When we hear the 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 (i.e. the moments that in notation are marked as rests), when perceived as emptiness, are neither opposed to the 'musical sounds' in a dualist manner as 'non-Music'—unimportant or irrelevant to the experience—and neither 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 it is not turned into objects by the discriminating consciousness, and it is something because it is fully present as lived experience–it is 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 expressed it: "Although my mind does not rise [to meet phenomena], there is nothing it does not connect with" (Grant, 1994, 88).
Hearing emptiness in this way is the meditative state of vipaśyanā, the state of thought-free wakefulness. It is the clear seeing of the nature of mind. It is the spontaneous shining forth of Buddha Nature. This state is beyond modes of listening, as well as styles of meditation. If music is successful in leading us there, it can be said that music has moved beyond itself. This happens most often (but not exclusively) in rests, when no agreeable sounds stir our emotions. In such moments of rest, we are still musically (nondually) attuned, but not attuned to anything that can be the source of grasping.
The processes described above inolve a kind of re-configuring of the normal background-foreground dichotomies we usually bring to art experiences. Many aestheticans from different traditions, including non-Buddhists, have described heightened art experiences in similar ways. Readers will, for example, recognize this kind of explanatory metaphor working at the very heart of Heidegger's aesthetics. I am especially drawn to Iain Thomson's interpretation of Heidegger, where what Heidegger encountered in the background layer of a painting by Van Gogh is described as 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" (2011, 89). Encountering the painting of Van Gogh is to, ideally, have an experience where the emerging and withdrawing of the suggestion of indeterminate shapes and figures in the background brings to awareness the often non-noticeable interplay and relation between foreground and background.
When Heidegger encounters Van Gogh's painting, the process in which foreground figures emerges out of an indeterminate background of "nothing" and the way a background emerges in relation to a foreground–in other words, the dependent arising of background and foreground–is placed at the center of perception. In bringing this process into awareness, the painting not only shows a kind of 'optical' effect but teaches us something more about the nature of perception and meaning-making. It gives us "a glimpse of the underlying structure hidden within all art", and shows us 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” (Thomson, 2011, 93). This is the phenomenological 'strife' that is at the center of Heidegger's aesthetics. The subject becomes aware of the usually non-noticeable process of carving out objects from the background that characterizes all perceptions.
The way Thomson reads Heidegger, foreground and background have the capacity, in aesthetic experiences, to merge in an epiphanic, nondualistic consciousness in which the world presences as an undifferentiated mass of phenomena–that from which objects can appear. It is a dynamic process in which the background, in a sense, can be said to 'become' the foreground but as background–as indeterminate. This new "background" (as foreground) does not stand in a dualistic relationship to a non-present foreground but is rather the point where all dualisms between foreground and background dissolve. This undifferentiated mass is vividly present at the same time as it 'recedes' from our attempts to create some kind of order out of it. It returns us "directly to the primordial level of engaged existence in which subject and object have not yet been differentiated" (Thomson, 2011, 97). This is very similar to how I interpret d'Angiolini's description of listening to music with a "happy indifference". It is about being attuned to a mode of listening in which there is a nonduality between foreground and background and subject and object. It is an equanimous attunement to the basic field of indeterminacy, or emptiness, from which objects can arise.
Some people will surely think that this is reading in a lot in a painting of just a pair of boots or listening to a piece of music. To assume that most people who enter a museum and see Van Gogh's painting would encounter such a phenomenological 'strife' is perhaps wishful thinking, and to assume that most listeners will be attuned to the "happy indifference" of d'Angiolini's music is likewise optimistic. Yet, for the viewer and listener who is sensitive enough to her perceptions, these subtle aspects of art pertaining to the relationship between foreground and background really do carry opportunities for profound insights.
Emptiness as presence
Another example of an aesthetic object that thematizes this kind of dynamic tension between objects of perception and the abundant background field is Fujiwara no Teika's perhaps most famous verse:
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 taken on a journey through conventional depictions of beauty (flowers and maple leaves) toward what is far away and difficult to discern. By the end of the poem, the reader's gaze is left focused on nothing at all as the images disappear from the horizon and are absorbed by the impending night. We are left with just the gazing itself. In this state of gazing without content, there is, as Odin comments regarding this poem, 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" (Odin, 2001, 183-184). By taking the reader on a journey through the landscape and effectively going beyond it, the poem allows the reader to experience pure object-less gazing; not gazing at anything that is turned into an object. What is present at the end of this verse is therefore a basic field of indeterminacy, where emptiness is fullness and fullness is emptiness.
In this way, Teika's poem has a similar function as the famous pith instructions that the awakened master Tilopa gave to his student Nāropā in the Ganges Mahamudra:
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 compared to resting one's awareness in non-dual meditative equipoise. What appears in these moments of nondual awareness is what Thomson calls a "dynamic phenomenological abundance that we can never fully grasp” (2011, 93) and what Odin calls a "boundless nothingness where emptiness is fullness and fullness is emptiness" (2001, 184). The same state is what we are left dwelling in at the end of the verse by Teika. The poem moves our gaze further and further away from looking at 'things' to finally attune us directly to empty space—a space that is not a vacuum or nihilistic nothingness but a boundless and vibrant nothingness. We are intentionally not looking at nothing, in the sense of deliberately conducting our gaze toward nothing, but nothing appears in our gaze, resulting in a nothingness that is 'present'.
The verse by Teika can be illustratively 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 are about gazing out over a landscape and taking the reader to the point where the gaze reaches its limit and where form gives over to nothingness. Despite this shared theme, the different levels of insight that these poems provide are strikingly different, and this difference comes about through the subtle differences in the poets' use of language and poetic construction.
In Wáng's verse, the reader's gaze is taken on a journey further away and into the distance. A deep sense of vast spaciousness is conjured up by the image of the earth and heaven meeting. A profound sense of timelessness is present by way of constructing the couplet as a dynamic interplay between the eternal elements of river, heaven, earth, form, and emptiness. On an intellectual level, the last line can be said to thematize the same idea of form receding into emptiness as Teika's verse: the mountains are receding into a boundless nothingness. The mountain's color or form (山色, above translated freely as 'the beauty of the hills') is between being and emptiness (有無中), neither seen nor unseen—an in-between-state that is perhaps similar to Odin's description of a state where emptiness is fullness and fullness is emptiness. Yet on an experiential level, this couplet does not make the reader's gaze dwell in that state where nothing, as indeterminacy, is presencing. The mountains become vague as they are receding into the background, but this vagueness is something that is 'pretty'. The reader's gaze focuses on the beauty of vagueness but the gaze is not allowed to linger nondually in the mountains' state of indeterminate emptiness. Their vagueness is aestheticized, similar to Monet's Waterloo Bridge by Twilight or Turner's Venice with the Salute. These paintings depict a hazy and vague atmosphere where the objects depicted seem to exist in a state between background and foreground. The objects of these paintings seem to be in a state of coming out from objectlessness. Wáng's couplet is similar to these paintings of Turner and Monet in being a pretty picture, not an instruction for settling the mind in meditative equipoise.
What drew Heidegger to Van Gogh is different. There is a clear dichotomy between foreground and background in many of Van Gogh's paintings, such as A Pair of Shoes (1886), so the phenomenon Heidegger was interested in was not how the foreground figures were emerging out of a hazy nothingness. What drew Heidegger to Van Gogh was rather how in the background itself, there seemed to be a phenomenological abundance and indeterminacy that suggested a vibrant emptiness. As Thomson (2011) writes: "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, brush strokes, and deep fields of color" (105). There is in the background of the paintings of Van Gogh a "subtle but dynamic tension between what shows itself and what recedes" (106). The background does not completely disappear behind the foreground image, but it "continues to manifest a complex texture of rifts and fissures that suggest the possibility of other gestalts" (Thomson, 2011, 101-102). The phenomenological strife that Heidegger was interested in was not just a pretty picture of vagueness, as in Monet and Turner's impressionistic scenes, but a way of encountering the vibrancy and playfulness of emptiness, a quality of a "phenomenological struggle of emerging and withdrawing" (Thomson, 2011, 89) that Heidegger would also identify in the late works of Klee and Cézanne.
Yūgen
Teika's intention was to, through his art, bring about meditative equipoise. The late Heian poets and aestheticians, starting with Teika’s father Shunzei, theorized the moments when this happened as the occurence of an aesthetic quality called yūgen (幽玄). This was a term that first originated in the translations of the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras and Mādhyamika śastras–a body of work that heavily thematized nonduality and emptiness–but the term became, through poets like Shunzei, also a term in poetics.
Yūgen is today mostly associated with a certain 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 had nothing to do with any particular 'mood' but was rather about the way in which emptiness could presence in the work. Yūgen was originally more a way of placing our mind in relation to phenomena than it was about any sensuous quality in phenomena. LaFleur explains that yūgen was about recognizing
“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” (1983, 99).
The comparison between Wáng's couplet and Teika's verse is illustrative because it shows the difference between a verse where yūgen is present and one where it is not. Of course, yūgen was not a modal term in Wáng's repertoire, so it makes sense that his poem does not give rise to it, but because the verses have such similar 'themes', they serve as good comparisons. The difference between Wáng's and Teika's verses is between a vagueness that is aestheticized (in Wáng's case) and a vagueness that directly points to the nondual, undifferentiated indeterminacy that is a feature of meditative equipoise. Wáng's verse is about the aesthetic prettiness of vagueness, while Teika's verse is about attuning the reader to an indeterminate state. Even though these two pieces of text are about very similar poetic 'topics', they are profoundly different in their 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 we above said that emptiness has no qualities, then a modal term such as yūgen, which itself can be expressed in any kind of color or emotional register, comes very close to being such a quality. At the same time, it would be wrong to say that Teika's verse is not besides this also conjuring up a pretty picture and a 'mood'; the view of the brightly shining scarlet maples being submerged in the cold, autumn dusk is a pretty picture to behold and establishes a certain atmospheric tone. But Teika goes further than this to also attune the reader to an unaesthetized indeterminacy, and this is what is truly meaningful about this verse.
Blandness
While it would be incorrect to associate Wáng with yūgen, Wáng became in Chinese poetics associated with the modal term dàn (淡), or blandness. In his elucidation of blandness, François Jullien imbues dàn with many qualities similar to those that we associate with yūgen. Jullien describes blandness as the flavor of flavorlessness: it is the flavor of that which is beyond specific flavors. It is the "root" of things and their "primordial nature" (2004, 52). In a passage similar to 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." (2004, 52-53)
Jullien emphasizes that blandness is not only a quality found 'in the sense datum' but has to do with consciousness placing itself in a certain way with regard to the sense data. According to Jullien, it is not about what is seen as much as it is about how it is seen. Jullien writes that poetic blandness depends "on our senses' never leaning markedly in one direction or another" and our consciousness placing phenomena at a "distance" (2004, 108). Jullien describes that the perceiving mind attuned to blandness neither should "adhere" to phenomena nor "separate" itself from phenomena–as captured in the four-character phrase bùjí bùlí (不即不離)–
This view of blandness comes very close to the unaesthetized view of yūgen, yet there is a difference. The primary goal of blandness seems to me to be minimizing emotional reactivity and facilitating a seeing with equanimity. The goal seems to be similar to the effects of śamatha: the stilling and elimination of emotions. It is about overcoming the 'need' for strong flavors, becoming free from likes and dislikes, and finding satisfaction and richness in that which has little or no taste. In this regard, blandness is very close to the aestheticized yūgen in which things are presented "almost without color or definite character" (Konishi quoted in LaFleur 1983, 99). Blandness is not, however, necessarily about seeing things as empty and indeterminate. If our original awakening is concealed by cognitive and emotional obscurations (jñeyāvaraṇa and kleśā-varaṇa), it seems to me that blandness targets the emotional obscurations: it leads to freedom from likes and dislikes. The unaesthetized yūgen, as its source in the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras makes clear, is instead targetting cognitive obscurations directly.
Jullien prefaces the passage from where the quotes above are taken with a discussion of Wáng's famous poem Lùchái (鹿柴) and even just the first lines can be used to further illustrate this point of 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 is in a secluded space, but the faint echoes of people speaking are still heard. The hill is empty, but the sound of society is still faintly present. The poem expresses how the world of humanity can be seen with detachment and equanimity. Finding satisfaction in detachment is what blandness is about. This can be compared to a single statement by Hóngzhì:
"The valley is empty, but echoes."
Shikan (止観) is a two-character word formed from combining the translations of the words śamatha and vipaśyanā. When combined in this way, it refers to a meditation practice of the Tendai school. Odin (2001) explains that the goal of shikan meditation is to arrive at an "even-minded perception of phenomena free of all blind reactions of craving and aversion, attraction or repulsion, love or hate, liking or disliking" (Odin, 190) and the recognition of "every phenomenon in nature as a spontaneous manifestation of the Buddha nature itself" (106). The first quality–the freedom from craving, repulsion, and so forth–pertains to shi (śamatha).
When related to aesthetic experience, shi is a common feature in both moments of blandness and the aestheticized yūgen. The second aspect–seeing phenomena as the spontaneous manifestation of Buddha nature, which here can be read as a positive synonym for emptiness–pertains to kan (vipaśyanā) and is what, when related to aesthetic perception, sets the unaestheticized yūgen apart from both blandness and the aestheticized yūgen. Odin's explanation of the goal of the shikan aesthetic consciousness focuses primarily on the vipaśyanā aspect since this is what is unique about it and what helps to explain the specific notetic detachment needed for yūgen:
"[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 is needed as a noetic mode for yūgen to come about. Because the kind of detachment is the same for meditation as well as for perceiving yūgen, there is, according to Misaki, a deep connection between Buddhist practice and the perception of yūgen. This is not at all the kind of superficial linking between Buddhism and art of the kind we find mentioned by Chōmei in his Hosshinshū. What the analysis of yūgen through shikan reveals is rather a true connection that goes deep into the art by relating the experience of meditation to the experience of perceiving art. The success of the art depends on the audience's way of perceiving being similar to as if they were meditating. Or put in another way: the art aims to structure the audience's way of perceiving in the same way as if they were meditating. It is difficult not to marvel at this enormous achievement from the Fujiwaras: yūgen provided a kind of resolution to the tension between the secular world of art and the meditative world of Buddhism–a resolution that still holds valid in contemporary times.
The 'suspension of judgment' of the shikan aesthetic attitude of detachment is something that Odin sees as having similarities to the phenomenological epoché. I agree that this term and the other phenomenological terms of noema and noesis that Odin employ are useful in articulating how the experience of yūgen is enabled by a certain mental attitude of detachment that is free from ontological commitments about an external world. When things are neither affirmed as being nor not being–when things appear like the echoes of emptiness–, we are returned, as we heard Thomson saying above, "directly to the primordial level of engaged existence in which subject and object have not yet been differentiated” (Thomson, 2011, 97). Yet, as long as the phenomenological terminology still suggests a kind of subject-object duality (and even if this duality is mapped on the noematic and noetic rather than person and external world) it misses out on fully articulating this undifferentiation between subject and object. It misses out on capturing how the experience of things presencing in the suchness of absolute openness no longer has what the phenomenologist Zahavi calls "for-me-ness" (2011, 58).
According to phenomenologists, "for-me-ness"–the feeling that whatever experience we have presents itself as experience 'for me' as an 'experiencer'–is a feature of all moments of consciousness. According to Buddhists, such a feeling of "for-me-ness" can dissolve and be replaced by a nondual consciousness. This is what I take to happen in the shikan aesthetic consciousness of yūgen. Teika's verse, for example, functions in the same way as Tilopa's pith instruction for mahamudra meditation–a nondual style of meditation. They lead to the same state of meditative equipoise in which the intentional structure is replaced by nondual resting. The moment absolute nothingness is actualized, the intentional structure necessary falls away. There is, therefore, an obvious limitation to phenomenological metaphors emplyed by Odin.
Śamatha and vipaśyanā in contemporary art
Before hearing of shikanteki biishiki, I had in my own reasonings started to apply the words śamatha and vipaśyanā as metaphors when thinking about the art of the Korean painter and sculptor Lee Ufan. Like the poem of Teika, Lee's art use material structures (whether paintings or sculptures) to intimate the emptiness–the 'empty space'–that exists as indeterminate phenomena around these structures. Lee sometimes refers to this as a practice of "marking infinity" or as creating an "encounter between inner and outer". According to Lee, establishing a relationship 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 surrounding his work—whether it is the white space around the brushstrokes of his paintings or the empty space surrounding his sculptures—is referred to by Lee on different occasions as both "reality" (2018, 50) and as "infinity" (2018, 268). The usage of both of these terms points to the perception of these empty spaces as being both present (real) as well as empty—as both something and as nothing.
Lee writes that he depends on "the power of empty space to evoke a sense of infinity in the work" (2018, 56), but perceiving the 'empty space' as 'reality' does not simply come about by leaving space "vacant". On the one hand, it is necessary to leave some space untouched in order for emptiness to be present. On the other hand, it has to be untouched in a certain way. Merely leaving parts of a painting vacant is not enough. Such vacant space "is lacking in reality" (2018, 50). Vacant space that is "lacking in reality" is a nihilistic nothingness that leaves no place for presence. It is like the musical silence in which there is nothing but waiting for the 'music' to go on–the ambient sounds that coexist with such a silence are completely ignored because they are not part of the musical world to which we are attuned: they are "lacking in reality".
In describing how an artist achieves an emptiness that has the fullness of 'reality', Lee uses a musical metaphor: the artist must activate the surrounding space in the same way as when a musician strikes a drum and "the sound reverberates into empty space" (2018, 50). That the sound reverberates into empty space means that there is not a dichotomy between 'silence' and 'sound'; when the sound that reverberates into empty space no longer sounds, what sounds in its place is a vital emptiness, not nothingness. Dōgen describes such a richly sounding emptiness with the following words:
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 use musical metaphors to describe the experience of a vibrant emptiness–an emptiness that is not lacking in reality–is not without coincidence. Being musically attuned is a nondual mode of experience, and when this nonduality meets nothing that is the source of grasping, we are just sitting (shikantaza) as phenomena appear as emptiness.
Visual art, in the same way, can be about the activation of the empty space surrounding it so as to make it present as a boundless nothingness where emptiness is fullness and fullness is emptiness. Just as with music, it is often in the untouched areas where this emptiness is vibrant: what the artist makes, such as brushstrokes, is not so much subsumed into this emptiness but stands as something that mediates its reality. Under certain circumstances, however, even the touched areas appear as emptiness and a nonduality between brushstrokes and empty space can be actualized. In 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 the moments in which a nonduality between foreground phenomena and indeterminate emptiness is realized–are usually described as very brief, like "momentary flashes of light" (2018, 62). In these brief moments, the conventional experience of time is suspended–something that Dōgen gesticulates to in the quote above by writing that the 'voice' of emptiness is endless and resounds both before and after its striking. When we return from these momentary flashes of light, "[t]ime becomes continuous again" and “[t]he gap is closed and turns into space where the surroundings remain unseen” (Lee, 2018, 155) In Lee’s writings, we find a preference for words such as otherness and strangeness to point to these "ruptures in the ordinary everydayness" (2018, 155).
There is no doubt that Lee’s art has the power to give the audience such profound, poetic flashes of nonduality. In these (brief) moments, we are in the fresh, wakeful, thought-free state of vipaśyanā which is free from dualistic clinging. Lee’s texts are all about these heightened, poetic experiences. Lee's writings make it seem as if this is all there is to his art. Bust just like most museum-goers will not encounter the 'strife' between foreground and background in Van Gogh's paintings, most members of the audience will not experience the kind of profound nondual insights that Lee's art facilitates and that he analyzes in his writings. If these flashes of nonduality do not happen, what then is the value of his art? Lee's art is beautiful and valuable even when these moments of thought-free wakefulness do not happen. Teika's verse is beautiful even if we just appreciate the aesthetics of it. The austerity, simplicity, and cool calmness of Lee's art invite to a kind of meditative state, but a meditative state that is not dependent on the opening up of a "transcendent space" to be valuable. This meditative quality is best captured with the part of the shikan-compound that is śamatha. Unlike the case with the vipaśyanā aspect of yūgen that was more about a way of perceiving than it was about recognizable sensory qualities, recognizable aesthetic 'qualities' such as simplicity, naturalness, coolness, slenderness, blandness, and austerity are important to talk about in connection to the śamatha-aspect.
Śamatha as shi (止) could be translated as "standstill". It is 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" (LaFleur, 1983, 88) Basically, "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, natural beauty, and simplicity. They make thoughts stop and a calmness that is free from passions arises. As Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche then explains, “[t]he more calm and quiet our attention can be made through this training, the easier it is to be introduced to vipaśyanā" (2002, 33). In Buddhist traditions, śamatha is recognized as a preliminary step towards vipaśyanā. In Lee's art, too, it is the poetic qualities of śamatha that actually enables the poetic flashes of light of vipaśyanā. This is of course also true of Teika's verse; it is precisely the scarlet maples, the huts by the harbor, and the cherry blossoms that first calm our minds and make us ready to leap beyond phenomenality into emptiness.
At the beginning of this text, it was similarly said that 'musical sounds' can be imbued with certain qualities so as to facilitate the actualization of emptiness in the rests. The sounds can have the quality of calming the mind and making it susceptible to authenticating the nature of mind in the rests. In Cage’s Number Pieces, for example, the sounds of the instruments are what afford śamatha: the aesthetic qualities of non-narrativity, tranquility, blandness, quietness, and sparsity invite a calm, meditative state. This state is in turn a prerequisite for subsequently perceiving the silences, and sometimes sounds, as emptiness.
A traditional way of explaining the relationship between śamatha and vipaśyanā is to liken meditation to a calm body of water. The cultivation of śamatha makes the surface of the water progressively calmer and more still. Vipaśyanā then dawns when the water has been calmed enough for phenomena to be clearly reflected on its surface. When the mind is calm, "it is possible to see clearly the nature of mind. This clear seeing is vipaśyanā" (Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche, 2002, 36). Zhìyǐ (538-597), who introduced the practice of shikan recognized that shi and kan were intimately connected and were supposed to be practiced together. That is why Zhìyǐ spoke of shikan instead of shi and kan. Their deep connection is illustrated in the kinds of art discussed in this text: it is not the case that we first become calm and then have insight but when they happen, they happen instantly together. From the perspectives of the Buddhist path and poetics, however, it makes sense to speak about them as separate because it is possible to experience śamatha without vipaśyanā. It is possible to experience a calm and equanimity that does not quite yet see the empty nature of phenomena. In the poetic context, this was illustrated by two excerpts from the poetry of Wáng Wéi.
Cage's music–similarly to Lee's art–does not stand or fall on perceiving silences-as-emptiness or sounds-as-emptiness. It is true that when we hear the silences and sounds in music as emptiness, we are just sitting (shikantaza 只管打坐). This mode of "without-thinking" (hishiryō) is teleological; it is an expression of awakening. But the music is beautiful even when we do not experience such moments of vipaśyanā. It is because of this beauty that art can function as an upāya. If art only has as its ambition to disclose moments of vipaśyanā, we would have an art of pure silence or empty space, in which vipaśyanā only would be available to those members of the audience who had prior meditative experience, in this or a previous life. The fact that Lee's art and Cage's music besides working with clear strategies (such as silence, empty space, sparsity, and austerity) to attune the viewers and listeners to emptiness also is beautiful (it is serene, intimate, and sensitive) is what makes it upāya–a skillful means. The art is not merely presenting empty space directly. There is something beautiful there that keeps our attention and that once it has permeated us also leads to vipaśyanā. As artists, we should therefore not shy away from beauty, but realize the true function of beauty.
