When we hear silences in music as emptiness, we are just sitting (shikantaza 只管打坐). In just sitting, the mind rests on its own accord in nonduality. The silences of music, when perceived as emptiness, are not opposed to the 'musical sounds' in a dualist manner as 'non-Music'—unimportant or irrelevant to the experience. Nor do the sounds presencing therein become 'part' of the music. Rather, ambient sounds are allowed to exist, to presence, as a primordially undifferentiated mass of indeterminate phenomena perceived with true equanimity (upekṣā). From this infinite mass, nothing is chosen as the object of perception and, equally important, nothing is rejected from the perceptual experience. It is nothing because it is undifferentiated and not turned into objects by the discriminating consciousness; yet it is something because it is fully present as lived experience–not ignored by consciousness or bracketed away as 'silence' or 'noise'. Things appear as they are, what Dōgen called genjōkōan, in a mode of "without-thinking" (hishiryō, 非思量), or, as Sū Shì put it: "Although my mind does not rise [to meet phenomena], there is nothing it does not connect with" (Grant 1994, 88).
To hear emptiness in this way is to enter the meditative state of vipaśyanā: thought-free wakefulness. It is a clear seeing of Mind’s own nature, a spontaneous shining forth of Buddha Nature itself. This state lies beyond modes of listening as well as styles of meditation. When music succeeds in leading us there, it may be said to have gone beyond itself—it transcends music. This most often (though not only) unfolds in rests, when no pleasing sound arises to stir emotion. In these pauses we remain musically attuned, but our attunement has no object: it is a nondual openness, free of grasping.
The processes described above involve a reconfiguration of the usual background–foreground dichotomy that structures most art experiences. Many aestheticians from different traditions, including non-Buddhist ones, have described heightened aesthetic experience as enabling a new way of relating to background and foreground phenomena. Readers will, for instance, recognize this explanatory metaphor at the heart of Heidegger’s aesthetics. Iain Thomson’s (2011) interpretation of Heidegger is especially illuminating in this regard: what Heidegger discerned in the background layer of a painting by Van Gogh, Thomson explains, is a process in which "what initially seems like ‘nothing’ in the background of Van Gogh’s painting continues to tantalizingly offer itself to our understanding while also receding from our attempts to order what it offers us into any firm, settled meaning" (89). On this reading, the background in Van Gogh’s painting is perceived as an indeterminate presence—neither fully in the background nor in the foreground, neither turned into an object of perception nor relegated to a mere non-object. According to Thomson, encountering a painting by Van Gogh is ideally to experience how the emerging and withdrawing of indeterminate shapes and figures in the background brings to awareness the usually unnoticed interplay between foreground and background.
When Heidegger encounters Van Gogh’s painting, the process through which foreground figures emerge out of an indeterminate background of "nothing", and the way a background co-arises in relation to a foreground—in other words, the dependent arising of background and foreground—is brought to the center of perception. By drawing attention to this process, the painting does more than display an "optical" effect: it reveals something fundamental about perception and meaning-making. It offers, as Thomson (2011, 93) writes, "a glimpse of the underlying structure hidden within all art", showing that "our intelligible worlds are shaped by what we take from and make of a dynamic phenomenological abundance that we can never fully grasp or finally master". This is the phenomenological strife that stands at the heart of Heidegger’s aesthetics: the moment when the perceiver becomes aware of the usually unnoticed act of carving objects from the background indeterminacy that underlies all perception.
In Thomson’s reading of Heidegger, foreground and background possess the capacity, within aesthetic experience, to merge in an epiphanic, nondual awareness in which the world presences as an undifferentiated field of phenomena—the very ground from which objects arise. This is a dynamic process through which the background can, in a sense, become the foreground but as background—as indeterminate. Such a "background-as-foreground" no longer stands in dualistic relation to what it once framed; it marks instead the point at which all distinctions between foreground and background dissolve. This undifferentiated field is vividly present even as it continually recedes from our efforts to impose order upon it. In this, it returns us "directly to the primordial level of engaged existence in which subject and object have not yet been differentiated" (Thomson 2011, 97).
To the extent that the aesthetic experience Thomson describes no longer involves any determinate foreground object, it parallels my interpretation of d’Angiolini’s notion of listening with a "happy indifference". Both point toward an attunement in which the dualities of foreground and background, subject and object, fall away. It is an equanimous openness to the primordial field of indeterminacy—or emptiness—from which all phenomena arise.
Some may think this reads too much into a painting of a pair of boots—or into a piece of music. To assume that most museum visitors encountering Van Gogh’s painting would experience such phenomenological ‘strife’ may seem wishful, just as it may be optimistic to imagine that most listeners will attune to the "happy indifference" of d’Angiolini’s music. Yet for those sensitive to perception itself, these subtle relations between foreground and background offer genuine possibilities for profound insight.
Emptiness in the art of Lee Ufan
A contemporary artist deeply inspired by Heidegger’s aesthetics is Lee Ufan, whose compositions are marked by the careful placement of painted and sculptural elements that intimate the empty space of indeterminate phenomena surrounding them. Lee sometimes refers to this as the practice of "marking infinity", describing how establishing a relation between the made and the unmade "will lead to the opening up of a poetic, critical, and transcendent space" (Lee 2018, 50). The activated space around his work—whether the white expanse framing the brushstrokes of his paintings or the open air encircling his sculptures—is referred to by Lee, at different times, as both "reality" (2018, 50) and "infinity" (2018, 268). His use of these seemingly paradoxical terms suggests a perception of emptiness as simultaneously present and void—as something and as nothing, as empty and cognizant.
Lee writes that he depends on "the power of empty space to evoke a sense of infinity in the work" (2018, 56), yet he emphasizes that perceiving this 'empty space' as 'reality' does not arise simply by leaving space vacant. On the one hand, a certain untouchedness is required for emptiness to presence. On the other hand, it must be untouched in a certain way. Merely leaving parts of a painting blank is not enough, for such vacant space "is lacking in reality" (2018, 50). Vacant space that is "lacking in reality" is a nihilistic nothingness that allows no place for presence. It is like the musical silence in which one merely waits for the 'music' to resume—where the ambient sounds coexisting with that silence are ignored, excluded from the world of musical attunement. They too are "lacking in reality".
Further describing how an artist achieves an emptiness that possesses the fullness of 'reality', Lee turns to a musical metaphor: the artist must activate the surrounding space in the same way that a musician strikes a drum and "the sound reverberates into empty space" (2018, 50). When sound reverberates into emptiness, the habitual dichotomy between 'silence' as merely in the background and 'sound' as something in the forground dissolves. And when that reverberation fades, what resounds in its place is not absence but an activated, vital emptiness. Dōgen evokes this same kind of resonant emptiness when he writes:
"The sound that issues from the striking of emptiness is an endless and wondrous voice that resounds before and after the fall of the hammer." (in Wadell & Abe 2002, 14)
That both Lee and Dōgen employ musical metaphors to describe the experience of a vibrant emptiness—an emptiness not lacking in reality—is no coincidence. Being musically attuned is itself a nondual mode of experience, and when this nonduality encounters nothing that becomes the source of grasping, we are just sitting (shikantaza), as phenomena appear as emptiness.
Visual art, in the same way, can be concerned with the activation of the empty space surrounding it—making that space present as a boundless nothingness in which, as Odin (2001) describes it, "emptiness is fullness and fullness is emptiness" (184). As in music, it is often within the untouched areas that this emptiness vibrates most vividly: what the artist creates—such as brushstrokes—is not subsumed into emptiness but stands as a mediator of its reality. Under certain conditions, however, even the touched areas may appear as emptiness, and a nonduality between brushstroke and space can be actualized. Writing about the work of his fellow Mono-ha artist Sekine Nobuo, Lee explains that the materials of Sekine’s art are transmogrified into dharmakāya (2011, 112)—they are transformed into emptiness.
In Lee's writings, the transcendent and poetic moments in which the unmade emptiness is vividly mediated by the artist-made structures—or, put slightly differently, the moments in which a nonduality between foreground phenomena and indeterminate emptiness is realized—are usually described as brief, like "momentary flashes of light" (2018, 62). In these flashes, or "ruptures in the ordinary everydayness" (2018, 155), the conventional experience of time is suspended—something Dōgen gestures toward in the passage above when he writes that the 'voice' of emptiness is endless and resounds both before and after its striking. When we return from these momentary illuminations, "[t]ime becomes continuous again" and "[t]he gap is closed and turns into space where the surroundings remain unseen" (Lee 2018, 155). Returning to 'everdayness' after such a respite is like returning to saṃsāra from nirvāṇa.
Emptiness as presence
The vision of emptiness that emerges in the works of Heidegger and Lee Ufan is not confined to modernity. Long before these philosophical and artistic articulations, poets and painters across cultures intuited that art could disclose emptiness as presence—as the subtle field in which all appearances arise and dissolve. This insight, though expressed in different idioms, recurs throughout the history of aesthetics. A striking early example is found in a famous verse by Fujiwara no Teika, which evokes a similar dynamic tension between the objects of perception and the boundless, indeterminate field that holds them:
Gaze out far enough 見渡せば
beyond all cherry blossoms 花も紅葉も
and scarlet maples, なかりけり
to those huts by the harbor 浦の苫屋の
fading the autumn dusk 秋の夕暮れ (trans. LaFleur 1983, 101)
Through this verse, the reader’s gaze is guided on a quiet journey through conventional images of beauty—the blossoms and maple leaves—toward what lies farther away and is more difficult to discern. By the poem’s end, the gaze rests on nothing at all: the images fade from the horizon and are absorbed into the encroaching dusk. What remains is the act of gazing itself. In this state of seeing without object, there arises—as Odin (2001) observes—a sense of presence "in the expanded horizon of openness located in the background field of boundless nothingness where emptiness is fullness and fullness is emptiness" (183–84). By leading the reader through the landscape and ultimately beyond it, the poem opens the experience of pure, objectless vision: a seeing that is not directed at anything, but simply sees. What is present at the end of this verse is thus a field of indeterminacy, where emptiness is present, and what is present is emptiness.
In this way, Teika’s poem serves a function similar to the pith instructions that the awakened master Tilopa gave to his disciple Nāropā in the Ganges Mahāmudrā:
For example, it is like looking in the middle of the sky and not seeing anything. In the same way when your mind looks at your mind, thoughts stop and you attain unsurpassable awakening. (in Thrangu Rinpoche 2002, 51)
In these instructions, looking at empty space is likened to resting one’s awareness in nondual meditative equipoise. What arises in such moments of nondual awareness is what Thomson (2011, 93) calls a "dynamic phenomenological abundance that we can never fully grasp", and what Odin (2001) describes as a "boundless nothingness where emptiness is fullness and fullness is emptiness" (184). This same state is what we find ourselves dwelling in at the end of Teika’s verse. The poem leads our gaze progressively away from looking at things until it attunes us directly to empty space—a space that is not a vacuum or a nihilistic nothingness, but a boundless and vibrant openness. We are not intentionally looking at nothing, in the sense of deliberately turning our gaze toward absence; rather, nothing arises within our gaze, resulting in a nothingness that is full of presence.
Teika’s verse can be illuminatingly compared with a famous couplet by Wáng Wéi:
The river flow beyond where earth meets heaven,
The beauty of the hills is between being and emptiness. (trans in Li Zehou p. 169)
Both Teika’s and Wáng’s verses guide the reader's gaze outward across a landscape, leading it to the point where vision reaches its limit and form yields to nothingness. Yet despite this shared theme, the levels of insight the two poems disclose are strikingly different—a difference that arises from the poets' distinct use of language and poetic construction.
In Wáng’s verse, the reader’s gaze is carried farther outward, into the distance. A deep sense of spaciousness unfolds through the image of earth and heaven meeting, while a quiet timelessness arises from the couplet’s construction as a dynamic interplay between the eternal elements of river, heaven, earth, form, and emptiness. On an intellectual level, the final line can be said to express the same movement of form receding into emptiness as in Teika’s verse: the mountains dissolve into a boundless nothingness. The mountain’s color or form (山色, here translated freely as ‘the beauty of the hills’) is situated between being and emptiness (有無中), neither seen nor unseen—a liminal state perhaps akin to what Odin describes as the condition in which emptiness is fullness and fullness is emptiness. Yet on an experiential level, this couplet does not draw the reader’s gaze into that state where nothing, as indeterminacy, is presencing. The mountains become vague as they recede into the background, but this vagueness is something beautiful. The reader’s gaze rests on the charm of this vagueness rather than lingering nondually in the mountains’ indeterminate emptiness. Their vagueness is aestheticized—much like in Monet’s Waterloo Bridge by Twilight or Turner’s Venice with the Salute—paintings that evoke a hazy atmosphere where forms hover between background and foreground, as if emerging from objectlessness. Wáng’s couplet, like these works of Turner and Monet, presents a beautiful image, but not an instruction for settling the mind in meditative equipoise.
What drew Heidegger to Van Gogh was quite different. In many of Van Gogh’s paintings—such as A Pair of Shoes (1886)—there is a clear distinction between foreground and background. The phenomenon that interested Heidegger, therefore, was not the emergence of forms from a hazy nothingness, but rather the way the background itself revealed a phenomenological abundance and indeterminacy suggesting a vibrant emptiness. As Thomson (2011) observes, "Heidegger seems to have been deeply moved by the way half-formed figures seem to struggle to take shape in the background of Van Gogh’s paintings, less in clear lines than in the thick texture of the paint, brushstrokes, and deep fields of color" (105). Within the backgrounds of Van Gogh’s works there is a "subtle but dynamic tension between what shows itself and what recedes" (106). The background never disappears behind the foreground image but "continues to manifest a complex texture of rifts and fissures that suggest the possibility of other gestalts" (101–2). The phenomenological strife that captivated Heidegger is not the prettified vagueness of Monet or Turner’s impressionistic atmospheres, but a direct encounter with the vibrancy and playfulness of emptiness—the "phenomenological struggle of emerging and withdrawing" (89) that he would later recognize in the late works of Klee and Cézanne as well.
The insight this offers to artists concerned with emptiness is significant. To draw attention to emptiness does not necessarily require blurring the distinction between foreground and background. Indeed, Lee Ufan’s work is, in this sense, akin to A Pair of Shoes: it is often unmistakably clear what the artist has brought into being—a single stone placed in a room—and what the artist has left unmade, which is everything else. The same clarity characterizes Dōgen’s bell: its tone is sharp, crystalline, unmistakable. That initial ring of precision is essential. Dōgen could easily have chosen another aural example—a faint, continuous tone that slowly rises and falls within the environment. Such a tone would draw attention to emptiness in a different way, one perhaps closer to the experience Wáng evokes than to the meditative stillness that Teika’s verse discloses.
Yūgen
Teika’s intention was, through his art, to bring about meditative equipoise. The late Heian poets and aestheticians—beginning with Teika’s father, Shunzei—sought to articulate the moments when this occurred through the aesthetic principle of yūgen (幽玄). The term yūgen first appeared in Chinese translations of the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras and Mādhyamika śāstras—a body of texts deeply concerned with nonduality and emptiness—but through poets such as Shunzei it came to denote, within poetics, the quality by which such emptiness might presence through art.
Yūgen is today often associated with a particular emotional register—"the emotions evoked by scenes and actions that are faint and thin to the point of being almost without color or definite character" (Konishi, quoted in LaFleur 1983, 99). For Shunzei, however, yūgen was not defined by any specific 'mood' but by the way emptiness could presence within a work. Originally, yūgen referred less to a sensuous quality in phenomena than to a way of placing the mind in relation to them. As LaFleur (1983) explains, yūgen concerns the recognition of "the mutual permeation of what is grasped and what is doing the grasping, and as such, it can materialize in any one of various colors: sometimes that of splendor, sometimes sadness, sometimes simplicity, sometimes subtlety—each is allowable" (99).
The comparison between Wáng’s couplet and Teika’s verse is illuminating, for it reveals the difference between a poem in which yūgen is present and one in which it is not. Of course, yūgen was not a modal term within Wáng’s poetic vocabulary, so it is unsurprising that his poem does not give rise to it. Yet because the two verses share such closely related 'themes', they invite comparison. The distinction between them lies between a vagueness that is aestheticized—in Wáng’s case—and a vagueness that opens directly onto the nondual, undifferentiated indeterminacy characteristic of meditative equipoise. Wáng’s verse delights in the prettiness of vagueness; Teika’s, by contrast, attunes the reader to indeterminacy itself. Though both address nearly identical poetic 'topics', they differ profoundly in meditative significance.
The state of indeterminacy that Teika’s verse leads to is, in essence, unaesthetic. It is not characterized by any particular mood or flavor. If, earlier, we said that emptiness has no qualities, then a modal term such as yūgen—which can manifest in any color or emotional register—comes close to being one. At the same time, it would be mistaken to claim that Teika’s verse does not also conjure a beautiful image or a certain 'mood': the sight of brightly shining scarlet maples being submerged in the cold autumn dusk is a pretty picture to behold and establishes a certain atmospheric tone. Yet Teika moves beyond this aesthetic surface, attuning the reader to an unaesthetic indeterminacy—and it is this, ultimately, that gives the verse its depth and meaning.
Blandness
While it would be inaccurate to associate Wáng directly with yūgen, in Chinese poetics he became linked with another modal term: dàn (淡), or blandness. In his elucidation of blandness, François Jullien (2004) attributes to dàn many of the same qualities that we associate with yūgen. He describes blandness as the 'flavor of flavorlessness'—the taste of that which lies beyond specific tastes. It is the 'root' of things and their 'primordial nature' (52). In a passage reminiscent of how yūgen in Teika’s verse is actualized by looking beyond the visible, Jullien describes dàn as "the color of the whole, as it appears to the eyes of those who look farthest into the distance; it makes us experience the world and existence itself beyond the narrow confines of the individual’s point of view—in their true dimension" (52–53).
Jullien emphasizes that blandness is not merely a quality found in the sense data but concerns the way consciousness situates itself in relation to them. It is not about what is seen so much as how it is seen. Poetic blandness, he writes, depends "on our senses never leaning markedly in one direction or another", and on consciousness placing phenomena at a "distance" (2004, 108). The mind attuned to blandness should neither "adhere" to phenomena nor "separate" itself from them—a balance captured in the four-character phrase bùjí bùlí (不即不離).
This view of blandness approaches the unaesthetic dimension of yūgen, yet a subtle difference remains. The primary aim of blandness seems to be the minimization of emotional reactivity and the cultivation of equanimous seeing. Its effect is akin to that of śamatha: the stilling and pacification of emotion. It is concerned with overcoming the 'need' for intensity—becoming free from likes and dislikes, seeing phenomena from a certain distance, and finding richness in what possesses little or no taste. In this respect, blandness closely resembles the aestheticized form of yūgen, in which things appear "almost without color or definite character" (Konishi, quoted in LaFleur 1983, 99). Blandness is not, however, necessarily concerned with seeing things as empty or indeterminate. If our original awakening is veiled by both cognitive (jñeyāvaraṇa) and emotional (kleśāvaraṇa) obscurations, then blandness, it seems to me, addresses the emotional obscurations: it leads to freedom from attachment and aversion. The unaesthetic yūgen, by contrast—as its origin in the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras makes clear—targets the cognitive obscurations directly.
Jullien introduces the passage cited above with a discussion of Wáng’s celebrated poem Lùchái (鹿柴). Even its opening lines can serve to illustrate the subtle difference between blandness and yūgen:
"In the empty hills I see no one; [空山不見人]
I only hear the echo of people speaking. [但聞人語響] " (Rouzer 2020, 107)
The poet stands in seclusion, yet faint echoes of human speech still reach him. The hills are empty, but the presence of society lingers as a distant murmur. The poem expresses a serene detachment, the world of humanity held in quiet equanimity. Finding satisfaction in such detachment is what blandness embodies.
This can be compared to a single line by Hóngzhì:
"The valley is empty, but echoes."
Here, too, we are in a secluded mountain space—but no faint human voices are heard. The valley is silent, and yet something resounds. What is heard is the echo of emptiness itself. The insight this phrase carries is that emptiness is not a form of silence but is itself phenomenally present; its echo reveals its vividness. Simply reading Hóngzhì’s line can attune the reader to a kind of objectless hearing—to the sound of emptiness. For me, it leaves one in a position much like that at the end of Teika’s verse: listening, yet with no particular sound arising, we are left within an emptiness that is nondually present. Hóngzhì’s phrase thus embodies yūgen—its meaning lies not in the aesthetic image of an empty valley but in the realization of a luminous emptiness.
"[Shikan is a] suspension of judgment that neither affirms nor negates the phenomenon in being or nonbeing but is, rather, an openness that allows the thing to presence in qualitative immediacy just as it is in the emptiness/suchness of absolute nothingness” (Odin 2001, 190-191).
It is this kind of detachment that serves as the noetic condition for yūgen to arise. Because this mode of detachment is shared by both meditative practice and the perception of yūgen, Misaki discerned a profound connection between Buddhist practice and aesthetic experience. This is not the kind of superficial association between Buddhism and art that we find, for example, in Chōmei’s Hosshinshū. Rather, the analysis of yūgen through shikan reveals a genuine affinity that reaches deep into the structure of the art itself—an affinity that relates the act of meditation to the act of aesthetic perception.
The success of such art depends on the audience's way of perceiving being shaped as if in meditation. Or, put differently, the art seeks to attune the perceiver’s consciousness to the same equilibrium and openness cultivated in meditation. It is difficult not to marvel at this achievement of the Fujiwaras: yūgen offered a resolution to the tension between the secular world of art and the contemplative world of Buddhism—a resolution that still feels alive and valid today.
The "suspension of judgment" that defines the shikan aesthetic attitude of detachment is, as Odin observes, closely related to the phenomenological epoché. I agree that this term—and the accompanying notions of noema and noesis—is useful for articulating how the experience of yūgen depends on a mental attitude of detachment free from ontological commitments about an external world. When things are neither affirmed as being nor denied as nonbeing—when they appear like echoes of emptiness—we are returned, as Thomson (2011) writes, "directly to the primordial level of engaged existence in which subject and object have not yet been differentiated" (97).
Yet, insofar as phenomenological terminology continues to imply some form of subject–object duality—even when this duality is transposed onto the noematic and noetic poles rather than onto person and world—it falls short of fully expressing this undifferentiation. It cannot quite capture how the experience of things presencing in the suchness of absolute openness is no longer marked by what the phenomenologist Zahavi (2011) calls "for-me-ness" (58).
According to phenomenologists, 'for-me-ness'—the sense that every experience presents itself as experience for me, as the experience of an experiencer—is an intrinsic feature of consciousness. According to Buddhists, however, this sense of 'for-me-ness' can dissolve, giving way to a nondual awareness in which no experiencer remains apart from the experienced. I take this to be what occurs in the shikan aesthetic consciousness of yūgen. Teika’s verse, for example, functions much like Tilopa’s pith instruction for mahamudrā meditation—a nondual practice that leads to the same state of meditative equipoise, in which the intentional structure of consciousness gives way to undivided resting.
When absolute nothingness is actualized, the very framework of intentionality necessarily falls away. In this sense, the phenomenological metaphors employed by Odin reach their limit: they can gesture toward, but not fully express, a consciousness that has gone beyond the duality of subject and object.
Śamatha and vipaśyanā
Throughout this essay, we have seen how certain works of art—such as those of Lee Ufan—can open momentary flashes of nonduality. In these brief illuminations, we find ourselves in the fresh, wakeful, thought-free state of vipaśyanā, free from dualistic grasping. Lee’s writings dwell on precisely these heightened, poetic experiences—on the vipaśyanā aspect of art. Yet his descriptions may give the impression that this is all there is to his practice.
In reality, just as many museum-goers will not perceive the subtle 'strife' between foreground and background that Heidegger discerned in Van Gogh’s paintings, many viewers will not encounter the kind of profound nondual insight that Lee’s work can facilitate and that his writings illuminate. Still, his art remains deeply valuable. Like Teika’s verse, it retains beauty even when its meditative depths are not actualized.
The austerity, simplicity, and cool clarity of Lee’s work invite a quieter kind of attention—a meditative composure that does not depend on the opening of a 'transcendent space' to be meaningful. This quality is best understood in relation to the śamatha aspect of shikan. Unlike the vipaśyanā aspect of yūgen, which concerns a mode of perceiving more than any sensory property, the śamatha aspect relates to recognizable aesthetic qualities: simplicity, naturalness, coolness, slenderness, blandness, and austerity.
It is understandable that writers such as Odin, Lee, Heidegger, Shunzei, and d’Angiolini have emphasized the vipaśyanā dimension of art, since it is rare and closely tied to teleological or soteriological goals. Yet we should not overlook the śamatha dimension—the stillness and balance—that quietly underlies the very possibility of those sudden flashes of insight.
Śamatha as shi (止) can be translated as “standstill.” It is, as LaFleur (1983) writes, "the act through which the random and confused perceptions and cognitions of ordinary experience are brought to a stop and remain in a tranquil state" (88). In more direct terms, “śamatha practice is the training in being quiet and calm” (Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche 2002, 32).
Lee achieves shi through the poetic qualities of his work—austerity, calmness, natural beauty, and simplicity. These qualities still the mind; thoughts come to rest, and a quietness free from passion arises.
A traditional way of describing the relationship between śamatha and vipaśyanā is through the image of a still body of water. The cultivation of śamatha calms the surface, allowing movement and turbulence to subside. When the water becomes sufficiently still, vipaśyanā can dawn—phenomena are then reflected clearly upon its surface. When the mind rests in such calmness, "it is possible to see clearly the nature of mind. This clear seeing is vipaśyanā" (Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche 2002, 36).
Zhìyǐ (538–597), who first systematized the practice of shikan, recognized that shi and kan were inseparably intertwined and meant to be cultivated together. Hence he spoke not of shi and kan separately, but of shikan as a unified practice. This intimate relation is mirrored in the kinds of art discussed throughout this text: it is not that calmness arises first and insight later, but that when they occur, they do so simultaneously—as one movement of still clarity.
From both the Buddhist and poetic perspectives, however, it remains meaningful to speak of them as distinct, since one can experience śamatha without vipaśyanā: a calm equanimity not yet illumined by the clear seeing of emptiness. In the poetic context, this difference was illustrated by two passages from the poetry of Wáng Wéi.
In Buddhist traditions, śamatha is often regarded as the preliminary step toward vipaśyanā. In Lee’s art, too, it is the poetic stillness of śamatha that prepares the ground for the sudden flashes of vipaśyanā—those brief illuminations of nonduality. The same is true of Teika’s verse: it is precisely the scarlet maples, the huts by the harbor, and the cherry blossoms that first settle the mind, making it ready to leap beyond phenomenality into emptiness.
As noted at the beginning of this text, musical sounds can likewise be imbued with qualities that facilitate the actualization of emptiness within the rests. These sounds calm the mind, making it receptive to recognizing its own true nature in the silence that follows. The tones of the instruments, through their very qualities—non-narrativity, tranquility, blandness, quietness, and sparsity—invite a meditative composure. This composure, in turn, becomes the necessary condition for perceiving silences, and sometimes sounds, as emptiness itself.
Yet music—like the art of Lee Ufan—does not stand or fall on the listener’s ability to perceive silences-as-emptiness or sounds-as-emptiness. It is true that when we hear the silences and sounds of music as emptiness, we are just sitting (shikantaza 只管打坐). This mode of 'without-thinking' (hishiryō, 非思量) is teleological; it is an expression of awakening. But music can be beautiful even when such moments of vipaśyanā do not arise. It is through this very beauty that art can function as upāya—a skillful means.
If art sought only to disclose vipaśyanā, we would be left with an art of pure silence or empty space, accessible only to those already trained in meditative seeing, in this life or another. The fact that art, while employing strategies such as silence, empty space, sparsity, and austerity, also remains aesthetically pleasing—serene, intimate, sensitive—is what makes it upāya. Such art does not merely present emptiness directly; rather, it offers something beautiful that holds our attention, and that, once it permeates us, opens naturally into vipaśyanā.
As artists, we should therefore give equal care to kan and shi. In doing so, we do not turn away from beauty but realize the true function of beauty.
