Intimating Emptiness

On September 14, 2025, a portrait concert of my music was held at the Yeshin Norbu Meditation Center in Stockholm. The program featured three pieces for solo violin, performed by Maya Bennardo. I read the following program note as an introduction:

Sound, emptiness, and resonance

The late autumn moon lights up the forest,

And mountain mists fill the secluded woods.

I love to look at this crystal clear landscape,

It helps me sustain an empty and clear mind.

On the flat moss, I can sit in stable meditation,

As the wind whips its way deep into the woods.

An old nun comes to see how I am getting along,

We light some incense, play a bit on the qin.

(modified from Grant 2003, 97)

This is a verse by the Chinese nun Xíngchè. It connects to a theme that runs deep in recluse-poetry: from a calm mind attuned to emptiness arises music—a music that does not stray from emptiness, but is a spontaneous function of it. Music that naturally teaches the fundamental insight of the Mahāyāna:

Whatever appears is necessarily empty,

Whatever is empty necessarily appears

Because appearance that is not empty is impossible (Mipam in Duckworth 2008, 10)

What kind of music might arise from Xíngchè’s qin? While no musical notation survives, Bái Jūyi gives us, in another verse, a sense of the style of recluse performers:

The cadence, slow; and leisurely the strumming:

Deep in the night, a few sounds, no more.

Bland, without flavor, they enter the ear;

The heart is tranquil, feelings lie beneath. (in Jullien 2004, 83)

I find this description deeply inspiring. The pieces performed at this concert might be thought of as my own attempts to clothe this attunement in sound: sparse tones, extended silences; sounds bland and without flavor, silences ordinary; leisurely, yet luminous. They strive to create a music of forgetting—a theme that also runs through the qín repertoire, with many pieces containing sections named after the meditation practice simply known as sitting and forgetting (zuò wàng 坐忘): forgetting meanings, forgetting ourselves. As it is written in the Zenrin-kushū,

Sitting motionless,

nothing happening

Spring coming,

grass growing

(Zenrin-kushū no. 380, in Shigematsu 1981)

Sunday, October 10, 2021

Intimating Emptiness

Part 1: Listening

Musical listening is non-dual. This becomes evident through the phenomenology of attunement—what the German tradition calls Stimmung. The term captures how, under ordinary circumstances, we do not experience music 'as an object'. Music is neither heard as something 'out there' in the material world nor as something 'in here', confined to the mind. Rather, it arises through an effortless, spontaneously non-dual, and egoless process in which our mind and body attune to the music. Because this form of musical attunement rests the mind in non-dual awareness, listening offers meaningful reference points and lived experiences that can support the practice of zazen—the actualization of that primordial non-duality Buddhist scriptures call the nature of mind. There is, therefore, a genuine soteriological value even in the most ordinary moments of listening, since they are already non-dual forms of musical attunement.

In both zazen and musical attunement, the mind is free from dualistic reference points. In such moments, we are not listening or attending to 'something' to be grasped; rather, we experience how phenomenality arises non-dually. Kasulis (2018) describes zazen as a state in which the "specifics of the situation dissolve back into the meaningless flow, the as-ness or presencing" (230). In Buddhism, we often find ideas such as these that seem to suggest that the goal is not to perceive any content, but rather be tuned to a content-less awareness, such as in Kūkai's idea of achieving liberation through non-dual attunement to 'empty space'—the dharmakāya. At first glance, this might suggest a stark difference between zazen and music: music is not merely a meaningless flow or 'empty space'. Rather, when we listen, a musical world is brought forth and its phenomena are engaged from a perspective of being attuned to that world.

Yet, according to Dōgen, zazen does not require the meditator to adopt a perspectivelessness that reduces phenomenality to undistinguished white noise or the mere perception of empty space—a 'view of nothing from nowhere'. It is not that kind of meaninglessness that is realized in meditation. As Davis (2011) explains, Dōgen advocates a form of perspectivism in which a 'perspective' is a necessary feature of all phenomenality, even for the awakened. Unlike the perspectives of saṃsāric existence, which, under the "winds of externality" (The Lankavatara Sutra 2012, 75), construct a false dualism between self and world, the perspective Dōgen describes is non-dual. This understanding also applies to Kūkai, who with the dharmakāya did not mean a vacuum or nothingness. Rather, 'empty space' points to the way all phenomenality, in all its forms, is like empty space when apprehended correctly—not by removing phenomenality (i.e., making space empty by deleting content), but by perceiving it as it truly is. For Dōgen, this happens when phenomenality is engaged from a non-dual perspectival opening: what emerges is a world, a world arising dependently from phenomena, but one in which subject-object duality and the objects imposed by false imagination (abhūtaparikalpa) have no objective existence (Davis 2011). In this sense, zazen is similar to musical attunement: it is not a state where we apprehend objects, but one in which the world nevertheless appears through a certain attunement and from a particular perspective.
Resting the mind in its natural non-duality means being attuned to all myriad forms. These forms are the empty revolving of a mind that is neither internal nor external, neither private nor communal. When apprehended as empty, these forms appear as focal points that gather a world; they are perspectival openings within events of interconnection (Davis 2019, 334). Through musical attunement, these openings become experientially accessible, allowing ordinary listening to participate in the non-dual realization described by Dōgen and Kūkai.
Davis (2019) argues that, for Dōgen, awakening is not a matter of attaining omniscience or seeing things without a perspective. Rather, it "entails a radical change in the "attitude" or "fundamental attunement" with which one participates in perspectival delimitation" (2019, 333). Musical attunements are moments in which such a radical change in fundamental attunement can be realized. These moments are not about abandoning perspectives; they are about how we give ourselves over to the world of the musical attunement—to the perspective of the music itself. Attuning ourselves to this musical world is a "pure action" that is "not forced by you or others" (Dōgen 1999, 114).
That music can, in this way, serve as a verification of non-duality does not mean that all musical attunements are inherently the pure perception of the dharmakāya. Kasulis’ use of the term "meaningless" is crucial because it highlights the distinction between music that intimates zazen and music that does not. Here, 'meaningless' does not refer to the absence of a world or perspectivelessness, but to the interpretation of 'objects' within a world. Music that does not ask the listener to hear sounds through concepts or symbols is the music that brings aesthetic experience closer to the attentiveness of zazen. Such music does not require the listener to 'make sense' of it either narratively or conceptually; instead, it invites a form of forgetfulness—an active, acutely perceptive forgetfulness rather than a dull or hazy one. Freed from the burden of understanding or conceptualizing the phenomena, the listener is drawn toward the bare attention of zazen, where things are seen as they truly are.
Relieving the listener of any burden to 'understand' the music does not transform her into a withered tree or a pile of dried ashes (koboku shikai 枯木死灰) in a nihilistic sense. On the contrary, such modes of listening encourage the mind’s spontaneous free play (Skt. līlā) to come to the foreground of experience, giving rise to insight into the creative workings of the nature of mind. Similarly, in musical attunement, letting go of the need to conceptually grasp the music allows the mind to roam freely, revealing its spontaneous activity. As Kasulis (2018, 230) writes: “zazen will always take us back to the point where the specifics of the situation dissolve back into the meaningless flow, the as-ness or presencing. That flux is a boundless, infinite resource out of which new situations and new meanings can arise" (2018, 230).
Buddhists speak of meditators being like withered trees not because the free play of their minds is suppressed, but because it is enabled. The metaphor of withered branches "depicts the total stillness of non-thinking that fosters rather than suppresses the inevitable and unstoppable budding of blossoms" (Heine 2020, 31). To describe this free play, Hóngzhì borrows a metaphor from Zhuāngzi: "roaming at will" (逍遙遊, xiāoyáo yóu). He writes:
"Roam and play in samādhi. Every detail clearly appears before you. Sound and form, echo and shadow, happen instantly without leaving traces. [...] The valley is empty, but echoes. From the beginning unbound by seeing or hearing, the genuine self romps and plays in samādhi without obstruction" (in Leghton 2000, 34 & 37).
In this way, both meditation and musical listening can allow the mind to enact a liberated, non-dual engagement with phenomena: attentive yet free, playful yet precise, perceiving without conceptual grasping. When musical attunement is completely pure like this, sounds appear but leave no traces. Phenomenality is playfully engaged with, yet leads to no clinging. All sounds appear like echoes–illusory and insubstantial moments of mind's "wonderful function" (Mǎzǔ Dàoyī in Jia 2006, 78)
Usually, we do not relish music’s beauty without subtly affirming or rejecting the phenomenal experience. This is so despite the 'disinterest' that philosophers like Schopenhauer have argued are a necessary feature of any aesthetic perception. For Schopenhauer, to perceive anything as beautiful requires that we do not really have a worldly interest in it. Yet, despite this ideal of disinterested perception, when listening to music, we are rarely as inert as wood, stone, or heaps of dried ashes. Beneath the ashes, there is often a glowing ember of like or dislike that we bring to the musical attunement. This holds even when we expand our idea of agreeable sounds to include traditionally 'plain' or even 'ugly' tones. It also applies when we broaden our poetic moods beyond highly charged rasa-s to encompass those that are most ordinary and insipid—moments that intimate the mundane, unspectacular rhythms of everyday life.
Drawing upon moods that seem most ordinary and insipid is precisely what aesthetic qualities like blandness (Ch. 淡 dàn) and moods of peace (Skrt. śāntarasa) accomplish. These qualities invite the listener to extend the non-dual awareness of hearing, even in the absence of garlands of pleasurable sounds or strong affective states (rasa-s), which usually compel the spontaneous continuation of musical attention. As François Jullien writes of the bland paintings of Ní Zàn (倪瓚): "Nothing here strives to incite or seduce; nothing aims to fix the gaze or compel the attention" (2004, 37).

Poetic moods such as dàn and śāntarasa can move the musically attuned non-dual awareness beyond the pleasure of agreeable sound into an equanimous relationship to phenomenality—a mode of experience in which phenomena "leave no traces". These qualities intimate a way of being that corresponds with Buddhist goals. Yet, there is a subtle way in which we usually relish these moods; this insipidity can still be agreeable. From a conventional standpoint, it is because of this subtle relishing that non-dual musical attunement does not always equate to the primordial, non-dual wakefulness of zazen; yet even when traces of liking, disliking, or conceptual engagement remain, non-dual musical attunement can persist—these minor ‘impurities’ do not collapse the listener’s awareness back into a dualistic mode.
Part 2: Tuning
The wish to intimate emptiness through artistic practices is the spontaneous function of the dharmakāya, naturally manifesting through the expressive capacities of human mind-bodies. When we find ourselves spontaneously attuned to the emptiness of the dharmakāya—the non-duality of nothing and something—we may feel an impulse to express this attunement in phenomenal form. For instance, upon encountering a vast blue sky, Táo Yuānmíng felt the dharmakāya beckoning him, remarking: "Today’s skies are perfect for a clear flute and singing qín" (Hinton 1993, 61). Open skies were considered "perfect" for the performance of music because they invited an attunement to emptiness that made the musical sounds performed in such a state resound as audible emptiness.
In the history of Chinese poetry, contemplatives often turned to chanting and musical instruments to express such attunement. Verses depicting scenes of seclusion and open landscapes—conditions conducive to this awareness—frequently culminated in musical performance. This dynamic is beautifully illustrated in a verse by Xíngchè (行徹):
The late autumn moon lights up the forest,
And mountain mists fill the secluded woods.
I love to look at this crystal clear landscape,
It helps me sustain an empty and clear mind.
On the flat moss, I can sit in stable meditation,
As the wind whips its way deep into the woods.
An old nun comes to see how I am getting along,
We light some incense, play a bit on the zither [qin]. (trans. Grant 2003, 97)
In this verse, the autumn moon and crystal-clear landscape attune Xíngchè to emptiness. Her mind is calm, luminous, and settled in meditation—empty like the moon that lights up the world. From this attunement arises the musical activity depicted at the end of the poem. This music is not a diversion from meditation but the spontaneous manifestation of the mind’s stillness—its natural resonance.
That music and meditation are two sides of the same coin—two ways of expressing the same non-dual attunement—is beautifully conveyed in Bái Jūyì’s Idly Chanting upon Getting up Early on a Winter Day. In this verse, he shows how the alternation between chanting and meditation gives rhythm to his nightly practice—a pacing not born of discipline or design, but of effortless attunement:
At night, practicing Chan, I sit a lot,
Affected by the autumn atmosphere I chant.
Leisurely, other than these two things,
My mind does not dwell on anything else. (modified from Poceski 2007, 48)
The scene mirrors that of Xíngchè’s verse: it is late autumn, and the poet is engaged in meditation. Finding himself "affected by the autumn atmosphere"—that is, attuned by empty space—Bái naturally begins to chant. The practices of zazen and chanting are not to be understood as representing meditation versus non-meditation. As in Xíngchè’s verse, chanting is neither a frivolous interlude nor an act of self-imposed discipline. Both meditation and chanting unfold as completely leisurely activities—the spontaneous expression of attunement itself.
If Xíngchè’s and Bái Jūyì’s verses reveal music as the flowering of contemplative stillness, a verse by Wáng Wéi deepens this insight. Here, the musician’s non-dual attunement allows the natural world itself to become the musician, so that sound arises not from the human hand but from the agency of moon and breeze:
Late, I love but quietness:
Things of this world are no more my concern.
Looking back, I’ve known no better plan
Than this: returning to the grove.
Pine breezes: loosen my robe.
Mountain moon beams: play my lute [qin]
What, you ask, if Final Truth?
The fisherman’s song, strikes deep into the bank. (Cheng 2016, 215, trans. Riggs & Seaton).

For Wáng, the pine breeze, the quietness, and—just as for Xíngchè—the moon attune him to the empty space through which the dharmakāya expounds the dharma via his instrument. Yet the moonbeams do not merely inspire the musician; they are what play the qín. The terse Chinese—山月照彈琴—casts the moon as the agent of performance. The sounds of the qín are the medium through which the moon expresses itself.
In answering what is Final Truth, Wáng offers the echo of a fisherman’s song. In doing so, he moves beyond Xíngchè and Bái Jūyì, emphasizing not only the non-duality of stillness and activity—meditation and non-meditation—but also the non-duality of the religious and the non-religious. Unlike the previous two poems, Wáng's verse does not mention sitting in meditation. In a sense, he is asking what the need is for religious contexts when the ultimate truth of reality can be expressed by the humble song of a fisherman and found through quietly attuning oneself to the natural world.
This theme is made more explicit by Hánshān, who concludes his own poem on the subject by asserting that "there is no Zen", indicating that whatever transpired between him, the night sky, the moon and its reflection in the stream, and his act of singing cannot adequately be captured by a religious framework:
High up, on the top of the peak:
Infinite in all directions.
Alone I sit: no one knows I'm here;
A lonely moon shines on the cold stream.
But there is no moon in the stream;
The moon's right there, in the night sky.
And as I chant this single song:
At the song's end, there is no Zen. (HS 287, trans. Rouzer 2016, 137)
If Hóngzhì described meditative equipoise as a state of roaming and playing in samādhi, Hánshān can be seen as having integrated this insight into the very fabric of his being. He is not merely playing in samādhi while seated in meditation. Hánshān’s verse evokes how the duality between chanter and landscape dissolves as voice and surroundings merge in a direct, unselfconscious act of expression. As Iriya notes in an oft-quoted passage, Hánshān’s attunement to the dharmakāya produces an ‘outward’ function—an artistic expression that is simultaneously free and playful, yet fully grounded in the equanimity of zazen and vipaśyanā: a sportive samādhi spontaneously manifesting in creative action:
"His best work, those examples successful as genuine poetry, are not those which attempt religious statement, but those in which the poet disports himself in a free, effortless revelling in the Way—the joyful outpouring of a 'sportive samadhi'." (in LaFleur 1983, 24)
Because there is no Zen in this attunement, one need not be a sage, monk, or nun to attune to the dharmakāya and feel the spontaneous desire to play music or chant verses. Kawabata Yasunari captures this vividly in Snow Country, portraying the geisha Komako as someone attuned to the vast sky, prompting her urge to play music. When she experiences the attunemental effects of the crystal-clear sky, she regrets not being home to practice the shamisen. In the first passage, strongly echoing Táo Yuānmíng, Komako says:
"I should have gone home early to practice the samisen. The sound is different on a day like this."
The ‘difference in sound’ does not simply describe the drier air of a clear day; it reflects how the sky attunes Komako to emptiness, enabling the shamisen’s sound to arise as inseparable from that clear sky. Later, Kawabata depicts her attunement as complete, describing her as becoming "a part of nature":
"Komako looked up at the clear sky over the snow. “The tone is different on a day like this.” The tone had been as rich and vibrant as her remark suggested. The air was different. There were no theater walls, there was no audience, there was none of the city dust. The notes went out crystalline into the clean winter morning, to sound on the far snowy peaks. Practicing alone, not aware herself of what has happening, perhaps, but with all the wideness of nature in this mountain valley for her companion, she had come quite as a part of nature to take on this special power." (trans. Seidensticker 1956)
Komako’s experience demonstrates the same principle seen in Xíngchè, Wáng Wéi, and Hánshān: when one is attuned to emptiness, music arises as a spontaneous, non-dual expression of the dharmakāya. Her experience shows that this sensitivity to emptiness transcends time, place, and vocation—it manifests wherever clarity and solitude converge. The performer and the environment are no longer distinct; the musical sounds are inseparable from the vastness and openness that attune the mind, revealing a seamless interplay between phenomenality and emptiness.
A common thread in these examples is the prominence of solo performers, suggesting that the solitary musician is particularly receptive to a relationship with emptiness, a phenomenon noted by the contemporary composer and musician Antoine Beuger. He observes that "[t]his focus on emptiness and silence, I feel, is absolutely connected to the idea of solo music. Today I would, axiomatically, say that the content of a solo is the void" (Saunders & Beuger 2009). Still, attunement to the dharmakāya is not confined to solo performance; it can manifest equally within ensemble music.
While many of the examples above emphasize forms of phenomenal openness—a clear sky, an autumn atmosphere, or a mountaintop—as conducive to attunement, the ultimate aim for meditators and musicians alike is to cultivate a state in which no specific stimulus is required. Kūkai described awakening as the recognition that all phenomena are like empty space. Although literal empty spaces can inspire such attunement, the goal is not to withdraw from the world or deny its forms, but to perceive phenomena differently. Thus, attunement to empty space may arise anywhere and at any time, through the recognition that all phenomenality is, in its truest apprehension, like empty space. At this point, the excerpts above show that listening and composing are no longer distinct activities: both arise from the same attunement to emptiness, differing only in whether sound is received or given forth.
Part 3: Composing
As musicians and composers, the way we create pieces that evoke emptiness is an intuitive process that cannot be put into words. It cannot be reduced to a set of playing techniques or stylistic strategies. It begins with the simple act of sitting in zazen, a state of attunement to dharmakāya that is neither meditating nor not meditating. In this state, ambient sounds are like ripples on the ocean of emptiness. The musician is inspired to contribute a sound, and by creating sounds, they facilitate the hearing of sounds as audible emptiness. If successful, this produces music that embodies the message of the Heart Sūtra: that form is emptiness, and emptiness is form. But what kind of sound could we imagine arising from Xíngchè’s qín or Bái Jūyì’s voice in the poems above—sound that resonates with such attunement and allows music itself to arise as emptiness?
It would be naive to assume that merely being attuned to emptiness is enough to produce music that maintains this realization of the union of appearance and emptiness. If this were the case, any Dzogchen master would automatically be a great composer-performer—but this is not so. The musician must have practiced something, and the composer must have studied something. Musō Soseki illustrates this point in his Dialogues in a Dream (夢中問答), when asked whether a person who awakens to their Original Nature without encountering the Dharma can teach the Dharma. In Zen, which emphasizes direct pointing to Mind’s nature without reliance on words or scriptures, the question is relevant: can realization alone suffice for transmission? In Zen, one could, in theory, awaken without following traditional Buddhist training or studying scriptures. Musō answers that such a person "cannot serve as a teacher since he lacks the means to help others. The intent is understood, but the words are not" (trans. Kirchner 2015, 178).
The same principle applies to music. A composer or performer may have realized the nature of emptiness, but to convey this attunement to listeners, they must also study music. What, then, does a musician skilled in this way know that a master meditator does not? What knowledge of sound allows them to perform so that sounds arise as soundful emptiness and dissolve back into the boundless auditory indeterminacy? To answer this, it is not sufficient to cite poetic assertions that "music is the dharmakāya expounding the dharma through humans". Instead, we must examine the nature of sound and its combinations—the study of poetics. We should study how the particular usages of parameters such as quietness, timbre, pointillism, and intonation can be used intentionally. Each of these, when handled with awareness, can allow the listener to enact the arising and dissolving of sound as empty yet manifest. Bái Jūyì knows something about phrasing, timing, intonation, and timbre that allows his chanting to be in a continuum with his meditation. By becoming intimate with sound in this way, the composer or performer becomes intimate with sound’s emptiness.
If we are intimate with sound, our attunement to emptiness will then be beneficial not only to ourselves but to others as well. The music becomes both a spontaneous expression of the dharmakāya and a means—an upāya (skillful means)—for transmitting attunement to listeners. Listeners may access the attunement to dharmakāya through the music, entering a shared experience of emptiness manifested as sound. This, ultimately, is the goal of music as I see it.

Tuesday, June 1, 2021

Music and Buddhist Monastics

Absence of sound is not the end of hearing,

And sound when present is not its beginning.

- The Śūraṅgama Sūtra

The denial of the value of music in the Vinaya

In the Vinaya—the part of the Buddhist canon that regulates the conduct of monastics—the performance, enjoyment, and teaching of music is prohibited. The seventh precept of the dasa-sīla (ten precepts) forbids monastic members from participating in or enjoying music. What should contemporary musicians make of this?

It must be noted that the vast contemporary English term music, which encompasses a wide range of sonic practices, did not exist in ancient India. Many of the musical forms we have today were not present at the time of the Buddha. We can only speculate how Śākyamuni would have reacted, for instance, to the subtle, poetic music of John Cage. As the terms for musical activities in India were much more specific, we should be cautious about assuming that the Vinaya bans everything we today call music.

A closer reading suggests that the main target of the Buddha’s prohibition was music that we might specifically call entertainment music. In Sanskrit, the term viśoka appears in connection with this ban; it literally refers to something happy and free from grief (Liu 2018), implying that music intended to evoke pleasure or frivolity was the primary concern.

The prohibition of music in the Vinaya does not, however, extend to the melodious chanting of Buddhist liturgy—which, in contemporary English, would clearly fall under the broad category of music. Greene and Wei (2004) note that in Southeast Asian Theravāda contexts, it is common to "deliver liturgical speech or chant in florid, music-like forms" (1), which, for the purposes of adhering to the seventh precept, are not considered "music."

In traditional Buddhist understandings of sounding aesthetic expressions, music for entertainment was clearly distinguished from music for religious purposes, such as chanting. This, however, did not imply that religious chanting was without regulation. Even chant was confined to appropriate contexts. It was not automatically sanctioned simply because it used a religious text; for instance, the recitation of the prātimokṣa rules was not allowed to be rendered in a melodious intonation (歌音, geyin).

In the Vinaya and its commentaries, the ban on music is explained in part by the need to regulate monastics’ outward behavior to secure the support of the laity. Monks and nuns were expected to embody high virtues and exemplary moral conduct. By observing this, the laity would be encouraged to offer food and material support, generating meritorious karma for themselves. Maintaining this mutually supportive relationship was a central function of the Vinaya, and it required monastics to clearly distinguish themselves from laypeople through their visible conduct.

An important distinction between the conduct of monastics and that of laypeople was that monastics were expected to refrain from sense pleasures. In the Pāli Vinaya, one case story recounts a group of nuns attending an arts festival. A lay audience member criticizes them, asking: "How can nuns come to see dancing (naccam), and singing (gītam), and music (vāditam), like women householders who enjoy pleasures of the senses?" (Liu 2018). Similar cases appear in the Chinese translations of the Sarvāstivāda, Dharmaguptaka, and Mahāsāṃghika Vinayas, prompting the mahāmuni to prohibit instrumental music (伎樂, jiyue) and song (歌, ge) (Liu 2018). Followers of the Buddhist path were expected to cultivate freedom from attachment to sense pleasures and entertainment; being seen playing or listening to music drew criticism and disappointment from the laity, who sought in monastics a worthy vessel through which their donations could generate maximal karmic benefit.

Yet, delivering the liturgy and sermons in a melodious voice was not a problem for the laity. Sources such as the Sapoduo bu pini modelejia (薩婆多部毘尼摩得勒伽) and the Mūlasarvāstivāda-Vinaya Kṣudrakavastu even indicate that the laity actively requested a more melodious and aesthetically pleasing (i.e., less monotonous) recitation of Buddhist scriptures. It was this request that led to the mahāmuni’s permission to recite the scriptural canon with a 'good voice' (好聲, hǎoshēng)—that is, a melodious voice—rather than only with a plain voice (凡聲, fánshēng) (Liu 2018).

If the first reason for banning music was to maintain social boundaries and distinctions between monastics and laypeople, a second reason concerns the actual distractions that aesthetic practices, such as music and poetry, could pose for monastics striving for awakening. In the Tang dynasty, the monk and poet Qíjǐ (齊己, 863–937) famously bore witness to this concern in his writings, describing how the 'poetry-demon' (詩魔, shīmó)—a term believed to have been first used a century earlier by Bai Juyi (白居易, 772–846) (Protass 2016, 97)—interfered with and disturbed his meditation practice (Mazanec 2017, 298). Just as the demon Māra tried to lure the Buddha away from awakening, the poetry demon tempted Qíjǐ to stray from the Buddhist path. Later, in the Song dynasty, the Buddhist follower Sū Shì praised practitioners who had managed to "forget words" (忘言) and transcend the need for language, while lamenting his own continued attachment to poetry. As he wrote in a verse dedicated to a Buddhist monk:

This Master has long forgotten words, has truly found the Way.

But if I give up writing verse, I'd have nothing left at all! (in Grant 1994, 68)

In the Mahīśāsaka-Vinaya, attachment to art is cited as a reason for banning music for monastics. The text recounts a story of nuns who attended a music performance (similar to the Pāli Vinaya episode) and became so absorbed that, upon returning to the monastic community, Buddhist practice lost its appeal. Later Sanskrit sources elaborate on this concern. Kamalaśīla writes that song, dance, and instrumental music "will cause self-aggrandizement (rgyags [རྒྱགས]) and arrogance (dregs pa [དྲེགས་པ]), and secondarily, they will keep one in a cyclic existence" (Liu 2017, 63). Vinītadeva, commenting on Śākyaprabha, explains that "since dance and so forth cause one to become extremely happy, but not become sad, for this reason, genuine happiness is the cause for cyclic existence" (Liu 2017, 63). In other words, as the use of the term viśoka suggests, the problem with music is its entertaining, joyous aspect. Music and art create an illusion of saṃsāra as a happy place. Liu summarizes Vinītadeva’s point:

"the performance or consumption of song, dance and instrumental music can bring happiness and dispel sorrow. For this reason, one who watches such musical performances would be content with worldly life and fail to see the peril of attachment to cyclic existence." (Liu 2017, 63)

So far, it might seem that, from a monastic perspective, music offered few intrinsic benefits. Early Buddhist communities acknowledged only the instrumental value of chanting liturgy in a melodious voice: it could help listeners focus on the meaning of the text and aid memorization. Although not explicitly stated in the texts cited above, the monastic community must also have recognized that chanting could calm listeners and create a serene atmosphere conducive to developing faith in the teachings. Wei Li (1992) captures this utilitarian view when noting that music aids individuals in regulating their behaviours:

"music for sense-pleasure is against Buddhist moral tenet, thus, is not tolerated; monastic chanting, rather than being a conventional notion of musical performance, is a utilitarian vehicle for religious ritual and a means for individuals to regulate their behaviors." (Wei Li 1992, 83)

The value of music, then, lies only in its role as upāya, a skillful means—a pedagogical tool rather than an end in itself. This view belongs to a broader Buddhist attitude toward the arts, often described through the trope of sugar-coating bitter medicine: aesthetic beauty can draw the audience in, making the harder truths of the Dharma easier to accept. A similar stance appears in discussions of literature. The Indian Buddhist author Aśvaghoṣa (ca. 80–150), for instance, articulated this perspective in his second-century poem Saundarananda. At the conclusion of the work, he steps forward as author and addresses his audience directly:

"This composition on the subject of liberation is for calming the reader, not for his pleasure. It is fashioned out of the medicine of poetry with the intention of capturing an audience whose minds are on other things. Thinking how it could be made pleasant, I have handled in it things other than liberation, things introduced due to the character of poetry, as bitter medicine is mixed with honey." (in Reich 2016, 388)

A similarly utilitarian attitude toward art was articulated by Mahimabhaṭṭa, the twelfth-century Kashmiri aesthetician best known for his Vyaktiviveka. Reich (2016) summarizes Mahima’s position as follows:

"under ideal conditions, a poem would be written without any figures of speech or literary qualities at all, in the style of a śāstra, and that literary figures and beautiful language are at best a concession to the weakness of the reader, who would otherwise be distracted. Their purpose is not to enable an experience that couldn’t be obtained any other way, but to enable an experience that should have been obtained in other ways, had the readers been more intelligent and disciplined" (Reich 2016, 389).

The effect—or fruit—of śāstra and poetry is essentially the same, and ideally only the former would be necessary; in this light, the Buddhist Vinaya and its commentaries reveal an attitude toward music similar to Mahimabhaṭṭa’s and Aśvaghoṣa’s views on poetry. Under ideal conditions, monks would not need to chant texts beautifully or melodiously—a plain recitation would suffice. Only because listeners require support to focus and cultivate a proper devotional atmosphere is it necessary to beautify the delivery.

From sense pleasure to insight: reconsidering the value of chant

As musicians, our deep experiences of sound may lead us to question the Vinaya’s view of chant as a mere ‘necessary evil’—a pragmatic device for drawing attention to the words rather than a practice of value in itself. We might instead argue that being musically attuned is not simply an indulgence in carnal sense pleasures but something far more wholesome. Yet suspicion of art has been a recurring theme across spiritual traditions worldwide and reflects a broader spiritual ambivalence toward aesthetic pleasure. As Watsuji Tetsurō explains:

"This tendency appears in all countries in all eras where there is religious tension. Paul opposed the sculptors of Greece. Savonarola opposed the authority of the Medicis. If one assumes that artistic pleasure accompanies carnal pleasure, then it is natural that art is balanced against this kind of religious faith as a "one or the other" sort of decision." (2011, 83)

From my perspective as a musician, it seems clear that appreciating art need not be framed as merely a worldly sense pleasure. Immersing oneself in music can open experiences that go beyond entertainment, offering insights similar to—or even on par with—those gained from meditation. The satisfaction we derive from music is closer to the fulfillment of meditation than to the indulgence of sensual desire. Pi-yen Chen, who spent years studying chanting in Chinese Buddhist monasteries, supports this view in an article titled "Sound and Emptiness: Music, Philosophy, and the Monastic Practice of Buddhist Doctrine." Chen presents a vision of music's soteriological value that sharply contrasts Mahimabhaṭṭa’s stance. Departing from the literature reviewed above, Chen does not treat chant merely as upāya (a skillful means) for the listener, but as a direct means of cultivating insight into cardinal Buddhist truths such as egolessness (anātman) and emptiness/dependent origination (śūnyatā/pratītyasamutpāda). According to Chen, Buddhist chanting can "serve to advance an idea of decentered, cognitively ununified subjectivity, the kind of subjectivity desired in enlightenment and approached in meditation" (2001, 27).

The mechanisms through which chanting imparts such insight can be understood through two aspects of the musical experience. The first aspect is the act of hearing itself, which I will return to later in this text. The second is the spontaneity observed in what Chen calls free chanting, which occurs during communal liturgy. As Chen explains:

"During free chanting, in addition to improvised melody, chanters emphasize sound in and of itself, outside the melodic progression. They pursue sound, in other words, free from the conceptual confines of music. This spontaneity is the point at which form meets formlessness in Chinese Buddhist music." (Chen 2001, 35)

Chen is here building on the classic Buddhist epistemological idea, perhaps most famously voiced by Dharmakīrti, that immediate experience is "free from conceptualization" (quoted in Thupten Jinpa 2020, 65). Chen’s point seems to be that, by emphasizing sound in and of itself, the chanter avoids superimposing this immediate experience with the "unreal web of concepts" (Dunne 1996, 535) that, according to Chen, a conventional musical composition imposes on the perception of sound.

Rather than being caught up in connecting sounds to construct a composition, this non-conceptual engagement allows for a heightened awareness of the momentariness of phenomena and mental states (Chen 2001, 36)—the chanter becomes conscious of the fleeting, moment-to-moment fluctuations of mental phenomena.

Chen describes the experience of hearing sound "free from the conceptual confines of music" as "reflective" (2001, 36). I take this to mean that the experience provides a pure reflection—similar to the way a calm, clear surface of water reflects its surroundings—rather than the other common meaning of the term, 'deep in thought.' In other words, the listening cultivated through free chant is not an introspective turning of attention toward momentary phenomena as objects to think about or 'grasp.' Instead, the reflective quality of these momentary phenomena lies in their reflexivity: there is no subject perceiving an object, only the arising of phenomena in a non-dual awareness.

Chen's description of musical performance and listening is one where focusing on the present moment has the most soteriological value. Through this focus, chanting itself becomes a meditation:

"While chanting, sangha members are supposed to concentrate wholeheartedly on one single intent, like water pouring down to a fixed point. The concentration is to be seamless. The monks can practice this concentration by listening to their voices, for each distinct sound and word. By concentrating on the sharpest faculty—the hearing—the sangha keeps other faculties from straying or becoming sluggish. In this way, sangha members attain the single concentration more steadily and therefore arrest deluded ideas and the straying mind." (Chen 2001, 36-37).

Of course, any phenomenal form could be used as an object of concentration, and the Buddhist tradition suggests a plethora of options, from focusing on a coloured disc to paying attention to the breath. By giving the mind an object to focus on, the scattered turbulence of the mind can calm down. This allows the chanter to enter a meditative absorption—a samādhi. Yet, Chen claims that focusing on sound is not only a particularly suitable object for something like a śamatha-like concentration practice–making it an "expedient for samadhi" (Chen 2001, 45)–but also that focusing on hearing itself is a vehicle for insight. This, has to do with the nature of hearing itself, and the possibility to hear sounds reflexively and "free from the conceptual confines of music".

Such a reflective mode of listening, Chen adds, is sustained through the spontaneity of free chant. The act of performing spontaneous chant provides a heightened non-dual 'access' to the momentary arising and falling away of mental phenomena—an access that ordinary activities of daily life typically obscure. Were a chanter simply to repeat the same melody day after day, the practice would lapse into habit and lose its mindful edge: "[r]epetitious chanting may draw chanters into an unreflective state of mind, depriving them of the ability to detect their inner situation" (Chen 2001, 36). Through the act of continual musical variation, however, the chanter’s awareness remains attuned to the flux of experience, and the chanter becomes synchronized with "the underlying theme in Buddhism that the world (both internal and external) is constantly changing" (Chen 2001, 35–36).

I believe that most musicians engaged in improvisatory practices will find a resonance in Chen’s description of how improvisation can serve as a skillful means for cultivating reflexive awareness—an awareness that arises without conceptualization or the objectification of experience, allowing one to perceive the de-centered flow of moment-to-moment mental phenomena. I am, however, somewhat suspicious of Chen’s statement that chanters "emphasize sound in and of itself, outside the melodic progression". Such a formulation suggests that the chanters attend only to the immediate moment, detached from any sense of past or future musical events. This, I think, is both an inadequate stylistic description—since the music hardly sounds entirely unmelodic or disconnected—and one that underestimates the practice’s deeper soteriological significance. To claim that improvisation is 'all about the present moment' may capture something of its aesthetic character, but it ultimately provides only a partial picture. It points to the arising and ceasing of phenomena, yet fails to encompass the full scope of what this situation discloses.

From my own experience of improvising, what I find soteriologically valuable is not that improvisation compels one to dwell solely in the present moment. Rather, it is that it opens an experience in which a radical interfusion of past, present, and future takes place. Improvisation, to me, is less about concentrating on the "now" than about recognizing the boundless interpenetration of the three times. This interfusion should not be mistaken for an overlay of conceptual thought upon the direct perception of the present, as Chen seems to imply. Instead, it constitutes the very phenomenal content of emptiness as described in sūtras such as the Avataṃsaka, where emptiness is identified with the mutual interpenetration and non-obstruction of the three times. While the ability to remain in the present moment has soteriological value for the beginning meditator—who must first interrupt the restless oscillation of the mind between past and future—a more profound meditation becomes possible when such single-minded focus gives way to what Fǎzàng describes as the realization that past and present "penetrate each other without obstruction" (in Gregory 1991, 155).

Thus, rather than opposing Chen’s emphasis on sound’s immediacy, we might understand improvisation’s interpenetration of temporal dimensions as the full flowering of that immediacy—a realization that the ‘now’ itself contains past and future non-obstructively.

Another profound soteriological value implicit in Chen’s account is the way collective improvisation discloses Mind as fundamentally communal. Improvisation does not reveal Mind as the private, "innermost being" of an isolated self; rather, it reveals Mind as non-dual, empty, and relational. Many musicians will recognize this from moments of collective improvisation: it is no longer I who make musical choices, but the music itself that arises through relational co-arising. As Chen emphasizes, the practice is not about "one’s own" spontaneous decisions of musical variation, but about participating in an intersubjective, ego-less process—a practice of achieving interpersonal harmony within the monastic community. Such a state stands in stark contrast to the saṃsāric mode of operating as individual agents.

This movement from individual to collective awareness anticipates Chen’s second explanation of chanting’s transformative potential: the reflexive act of hearing. Just as the spontaneous chant dissolves the distinction between self and others through musical co-arising, the act of hearing itself dissolves the distinction between perceiver and perceived, revealing sound—and mind—as self-luminous and without division.

For the kind of 'śamatha with sound as its object' that Chen describes to work successfully, it needs to be performed in a specific way: the concentration on sound has to be so "seamless" (Chen 2001, 36) that the sounds are not heard as separated from the chanter; there can be no distance or seam between the chanter and the sound. That the concentration is performed "wholeheartedly" means that the chanter's very self becomes, as Wallrup (2012) explains, "wholly a play of sound" (104). It is not merely about observing sounds dualistically but becoming them. This is a necessary feature for achieving śamatha with musical sounds because, as Wallrup explains, it is "only in the total engagement with the music that irrelevant thoughts be purged from the mind" (Wallrup 2012, 104). It is only by wholly becoming sounds that the mind stops wandering. In other words, for the meditation on sound to be successful, it has to be non-dual. If the chanter imposes a subject-object structure onto the experience, the mind will continually wander away from the meditation.

To articulate this non-dual hearing more precisely, Chen draws on the Śūraṅgama Sūtra (首楞嚴經, Shǒuléngyán jīng), which describes non-dual hearing as the very nature of hearing prior to the imposition of artifical dualism. According to this sūtra, the true, non-dual nature of hearing is nothing other than the nondual nature of Mind itself. In this scripture, Mañjuśrī states:

"Absence of sound is not the end of hearing, And sound when present is not its beginning. The faculty of hearing, beyond creation And annihilation, truly is permanent." (in Chen 2001, 47).

In other words, hearing is identical with Buddha Nature—the ground from which all phenomenality and non-phenomenality arise. To apprehend the faculty of hearing itself is therefore to perceive the non-dual nature of Mind. Drawing on this passage, Chen interprets the Śūraṅgama as suggesting that chanting in a musically non-dually attuned manner is tantamount to recognizing—or literally ‘hearing’—mind in its natural state:

"In this concentration [upon sound], monks also experience the nature of their hearing when they chant. That is, when the sound appears, there is sound; when the sound disappears, there is no sound. Our hearing, nevertheless, is neither produced nor destroyed by the appearance or disappearance of the sound. The nature of our hearing the sound is like a mirror that reflects the objects, but it is not transformed by them; the substance of the mirror is always the same, no matter what it reflects. One’s own nature is just the same; it is neither produced nor destroyed by what we see, hear, smell, taste, touch and think. […] It is thus important for chanters to keep in mind that they should turn back their hearing from pursuing external sonic objects to hear their own nature." (Chen 2001, 37)

The faculty of hearing refers to the luminous awareness that exists prior to the imposition of false subject–object dualisms. To say that "hearing” is “neither produced nor destroyed by the appearance or disappearance of the sound", and that it is like a mirror that "is always the same, no matter what it reflects", does not imply that it exists behind sounds as a substrate or some kind of latent ‘Self.’ Mañjuśrī in the Śūraṅgama does employ a formulation that might appear to suggest such an interpretation when he says, "To hear your very Self, why not turn backward / That faculty employed to hear Buddha’s words?" (in Chen 2001, 48). Yet 'Self' here functions only as a positive synonym for the no-self of Buddha Nature; it does not signify that Buddha Nature lies concealed behind phenomenality, to be heard only when all sounds have ceased. Rather than obscuring the nature of mind, sounds are mind—they are "wonderful functions" arising "because of the revolving of the mind" (Mǎzǔ Dàoyī in Jia 2006, 78). Sounds are the very way Mind expresses itself, and it is through hearing them that its nature is heard.

Vimalakīrti describes nondual perception as nonperception (anupalabdhi or anālambana). This does not denote an absence of phenomenality, but rather an absence of grasping and objectification: "The internal subject and the external object are not perceived dualistically. Therefore, it is called nonperception" (in Thurman 1976, 46). The wakeful state of nonduality is thus not devoid of appearance or sensory activity. As Chen emphasizes, what must be relinquished is not sound itself but the pursuit of external sonic objects. To experience this directly is what the Śūraṅgama points to in speaking of hearing "hearing". Hóngzhì evokes this beautifully in a passage that references the Śūraṅgama:

...genuine hearing is without sound. So it is said that perceiving without eye or ear is where the wonder is verified and fulfilled. Light streams forth from there and many thousands of images appear. (in Leighton 2000, 42-43)

According to Chen, monastics are explicitly instructed to move beyond experiencing hearing as an act directed toward external objects—an act that registers sounds as 'out there'—and instead to hear hearing itself. They approach chanting with a nondual awareness in which all sounds arise reflexively. In doing so, they "hear" their very nature: the practice of śamatha naturally unfolds into vipaśyanā.

This description recalls a beautiful scene from Edward Burger’s documentary One Mind about monastic life at the Zhenru Chan Monastery. In this scene, a monastic describes how to drink tea with the following words:

"When you drink tea, be mindful of the place from where mind arises. If there are thoughts there, then when you drink tea, you won't taste Zen" (2016).

In other words, when engaging with the senses, the monastic enacts the instruction of the Śūraṅgama Sūtra by, in this case, tasting 'tasting' in a nondual and nonconceptual manner. In doing so, the monk is mindful of the "place from where mind arises"—the unconditioned Tathāgata store, free from conceptualization. It would be consistent with this view that the same monastic approached chanting in the same way: hearing not sounds, but hearing itself. From this perspective, chanting’s musical dimension is not an aesthetic embellishment but a direct path of realization. The practice of "hearing hearing" reveals sound not as an obstacle to awakening but as its very expression.

Revealing or constructing Mind

At this point, by following Chen’s second argument into the Śūraṅgama, we arrive at a perspective on monastic chant far removed from the Vinaya’s view of it as sugar-coated medicine. Chanting does not merely support the development of meditative absorption (samādhi) by cultivating focused concentration on sound. By sustaining a dwelling within the nondual experience that is hearing itself, it also opens a gate toward hearing the nature of Mind.

If this is what is truly soteriological about monastic chant, it becomes clear that these same qualities can also arise in forms of music other than explicitly 'Buddhist' chant. Even Christian chant, for instance, can evoke such states of awareness. This raises the question of whether the Buddhist context offers something that makes the act of hearing different from the 'Christian'.

A critical reader might argue that it is precisely the institutional and discursive matrix of 'Buddhism' that prepares or conditions the chanter–listener for particular forms of 'Buddhist listening experiences' and insights. Through sustained participation in Buddhist ritual, language, and epistemology, the practitioner in the tradition Chen describes learns to attune to "hearing itself" within a conceptual horizon already framed by the conviction that mind is "nondual, empty luminosity". In this view, Buddhist discourse shapes and inflects the experience in a distinctive way: the practice of chanting, coupled with the instruction to "hear hearing", is not a neutral method for revealing the mind "as it is" in itself, but rather a process that socially and institutionally constructs the mind. What is heard, and how it is heard, thus arises within a field of historically and conceputally shaped possibilities.

If this critical reader is correct, then the mind constructed through institutional and discursive practice would not be the same as the unconstructed Buddha Nature that the Śūraṅgama (and many other sūtras) describe as uncreated—something actualized not by fabrication but by simple being 'exposed' or 'revealed', in this case through hearing 'hearing'. From this critical standpoint, hearing 'hearing' would be understood not as a direct revelation of the fundamental nondual awareness that makes all modes of listening possible, but as one culturally and historically conditioned mode of listening among others. The question, then, is whether Buddhist ontology and the practice of chanting function as a transparent means of uncovering the Tathāgatagarbha—a way of revealing Buddha Nature—or whether they themselves are constitutive forces that construct a particular, culturally specific way of listening.

In Why I Am Not a Buddhist, Thompson addresses a parallel tension—between, on the one hand, the popular rhetoric in contemporary meditation communities that describes meditation as a means of revealing the mind or its true nature, and, on the other hand, the recognition, gestured toward above, that meditative contexts actively shape the mind. Given that meditators are typically provided with elaborate conceptual frameworks through which to interpret their experiences, Thompson asks how such frameworks could not influence or construct what is experienced. As he writes:

"On the one hand, mindfulness meditation is a practice that shapes the mind according to certain goals and norms, such as making the mind calmer and less impulsive. [...] How are these two ways of thinking about bare attention—as disinterested disclosure of how the mind truly is versus as shaping it according to a value standard—supposed to be related? They seem to be in tension. To disclose something requires not changing it as you disclose it. To shape the mind is to change it. How can bare attention reveal the mind if it also changes it?" (2020)

In his analysis of the rhetoric surrounding modern Buddhist practices, Thompson observes that contemporary mindfulness communities often portray meditation as a tool for revealing the mind as it truly is. Yet, he contends that attention and mindfulness cannot reveal the mind without simultaneously affecting it. Meditation, in his view, is not a transparent window onto an already-given mental reality but a disciplined practice that enacts particular forms of knowing and being. As he writes, meditation "provides insight into the mind (and body) in the way that body practices like dance, yoga, and martial arts provide insight into the body (and mind)" (Thompson 2020), and to this list we may also add chanting.

Thompson notes that this issue mirrors a long-standing debate within Chán Buddhism over whether awakening is gradual—that is, constructed through practice—or sudden, revealed as ever-present. According to the Mahāyānottaratantra Śāstra, the mind is without beginning or end: unconditioned, unconstructed (asaṃskṛta), and spontaneously present. It can be realized only through reflexive awareness—never as an object of cognition, but through its own self-illumination. Yet, as already emphasized, this should not be taken to imply a dualism that sets the nature of Mind apart from 'ordinary' phenomena. In this regard, the teachings of the influential Chán master Mǎzǔ Dàoyī—an advocate of the sudden view—are particularly instructive. Mǎzǔ rejected the notion that the nature of Mind could be found by seeking some hidden "internal essence". The metaphor of a pure mind concealed beneath conditioned experience, he argued, is mistaken. Rather, it is precisely through the mind’s external functioning that its essence is revealed:

"seeing, listening, sensing, and knowing are inherently your original nature, which is also called original mind. There is no Buddha other than the mind" (Jia 2006, 77).

In this way, Mǎzǔ dismantles any dualism between a pure, unconstructed 'nature of mind' and a saṃsāric, constructed mode of everyday perception. The ordinary, functioning mind is none other than the nature of Mind itself. Not only are they ontologically identical from the standpoint of ultimate truth, but the nature of Mind is revealed precisely through ordinary modes of perception—even through our failed or deluded attempts to reveal it. From this perspective, it makes no difference to 'the nature of hearing' that sounds are intuited through culturally or historically constructed modes of listening.

The view that nature manifests through forms and functions stands in contrast to the attitude prevalent in many contemporary mindfulness communities that Thompson critiques. Adopting Mǎzǔ’s nondual perspective renders the distinction between constructed and unconstructed modes of perception ultimately artificial. The nature of Mind is revealed in its functioning. In this light, whether "hearing hearing" constitutes a revelation of Mind or a constructed mode of listening becomes a secondary question. What matters is the recognition that there is no neutral or transcendental method capable of revealing Mind as something unconstructed, outside the world of dependently arising phenomena. No such unconditioned state exists apart from the dynamic functioning of experience itself.

Taking Mǎzǔ’s perspective seriously means that to disengage hearing from external sounds—and thereby "hear" hearing itself, as described in the Śūraṅgama—need not imply that the nature of Mind is revealed only in moments devoid of phenomenal content or when all modes of listening are suspended. In this respect, Mǎzǔ aligns perfectly with Thompson’s insight that "[m]editation provides insight into the mind (and body) in the way that body practices like dance, yoga, and martial arts provide insight into the body (and mind)" (2020). And because this is so, the converse also holds: chanting provides insight into the nature of Mind analagous to meditation. We do not require absolute silence to 'hear' hearing, nor the (impossible) experience of a pure, unconstructed presence of meaningless flow. We can hear 'hearing' even amid sound—and, more profoundly, even when sound is apprehended through a constructed or conceptually scaffolded musical mode of listening—so long as it is heard nondually, as nothing other than Mind itself.

Grasping dharmas

It follows from Mǎzǔ’s nondual perspective that all modes of listening ultimately conform to the absolute nature (證性 zhèngxìng) and constitute pure functioning (淨用 jìngyòng). Yet, after such affirmations, Buddhist thinkers are often quick to add important qualifications. Dōgen, for example, affirmed that we are never apart from Buddhahood, even in our most deluded moments, but cautioned that if there is even the slightest discrepancy, the Way becomes as distant "as heaven from earth" (Waddell & Abe 2002, 2). Likewise, while Mǎzǔ taught that Buddha Nature manifests through ordinary functions, he nevertheless maintained a distinction between saṃsāra and nirvāṇa. Drawing on the doctrine of the two aspects of the One Mind found in the Dàshéng qǐxìn lùn, Mǎzǔ explained that the difference between the Thusness aspect of Mind and its saṃsāric aspect lies not in essence but in engagement or praxis. When we grasp characteristics and qualities, we relate to reality as saṃsāra. In the same vein, music cannot always be said to function purely: it, too, can fail to actualize Thusness when grasping arises.

‘Grasping dharmas’ can refer to two distinct ways in which we might try to hold on to musical experience. First, it concerns perceiving dharmas as external—that is, through a dualistic framework that separates subject and object. Second, it involves an emotional reaction of liking or disliking what is heard. In other words, cognitive and emotional obscurations (jñeyāvaraṇa and kleśāvaraṇa) veil the Thusness aspect of the mind. As argued above, musical attunement can be seen as already effortlessly nondual; hence, the principal difficulty in musical experience does not lie in cognitive obstructions. In musical attunement, we are already free from thoughts of subject, object, and action, in the sense described by the Uttaratantra as the mark of cognitive obscuration. Rather, the main cause of grasping dharmas arises from emotional attachment—the movement of liking and disliking. It is this affective obscuration that most often explains why musical attunements fall short of being pure functions not just in theory, but in practice.

In practice, however, it is not always easy to distinguish between the two obscurations. A telling illustration can be found in the autobiography of Hānshān Déqīng (憨山德清), who also wrote an important commentary on the Śūraṅgama Sūtra. The episode takes place before his awakening experience, when Hānshān describes struggling with emotional reactions to sounds during meditation:

"At the start of this meditation, when I heard the howling of the storms and the sound of the ice grinding against the mountains, I felt very distrubed. The tumult seemed as great as that of thousands of soldiers and horses in battle." (C.C. Chang 1971, 177)

Seeking guidance from Miàofēng Fúdēng (妙峰福登) on how to proceed in his practice amid these auditory disturbances, Hānshān received a teaching grounded in the Śūraṅgama’s doctrine of Mind-Only. Miàofēng’s response (attributing the words to "the ancient master" 古人) offered a direct instruction on transforming perception:

“Objects (jing 境) are created by the mind rather than coming from outside. The ancient [master] says, ‘If you hear the sound of water for thirty years but do not let it move the faculty of thought (意根), you will realize the perfect understanding of the ear (耳根圓通) of Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara.” (境自心生，非從外來。古人云:三十年聞水聲，不轉意根，當證觀音耳根圓通)" (Zhang Dewei 2016, 336-337).

Miàofēng Fúdēng’s instruction suggests a close link between perceiving things as non-dual and not reacting to them emotionally. The 'diagnosis' for Hānshān’s emotional reactions to sound was that he did not yet perceive them as Mind-Only. He overcame the problem by no longer considering experience as involving 'subject', 'object', and 'action'. In other words, he addressed the cognitive obscuration, and in doing so also resolved the emotional one. The therapeutic effect of perceiving everything as Mind is easy to grasp: when the cause of the sound is not separate from oneself, there is nothing 'external' to be upset by and no conceptualized 'other' that can serve as the focus of one’s emotional reactions. Yet that all emotional reactions would thereby disappear is shown mistaken by the example of listening to music. Not perceiving sounds dualistically is already realized in the nature of musical attunement, but not clinging to their prettiness is not necessarily achieved therein. There are, therefore, good reasons to speak of the two obscurations separately.

For the chanter to truly authenticate the nature of Mind while chanting, the most urgent aspect must therefore be understood as something omitted in Chen’s analysis: not grasping sounds by clinging to their prettiness. In fact, not having emotional reactions to sounds is, I would argue, far more difficult than not hearing them dualistically. As Fúdēng said, it requires thirty years of listening to the sound of water without letting the mind be stirred, in order to realize Avalokiteśvara’s 'perfect understanding of the ear' (耳根圓通). Because of this difficulty, Hānshān’s autobiography emphasizes the crucial role that the temporary annihilation of sound and silence played in his spiritual development:

"I then went to sit on a solitary wooden bridge and meditated there every day. At first, I heard the stream flowing very clearly, but as time passed I could hear the sound only if I willed it. If I stirred my mind, I could hear it, but if I kept my mind still I heard nothing. One day, while sitting on the bridge, I suddenly felt that I had no body. It had vanished, together with the sound around me. Since then I have never been disturbed by any sound." (in CC Chang 1971, 178)

Hānshān’s method, as described here, is to use the control he gains over his mind to will the sound to stop. Through the force of his will, he manages to ignore sounds completely until a state of hearing nothing is achieved. If we read this passage too literally, it would seem to suggest that phenomenal content is, by default, delusive—that awakening occurs only in silence. But this would amount to a form of annihilationism: a view of emptiness as nothingness, akin to Śāriputra’s stance in the Mahāhattipadopama Sutta, where the goal is a state in which no sounds appear (Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi [1995] 2009, 284). From a Chán perspective, however, this interpretation is unorthodox, since the school emphasizes openness to phenomenality within meditation. The method of Chán is one of non-doing, of accepting the coming and going of phenomena rather than actively willing them to cease. As we will see, Hānshān ultimately affirms such openness and the presence of phenomenality in his awakening experience.

Hānshān’s story, however, suggests that silence itself can serve as a skillful means. A more dualistic interpretation of the Śūraṅgama—one that takes disengagement from sound to mean the actual silencing of sound, rather than simply hearing without duality or grasping—can still have value for practitioners who have not yet realized the 'perfect ear-understanding'. Instead of striving to hear the water without emotional reactions, one may instead be nondually attuned to nothing that elicits such reactions in the first place. As Hānshān explains in his commentary on the Śūraṅgama, when hearing remains operative but encounters nothing that can become an object of grasping, "all differentiation will cease, and the Tathāgata store will be exposed" (Śūraṅgama, 98).

The emphasis on silence in Hānshān’s autobiography illustrates, on the one hand, the difficulty of hearing sounds without like or dislike, and, on the other, the soteriological benefits of being nondually attuned to nothing that can become a source of grasping. In aesthetic experience, as thinkers such as Schopenhauer remind us, a certain indifference toward phenomenality is a prerequisite for perceiving beauty at all. Hearing phenomena as music always entails both a state of nonduality and some level of emotional detachment. This parallels Miàofēng Fúdēng’s teaching that cognitive and emotional obscurations are intertwined. Indeed, one might even interpret his instruction as an invitation to 'hear the water as music', since doing so requires both nondual perception and a detached stance toward the sensory flow. Still, among these two obscurations, the emotional tends to be the more persisting. Hearing sounds nondually is a spontaneous and effortless feature of musical attunement, but refraining from liking or rejecting the prettiness of music is far less so. Not all music is free from attachment by default. For this reason, I have elsewhere suggested that working with long silences and poetic qualities such as blandness and plainness may offer a way forward for a Buddhist musical poetics—since these qualities aim precisely at minimizing emotional reactivity to sound. Such practices approach as closely as possible an experience of 'hearing that does not grasp sounds', while still remaining within the domain of sound itself.

Yet, for Hānshān, silence is only an expedient means; awakening itself is not silent. Immediately following the passage above, he describes awakening not as the absence of sound, but as a nondual state in which the myriad sounds arise and vanish freely without eliciting any like or dislike:

"In a flash, the violent mind stood still;

Within, without are both transparent and clear.

After the great somersault

The great Void is broken through.

Oh, how freely come and go

The myriad forms of things!" (C.C. Chang 1971, 178)

Is the music Buddhist?

There is nothing inherently 'Buddhist' about perceiving music non-dually, nor about experiencing it with a concentrated mind—a state that Buddhists would call samādhi—both of which Chen highlighted as distinctive features of monastic chant. These qualities are present by default in ordinary, secular musical attunements and can arise across virtually any type of music. As hinted by Thompson's critique above, imbuing musical experiences with explicitly Buddhist soteriological values can be double-edged: it may help cultivate such experiences, but it can also interfere with engaging them in a genuinely soteriologically effective way.

We can observe both the helpful and distracting roles that conceptual frameworks play when attending concerts. Before listening to a piece and knowing its composer, we mentally prepare ourselves for a particular listening experience. For example, just before a Morton Feldman piece is performed on a mixed program, many audience members adjust their posture, as if readying themselves to enter the 'Feldman experience'. This 'setting-up' is not necessarily a bad thing. It can be a helpful practice that facilitates deeper, more meaningful listening. The way we conduct our attention—through posture, energy, and embodied readiness—is crucial in shaping the experience. It reminds us that listening is not a purely passive activity but an enacted one: music is something we do, not merely something we perceive. As Thompson describes mindfulness practices, listening can be understood as a "skillful know-how for enacting certain situated mind-body states and behaviors" (Thompson et al. 1991/2016, xxv). Tia DeNora similarly emphasizes that "[l]isteners are by no means simply 'affected' by music but are, rather, active in constructing their 'passivity' to music—their ability to be 'moved'" (2003, 92).

Taking a more skeptical stance, one could equally argue that labeling a piece of music as 'Feldman' or 'Buddhist' risks reifying and essentializing the experience: the music is expected to be a certain way before it is even heard. In such cases, the experience becomes predetermined, and we are closed off from engaging with the sounds as they actually are. This phenomenon is evident both in conversations with fellow audience members who greatly value certain composers—the experience is profound before it even begins, and they are therefore closed off from engaging with the sounds as they are—and in Chen’s analysis above, where the simple practice of musical variation in Buddhist chant is ascribed to the 'Buddhist truth' of anitya. The listener already assumes that the music must express Buddhist principles, and consequently hears variation as a teaching on impermanence. A mundane musical fact is transformed into a conceptualized lesson. The problem is that this creates an overly symbolic experience: variation is heard through the lens of anitya rather than as itself. Instead of apprehending the music as what Mipam would call "uncategorized emptiness", we hear it as "categorized emptiness." These are not new concerns; Buddhist practitioners have long recognized the risk that Buddhism itself can become merely another filter or ideology, shaping how we interpret the world rather than serving as a method to deconstruct such conceptual frameworks.

The double-edged role of conceptual frameworks raises complex questions for Buddhist composers and musicians who consider their artistic work as integrated with their practice. Should their musical activities evoke Buddhism as a system and a path—in other words, actively engage with its conceptual framework—or is it better to focus solely on non-conceptual experiences that align with Buddhist soteriology without explicitly invoking it? Is the Buddhist context necessary for musical listening to enable one to 'hear the mind itself,' or can such experiences occur without it? Do we even need Buddhism as a context, or is it possible, like Stephen Batchelor seem to suggest, to achieve something like the 'Buddha's insights' in a post-Buddhist and secular age? And if one concludes that music is best experienced free of any Buddhist framework, we might still ask: what, then, is the point of the meditative experiences that music can facilitate if there is no wider context to make sense of them?

Long before I became engaged in Buddhist practice, I encountered Yoko Ono’s Stone Piece. In this work, the listener is asked simply to attend to the sound of a stone aging. Experiencing literally nothing audible as if it were music—listening with the kind of acoustic empathy that musical engagement requires—was profoundly epiphanic for me. It was a form of hearing disengaged from conventional sound, and this objectless listening revealed something deeply meaningful about mind and world. It disclosed a world without edges and with limitless spaciousness—a world in which distinctions between idea and matter, or between externality and internality, were entirely dissolved. The listening that Stone Piece invited seemed to transcend ordinary musical modes, opening onto a completely unstructured experience in which the forms of things could freely appear and vanish without leaving any traces—in other words, an experience of emptiness.

Early on, I was drawn to art that seemed to invite similar experiences. In the visual field, I found this quality in the works of Agnes Martin and Lee Ufan. Martin herself described her paintings as "about merging, about formlessness […] A world without objects, without interruption" (in Princenthal 2015). The viewer does not need to be committed to any particular institutionalized path of cultivation to perceive this formlessness—this is one of art’s great gifts. There is no need for explicit ideas or concepts; instead, art can directly inspire and benefit the mind-bodies of sentient beings through the attunement it fosters between them and the work itself.

When I later began meditating, I recognized the sound of the aging stone in those experiences as if greeting an old friend. I realized that the listening the Stone Piece cultivates is akin to the kind of attention the Śūraṅgama instructs. This raises a provocative question: had I been practicing the Śūraṅgama meditation all along, without realizing it? And if the answer is yes, what need is there for Buddhism if such meditation is accessible through something as simple as listening to an aging stone?

As Mumon says in his verse to the 30th case of The Gateless Gate, it is silly to search for anything else on a day with a blue sky. Mere attunement to emptiness is enough. To disrupt this state by asking logical questions—such as what comprises the nature of a Buddha—is as foolish as stealing and then declaring oneself innocent (青天白日, 切忌尋覓, 更問如何, 抱贓叫屈). In this vein, some might claim that not being fully content with these early art experiences—and being spurred by Ono’s piece to engage with Buddhism, to ponder further and ask questions about the nature of this attunement—is a mistake. Others would counter that such a claim oversimplifies awakening: occasional encounters with emptiness or nondual states through art are not enough. To move beyond these temporary glimpses—whether listening to the aging stone or experiencing the infinite in Lee Ufan’s sculptures—one must seek guidance from someone who can show the way to full, atemporal awakening. From this perspective, taking refuge in the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha is indispensable.

This very question—whether such experiences can stand alone—has preoccupied Buddhist thinkers for centuries. It echoes a recurring tension within Buddhist thought: the interplay between reliance on scriptures and a profound skepticism toward language as able to point beyond saṃsāra. As has been recognized across traditions, the ultimate can only "be revealed beyond the borders of language" (Harris 1991, 1), and the essence of awakening is "wordless" (Miaohui, trans. Grant 2003, 122). If such is the case, why not dispense with words altogether and focus solely on cultivating direct, non-conceptual experience? In Zen, this skepticism is woven into its very origin story. The Buddha transmits the shōbōgenzō (the "repository of the eye for the truth") to Mahākāśyapa in a wordless, mind-to-mind transmission, bypassing verbal utterances. The scene is of poetic beauty—the mahāmuni initiates the transmission simply by holding up a flower. Such stories have, in certain circles, fostered a suspicion of language and an idealization of ‘pure’ non-linguistic experiences. This emphasis on direct experience was taken up by 20th-century artists influenced by Zen, such as Agnes Martin and John Cage, who arguably treated the art experience itself as sufficient—without needing to be framed, or colonized, by institutionalized religion.

I associate this approach more with ‘Buddhist Modernism’ than with traditional Buddhism—a blend of Buddhist thought and Romantic aesthetic values. Contrast this with Dōgen’s reflections on the flower transmission to Mahākāśyapa: "If Shakyamuni dislikes the verbal and prefers to twirl the flower, he should have saved the twirling for after speaking" (2011, 160). Dōgen underscores the indispensable role of verbal instruction: "Those who have not heard a genuine master's instructions, though they may sit on a meditation seat like a buddha, have not even dreamed of the way things really are" (2011, 160). In other words, while the stones in Ono’s Stone Piece or those in Lee Ufan’s sculptures may intimate the state of liberation in profound ways, they are not sufficient to guide one fully to awakening.

With this statement, we return, in a sense, to the instrumental view of art with which this essay began—that of art as an upāya, a skillful means or pedagogical method. Aśvaghoṣa likened art to bitter medicine mixed with honey. Yet the works of Ono and Lee under discussion differ fundamentally from Aśvaghoṣa’s Saudarananda or the mere "beautification" of Buddhist sermons through chanting pleasantly (好聲 hǎoshēng). Just as musical attunement can spontaneously evoke nondual awareness and subtle insight, encountering Ono’s Stone Piece or Lee Ufan’s sculptures offers a comparable attunement to emptiness and the nature of mind. In his essay Beyond Being and Nothingness: On Sekine Nobuo, Lee describes how Sekine’s 1968 piece Phase—Mother Earth created a situation in which "objects were transmogrified into dharmakāya" (2011, 112). That is, audiences encountering this work experienced phenomena as emptiness—the very body (kāya) of Dharma—and witnessed how "[p]henomena, always unborn, are the Thus-gone-one" (Rangzom Chökyi Zanpo, quoted in Köppl 2008, 99). In this way, visual art, like music, can function to attune the audience to seeing things as they are, providing a taste of the liberating insight into emptiness that arises from such direct perception. Unlike Aśvaghoṣa’s upāya, however, these artistic experiences are not explicitly didactic; they rely on the immediacy of perception rather than on conceptual instruction, yet they can evoke insight in ways that resonate across media.

When reading Lee’s writings, one is struck by how consistently he emphasizes this as the purpose of his art. His aim is to create conditions in which the audience can see things as they are—to generate "ruptures in the ordinary everydayness" (2018, 156) so that perception of emptiness becomes possible. Returning from such encounters with art is akin to returning to saṃsāra after a brief liberation: "[t]ime becomes continuous again" and "[t]he gap is closed and turns into space where the surroundings remain unseen" (2018, 156). I believe Lee would have no objection to describing his sculptures and paintings as the 'honey' that enables these rapturous moments. Far from diminishing the art, calling it upāya instead highlights its supreme accomplishment.

In Lee’s terms, art grants a glimpse of liberation, but only a glimpse. From a Buddhist perspective, such ruptures prepare the ground; they do not yet constitute awakening. Even the most profound art experiences are not enough on their own from a normative Buddhist perspective. To allow moments of emptiness to truly transform us, one must take refuge in the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. This insistence on institutional guidance is both untimely and indispensable: untimely because the insights glimpsed through art may seem complete in themselves to many secular moderns, and indispensable because they alone cannot guarantee full awakening. Remarkably, this tension was already present in the Tang dynasty, as the Buddhist monk, poet, and painter Guànxiū described how 'no one' understood the act of offering poetry to the Buddha:

得句先呈佛 Attaining lines, you first offer them to the Buddha;

無人知此心 No one understands this mindset. (translated in Mazanec 2017, 337)

Art can illuminate and awaken, but it is an invitation, not a replacement for the path. The ephemeral insights it affords are invaluable, yet they function as upāya—a skillful means that prepares and inclines the mind toward liberation. For Buddhist artists such as Guànxiū, engaging with art involves both surrendering to its non-conceptual perception in the moment and acknowledging the necessity of guidance and disciplined practice to translate these glimpses into the enduring realization of awakening.

Intimating Emptiness

Saturday, October 11, 2025

Table of contents.

Monday, October 6, 2025

Violin Works at Yeshin Norbu

Sunday, October 10, 2021

Intimating Emptiness

Tuesday, June 1, 2021

Music and Buddhist Monastics

Report Abuse

Labels