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 (Dōgen, trans. Waddell & Abe 2002, 14)
The instrumental parts sounded independent, as if no coordination existed between them. The musicians played sporadic single pitches surrounded by rests—some tones were long, some brief; some overlapped, while others appeared alone. Only occasionally did they converge, starting or ending at roughly the same time. The music aspired to no thematic development, no sense of narrative progression. It was content with an even, tranquil coming and going, in which isolated sounds arose without any discernible direction. The mind attuned to this music remained fully in the present moment, listening neither for form nor for unfolding, but simply resting in what appeared.
Even as these individual tones briefly coalesced into something resembling a melodic gestalt, the music could not be said to constitute a qū (曲) in its strict, classical sense. It was, of course, a composition that I was listening to because the pitches were bound into a score authored by the person whose name was printed on the recording, but a qū would require more than that. In the classical understanding, a qū is not brought into being simply by assembling diverse sonic elements within a span of time and giving them a title. Rather, it emerges when these elements combine to produce the illusion of a single, meandering, and undulating musical line—one that turns, curves, rises, and falls (Tien 2015, 68). What I heard in this music, however, was not a qū but a kind of sound environment—an ambiance rather than a line—where the fleeting semblances of linearity felt merely accidental.
At the few moments when sounds did come together to form something resembling a coherent gesture, it was impossible to say whether this arose from a feature in the music or from my own so-called cognitive functioning—the mind’s habitual tendency to bundle sounds into discrete objects or gestures of meaning. This ambiguity heightened my awareness of the listening mind’s spontaneously active, co-creative role in aesthetic experience—its capacity for free play (as Kant called it) or līlā (as the Sanskrit philosophers called it). Such play is always present in listening, but here it emerged into consciousness with unusual clarity. Perhaps this was simply because the music made no demands for any strenuous 'mental work'. There was no expectation that the listener engage in active recollection or anticipation to enjoy it. In other words, the music did not demand that one make sense of it formally; there was no need to seek the kind of inner 'logic of the work' that Adorno’s modernist aesthetics would have required. Instead, the music seemed to dwell in a state of active forgetfulness—letting go of both past and future—and the listening mind followed. The music relished in this forgetfulness and roamed around freely, perhaps as a fleeting embodiment of the ideal of "roaming at will" (逍遙遊, xiāoyáo yóu) described in the Zhuāngzi.
The music was, however, far from as chaotic as the description above might suggest. Its free roaming unfolded within an utterly tranquil and placid landscape. The tones were sparse, and the silences often long. Before first encountering the Number Pieces, I had heard and admired several of John Cage’s earlier works—such as the Concerto for Prepared Piano and String Quartet in Four Parts—but none of them embodied austerity as radically as these later compositions. Despite being soundful, this music carried the flavor of silent meditation. Its sounds did not lull the mind into a hazy, dreamlike state, but calmed it into an equanimity that was sharply alert—ready for anything unexpected to occur at any moment. Forgetful and calm, yet clear and aware.
Cage and qín-aesthetics
Listening in this way reminded me of how, in the tradition of the gǔqín, certain compositions include sections named after the Daoist meditation practice known simply as sitting and forgetting (zuò wàng 坐忘). The piece Wàng jī (忘機), for instance, is described in the preface to Zhū Quán’s (朱權) fifteenth-century qín handbook Shénqímìpǔ (神奇秘譜) as having the same flavor as “sitting down and forgetting meanings” (“大概與〈坐忘〉意趣同耳”) (Thompson, n.d.). I am reminded of this religio-aesthetic tradition not only because Cage himself alluded to it through his use of the Yìjīng (易經) in compositional practice, but because his music seems to belong more naturally to the spiritual lineage of the Shénqímìpǔ than to the lineage of so-called New Music represented by his teacher Schönberg. Sitting and forgetting could, I think, serve as an apt subtitle for all of Cage’s Number Pieces.
There are further touchstones between the Chinese aesthetics of the Shénqímìpǔ and the Number Pieces. In listening to this work, the tones did not seem to be pushed forth by the composer’s intention or by the will of the performers, but rather to arise and unfold of their own accord—as if they emerged spontaneously from nowhere. Earlier I have already gestured toward this quality by speaking of the music’s free roaming and forgetful character, yet the music might also be understood through the framework of zàohuà (造化): an aesthetic quality denoting fluency with nature and a sense of naturalness—as though the music were part of Creation itself.
The Shénqímìpǔ alludes to the aesthetic quality of zàohuà by giving the first three sections of the piece Xuán mò (玄默) the evocative subtitles "Shrinking the Universe", "Narrowing the Directions", and "Becoming One with Creation". In the preface to this piece, Zhū Quán—known by his self-appellation the Emaciated Immortal (qú xiān 臞仙)—writes that "[t]he interest of this piece is in shrinking heaven and earth and narrowing the six directions (down to manageable size), in advance of creation" (Thompson, n.d.). In other words, the qín performer, through her playing, gathers the whole process of nature’s creativity and spontaneous unfolding into the space in which she performs Xuán mò, attuning her playing to its rhythms. By seeming to arise and unfold by themselves—as if emerging from nowhere and everywhere at once—the sounds of the music come to feel like nature's own doing.
Sitting motionless,
nothing happening
nothing happening
Spring coming,
grass growing (Zenrin-kushū no. 380, in Shigematsu 1981)
The quality of zàohuà is attained by artists who, in their work, eliminate all signs of purposefulness and artifice. Cage’s method was radical in that he relied so extensively on chance procedures to achieve this effect. Yet despite the apparent novelty of such an approach—though not without precedent in the history of art—his striving for zàohuà makes him, in essence, a profoundly traditional artist. In the history of Chinese painting, this quality was famously recognized in the works of the Song-dynasty painters Lǐ Chéng (李成) and Fàn Kuān (范寬). The latter, in the words of James Cahill,
"is credited by Sung critics with a power akin to that of natural selection; his works were endowed, that is, with the same all-pervading rightness or inherent order which one senses in natural scenery. Nature can never produce a rock or tree that looks artificial and wrong; an ordinary mortal can, but a truly great artist, the critics maintained, never will, because he work with the same spontaneity as nature itself, and without human willfulness." (Cahill 1977, 34)
Cage himself testified to the importance of such naturalness in his music, describing his artistic aim as a striving for fluency with nature:
"I would see art not as opposed to nature but certainly as a means of introducing us to nature of which we are part. Art cetainly is essentially a human activity but it can move from being a selfish human activity to being what I would call a human activity which is fluent with nature… I’m not so much interested in salvation as I am in enlightenment… I want to wake up to the very life I’m living— not to be saved at some future time." (1963)
Attunement to a way of being
This Number Piece was, for me, more than merely pleasant to listen to. It seemed to teach something essential about life: it revealed a way of being—a spacious and equanimous mode of awareness—that could be applied even after the piece ended. The mode of listening that I was attuned to by Cage’s piece was uninvolved with emotional responses such as wanting pleasure or escaping suffering. It was content to merely be in the present moment. This, I felt, was a mode of being that could extend into everyday life. In this insight lies the complete fusion of aesthetics and ethics—a fusion long recognized in the Chinese religio-aesthetic tradition, where modal terms such as zàohuà and dàn describe not only the qualities of artworks but also the ethical virtues embodied in the comportment of religious sages.
The austere music of Cage encouraged me toward actual acts of renunciation. It was as if the music’s minimal style—its mild blandness and the focused attention it invited—quietly suggested a life with fewer distractions and fewer passions. The music seemed to ask: What if your thoughts could be as sparse as these pitches we are playing? What if your perception could share the same focused quality, the same attentiveness to detail, as this music? In the moments between sounds, what if you could simply rest in the natural luminosity of mind, without thoughts chasing after this or that—would that not be a joyous way to spend the remaining seasons of this life?
It inspired me to relinquish concerns and attachments, to adopt instead a more carefree and spacious stance. Life is impermanent, as fleeting as a flash of lightning, yet there is a clear, luminous, and equanimous awareness that endures—independent from the details that make up the particular drama of this life. The music conveyed this not through metaphor—as if its rhythm stood for the rhythm of thought—but by showing, by attuning the listener directly to its example.
Ryōkan writes:
The water of the valley stream
Never shouts at the tainted world
“Purify yourself!”
But naturally, as it is
Shows how it is done (trans. Abé & Haskel 1996, 75)
This, too, is akin to sitting in a room with a great, accomplished meditator and noticing how profoundly their presence shapes our own mode of being. Simply by being near them—without speaking—we are affected. No verbal instruction is necessary; their awareness itself becomes a silent teaching.
The stories of Ryōkan’s life show how deeply he embodied this capacity not only to be attuned to life’s shifting circumstances but also to attune others. One account recalls:
"Ryokan stayed with us for a couple of days. A peaceful atmosphere filled our house, and everyone became harmonious. This atmosphere remained for some days even after he left. As soon as I started talking with him, I realized that my heart had become pure. He did not explain Zen or other Buddhist scriptures, nor did he encourage wholesome actions. He would burn firewood in the kitchen or sit in meditation in our living room. He did not talk about literature or ethics. He was indescribably relaxed. He taught others only by his presence." (in Tanahashi 2012, 4-5)
A similar kind of attunement is found in Hermann Hesse’s account of the Music Master in The Glass Bead Game. Upon attaining awakening, the Music Master was able to attune those in his presence to a kind of silent music—a musical communion without explicit sound. As the book’s spiritual seeker, Joseph Knecht, recounts:
"...he received me into his peace and his brightness; cheerful serenity and a wonderful peace enclosed the two us. Without my having deliberately and consciously meditated, it somewhat resembled an unusually successsful and gladdening meditation [...] I experienced what radiated from him, or rather what surged back and forth between him and me like rhythmic breathing, entirely as music, as an altogether immaterial esoteric music which absorbs everyone who enters its magic circle ..." ( Hesse 2000, 245-246)
My point is that this process is also true of art: it teaches through its presence, through attunement. I am reminded of Johannes Volkelt’s phrase about how music operates—unmittelbar akustische Einfühlung—an unmediated acoustic empathy. The poem by Ryōkan, the account of his serene presence, and Hesse’s description of the Music Master in The Glass Bead Game all recognize the profound effects of nonverbal attunement—the possibility of a harmonization of ethical values without recourse to concepts or ideologies. This same insight was long acknowledged in the Confucian tradition, where Mencius observed that "benevolent words do not have as profound an effect on the people as benevolent music" (Lau 1970, 184).
A detailed attention to just sounds
One prominent feature of the listening mode to which the Number Pieces attuned me was a heightened, detailed attention to sound itself. The tones of the instruments—the sensual surfaces of sound—appeared with unusual clarity. They seemed to exist by themselves, not necessarily as parts of a composition. Earlier I described this as the music’s lack of qū (曲); perhaps it is precisely this absence that allows the listener to enter a more detailed listening, to hear sound more fully. The music invited the sounds to be heard simply as 'just sounds', as Cage would say—completely non-symbolic, unburdened by meaning or association.
Cage spent his artistic life reacting against Western music’s use of sound—a use he regarded as problematically symbolic. He did not, as he famously put it, want to hear a sound 'pretending to be in love with another sound', or a sound 'pretending to be president'. He wanted sounds to be simply audible phenomena—outer rather than inner—free of psychological or representational connotations.
It is perhaps here that Cage’s indebtedness to D. T. Suzuki’s distinctive interpretation of Zen becomes most evident. While it is true that artists in China and Japan had long responded to Zen’s critique of symbolism by creating works expressing an immediate, uncomplicated recognition of mere phenomena, Suzuki went further. As Sharf (1995) has noted, he began to anachronistically "render any and all Zen cultural artifacts—from kōan exchanges to dry-landscape gardens—as "expressions of" or "pointers toward" a pure, unmediated, and non-dual experience, known in Zen as satori" (248). It is intriguing to speculate how much of Cage’s emphasis on the aesthetics of 'just sound' was shaped by this Suzukian notion of art as an invitation into a pure experience that intimates satori.
While Sharf has shown that the Suzuki-esque notion of 'pure experience' is less grounded in traditional Buddhism than Cage might have believed—Candrakīrti, for instance, would not have acknowledged the possibility of any 'pure perception' free from conceptuality—we can nonetheless intuit the kind of aesthetic quality Suzuki intended with his description of art as pure experience and expressive of satori. Likewise, we can sense the aesthetic quality Cage had in mind with his idea of music as 'just sounds', even if we might raise epistemological objections. The Number Pieces succeed with remarkable clarity in bringing listening into a state that attends solely to the transparent mediality of sound and its appearance as empty phenomenality—a simple, direct perception of sound as something that requires no symbolic interpretation. Sounds heard as just sounds.
An aesthetics of ordinariness
Perhaps it was precisely because the sounds were heard so plainly—as just sounds—that the Number Piece did not construct its own autonomous reality or ask the listener to exclude external noises. Instead, the piece seemed to blend, like the smoke from burning sandalwood, into the fabric of everyday life. One reason may be that these sounds, perceived with such clarity and attention, revealed their own transparent edges and illusory emptiness. This is, in fact, the nature of all sounds, if only we attend to them carefully: whatever we examine closely is found to evaporate like dew in the sun. The phenomenon of a mere sound—a 'just sound'—therefore inevitably includes the ground from which it arises. When articulated as a mere sound, this ground is allowed to shine through, and sounds appear not in conflict with their surroundings but as sharing the same essence.
The result of this detailed listening in Cage’s piece was not only that the instrumental sounds appeared vividly to the senses. Equally present, equally alive, were the ambient sounds that Cage had not notated in his score.
On that August night in my late teens when I first heard one of Cage’s Number Pieces—the experience I have been recollecting here—I remember the sensation of the music blending with the humid sounds of summer: the crickets, the wind, all becoming part of time’s unfolding together with the sounds from the record player. I also remember the remarkable experience of how, in the rests between sounds from the speaker, the calm evening simply continued as usual, unfilled by any tense musical anticipation or expectation for the 'music' to resume. Whether sounds issued from the speakers or not, the experience remained much the same. It did not feel as though the music were creating a separate 'musical time', but rather that it existed within 'ordinary time'. It seemed to arise within a pre-existing field of everyday life.
Yet it was precisely my encounter with the music that made this perception of ordinary time possible. The music attuned me to its own mode of being; without the calm focus it offered, the mind might have been too scattered to notice the ordinariness of time in this way. The Cage interpreter Rob Haskins beautifully describes this aspect of listening to the late Number Pieces:
"More and more I find the music taking equal precedence with the other events around me, gently enveloping me until I see and hear minute details of everyday life with a fresh, uncluttered clarity. Perhaps this experience transcends any emotional reaction I could have." (Haskins 2004)
I take special note of Haskins’s use of the words clarity and everyday life. This music did not give rise to anything that could be described as mystical or 'religious', but rather to an experience of simple, uncluttered clarity—a revelation of ordinary life itself. What is important in Haskins’s description is that this quality is itself affective: it comes as a mood, though one that transcends the more obvious emotions. Among the classical Indian rasas, or aesthetic moods, it might correspond to the rasa of peace—śāntarasa. In the Chinese tradition, its taste might instead be compared to that of pure, fresh spring water, the summit of the modality of blandness (dàn 淡).
Within this aesthetics of ordinariness, everyday life was perceived in a detached and equanimous way. Yet this was not the ordinary mode of perception characteristic of our saṃsāric day-to-day existence. If by ordinary we mean the mind’s habitual caught-up-ness in the worldly winds, then this listening was anything but ordinary. It is important to distinguish these two senses of the word. When ordinary is used as a positive term—pointing to the pure nature of reality as immanent in everyday experience—it takes on a very different meaning. This affirmative sense of ordinariness is found throughout Chán and Tibetan Vajrayāna thought.
Ordinary mind
In a well-known kōan from the Chán tradition, Master Mǎzǔ’s disciple Nánquán Pǔyuàn answers Zhàozhōu Cóngshěn’s question, "What is the Dao?" with the words, "Ordinary mind is the Way". Here, ordinary mind does not refer to the deluded mind lost in passions, but to the recognition that our true, originally awakened mind is already present—fully available—even in the midst of those passions. As Mǎzǔ taught, our Buddha-mind reveals itself in the ordinary acts of "responding to situations and dealing with things" (Jia 2006, 68). Awakening is not something extraneous that must be attained; it has never been absent. In this sense, it is utterly ordinary.
Even though being lost in the passions is not separate from awakening, such lostness nevertheless obscures its recognition. Ordinary mind is therefore realized only when all striving is relinquished and we rest in a state free from effort or mental doing. Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche, speaking from the Tibetan tradition, explains that terms like ordinary mind
"point at the natural state by describing how our nature already is. It is not something we make, not something we construct, or something that we do. It is how our basic state is when not doing anything to it whatsoever. When we do not try to contrive or form it into anything at all, it is already rigpa, ordinary mind.” (2002, 87)
While emphasizing non-doing in this way clarifies how the ordinary mind is unconstructed, speaking of it as a negation of activity might imply a dualism—as if the true nature of mind were revealed only by 'stepping back' and distancing oneself from phenomena and activity. Yet recognizing the nature of mind is neither a matter of withdrawal from ordinary circumstances nor of being entangled in them. The Vimalakīrtinirdeśa Sūtra therefore describes the Bodhisattva’s practice as "[n]either the practice of ordinary men, nor the practice of sages" (quoted by Mǎzǔ in Jia 2006, 123). It is not about remaining a saṃsāric being, nor about separating oneself from saṃsāric existence through an ascetic pursuit of non-doing.
It is neither doing nor non-doing. For ordinary mind to be actualized, Jia explains, there can be "no intentional creation and action, no right or wrong, no grasping or rejecting, no terminable or permanent, no profane or holy" (2006, 68). Rather, it is a pure, nondual activity—one "not forced by you or others" (Dōgen 1999, 114). I find this phrase an extraordinarily accurate way of describing musical attunement: it is not something we do, nor something in which we are merely passive. It is neither caused by us nor by the music. Because of this, it is a pure activity—an activity in which ordinary mind can be revealed. Cage, in the foreword to Silence, gestures toward this attitude, perhaps unintentionally, when he writes that "nothing is accomplished by hearing a piece of music" (1961, xii). In other words, ordinary mind is accomplished precisely by hearing a piece of music, because musical attunement is a state in which there is no attempt to accomplish anything.
An attunement to non-obstruction
In listening to Cage’s Number Piece, the ordinary mind was intimated through a process of attunement. For the duration of the piece, the gross subject–object dualism in which we usually operate was suspended: my mind was the music, and the movement of the music was the movement of the mind. There was no sense of perceiving a piece of music. This nondual aspect of experience was not in any way mystical; in fact, it arises whenever we listen attentively. All musical listening is, at its root, nondual. Musical sounds are not grasped as objects out there, nor are they merely mental events within a mind. Likewise, they are neither something we do nor something we passively observe. In both respects, they resonate with nondual awareness.
What was remarkable about this Number Piece was that, in its long stretches of silence, this nondual awareness extended into nothing-in-particular. Earlier I described how the music coexisted with the ambient sounds that occurred alongside Cage’s notated material. By this I do not mean that those sounds became Music (with a capital M), but rather that a musical, nondual mode of listening was allowed to include them. I did not begin to hear the wind and the crickets as equally musical as the instrumental tones—as some composers within the Acoustic Ecology movement might intend—nor were the ambient sounds opposed to the Music as 'non-Music', unimportant or irrelevant to the artistic experience, as in much of the Western classical tradition. The ambient sounds were thus neither Music nor non-Music, neither noise nor not-noise.
What I mean by nothing-in-particular is that these surrounding sounds were allowed simply to exist—as a primordially undifferentiated field of phenomena perceived with true nondual equanimity. From this field, nothing was singled out as the object of perception, and, equally, nothing was excluded from it. It was nothing because it remained undifferentiated and ungrasped by discriminating consciousness; yet it was something because it was neither silent nor ignored. It was akin to the state of 'without-thinking' (hishiryō 非思量) described by Dōgen: neither thinking nor not-thinking, but an open equipoise that recognizes the wisdom of the Heart Sūtra—that form is emptiness and emptiness is form: rūpaṁ śūnyatā, śūnyataiva rūpaṁ.
The sounds of the instruments intimated the state of without-thinking by taking on some of its qualities: they behaved like an environment rather than a musical line; they were heard as 'just sounds', rather than as elements within a symbolic system; they breathed with the calm, organic rhythm of zàohuà rather than sounding composed by a human subject; they were bland and plain rather than artful or artificial; forgetful and purposeless rather than narrative and intentional. Because of this, the instrumental sounds gradually—through the slow unfolding of the listening experience—came to be perceived with the same equanimity as the silences-as-emptiness. At times there was no qualitative difference between hearing instrumental sounds and sensing the ambient sounds presencing in emptiness.
In those moments, the sounds might be said not merely to intimate emptiness but to become it. When particular sounds, articulated as just sounds, stood forth from emptiness without concealing it, they shone as audible thusness (tathātā). The mode of listening itself became an embodiment of what the Huáyán tradition calls the non-obstruction between universal principle (emptiness, suchness) and particular phenomena (form)—lǐshì wú’ài (理事無礙).
Aestheticized equanimity as upāya
From the description above, it is clear that the music carries a soteriological value. Yet I do not wish to overstate it. Certainly, at times it felt as though the mind were resting in a natural, unanesthetized state, and the music indeed intimates such a condition. Still, the attunemental mode of listening that extended into nothing-in-particular while hearing Cage’s piece was sustained primarily by the peaceful affectivity produced by the instruments. It was, in this sense, a poetic mood—akin to śāntarasa or dàn (淡)—in which we, as listeners, find beauty and consequently delight.
Of course, we do not crave this beauty in the same way we crave objects in ordinary life. There is truth in the theory of aesthetic detachment, which holds that a certain disinterest—or more precisely, a state that is neither interested nor uninterested—is required to perceive something as beautiful. Yet because this equanimity arises within an atmosphere of beauty, it becomes an aestheticized equanimity: one that we quietly approve of and even cherish, one that we grasp rather than reject.
There were, at certain points—not only in the silences—moments when the experience of listening to music seemed to dissolve, and equanimity revealed itself without aesthetic mediation. Yet such moments, while important, were far from constituting the greater part of the piece. A genuine recognition of the mind’s nature must occur entirely without even the subtlest grasping. It is difficult, within aesthetic experience, to enter into true equanimity. For this reason, Mahimabhaṭṭa, the twelfth-century Kashmiri aesthetician renowned for his Vyaktiviveka, regarded art as merely an upāya—a skillful means that may lead the listener further along the path, but one that must ultimately be left behind once it is no longer needed.
At the same time, the moments of unaestheticized equanimity I experienced in Cage’s piece would not have been possible without the affective presence of musical sound. The music itself was what enabled the glimpse of emptiness. The thirty-fifth chapter of the Dàodéjīng illuminates how musical beauty can lead toward an experience beyond the very pleasant sounds that first draw us in:
[樂與餌] Music and things dear and delectable
[過客止] stop the passerby in his tracks.
[道之出口] When it passes through [that is, "comes out of"] the mouth,
[淡乎其無味] the Dao is insipid and flavorless:
[視之不足見] it cannot be perceived,
[聽之不足聞] it cannot be heard,
[用之不足既] but it is inexhaustible. (trans. in Jullien 2004)
In this passage from Lǎozi, music is a skillful means—an upāya—with the power to make the listener, or passerby (過客), come to a stop (zhǐ 止). The character zhǐ can also be read as referring to the Buddhist meditation practice of śamatha (止), 'calm abiding'. On this reading, the pleasing sounds of music function as the śamatha-aspect of music: they bring about the standstill of thought and emotion. As Fǎzàng explains, "It is just like saying ‘Be quiet!’ If this voice were not there, other voices would not be made to cease" (quoted in Hakeda 2006, 40). The music causes the listener to stop, and only through this stillness does something imperceptible become perceptible.
The standstill that the fleeting sounds of music bring about makes it possible for the insipid and flavorless thusness to be savored. Since this passage comes from the Daoist tradition, thusness—the nature of mind and reality—is here referred to as Dao (道), the way things are. From a Buddhist perspective, the musical sounds serve as śamatha, the calm abiding that allows the clear seeing of vipaśyanā to arise—making it possible to taste the flavorless way of things. If vipaśyanā alone were presented, without the preceding music and "things dear and delectable", it would be difficult to taste the insipid way, which, as Hinton’s translation of the fourth line renders it, "isn’t even the thinnest of bland flavors" (Hinton 2008, 339). Because the Way itself is so flavorless, it rarely asserts itself without some form of upāya. By itself, it would not necessarily cause a traveler to stop.
Unlike the bland qualities that we can attribute to musical sounds, the bland and flavorless Way of things (道) is not merely an aesthetic mood or a lack of color. It is the actualization of the inexhaustible, indeterminate, non-conceptual source. Because it "transcends all particular actualizations," this source cannot "be reduced to a concrete manifestation or completely apprehended by the senses" (Jullien 2004, 42). It is the luminous wakefulness—vipaśyanā—of seeing things as they are.
Music can, through poetic qualities such as blandness, lead toward this non-conceptual and unsayable vipaśyanā by first bringing the listener to a state of standstill or śamatha, and then, by extending this stillness through sparsity, thin textures, and sonic absences, intimating the wisdom of vipaśyanā. Once we arrive at this state, however, we must leave “music” behind. We no longer need it, for we begin to find flavor in that which is truly flavorless.
The blandness spoken of in the Dàodéjīng is the ultimate blandness—not the relative blandness that manifests as an aesthetic quality, but a blandness beyond all words, utterly beyond like or dislike. Relative blandness serves as an upāya that helps us to authenticate ultimate blandness. Once this ultimate blandness is realized, the relative form falls away. Cage’s music functions as such an upāya: in the end, we no longer need it.
Using sounds to stop the clinging to sounds
As noted above through Fǎzàng’s metaphor of saying 'be quiet', using music in this way parallels the Buddhist view of language’s capacity to bring conceptualization to a halt. Within Buddhist soteriology, one of the principal forms of clinging to be overcome is prapañca—the mind’s endless proliferation of concepts and its inauthentic use of language, discordant with the way things truly are. This is not only because of our attachment to conceptualization itself, but because everything expressed in words is, in a strict sense, false. Language divides the world into categories, essences, and existent objects—but the world does not, in truth, exist in this way. As written in the Dàshéng Qǐxìn Lùn (大乘起信論):
"All explanations by words are provisional and without validity, for they are merely used in accordance with illusions and are incapable [of denoting Suchness]" (Hakeda 2006, 39-40).
Seeing things as they truly are—seeing the emptiness and suchness of phenomena—is necessary for liberation, yet this insight is not achieved simply by remaining silent or suppressing thought. It requires the use of techniques and methods, which, though grounded in the saṃsāric framework, can nonetheless lead beyond it. The Yuánjué jīng speaks of “using illusion to remedy illusion,” offering the metaphor of burning wood: “It is like rubbing two pieces of wood together to obtain fire. When the fire ignites and the wood completely burns, the ashes fly away and the smoke vanishes” (in Sheng-yen 1999, 20).
Language and concepts can be employed in this same skillful way—as John Dunne (2016) notes, "in order to try to unlearn the reality-habit about language and concepts." Engaging in Buddhist contemplative-philosophical practices such as studying Madhyamaka, working with kōans, or composing and intoning poetry, are all examples of this skillful use of language. It is through language itself that the end of language is reached, and beyond that border, ultimate truth is revealed. As Yán Yǔ beautifully wrote:
"Like a sound in emptiness ... words come to an end but the meaning is limitless" (如空中之音...言有尽而意无穷).
Yán Yǔ’s sentence echoes Dōgen’s 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” (trans. Waddell & Abe 2002, 14). Music can provide those very sounds that strike emptiness and reveal ultimate truth. This, I believe, is the deepest purpose of Cage’s music: an aestheticized perception that does not seek to perpetuate aestheticized perception. The Number Pieces bring listening to the point where the craving for music—and for sensory pleasure itself—comes gently to rest. It is remarkable how far the musical experience can carry us toward this cessation while still operating as music.
The difference between hearing the long silences in Cage’s Number Pieces and truly resting the mind in its natural state is, at times, almost imperceptible. Yet in the end, the music is a raft to be left behind once the river has been crossed. When that happens, we no longer feel any need for music or for aesthetic experience at all. For this reason, we may say of Cage’s music that it is music that intimates emptiness—music that carries within it the very end of music.
