We can replace the phrase "having my mind immersed in blossoms" in this verse with "being musically attuned". Being musically attuned is what might lead to satori if wisely coupled with the cultivation of qualities such as renunciation and compassion. This is wonderful news for all Buddhist musicians who might share the fear famously voiced by the poet Kamo no Chōmei that we have wasted our precious life on artistic pursuits instead of committing fully to Buddhist practice.
Saigyō was by far not the only one to argue for the soteriological value of art, and indeed the Japanese Buddhist tradition provides us with a great valorization of beauty and art that would be unthinkable to the early monastics following the ban on art and music in the Mahīśāsaka-vinaya. Zeami would a couple of hundred years later than Saigyō stress the importance of nondual attunement and he used Buddhist terminology to describe the adequate nondual mode of seeing a Nō play. He wrote that: "in watching Nō, those who know watch with their minds, while those who don't know watch with their eyes" (2006, 6). Relishing art is not about being caught up in objects as external, but rather seeing phenomena for what they truly are–seeing that phenomena (事, or functioning 作用) are fundamentally of the nature of emptiness (or principle 理, or nature 性) (Zeami, 2013, 6). It is about seeing how phenomena arise as mind–how the nature of mind manifests as function (性在作用). This can only be realized when dualistic perception is given up.
The question then arises whether all musical attunements are equally soteriologically efficacious. If it is merely the fact that they are instances of nondual awareness that makes them soteriological, then all musical attunements should be equally soteriological since this mere nondual ground is the same. Such a conclusion does not, however, fit with our experiences of being musically attuned. I believe that for most of us, certain pieces of music have stood out in our lives as more soteriologically valuable and more meaningful than others. In my own life, to give an example, I have cherished most music by John Cage, but his Number Pieces continue to be markedly more successful in turning my mind towards the dharma than the same composer's Sonatas and Interludes. The important question to answer is whether is it possible to say why that is.
On the one hand, we could leave such an inquiry untouched by evoking the idea of individual subjectivity and karma: all music is dharmically efficacious, but due to our individual karmic conditionings, some music will be more dharmically efficacious to us than others. The Buddha taught 84.000 dharma gates to accommodate our different inclinations. Different pieces of music simply address our different needs in different ways. The theory of upāya emphasizes clearly that people need to encounter the dharma "in accord with their mentalities". In the seventh book of the Avataṃsaka Sūtra, we hear Manjuśri, empowered by the Buddha, exclaim that
“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, to express in words, exactly why the Number Pieces were more dharmically efficacious to me than the Sonatas and Interludes. It is my opinion that we should not simply evoke the theory of upāya as part of an argument to not formulate a general theory of poetics. While the Buddhist tradition with its theory of upāya recognizes our individual differences, it explicitly argues against the view that we walk around in this cosmos as separate beings that somehow 'perceive' the world in radically different ways. Our selves are empty of essences and arise relationally with other selves. We are empty mirrors that are being mirrored by other empty mirrors; we exist in everything and everything exists within us. There is no limit to the interpenetration and co-arising of phenomena. The Buddhist tradition speaks of karma as 'collective karma'. By engaging the world in comparable ways we come to accept and assume the notion of a shared world. Precisely because the Number Pieces were dharmically efficacious to me, I can assume that they also will be so to some others. This legitimizes the study of and construction of poetics.
Figure 1. Vairocana in 9th century Javanese temple Candi Mendut
In searching for an answer to the question as to why the Number Pieces were more efficacious than the Sonatas and Interludes, it is my opinion that we should not be afraid to closely analyze compositional techniques and musical parameters. We should study how the usage of these impacts the mode of listening that the listener adapts when listening to the music. This is what it means to study soteriological poetics. It is only by being 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? Is it more efficacious to have long silences or none? For the music to be in pulse or freely floating? For the music to be in just intonation or undefined intonation? For the music to be pointillistic or for it to employ sweeping cascades of pitches? Put as single questions like this, these questions might be interpreted to imply an unrealistic and naive instrumentalism in which certain types of sounds are said to have certain effects. We might interject by saying that what makes a piece 'dharmically efficacious' can not be singled down to having to do with such a simplistic employment of certain techniques or parameters. It is a much more subtle, and complex process. In my own listening and compositional practice, however, I have often marveled at the great effect that the simple adjustment of certain parameters can have in turning my mind toward the dharma. I am continually amazed by the marvelous effects that quietness and lengthy silences have, or to what extent my sense of awareness changes when a melody is given a pointillistic articulation instead of performed with a homogenous timbre. Mastering these parameters alone, however, can never teach one how to write a dharmically efficacious piece. How we do this is primarily a tacit process that cannot be simplified as the employment of certain playing techniques or stylistic strategies; it is mistaken to assume that emptiness will be intimated by resounding gentle and quiet sounds surrounded by long silences and a blue sky. We must first know how to attune ourselves to the empty sky.
The result of my investigation into the compositional usage of musical parameters has been formulated into a Buddhist poetics that I have called 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 can not 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 better as upāya than others; some pieces will intimate emptiness more closely than others.
In this Buddhist poetics of mine, Yoko Ono’s Stone Piece is placed at the very apex. This piece intimates extremely closely the act of resting the mind in its natural state. It does this by asking us to musically attune to what is practically nothing—the sound of the aging stone. Ono's poetically evocative, yet very practical instruction, gives us just enough input to do this successfully. This wondrous piece is, however, not always accessible to me. I need to have a good day to truly relish its flavorless flavor. On worse days, I need something that gives me a little bit more 'help' by introducing flavorful flavors in the form of sounds. Ono's piece does not have any sounds and does therefore not provide much sounding aid that takes us away from our practical saṃsāric way of being by replacing it with the detached, nondual mode of musical attunement. As Roman Ingarden has pointed out, there has to be something about the art, a quality in the art, 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 come about solely by the will of the subject, or by the minimal poetic introduction given by Ono's piece, it is much easier accessed if 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 we are interested in. If we, for example, introduce sounds that are soft, serene, and extremely sparse, the mind can easily attune to nothing in the long silences between the sounds. In these silences, we are very close to the same experience as being musically attuned to the aging stone but added is a more distinct affective quality. The mood of the piece, which emerges from the internal relationships between the sounds and between the sounds and silences, will provide the anchor that keeps us in nondual attunement and will prevent thoughts from arising.
This way of thinking, that musical sounds exist in order to allow us to hear the silences as emptiness, can be thought of as analogous to the very common way of introducing nonduality from within a breath-śamatha context (a dual style of mediation where the meditator has as the breath as the object of śamatha); by paying extra 'attention' to the space and gap between the breaths, the meditator can experience pure, nondual spaciousness within a śamatha framework. In these gaps between the breaths, the meditator is paying attention intransitively; attention without an object to pay attention to. In this way, the taste of nondual meditation can be relished even within the framework of a dual style of meditation. The dual style of meditation is, in this metaphor, like the mood of a piece of music; it is what helps us to stay mindful and is what prevents thoughts from arising. To say that silences between musical notes are analogous to these 'gaps' is a fine metaphor, but it is deficient in a very crucial way: music is already perceived nondually. Musical sounds and silences alike are perceived nondually because of the nature of musical attunement. The sounds of the music do not have the same dual relationship to us as the 'objects' of śamatha have. When Mingyur Rinpoche in a most populistic effort suggested that we take the sound of Classical music as the object of śamatha, Rinpoche inadvertently revealed not only a lack of insight into music but also how this is a most inadequate and awkward way of listening to music. This failed exercise clearly reveals that the nature of musical attunement, because of its nonduality, already is soteriological.
Yoko Ono's "silent" Stone Piece is different from John Cage's more famous silent piece 4'33" in profound ways that illustrates the difference between nondual and dual modes of perception. The way I see it, Cage's piece thematizes the sounds of the environment. As such, Cage draws our focus to the sounds therein and brings them to the foreground focus as sounding Gestalts. He is not, pace Seel, 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 clearly talked about this piece as being a piece that brought ambient sounds to the foreground but not as vague background phenomena. Speaking about the premiere performance, Cage described how
"[y]ou 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. It asks us to attune ourselves to it nondually, and the undifferentiated mass of background sounds make themselves present in this nonduality. It is Ono's piece, rather than Cage's music, that closer fits Seel's paradox of background phenomena being pushed to the foreground as background. When being attuned to the aging stone, sounds are presencing as they are, nondually, in the boundlessness of emptiness.
Heidegger's praise of Japanese Nō theater and simultaneous critique of the cinematic arts (1971) emphasizes a similarly simple phenomenological distinction regarding the intentional structures involved in different art experiences. Julian Young writes that for Heidegger, on the Nō theater 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 somehow already taken up by phenomena. On a stage, it becomes easier for the actor to conjure up empty space. Of course, the field of vision is also in that case filled up with phenomena, but there is something about the spatiality–Heidegger does not specify what–that makes this impossible on a flat screen. This difference between presenting something on screen or stage might seem subtle, but I believe that it is an example that illustrates the profound difference–in terms of dharmic efficacy–that subtle changes in parameters can have. In music, the same kind of difference can be expressed by the use of either ordinary silences–silences that become moments of emptiness–or musical and ambient silences–silences that prevent this emptiness to shine forth by either having the sounds present therein being ignored or turned into 'musical objects'. When introducing silences in our music, we have to allow 'the empty' to presence. We neither want to thematize the sounds of the silence (i.e., turning the ambient sounds 'into objects') nor have the silence just be a vacuum of anticipation for the 'real music' to go on.
Composers and musicians bring about different experiences of silence by using certain sounds and compositional techniques. That the character of the sounds will shape how we perceive the silence between them is known to all musicians. The question then becomes what kinds of sounds afford the experience of silence-as-emptiness. As mentioned above, a key factor seems to be to let the surrounding musical sounds take on some of the qualities of this silence-as-emptiness and not impose too much energy onto the silence. By avoiding 'charging' the silence with energy, the silence is heard as 'ordinary silence' rather than 'musical silence'. We can do this by minimizing rhythmic energy, affective energy, and dramatic energy. This might mean working with a natural flow rather than rhythmic time, working with a bland (淡) affect rather than heightened emotions, and working with quiet, thin textures. Having the affective quality of the music be as bland as possible means that our non-dual experiences in the silences come as close as possible to the sound of the aging stone. If we are reaching for maximum emptiness, the 'mood' that perfumes the silences should be as flavorless as possible. Writing 'bland' music can invite the listener to extend her nondual listening even when the affect from the music is extraordinarily weak and 'insipid'—a skill that also is needed in the practice of meditation and ultimately to clearly recognize the nature of mind.
If instead of using such sounds, we use dramatic gestures that build up strong anticipation and intensity in the silences, we will have a silence-as-anticipation-for-sound instead of silence-as-emptiness. Such a piece of music has moved even further away from using the silences as places for dwelling in emptiness. But a piece with dramatic silences might intimate emptiness in other ways; listening to emptiness in silence is far from the only way to intimate emptiness in music. For Heidegger, emptiness was not only revealed in the nothingness on a theater stage but also in the dense colors of Van Gogh. Emptiness is never to be thought of as something silent. It is audible as the fullness of forms and does not exist separate from form. A heightened focus on the present moment that leads to a dharmically efficacious revelation of the mind’s spontaneous 'free play' (līla) and the emptiness of sounds can be achieved in forms that are extremely loud and dense.
The important thing is that we search for the effectivities in the music, 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 a 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 michi. When studying the traditional approaches to Buddhist art, there are primarily two traditional ways of explaining dharmic art that I am here not pursuing because they focus primarily on art as a mārga.
The first one is the notion that all art that is done single-mindedly and with such dedication that the artist forsakes all worldly gains and thoughts of fame or success are automatically 'dharmic'. In medieval Japan, this ideal was known as the pursuit of suki (数寄)—the single-minded devotion to art that "creates the state of purity and detachment upon which Buddhist salvation is dependent" (Pandey, 1998, 7). For the 'artist-renunciants' that followed this path, the act of creating art meant giving up attachments to the world and was therefore "the first step toward escaping from the cycle of births and deaths and entering nirvana" (Pandey, 1998, 133). In his Hosshinshū, Kamo no Chōmei describes the flute and shō player Eishū as being on the path of becoming awakened because he was so absorbed in his playing that he did not notice the imperial messenger calling him to court. Rajyashree Pandey observes that 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 am not going to address the multiple ways of questioning Chōmei's seeming assumption that simply giving up worldly concerns for the pursuit of anything will be on the path to awakening. Michael F. Marra has amusingly shown that if that were so, then the contemporary Japanese "reclusive youths of otaku" (2010, 196) would also be sukimonos. The main reason I am not pursuing this is instead that it does not say anything about what kind of art Eishū created. In fact, Eishū's art could sound 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 by Senshi in her statement that writing poetic verse can be a service to the Buddha (Miller, 2013, 149) and in this beautiful couplet by Guànxiū (Translated in Mazanec 2017, 337):
得句先呈佛 Attaining lines, you first offer them to the Buddha;
無人知此心 No one understands this mindset.
It is also the notion in another story told by Chōmei in the Hosshinshū, as retold by Pandey:
"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)" (1998, 133)
Lastly, it can also find a scriptural basis in the Lotus Sutra:
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)
This way of "producing fine sounds" and "presenting them as offerings" is not without importance for the practitioner. I myself can recall the personal importance of this that started with a visitation in a dream from Vairocana. I was kneeling before Vairocana and above my head holding all the pieces I had ever written, as a collection of scores, and offered them to Vairocana. In the dream, I felt how tears were streaming from my eyes when I wholeheartedly gave away everything that I had written, and Vairocana was assuring me that everything that I would write in the future too would be dedicated to the awakening of others. A great relief arose and it felt as if every kind of personal attachment to my pieces was at this moment removed. Ever since waking up from that dream, everything has been feeling lighter.
After this vision, I started to more literally and symbolically blend my Buddhist and artistic practices. For one, I started representing my music in the eight offering bowl (where traditionally a conch shell is placed that represents the deep sound of the Dharma) on my altar by having a miniature score of a piece placed in it (Figure 2). Secondly, I wrote my own melody to the mantra of the Heart Sūtra (Figure 3) and I started chanting this when doing offerings at the altar. I later wrote a composition, Tak ada yang dicapai–in which I used this mantra and other parts from the sūtra– that I dedicated to Avalokiteśvara.
I mention this to attest that as a Buddhist practitioner, dedicating all of one's action towards awakening for the welfare of others is profound, but if we are to formulate a Buddhist musical poetics, it is facile to search for the 'Buddhist' aspect of music in either the single-minded devotion of a sukimono or in the dedication of the art towards awakening. The reason is that none of these aspects tells us anything about how the music actually sounds. In fact, any kind of music could qualify. The purpose of constructing Buddhist poetics is to discuss what it is about certain pieces that make them soteriological even for the audience that may lack any conceptual information about the music. We have to dare to listen to the sounds themselves and question what we actually hear. The purpose of Buddhist poetics is not to rank different parameters on a list, or to create a kind of recipe for Buddhist music, but to provide a positive religious ideal in relation to which we can discuss the Dharmic efficaciousness of music. Instead of asking whether a piece is beautiful or ugly, we instead ask, how does it intimate emptiness and turn our minds toward the dharma? If we are serious about being Buddhists and musicians, this is the topic we should always be keeping in mind.
