Highlights

self-creation (自己創造) is akin to the élan vital (エラン・ヴィタル) in Bergson's philosophy, which, put simply, is about the arising of presence from absence (無から有を生ずること).

He brought the pagoda into presence (塔を創造したのである). Sesshū was at once a Buddhist (仏教家) and a Shintō practitioner (神道家).

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From Andrew:

In connection with being an artist in connection with these ideas, I've just posted a short piece by Imaoka-sensei talking about J. W. T. Mason, Bergson and the artist, Sesshū. The idea that, as artists (and jiyū shūkyōjin/free-religionists), creativity is somehow about presencing, that is to say something like acting from a sense of our highest future potential, sensing and acting from the emerging future, and bringing it into being. That seems to me what just what Sesshū was doing. Recently I've discovered that Otto Scharmer at MIT often talks about this kind of stuff in the systems thinking context (https://ottoscharmer.com/bio/).

References

Brown, Andrew James. “The Arising of Presence from Absence—an Insight of J. W. T. Mason’s about the Connection between Henri Bergson’s Philosophy, Shinto and Buddhism.” Caute, 17 Apr. 2025, https://andrewjbrown.blogspot.com/2025/04/the-arising-of-presence-from-absencean.html.