and wildfires destroy them on a gigantic scale. Nakashima's message that trees have a soul and complement our lives on globe needs to be urgently remembered.

From sannyas to woodworking

I would non have known about Nakashima'south volume if life had not nudged me into this arts and crafts. A couple of years after I took sannyas, I fell out of my ambition-driven filmmaker career – which was not a tragedy. Germany in the 1980s was all the same thriving with the 'Wirtschaftswunder' (economic miracle). Odd jobs like renovations were well paid and widely available. One 24-hour interval, after having painted a kitchen in Munich, my client asked me if I could build a wooden shelf for him. Soon I felt such joy cutting and joining the boards. My enthusiasm needed a chip of training though, which I managed mainly by reading woodworking magazines. How generous life was with me to shift me to this new and salubrious management! I could manage my living and enjoy making useful things.

In the Pune Resort of the 1990s our small woodworking tribe exchanged job opportunities and experiences. And it was so that someone walking through the book-lined corridors towards the Samadhi in Lao Tzu Firm shared that he had discovered TheSoul of a Tree up on a shelf there. The back of information technology was sticking out considering of its large coffee tabular array format! A few days after I felt intensely inspired just by looking at the volume myself. Many years later, Sarvogeet, a Freiburg woodworker, gave me his re-create to look through. And he showed me his exquisitely congenital little side table inspired past Nakashima; information technology had a finely grained table acme and natural edges sitting on an artistic stand.

Osho's beloved for books and his superb use of their stories and anecdotes for his discourses is outstanding. He weaves them like gilded threads into the carpet of his talks, plus jokes – to wake u.s.a. up! Although he stopped reading in 1981, the year The Soul of a Tree was published, many sannyasins connected to donate books to his library. Commonly Osho had a look at these gift books and signed them. Someone must have noticed the resonance between this Zen woodworker and the Main's deep respect for trees and creativity and probably donated it.

1) Osho, Tantra: The Supreme Agreement, Ch 5 (extract)
2) Osho, A Sudden Clash of Thunder, Ch iv

Nirbija Bhagawati More manufactures by Nirbija on Osho News

More articles by Bhagawati on Osho News

Sources :
George Nakashima: The Soul of a Tree: A Master Woodworkers Reflections , Paperback 2012 (1981 edition out of print) – amazon.com – amazon.co.uk – amazon.de – amazon.in
Nakashima, Mira: Nature, Course and Spirit: The Life and Legacy of George Nakashima. New York: Harry North. Abrams, 2003
nakashimawoodworkers.com/
incollect.com – The legacy of George Nakashima
Mira Nakashima interview on YouTube