Sensei at conclusion of 2008 Ikenobo Show; photo by Ira Abrams
written by Ira Abrams
Ikebana and tea-ceremony master Dr. Seiko Nakashima, whom I (and hundreds of others) called “Sensei,” passed away on July 8 at the age of 87. A number of Shambhalians in Chicago (and some elsewhere) were among the many students of Sensei Nakashima.
Sensei’s professional and teaching life was split between her academic work as a microbiologist and what she referred to as her work as an ambassador of Japanese Culture — primarily teaching and practicing Ikebana and Chanoyu, tea ceremony.
She had earned the highest credentials honor in both the ancient Ikenobo school of Ikebana and the Urasenke school of tea ceremony. She also practiced and taught calligraphy and classical dance. In 2006, the Emperor of Japan declared her a national treasure in awarding her the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Rays for her accomplishments in promoting Japanese culture and — as she often proudly pointed out — in scientific research.
Sensei always expressed a great affection and admiration for Shambhala. At one point in the late 1970s or early 1980s, while in Chicago, Shambhala founder Chogyam Trungpa accompanied by his son (then the Sawang), visited Sensei and tried (unsuccessfully) to persuade her to move to Colorado to teach tea ceremony to the members of the Shambhala community. She was delighted by this visit and liked to recount it for me during flower-arranging lessons, always exclaiming in her characteristically exuberant manner how “CHARming” Trungpa Rinpoche was, and how “HANDsome” was the son.
I was a mediocre student and Sensei would often encourage me to leave my flowers alone before the other students were done so we could chat about Shambhala or about teaching children (my profession). In the last year that I studied with her, after the death of her husband and just before health issues caused her to limit her teaching activity, Sensei liked to joke regularly that maybe it wasn’t too late to take up the offer and move to Boulder or Shambhala Mountain Center.
When a person has spent many decades being addressed as “Sensei,” the inexpressible heart-meaning of her life is something that has to be pieced together from the testimonies of a great variety of people, each of whom who had a significant but utterly unique relationship with her. It is the accumulation of deeply significant gestures, words, and silences — sometimes pointedly delivered, sometimes only casually observed — that allow us to glimpse the qualities and the principles of a great teacher’s life. At the risk of focusing only on my own, partial understanding of Sensei, I want to offer the story of my first meeting with her. I hope that others will add to this story to create a more complete picture.
Certainly by the time I began studying with her, when Sensei was in her mid 70s and struggling with chronic pain and injuries, she took on students only if they were willing to make a serious commitment. She knew us well, and she taught each person something different, in a different way. My experience of Sensei was not based on my skills as a flower arranger (which were minimal to begin with and progressed very little in four years) but on a shared interest in the implications of flower arranging for life.
Our conversations could thus be fairly abstract. And this could be further complicated by the fact that Sensei’s English, while it could be perfectly clear when she wanted it to be, was often strange and indefinite when she had other ideas in mind.
One of the effects of Sensei’s variable English was that it created a bond among her students, who struggled together to understand her instructions, or at least to form a common misunderstanding for the sake of group efficiency and harmony. Past a certain point, it was not possible to get clarification from Sensei about a word or phrase that no one could make out or plausibly infer. In some cases, it didn’t matter, but often it was a key term or step that couldn’t be discerned. Her difficulty, or apparent difficulty, in saying things clearly in these cases brought us together and engendered a sense of humility and real eagerness to understand. Sometimes, it seemed that she deployed seemingly broken English in order to test her students.
I first met Sensei when I sat in on an advanced group lesson that she had, for some reason, encouraged me to join. I had spoken with her by phone a few weeks before and, having heard that she did not accept many new students, I had told her of my study of Buddhism and my involvement with Shambhala and its tradition of Ikebana, to enhance the case for taking me on as a student. Sensei said little but told me to come to a class a few weeks later.
Her practice in group lessons was to start by lecturing about and then demonstrating a particular arrangement. Then, giving each of us a pre-selected bunch of flowers and other materials, she watched and helped us to create arrangements of our own embodying the same principals. At the end of class, each student’s arrangement would receive a public “correction” from Sensei. All the while, she explained the history and significance of the particular arrangement, or just commented on things that she found interesting — often it was the news.
The day of my first appearance, Sensei seemed very particularly interested in involving me in the class. She asked me several questions during her lecture, in which she continually repeated the phrase “and so.” Or so I thought. I felt more or less at home, since Tibetan Buddhist teachers often sprinkle their remarks with short relatively meaningless phrases such as “na so.” But the other students seemed baffled by what Sensei was discussing and she seemed to be asking me to help her explain whatever it was that she was saying “and so” to.
Finally, Sensei drew a circle on her white-board and exclaimed “and so!” Still failing to see that she was discussing the ubiquitous Japanese character known as the Enso, I must have disappointed Sensei deeply and she asked me quite forcefully, “Why are you here?” — pointing at the base of the circle on the board. “To learn flower arranging,” I offered weakly. “No!” she thundered. Only to demand again, “And so? And so?” Finally, giving up on me, she said, with hardly a trace of a Japanese accent, “Enso. This means you are here to find out why you are here. For no other reason.” Ironically, despite the seemingly slapstick quality of my first encounter with Sensei, it proved to be prophetic. I was there to find out why I was there, not to learn flower arranging.
As my first class progressed I grew bold despite my initial failure to demonstrate a basic knowledge of the Buddhist concepts I had boasted of studying. At a certain point, I commented that I had been lucky in the flowers I had been given, because the leaves in my arrangement looked fresh while those of my neighbor looked like they had been eaten by bugs. Sensei, who was standing near my table when I said this, turned to my arrangement and began tearing the leaves, one by one, until they were all damaged. “The plants always die,” she said. “You learn this by practicing Ikebana. They grow, they get old, and they die. This is the way of life.”
I knew by the end of that first class that I was not going to be either a star arranger or the class expert on Buddhism, but I was going to stick around to find out why I was there.
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Sensei was born Seiko Kanbayashi in Hokkaido, Japan. In 1950 she married Takao Nakashima, a Japanese-American, and she moved back with him to Hilo, Hawaii, ultimately ending up in Chicago. Mr. Nakashima passed away in 2004, and was buried in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. Sensei’s body will be buried alongside her husband’s.