As far as I know, the first artist to articulate a similar idea was the 12th-century Buddhist poet Saigyō. Although he did not write explicitly about musical attunement, his description of aesthetically relishing the beauty of nature was markedly nondual and attunemental. In countless verses, Saigyō explores his unification with the natural beauty of cherry blossoms, famously wishing to die beneath their bloom. For him, effortless attunement to beauty was not merely pleasurable—it was a valuable preparation, even a prerequisite, for liberation.
In one verse describing his experience of awakening (satori), he writes that it was the act of being nondually attuned to beauty—expressed as his mind being "immersed in blossoms"—that led to his realization:
We can replace the phrase "having my mind immersed in blossoms" with "being musically attuned." Being musically attuned, if wisely coupled with the cultivation of qualities such as renunciation and compassion, can similarly lead toward satori. This is reassuring for Buddhist musicians who might share the fear famously voiced by the poet Kamo no Chōmei—that a life spent on artistic pursuits instead of Buddhist practice is a wasted life.
Saigyō was by no means the only one to argue for the soteriological value of art. The Japanese Buddhist tradition as a whole strongly valorizes beauty and art—something that would have been unthinkable to the early Buddhist monastics of the Indian subcontinent, who followed the ban on art and music in the Mahīśāsaka-vinaya. A couple of centuries after Saigyō, Zeami emphasized the importance of nondual attunement and employed Buddhist terminology to describe the adequate nondual mode of perceiving a Nō play. He wrote: "In watching Nō, those who know watch with their minds, while those who don’t know watch with their eyes" (2006, 6). Relishing art, in this sense, is not a matter of being caught up in external objects, but of seeing phenomena as they truly are—recognizing that phenomena (事, or functioning 作用) are fundamentally of the nature of emptiness (principle 理, or nature 性). It is a matter of seeing how phenomena arise as mind—how the nature of mind manifests as function (性在作用). Such realization becomes possible only when dualistic perception is relinquished.
Differences in attunements
The question then arises whether all musical attunements are equally soteriologically efficacious. If their soteriological value lies solely in the fact that they are instances of nondual awareness, then all musical attunements should be equally valuable, since the nondual ground is the same. Such a conclusion, however, does not accord with our lived experience of being musically attuned. For most of us, certain pieces of music have stood out as more soteriologically powerful and more personally meaningful than others. In my own case, for example, I have cherished much of John Cage’s music, yet his Number Pieces have been markedly more successful in turning my mind toward the dharma than his Sonatas and Interludes. The important question, then, is whether it is possible to say why this is so.
On the one hand, we could leave such an inquiry largely untouched by appealing to individual subjectivity and karma: all music is dharmically efficacious, but due to our unique karmic conditionings, some pieces will affect us more profoundly than others. The Buddha taught 84,000 dharma gates to accommodate different inclinations, and different pieces of music simply meet our needs in distinct ways. The theory of upāya emphasizes that people must encounter the dharma "in accord with their mentalities." In the seventh book of the Avataṃsaka Sūtra, we hear Mañjuśrī, empowered by the Buddha, exclaim:
"all the Buddhas in the worlds in the ten directions know that the inclinations of sentient beings are not the same, and so they teach and train them according to their needs and capacities. The extent of this activity is equal to the realm of space of the cosmos." (Cleary, 1993, 272)
On the other hand, my practice as a composer has led me to try to understand—and to put into words—why the Number Pieces were more dharmically efficacious to me than the Sonatas and Interludes. In this search, I am not merely interested in why they were efficacious for me personally; I am not analyzing my private karmic history of habitual patterns to explain the relation between the Number Pieces and myself. While individual karmic conditions shape how music affects us, this does not mean that the dharmic efficacy of a piece is limited to a single listener. Our experiences are always relational, intertwined with the shared field of phenomena, and this interconnection opens the possibility of general patterns in how art moves us.
In my view, we should not simply invoke the theory of upāya as a reason to avoid formulating a general theory of poetics. While the Buddhist tradition, through its theory of upāya, acknowledges individual differences, it also explicitly rejects the notion that we move through the cosmos as entirely separate beings who somehow perceive the world in radically different ways. Our selves are empty of essence and arise relationally with other selves. We are empty mirrors reflecting one another; we exist in everything, and everything exists within us. There is no limit to the interpenetration and co-arising of phenomena. The Buddhist tradition even speaks of karma as 'collective karma.' By engaging the world in comparable ways, we come to recognize and inhabit the notion of a shared world. Precisely because the Number Pieces were dharmically efficacious to me, I can assume that they will also resonate with others. This, in turn, legitimizes the study and construction of poetics.
Vairocana in 9th century Javanese temple Candi Mendut
Soteriological Poetics
In searching for an answer to why the Number Pieces were more efficacious than the Sonatas and Interludes, I believe we should not shy away from closely analyzing compositional techniques and musical parameters. We can study how the usage of these impacts the mode of listening that a listener adopts. This, in essence, is what it means to study soteriological poetics: it is only by becoming intimate with sound that we can become intimate with emptiness.
In the process of analyzing compositional techniques and parameters, we might find ourselves asking questions such as: Is it more dharmically efficacious to play loud or soft sounds? To include long silences or none? To maintain a strict pulse or allow the music to float freely? To use just intonation or an undefined tuning? For the music to be pointillistic or for it to employ sweeping cascades of pitches? Taken as isolated questions, these might seem to imply a naive instrumentalism, in which certain types of sounds are thought to have specific effects.
Yet what makes a piece 'dharmically efficacious' cannot be reduced to such simplistic rules. It is a much more subtle and complex process than employing certain techniques or parameters. In my own listening and compositional practice, however, I have often marveled at the profound effect that even small adjustments to certain parameters can have in turning my mind toward the dharma. I am continually struck by the profound impact of quietness and extended silences, or by how my sense of awareness shifts when a melody is articulated pointillistically rather than performed with a homogeneous timbre.
Mastering these parameters alone, however, can never teach one how to write a dharmically efficacious piece. Achieving this is primarily a tacit process that cannot be reduced to the use of specific playing techniques or stylistic strategies; it is a mistake to assume that emptiness will automatically be intimated by resounding gentle or quiet sounds framed by long silences and empty space. Mere empty space as an isolated parameter has, as Mumon says, nothing to do with Zen (太空猶末合吾宗), but it can play an important role in intimating emptiness.
The result of my investigation into the compositional use of musical parameters has been formulated into a Buddhist poetics that I call Intimating Emptiness. As a Buddhist composer, I want to write music that moves our minds toward the dharma and that attunes us to emptiness. Listening to music cannot be assumed to be the sole factor that brings about true realization—there is a significant distance between art and awakening—but it can intimate this realization and have a decisive impact on the path, just as Saigyō wrote of his attunement to beauty. Music is an upāya, and some pieces function more effectively as upāya than others; some pieces intimate emptiness more closely than others.
Sounds introducing emptiness
In this Buddhist poetics of mine, Yoko Ono’s Stone Piece occupies a central place. This piece intimates very closely the act of resting the mind in its natural state. It does so by asking us to musically attune to what is, in practical terms, almost nothing—the sound of the aging stone. Ono’s instruction, simultaneously poetically evocative and pragmatically precise, provides just enough guidance to enable this attunement.
This wondrous piece, however, is not always accessible to me. I need to have a good day to truly relish its flavorless flavor. On more difficult days, I require something that provides a little more 'help' by introducing flavorful flavors in the form of sounds. Ono’s piece has no such sounds and therefore offers minimal aid in guiding us away from our practical, saṃsāric way of being toward the detached, nondual mode of musical attunement.
As Roman Ingarden has pointed out, there must be something in the art itself—a quality that causes the shift "from the natural attitude with its practical and cognitive interests to the distanced contemplation of the aesthetic attitude" (quoted in Odin 2001, 58). While it is possible for the state of without-thinking (hishiryō) that accompanies musical attunement to arise solely by the will of the subject, or by the minimal poetic introduction in Ono’s piece, it is much more easily accessed when there is something audible that feels like it causes it.
When constructing a body of soteriological poetics, it is precisely these qualities in the art that are of interest. For example, by introducing sounds that are soft, serene, and extremely sparse, the mind can more readily attune to nothing in the long silences between them. In these silences, we approach the same experience as attuning to the aging stone, yet with the addition of a more distinct affective quality. The mood of the piece—emerging from the relationships between sounds, and between sounds and silences—provides an anchor that sustains nondual attunement and prevents discursive thoughts from arising.
In these intervals between breaths, attention shifts into an intransitive mode—attention without an object. In this way, the taste of nondual meditation can be savored even within a dual practice. The dual style of meditation can, in this metaphor, be compared to the mood of a piece of music—it supports mindfulness and helps prevent thoughts from arising, yet it also serves as the springboard for moments of nondual perception.
To say that silences between musical notes are analogous to these 'gaps' is a fine metaphor, yet it falls short in a crucial way: music is already perceived nondually. In ordinary listening, musical sounds and silences alike are experienced in this way because of the nature of musical attunement. The sounds of the music do not stand in the same dual relationship to us as the 'objects' of śamatha do. When Mingyur Rinpoche, in a well-meaning but simplified analysis, suggested that we take the sound of classical music as the object of śamatha, he inadvertently revealed not only a limited understanding of music but also how inadequate and awkward such a way of listening can be. This failed exercise makes clear that the nature of musical attunement is already nondual—and in being nondual, it is inherently soteriological.
The difference between hearing sounds in silences or silences as emptiness
Yoko Ono’s 'silent' Stone Piece is different from John Cage’s more famous silent piece 4'33" in ways that illustrate the contrast between nondual and dual modes of perception. From my perspective, Cage’s piece thematizes the sounds of the environment. In doing so, he draws our attention to these sounds, bringing them into the foreground as distinct sounding Gestalts. He is not, contrary to Seel’s claim, creating a situation where "what otherwise forms the vague background of perception comes to the fore, without however being released of its vagueness," so that "[t]he background of listening is pushed to the foreground as background" (2005, 148). Cage himself described the piece as bringing ambient sounds to the foreground—not as vague background phenomena, but as perceptual objects. Speaking about the premiere performance, he recounted:
"You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out." (in Kostelanetz 2003, 65)
Ono, on the other hand, thematizes the sound of the aging stone, asking us to attune to it nondually. In this nondual mode, the undifferentiated mass of background sounds makes itself present. It is Ono’s piece, rather than Cage’s, that more closely fits Seel’s paradox of background phenomena being pushed to the foreground as background. When attuned to the aging stone, sounds are presencing, nondually, just as they are, in the boundlessness of emptiness.
This contrast between Cage’s 4'33" and Ono’s Stone Piece echoes a distinction Heidegger draws between Japanese Nō theater and cinematic arts (1971). Heidegger critiqued film for not conjuring up emptiness, whereas he praised Nō for doing just that. The difference, he argued, was not a matter of repertoire—film directors were certainly capable of intending emptiness—but lay in the limitations of the medium itself, or more precisely, in the limitations regarding the intentional structures–the phenomenology–that each art form makes possible. As Julian Young explains, for Heidegger, on the Nō stage:
"the play allows 'the Nothing', 'the empty', to presence because emptiness is literally present: the stage is empty. Film, on the other hand, because it cannot avoid providing a denseness of naturalistic detail, cannot allow anything but objects to presence" (2001, 150).
On a screen, Heidegger argued, it is impossible to make emptiness present because the entire field of vision is already taken up by phenomena. On a stage, it becomes easier for the actor to conjure up empty space, although Heidegger does not analyze why. Of course, the field of vision is still filled with phenomena, but there is something about the spatiality—again, Heidegger does not specify what—that makes this impossible on a flat screen. This difference between presenting something on screen or on stage might seem subtle, yet it illustrates the profound effect that subtle changes in parameters can have in terms of dharmic efficacy.
In music, a similar difference can be expressed through the use of ordinary silences—silences that become moments of emptiness—or musical and ambient silences, which can prevent this emptiness from shining forth by either having the sounds within them ignored or turned into musical objects. Ono's piece achieves ordinary silences, while Cage's piece achieves what might be called ambient silences. Although Cage and Ono accomplish this primarily through verbal instructions for listening—the musicians do not actually perform anything—these different kinds of silences can also be elicited with musical sounds. Some sounds naturally invite ordinary silences, while others invite ambient, or more commonly, musical silences.
If we aim to bridge the gap between music and nondual styles of meditation, we must allow 'the empty' to presence when introducing silences. We neither want to thematize the sounds of the silence (i.e., turning ambient sounds into objects, as in ambient silences) nor let the silence serve merely as a vacuum of anticipation for the ‘real music’ to begin (as in musical silences).
The poetics of sounds-inviting-emptiness
That the character of sounds influences how we perceive the silences between them is something every musician knows. The subtler question, then, is: what kinds of sounds afford the experience of silence-as-emptiness? A key factor seems to be allowing the surrounding musical sounds to take on some of the qualities of silence-as-emptiness, and not imposing too much energy onto the silence itself. By avoiding the ‘charging’ of silence with energy, it can be heard as ordinary silence rather than musical silence. This can be done by minimizing rhythmic energy, affective energy, and dramatic energy. In practice, this might mean working with a natural flow rather than strict rhythmic time, cultivating a bland (淡) affect rather than heightened emotions, and using quiet, thin textures.
When the affective quality of the music is kept as bland as possible, the nondual experiences arising in the silences come closer to the sound of the aging stone. If the goal is maximum emptiness, then the mood that perfumes the silences should be as flavorless as possible. Writing bland music can invite the listener to sustain nondual listening even when the affective content is extraordinarily weak or seemingly 'insipid'—a skill also cultivated in meditation, and ultimately crucial for clearly recognizing the nature of mind.
If, instead of using calm and insipid sounds, we use dramatic gestures that build up strong anticipation and intensity in the silences, the result is not silence-as-emptiness, or ordinary silence, but silence-as-anticipation-for-sound, or musical silence. Such music moves further away from treating silence as a place for dwelling in emptiness. Yet dramatic silences can still intimate emptiness in other ways; silence is far from the only path by which music gestures toward emptiness. For Heidegger, emptiness was revealed not only in the nothingness of a theater stage but also in the dense colors of Van Gogh. Emptiness should never be thought of as something merely silent. It resounds in the fullness of forms and is inseparable from phenomena. A dharmically efficacious glimpse of the mind’s spontaneous līlā (free play) and the emptiness of sounds can also be achieved through forms that are loud, dense, and overwhelming.
Music as upāya rather than mārga
The important thing is that we search for the effectivities in the music itself, not only in the artist or perceiver, when determining what makes any piece of music dharmically efficacious. In this sense, one could say that I am more interested in art as upāya than as a mārga (dō or michi in Japanese). Of course, it is not completely possible to separate these completely; the artist who creates art as upāya surely has that upāya work on herself. The act of artistic creation therefore necessarily becomes a mārga.
Nonetheless, traditional approaches to Buddhist art tend to explain the value of art almost entirely through the mārga framework. It is therefore worth engaging this view to some extent. In particular, there are two primary ways of explaining dharmic art that focus on art as mārga, which are especially interesting to mention here.
The first approach is the idea that any art pursued with single-minded devotion–a dedication so complete that the artist forsakes worldly gains, fame, or success—can itself be considered dharmic. In medieval Japan, this ideal was expressed in the pursuit of suki (数寄): a devotion to creating art so pure that it "creates the state of purity and detachment upon which Buddhist salvation is dependent" (Pandey 1998, 7). For the artist-renunciants who followed this path, the act of creation became a letting go of worldly attachments, "the first step toward escaping from the cycle of births and deaths and entering nirvana" (Pandey 1998, 133).
In his Hosshinshū, Kamo no Chōmei tells of the flute and shō player Eishū, who was said to be so absorbed in his music that he did not even notice the imperial messenger calling him to court. As Rajyashree Pandey observes, for Chōmei, Eishū "achieves more than a mastery of his art [...] [he] becomes an example of a sukimono [数寄物] who ends up following the Buddhist path even if he does so unwittingly" (1998, 127).
I will not address the various ways one might question Chōmei’s assumption that merely giving up worldly concerns for the pursuit of anything guarantees a place on the path to awakening. Michael F. Marra has wryly noted that, if this were the case, even the contemporary Japanese "reclusive youths of otaku" (2010, 196) would count as sukimonos. My main reason for setting this view aside, however, is that it tells us nothing about the character of Eishū’s art itself. In fact, his music could have sounded like anything.
The second notion that I am not pursuing is the notion that art that is dedicated by the artist to the triple jewels automatically becomes 'dharmic'. Such a notion is expressed in various traditional sources. There is the statement by poets such as Senshi that writing poetic verse can be a service to the Buddha (Miller, 2013, 149)—a sentiment shared by Guànxiū in his insistence upon always offering one's verses to the Buddha (得句先呈佛, Mazanec 2017, 337). In his Hosshinshū, Chōmei tells the story of a biwa player who dedicated his merit of playing music to advancing on the path:
The second notion I will not pursue is that art automatically becomes dharmic when it is dedicated by the artist to the Triple Jewel. This idea appears in a range of traditional sources. Poets such as Senshi, for instance, claimed that writing verse could be a service to the Buddha (Miller 2013, 149)—a sentiment echoed by Guànxiū, who insisted on always offering his poems to the Buddha (得句先呈佛; Mazanec 2017, 337). Within this same spirit of dedicating artistic practice, Chōmei tells in his Hosshinshū of a biwa player who dedicated the merit of his music to advancing on the Buddhist path.
"Daini so Sukemichi, an extremely talented biwa player, would have nothing to do with customary religious observances. Every day he would go into the Buddhist prayer hall and play melodies on his biwa. He would have someone count his recitals and have them transferred to his accumulated merit for the attinment of rebirth in the pure land (gokuraku ni ekō shikeru)" (Pandey 1998, 133)
This idea finds further support in the Lotus Sūtra, which proclaims that “the Buddha way” can be fulfilled even with “just a tiny sound” offered in devotion:
Or if they have others perform music,
By beating drums or blowing horns or conch shells,
Or by playing pipes, flutes, lutes, harps,
Mandolins, cymbals, or gongs,
Producing fine sounds are presenting them as offerings;
Or if they joyfully praise
The Buddha's virtues in song,
Even with just a tiny sound,
They have fulfilled the Buddha way (Reeves, 2008, 94)
Even if the benefits described in the Hosshinshū and the Lotus Sūtra may strike us as unrealistic, approaching one’s art with this attitude can still be profoundly meaningful. In my own practice, regarding each piece as an offering has long served as a guiding principle, a way of integrating my Buddhist and musical life. Perhaps because I had reflected on this so deeply, I once had what can best be described as a 'visitation' from Vairocana. In a vivid dream, I found myself kneeling before Vairocana, holding above my head all the pieces I had ever written, gathered together as a collection of scores, and offering them in their entirety. I felt tears streaming down my face as I wholeheartedly gave away everything I had composed, while Vairocana assured me that all my future work, too, would be dedicated to the awakening of others. In that moment, a great relief arose, as though every trace of personal attachment to my compositions had been lifted. After this dream vision, I began symbolizing my music in the eight offering bowls on my altar—placing a miniature score of a piece in the bowl where a conch shell would traditionally stand, representing the deep sound of the Dharma.
I mention this to attest that dedicating one’s musical activities to awakening can be deeply meaningful for the individual practitioner. Even making Buddhism the explicit subject of art—for instance, by setting Buddhist texts to music, or by, as the Lotus Sūtra suggests, "joyfully praising the Buddha’s virtues in song"—can be powerful. I recall, for example, the composition of my piece Tak ada yang dicapai, in which I set the Heart Sūtra to music, as a particularly rewarding experience, especially the process of composing my own melody for the mantra.
Yet if we are to formulate a Buddhist musical poetics, it is insufficient to locate the 'Buddhist' dimension of music in the single-minded devotion of a sukimono, in the dedication of artistic merit toward awakening, or even in the use of Buddhist texts. The problem is that none of these approaches says anything about how the music itself sounds. By these measures, virtually any kind of music could qualify as 'Buddhist music,' provided the right attitude or dedication were attached to it.
The purpose of constructing a Buddhist poetics is to ask what it is in certain pieces that makes them soteriological—even for audiences who may lack conceptual knowledge of the music or cannot understand the words. We must attend to the sounds themselves and ask what we actually hear. Such a poetics is not about ranking parameters or offering a recipe for 'Buddhist music,' but about articulating a positive religious ideal through which we can discuss the dharmic efficacy of music. The crucial question is not whether a piece is beautiful or ugly, but how it intimates emptiness and turns the mind toward the Dharma. For those of us who are serious about being both Buddhists and musicians, this is the question we should never lose sight of.
