Mayumi Oda - The Autobiography of Mayumi Oda—Artist, Activist, and Modern Buddhist Revolutionary

S ARASVATIS G IFT , Mayumi Odas great gifthow wonderful to receive it in this beautiful, heartfelt, honest book. Sarasvati, the goddess of art, the Lady of the River of Beauty, is the cleansing divine flow of the waters of truth and beauty, and she emanates to heal and cleanse our stressed-out lives on our stricken planet through the undaunted art and golden heart of Mayumi Oda.

I have known Mayumi since 1966, when our two families were just starting to have our wonderful children. We have walked through the decades since then, each on our own distinct Buddhist paths but ultimately shoulder to shoulder in the direction of the victory of truth and love in the golden future of this planet, trying not to get too stressed or to give in at all through the long tunnel of obstacles under the self-destructive leadership of obsolescent elites. This book is a revelation of the glory of her determined artistry, filled with all the kindness, beauty, and power that flows from the indomitable feminine, divine as nature, of nature, in nature, gentle and nurturing and ferocious in the defense of life. It chronicles her discovery of our mother Gaias inconceivable gracious abundance to us humans, giving us the opportunity to thrive in joyful celebration of her grace. Only when I read this book did I finally learn so much more of Mayumis youth, of her sufferings from a war-torn childhood, and understand more deeply her dreams, insights, bravery, and irrepressible creative force. I also heard more keenly than ever her bone-deep, marrow-piercing message to us all to wake up, stop at once our busyness-as-usual, step back from our sleepwalking into catastrophe, and turn away from the path of greed, hostility, and delusion, to restore our worldour earth, our oceans, our fire, our air, our space itselfand recover the joy of care and creativity, taking up the universal responsibility to make everyone enjoy the unending time we will face together on this planet.

Mayumi and I were born the same year, 1941, and that sweet child with the sensitive soul of a fine artist had to cower in a homemade bomb shelter during the fire bombings of Tokyo, culminating in the all-too-nearby nuclear horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She then had to grow up in a culture both rigid with samurai patriarchy and deeply traumatized by war and devastation, loss, and grinding privation. Kindness of family and friends and the expressiveness of art were clearly her salvation, and the experience of finding beauty in the rubble and turning stubborn love into creativity has been the triumph of her life, the great achievements of her art, and the depth and urgency of her teaching and its activism for life.

As I read the book alone in my study, it brings me to tears, thinking of her suffering as a child. I marvel at how succinctly but thoroughly she chronicles the huge transformations the world has suffered and achieved in our lifetimes. Her life itself testifies to how we have come on the people level, in spite of gigantic and intensifying dangers and catastrophes, truly to a new age of gentleness, sustainability, recovery of human intelligence, love, and creativity. Her art and her activism, how it faces obstacles, also show how we all still seem to be driven toward doom by insane leadership, a relative few sad but powerful people still imprisoned by habit patterns of ignorant, outmoded-but-obstinate convictions, personal rigidity, male chauvinist arrogance, and escapist self-destructiveness based on the subliminal nihilism of scientistic materialism.