In 2009, Mingyur Rinpoche gave a lecture-performance at the Kagyu Rangjung Kunchab Center in Taiwan called Union of Sound and Music. In March 2019, part of this lecture was transcribed and published in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review under the title “Meditating with Beethoven.” In the present text, I offer my personal response to Rinpoche’s views of music and meditation as expressed in these sources.
As the lecture’s subtitle—Meditation on Music—indicates, its central topic is Rinpoche’s method of meditating with or on music. He introduces a novel meditation technique that might be described as śamatha with music as support. In the Western Buddhist context, following the breath—using it as the anchor for settling the mind in one-pointed concentration—is among the most common forms of śamatha meditation. Rinpoche replaces the breath with the sounds of music: instead of following the breath, the meditator follows the sounds of music, which become the object of focus. Here is a redacted version of his guided meditation (as transcribed in Tricycle):
“How do you practice listening meditation? Just listen to sound. […] The sound and the music become the object of the meditation. […] Relax and let go of all your worry. Just be your mind in your body; your mind comes to your body, fills your body. […] From this relaxed posture, begin listening to sound. Don’t listen too forcefully; simply notice the sound. You cannot mindfully listen to sound for too long, maybe a few seconds, before your mind wanders away. That’s OK. Listen again. The practice consists of a short time, many times. You will notice that you have a lot of thoughts and emotions […] Instead of telling the thought or emotion, “Get out!” or “Yes, sir,” you just let go, and give a job to the monkey mind.” (Mingyur Rinpoche 2019)
Rinpoche instructs the meditator to listen to the sounds of music by 'simply noticing them'–a noticing that should be done in a rather detached manner: "We should not listen to the music too forcefully." As he notes, this non-involved listening of 'simply noticing' is difficult to sustain: "You cannot mindfully listen to sound for too long ... before your mind wanders away." The practice, therefore, consists of repeatedly bringing attention back to the sound of music.
When I apply Rinpoche’s instructions and treat music as the object of śamatha-meditation, it is indeed remarkable how easily my mind wanders away from the sounds of music. It is just as Rinpoche describes: I cannot seem to focus on the music for more than a few moments.
Initially, I felt disheartened by this, left with the impression that it is difficult to listen to music without distraction. But then I remembered that distraction is normally not a problem when I listen to music. Ordinarily, I can remain fully present in the sound for long stretches without losing focus. It became clear that something about the application of śamatha-like instructions to musical listening had made the experience more difficult.
The detached, object-oriented mode of listening enabled by śamatha-style attention is not the usual way we listen to music. It would be phenomenologically inaccurate to claim that we normally experience music as an 'object' existing out there, detached from us, which we 'simply notice'. Rather, we let our being become one with the music; the musical unfolding becomes our unfolding. In European aesthetics, this union was captured by authors such as Wackenroder through the concept of Stimmung: music as attunement. Music is authenticated through an effortless, spontaneous, nondual process of tuning-with sound. In such moments, one loses a sense of self and temporarily abandons the subject–object structure that dominates so much of our ordinary experience.
Rinpoche says that "normally we are lost in sound", as if this were something unskillful, and offers his method as a way to listen more 'mindfully'. Yet experiencing nondual consciousness is not, as readers of the Mahāyāna sūtras know, unskillful—but quite the opposite. Musical attunement is not a matter of being unmindfully 'lost' in sound (as Rinpoche implies), but of participating in it nondually.
One way to recognize the value of musical attunement, following Rinpoche's own criteria, is by observing how this kind of listening reduces distraction. Our minds wander less when we listen to music in an attunemental way than when we listen to it in the 'object-subject'-dualistic way that Rinpoche asks us to. As Erik Wallrup notes in his discussion of Wackenroder and the concept of Stimmung in European aesthetics: "It is hard to repress the impressions from the outer world, and only in the total engagement with the music can irrelevant thoughts be purged from the mind" (2012, 104). It is only by attuning ourselves to music—by becoming "wholly a play of sound" (Wallrup 2012, 104)—that a truly distraction-free state can be actualized.
By downplaying ordinary attitudes toward music, Rinpoche misses an opportunity to draw upon one of the most remarkable affinities between musical listening and meditation: music’s potential as a direct gateway to nondual, objectless awareness–one largely free of distraction.
The distinction between hearing music as an object and being the musical unfolding has a clear parallel in Dōgen’s writings on zazen, a nondual mode of meditation. Dōgen articulates two contrasting ways of relating to the phenomenal field of experience:
"To practice-authenticate the totality of phenomena by conveying yourself to them—that's delusion. To practice-authenticate yourself by letting the totality of phenomena come forth—that's realization." (Kasulis 2018, 223)
The first perspective is that of a detached observer who has experience—someone who listens to something. This, according to Dōgen, is delusion. The second is that of one whose identity is inseparable from the presencing phenomena—"someone who is experience" (Kasulis 2018, 223). When we listen to music in an attunemental way, we do not listen to music—we are music. We experience a "total engagement" that renders us "wholly a play of sound". Listening to music in the way Rinpoche considers more 'mindful', by contrast, reinstates the delusional, dualistic mode of hearing as if we were separate from what is heard.
Instead of using musical listening as a basis for cultivating object-based śamatha, music offers valuable lived experiences to draw upon when cultivating nondual meditations that reveal the mind’s nondual nature. Music listening, understood in this attunemental way, is already a nondual meditation and as such a form of vipaśyanā. This does not mean that music is flawless as a meditative vehicle; as long as it invites attachment to agreeable sounds, it remains imperfect as a path toward awakening.
A teacher who recognized that music is closer to vipaśyanā than śamatha is Joseph Goldstein. In a discussion of 'present-moment awareness' from his audio teaching Abiding in Mindfulness (Volume 1, "The Body"), he describes cultivating the 'bare attention' and 'non-interfering awareness' that "allows us to see all experience as empty phenomena rolling on", without avoidance or reaction. Goldstein explains that this simple state of mind—an "openness of mind"—that we strive to cultivate in our meditation practice is something we all already know "in a very mundane way":
And that is the experience we have when we’re listening to music… The mind is open, attentive, it’s not trying to control anything, not trying to control what comes next, it’s not reflecting on the notes that have just passed. We’re just there, moment to moment in the unfolding. And often I think the term "listening" is a very good description for this quality of bare attention.
Goldstein's description of musical attunement as nondual and engaged through a mode of 'nondoing'–"we're just there", "not reflecting", "not trying to control anything"–suggests that musical attunement is already a highly skillful mode of being. It is not merely a case of being "lost in sound", as Mingyur Rinpoche warns. Rather, Goldstein suggests that if we use the same noetic attitude involved in musical attunement, but apply it to moments of not listening to music, the result is the "bare attention" of nondual meditation.
To my knowledge, the Buddhist scripture that first explored this correspondence between listening and the nondual nature of mind is the Śūraṅgama Sūtra, which instructs the meditator to "turn hearing backward" away from external sounds to the act of hearing itself:
"To hear your very Self, why not turn backward That faculty employed to hear Buddha’s words? Hearing is not of itself, But owes its name to sound. Freed from sound by turning hearing backwards, What do you call that which is disengaged?" (Śūraṅgama, 209)
Since hearing is always nondual prior to the imposition of subject–object dualism, turning hearing backward means hearing the mind’s nonduality itself. As the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī says later in the text:
“Absence of sound is not the end of hearing, And sound when present is not it's beginning. The faculty of hearing, beyond creation And annihilation, truly is permanent.” (Śūraṅgama, 208)
Here, 'hearing' names the unconditioned, nondual awareness—our Buddha Nature. While the earlier passage may seem to suggest that hearing has to be 'freed from sound' in order for us to 'hear' Buddha Nature, what it really means is that hearing has to be freed from conceptualizing sounds as external and as objects of perception. As Mañjuśrī emphasizes, the presence or absence of sound makes no difference to the nature of hearing.
As a nondual attunement, being freed from conceptualizing sounds as external occurs naturally in musical attunement. Yet, as mentioned above, music comes with its own set of problems, most notably that it is an activity in which we may like or dislike what we hear. A suggestion for how to use music as the basis for a profound meditation practice is therefore to draw upon our shared familiarity with listening to music, but instead of listening to music, listen to nothing, but as if it were music. This is precisely what Goldstein instructs us to do in order to cultivate vipaśyanā. By using the way of experiencing involved in musical listening, but applying it to moments where we are not listening to music, we are in fact left in a bare nondual attunement, free from subtle liking and disliking.
This effect is realized beautifully in Yoko Ono’s Stone Piece, whose sole instruction is to listen to the sound of the aging stone. The work invites us to listen as if music were occurring. It attunes us musically to the sound of the stone. Yet since no sounds are produced by the silent stone, what remains is awareness itself resting in nonduality.
It is therefore somewhat disappointing that such a renowned teacher as Mingyur Rinpoche presents music primarily as a novel support for śamatha, rather than as an opportunity to reveal mind’s nondual nature. His meditation comes across as a way to 'improve' the activity of listening to music by making it more deliberately mindful. Yet paradoxically, listening to music in Rinpoche’s way is less soteriologically helpful than listening in the ordinary, ‘mundane’ (as Goldstein puts it) attunemental way. This nondual experience is valuable in itself, for it momentarily frees us from the subject–object structure that perpetuates saṃsāra. Our everyday familiarity with this nondual mode of awareness through music thus offers a profound reference when we learn to practice nondual meditation; the only thing we have to do is to listen to music without any music.
