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, some of this lecture was transcribed and published in the article "Meditating with Beethoven" in the Tricycle - The Buddhist Review. In this present text, I will offer my personal response to Rinpoche's views of music and meditation expressed in these sources.
As the lecture's subtitle "Meditation on Music" indicates, its central topic is the teaching of Rinpoche's method of meditating with, or 'on', music. Rinpoche gives instructions on a novel meditation technique that we might call śamatha with music as support. In the Western context, following the breath–using the breath as the anchor for settling the mind in one-pointed concentration–is one of the most common forms of śamatha meditation. In this lecture, 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 the guided mediation (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 Rinpoche says, 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 meditation, therefore, consists of again and again bringing the attention back to the sound of music.
When I apply Rinpoche’s instruction and treat music as the object of śamatha-meditation, it is indeed remarkable how easy it is for my mind to wander away from the sounds of the music. It is just like Rinpoche says: I can’t seem to focus on the music for more than a few moments.
After having followed along in the lecture and practiced the meditation, I was disheartened as I was left with the feeling that it is difficult to listen to music without being distracted. But then I remembered that this kind of distraction is usually not a problem when I listen to music. Usually, I can be fully present in the sound of music without any distractions for very long periods. I realized that there was something about the exercise of applying śamatha-like instructions to music listening that made it more difficult.
The detached, object-oriented way of listening to music that the śamatha instruction enables is not the usual way in which we listen to music. It would be phenomenologically mistaken to say that we under normal circumstances listen to music as an 'object' that somehow exists 'out there' detached from us that we 'simply notice'. It is more accurate to say that 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 by talking about music listening as attunemental–music as being a Stimmung. Music is authenticated through an effortless, spontaneous non-dual process of tuning-with the sound; one loses a sense of self and therefore also temporarily abandons the subject-object structure through which we experience so much of our day-to-day living.
Rinpoche says that "normally we are lost in sound" as if that was something negative, and offers his instruction as a way of listening to music more 'mindfully'. But experiencing nondual consciousness is not, as all readers of Mahāyāna sūtras know, something unskillful but rather the opposite. Musical attunement is not about being unskillfully 'lost' in the music (as Rinpoche implies) but about participating in it nondually.
One way in which we immediately can intuit the value of musical attunement is precisely by acknowledging how this kind of listening makes us less likely to be distracted. Our mind is less prone to wandering away when we listen to music in an attunemental way rather than in the 'object-subject'-dualistic way that Rinpoche asks us to do. As Erik Wallrup writes in a discussion on 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–to make our selves "wholly a play of sound" (Wallrup, 2012, 104)–that a true distraction-less state can be actualized.
By downplaying normal attitudes to music, Rinpoche actually misses out on utilizing one of the remarkable ways in which musical listening relates to meditation—as a gate to nondual, objectless meditation with few distractions.
The distinction between hearing music as an object and being the musical unfolding has clear parallels to Dōgen's writings about zazen, a nondual style of meditation. Dōgen articulated how to practice zazen by describing two contrasting ways of relating to the phenomenal field of our 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 the detached observer who listens to something. It is someone who has experience. This is according to Dōgen a delusional perspective. The second one is, according to the commentary by Kasulis, "someone whose identity is inseparable from the presencing phenomena"—someone who is experience (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 leads to us being "wholly a play of sound". When we listen to music in the way that Rinpoche considers more 'mindfully' we are actually listening in a delusional, dualistic way–we are listening to music.
Instead of using musical listening as a basis for cultivating object-based śamatha, music actually offers us valuable practical experiences to draw upon when cultivating the nondual meditations meant to have us recognize the nondual nature of mind. Music listening itself can be a nondual meditation and is as such a form of vipaśyanā. This does not mean that music is by default perfect; as long as it asks the listener to relish agreeable sounds, it is imperfect as a vehicle for awakening.
A meditation teacher who recognized that music is closer to vipaśyanā than śamatha is Joseph Goldstein. In a discussion about '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 avoiding, suppressing or reacting to anything. Goldstein explains that this simple state of mind–an "openness of mind"–that we strive to cultivate in our meditation practice actually is something we are all familiar with "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", and "not trying to control anything") implies that musical attunement is a highly skillful mode of being. It is not just a matter of being "lost in sound" as Mingyur Rinpoche thinks. In the excerpt above, Goldstein suggests that if we use the same attitude involved in musical attunement, but apply it to moments of not listening to music, the result is a nondual meditation.
To my knowledge, the Buddhist scripture that first thematized such a correspondence between listening and the nondual nature of mind was the Śūraṅgama Sūtra. In this work, the meditator is asked to "turn hearing backward" away from the objects of sound and 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 before imposing a subject-object dualism onto experience, turning hearing backward means hearing the mind's nonduality. In the same sūtra, the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī says:
“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)
Hearing is here used as a name for the unconditioned nondual awareness, our Buddha Nature. Even though the first quote seems 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 says, absence or presence of sound makes no difference to the nature of hearing.
As a nondual attunement, being freed from conceptualizing sounds as external happens by default in musical attunement. Yet, as mentioned above, music comes with its own set of problems, most notable that it is an activity in which we 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 was music. This is what Goldstein instructs us to do in other to induce vipaśyanā. By using the way of experiencing involved in musical listening, but then applying it to moments where we are not listening to music, we are in fact left in a bare nondual attunement without any subtle likes or dislikes.
This very effect is actualized in a marvelous piece by Yoko Ono called Stone Piece. By asking us to listen to the sound of a stone aging–the sole instruction for the piece–Ono's piece in fact attunes us to listening to something musically, but since no sounds are produced by the silent stone, we are left with resting in mere nonduality.
It is therefore with some disappointment we see such a renowned teacher as Mingyur Rinpoche turn music into a prop for a populistic 'show' that proposes how to listen to music more mindfully (the title of the Tricycle transcription is "Meditating with Beethoven"). Listening to music in Rinpoche's way is actually less soteriologically helpful than listening to it in the mundane (as Goldstein called it) attunemental way. This nondual experience is good in and of itself because it temporarily sets us free from the subject-object structure that keeps us in saṃsāra. Our "mundane" familiarity with this nondual mode of awareness through musical attunement provides 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.
