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. It was as if no coordination existed between them. The musicians played sporadic single pitches surrounded by rests–some pitches were long, some rests were short; some pitches were overlapping and some were presented by themselves. Never did they converge to create unified gestures other than the occasional starting and ending at approximately the same time. The music did not hope for any thematic development or musical narrativity; it was content with an even, tranquil coming-and-going in which single pitches arose without any clear direction. The mind attuned to this music was left with an awareness completely in the present moment, not listening to any formal features or thematic unfoldings.
Even as these individual tones occasionally came together to create something like a melodic gestalt, the music could not be said to qualify as 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 the music to give rise to the illusion of a line. In its classical sense, a qū does not come into being just because one combines diverse sonic elements within a given time frame and gives them a title. Rather, for it to count as a qū, diverse sonic elements have to come together to create an illusion of a single meandering and undulating musical line that one can describe as having turns and curves and which rises and fall (Tien 2015, 68). What I was listening to at this moment sounded not like a qū but more like a 'sound environment'—an ambiance rather than a line—where the momentary resemblances to linearity seemed purely accidental.
At the few times when sounds did come together to create something that resembled a coherent gesture, it was impossible to say if this was due to a feature 'in the music' or due to a feature of my so-called 'cognitive functioning'—the mind’s habitual way of bundling sounds together into discrete objects or gestures of meaning. This ambiguity gave rise to a heightened awareness of the listening mind’s spontaneously active, co-creating role in aesthetic experience — the mind's capacity for 'free play' (as Kant called it) or līlā (as it is called in the Sanskrit tradition). This free play is always present when listening, but here it was able to come to the foreground and into my conscious experience. Perhaps this was simply afforded by the fact that the music did not make any demands for any heavily engaged 'mental work'. There was no expectation put on the listener to involve herself cognitively in either active recollection or anticipation in order to enjoy the music. In other words, the music was not demanding of the listener to 'make sense' of the music formally; there was no need to search for the kind of inner 'logic of the work' that the adequate listener in the modernist aesthetics of Adorno was to detect. The music seemed instead to be in a state of actively forgetting both past and future, and the listening mind followed in this. The music relished in forgetfulness and 'roamed around freely'; perhaps a momentary 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 imply. The free-roaming took place in an utterly tranquil and placid scenery. The tones were sparse and silences were often long. Before first encountering the Number Pieces, I had heard and admired some of John Cage’s earlier works, such as Concerto for Prepared Piano and String Quartet in Four Parts but none of them were as radical in their embodiment of austerity as these later compositions. Despite being soundful, this music had the flavor of silent meditation. The sounds did not simply lull the mind into a hazy dream-like state but calmed it into an equanimous state that was sharply alert and ready for anything unexpected to happen at any time. 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, some compositions have sections titled after the Daoist meditation practice simply called sitting and forgetting (zuò wàng 坐忘). The piece Wàng jī (忘機), for example, is suggested in the preface to Zhū Quán's (朱權) 15th-century qín handbook Shénqímìpǔ (神奇秘譜) to have 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 by using the Yìjīng (易經) in his artistic process but because Cage's music seemed much more to belong to the spiritual lineage of the Shénqímìpǔ than to the lineage of so-called New Music that his teacher Schönberg represented. Sitting and forgetting could be a suitable subtitle to all of Cage’s Number Pieces.
There are more touchstones between the Chinese aesthetics of the Shénqímìpǔ and the Number Pieces. When listening to this Number Piece, the tones did not sound as if they were being 'pushed forth' by a composer’s intention or the will of the performers but rather seemed to appear and unfold by themselves, as if they arose spontaneously from nowhere. Above, I have in a sense already gesticulated toward this quality by speaking of the music's 'free roaming' and 'forgetful' qualities, but the music could also be analyzed through the framework of zàohuà (造化); an aesthetic quality that points to fluency with nature and a feeling of 'naturalness'—as if the music was 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 evocate subtitles "Shrinking the Universe", "Narrowing the Directions", and "Becoming One with Creation". In the preface to this piece, Zhū Quán–or the 'Emaciated Immortal' (qú xiān 臞仙) as he refers to himself–explains 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, brings the whole process of nature's creativity and spontaneous unfolding into the space in which she is performing Xuán mò and harmonizes her playing with it. By seeming to appear and unfold by themselves, as if they came from nowhere and everywhere, the sounds of the music sound like nature's doing.
Sitting motionless,
nothing happening
nothing happening
Spring coming,
grass growing (Zenrin-kushū no. 380, in Shigematsu 1981)
The quality of zàohuà is achieved by those artists who in their work eliminate all signs of purposefulness and artifice. Cage's method was radical in that he leaned so heavily upon the use of 'random' chance procedures to create this effect. Despite this innovative move, although not without precedents in the history of art, his striving for zàohuà makes him a most traditional artist. In the history of Chinese painting, this quality was famously identified in the work of 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 would testify of the importance of such naturalness in his own music by describing striving for music that is 'fluent 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 just pleasant to listen to. It also seemed to teach something important 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 was a mode of being that could be extended into my daily life. In this thought lies the total fusion of aesthetics and ethics—a fusion that was clearly recognized in the Chinese religio-aesthetic tradition where aesthetic modal terms such as zàohuà and dàn were used to describe both artworks as well as the ethical virtues embodied in the behavior of religious sages.
The austere music of Cage encouraged me to actual acts of renunciation. It was as if the minimal style of music, its mild blandness, and the focused attention it invited, suggested a life with fewer distractions and fewer passions. The music asked: "What if your thoughts could be as sparse as these pitches we are playing? What if your perception could have the same focused quality and attention to detail as this music has? In the moments between sounds, what if you could just 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 you have on this earth?" It inspired me to give up concerns and attachment for this life and to instead adopt a more carefree and vast position; this life is impermanent and as fleeting as a flash of lightning but there is a clear, luminous, equanimous awareness independent from the details that make up the particular drama of this life. The music said this not in the kind of metaphorical form given here (with, for instance, the rhythm of the music serving as a metaphor for the rhythm of thoughts), but by showing or rather attuning us to its example. Ryōkan writes in a verse:
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 itself is similar to when we sit in a room with a great, accomplished meditator, and notice how profoundly they impact our mode of being. By just being in their presence without speaking, one is greatly influenced. We do not need to receive any verbal instructions, but by just being in their presence without speaking, we are greatly influenced by the way they conduct their awareness. The stories of Ryōkan's personal life tell us how he had the capacity to not only be tuned to life's many different situations but also to attune:
"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)
My point is that these qualities are also true of art; it is teaching by its presence and by attunement. I am reminded of a phrase spoken by Johannes Volkelt about how music operates: unmittelbar akustische Einfühlung—an unmediated acoustic empathy. The poem by Ryōkan, as well as the story about his personality, recognizes the profound effects of nonverbal attunement and the possibility for the harmonization of ethical values without using concepts or ideologies, an insight that was clearly recognized in the Confucian tradition when Mencius said 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 mode of listening that the Number Pieces attuned me to was a detailed attention to the sounds of the music. The sounds of the instruments–the sensual surfaces of sound–appeared with greater clarity than usual. These sounds sounded like they existed 'by themselves', not even necessarily belonging to a piece of music. Above, I described this as the music's lack of qū (曲), and maybe it is precisely this lack of qū that allows the listener to enter a detailed listening to sound more fully. The music allowed for the sounds to be heard as 'just sounds', as Cage often referred to them, and as completely 'non-symbolic'.
Cage was throughout his artistic life reacting against Western music's usage of sound–a usage that he considered 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 just the audible phenomena itself—'outer' not 'inner'—to not be anything psychological. It is perhaps here that Cage's influence from D.T. Suzuki's particular brand of Zen can be seen more clearly than anywhere else. While it is true that artists in China and Japan responded with some of their art to Zen's critique of symbolism by producing works that expressed the immediate and simple recognition of mere phenomena, Suzuki began, as Sharf (1995) has noted, 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 interesting to speculate just how much of Cage's emphasis on the aesthetics of 'just sound' was influenced by Suzuki's notion of art as being able to invite the audience into a 'pure experience' that intimates satori.
While Sharf has shown how the Suzuki-esque notion of 'pure experience' is not as grounded in traditional Buddhism as Cage might have thought (Candrakīrti would, for example, not acknowledge such 'pure perception' free from conceptuality as possible), we can still easily intuit what kind of aesthetic quality that Suzuki intended with his description of art as 'pure experience' and expressive of satori. We can likewise intuit the aesthetic quality that Cage had in mind with his description of music as 'just sounds' even if we have epistemological objections to raise: Cage's Number Pieces are extremely successful in bringing my hearing into a mode of listening that solely focuses on the transparent mediality of sound and its mere appearance as empty phenomenality—the simple perception of sound as nothing that needs to be interpreted symbolically. Sounds heard as just sounds.
An aesthetics of ordinariness
Perhaps precisely because the sounds were plainly heard as just sounds, the Number Piece did not create its own autonomous virtual reality that asked the listener to shut out all outside noises. Instead, it appeared that the piece blended, like the smoke from burning sandalwood, with 'everyday life'. One reason for this is perhaps that the sounds, precisely because they were perceived with such detail and clarity, revealed their transparent edges and illusory emptiness. It is the nature of all sounds to have this quality if we only give them the proper attention. Whatever we examine closely is found to evaporate like dew in the sun. The phenomenon of a mere sound (a 'just sound') will therefore necessarily include the ground from which it arises. When articulated as a mere sound, this ground is allowed to shine forth in the sound itself, and sounds will appear as not being in conflict with their surroundings but rather of the same essence. The result of the 'detailed listening' to just sounds in Cage's piece was thus not only that the sounds of the instruments appeared vividly to the senses. Equally present and vibrant were the ambient sounds that Cage had not notated in his score.
On this August night in my late teens of first hearing one of Cage’s Number Pieces that I am in this text recollecting, I remember the sensation of music blending with the humid sounds of the summer night; the crickets and wind becoming as much part of time's unfolding as the sounds from the record player that was playing the music. I also remember the remarkable experience of how in the rests between sounds from the speaker, the ordinary experience of the calm evening continued just like normal, not filled with any kind of tense musical anticipation waiting for some kind of 'music' to go on. Sounds from the speakers or no sounds from the speakers, it was not a particularly different experience. It did not feel as if the music was creating 'musical time’ but that it was existing in 'ordinary time'. It was as if the music simply arose in a pre-existing field of 'everyday life'. But it was precisely my encounter with the music that facilitated this feeling of 'ordinary time'. The music attuned me to its mode of being; if it was not for the calm focus that the music provided, the mind might have been too scattered to experience ordinary time in this way. The notable Cage interpreter Rob Haskins beautifully described this aspect of listening to Cage's late Number Pieces with these words:
"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 hold of Haskins's use of the words clarity and everyday life. This music did not give rise to anything that can be described as a mystical or 'religious' experience, but rather one of simple, uncluttered clarity and a revelation of ordinary, everyday life itself. What is important in Haskins’ description is that this quality in itself is affective—it comes as part of an emotional mood, albeit one of transcending gross emotional reactions. Among the classical Indian rasas, or aesthetic moods, it was perhaps the rasa of peace, śāntarasa. In the Chinese tradition, we might instead have described its taste as being like that of water, which was the apex of the modality of blandness (淡 dàn).
Within this 'aesthetics of ordinariness', everyday life was perceived in a detached and equanimous manner. Since this is not the 'ordinary' way of perceiving our saṣmāric day-to-day living, the listening was not ordinary at all, if we by 'ordinary' mean the caught-up-ness in the worldly winds that characterize much of our saṃsāric experience. These two different ways of using the word 'ordinary' are important to keep separate. The usage of 'ordinary' as a positive term pointing to the pure nature of reality as immanent in ordinary experience is frequently found in Chán and Tibetan Vajrayana. In a very famous koan from the Chán tradition, Master Mǎzǔ’s student Nánquán Pǔyuàn answers Zhàozhōu Cóngshěn’s question “What is Dao?” with the phrase “Ordinary Mind is the Way.” The term ordinary mind is not used here to refer to the saṃsāric ordinary mind that is lost in the passions but is rather used as a term to point to the fact that our true, originally awakened mind is already present and available to us in the very act of being lost in the passions. According to Mǎzǔ, our Buddha mind is revealed in the ordinary activities of "responding to situations and dealing with things" (Jia 2006, 68). Awakening is not anything extraneous that needs to be acquired and we have never been separated from it. In this regard, it is completely ordinary.
Even though being lost in the passions is not separate from awakening, this lostness hinders the recognition of it. Ordinary mind is, therefore, recognized only when we give up all sense of striving and rest in a state without any effort or mental doing. Chökyi Nyingma Rinpoche, speaking from the Tibetan tradition, explains that words 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 clarifies how the ordinary mind is unconstructed, talking about it as a negation of activity might imply a dualism in which the true nature of the mind only can be perceived if we simply take a 'step back' and distance ourselves from phenomena and activities. But recognizing the nature of mind is not a matter of distancing oneself from ordinary phenomena and activities, and neither about being caught up in them. The Vimalakīrtinirdeśa Sūtra, therefore, describes the practice of the Bodhisattva as "[n]either the practice of ordinary men, nor the practice of sages" (quoted by Mǎzǔ in Jia 2o06, 123). It is not about being an ordinary saṃsāric being, and neither is it about distancing oneself from this saṃsāric way of being by acting like a sage that tries to accomplish a state of non-doing. It is not doing, and also not non-doing. For ordinary mind to be actualized, Jia explains that 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). It is rather a pure, nondual activity that is "not forced by you or others" (Dōgen 1999, 114). Cage, in the foreword to Silence, plays into this attitude, perhaps accidentally, when he writes that "nothing is accomplished by hearing a piece of music" (1961, xii). In other words, ordinary mind is accomplished by hearing a piece of music precisely because musical attunement is a state of not trying to accomplish anything.
An attunement to non-obstruction
In listening to Cage’s Number Piece, the ordinary mind was intimated by a process of attunement. For the duration of listening to this Number 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 feeling of perceiving a Piece of Music. This nondual aspect of the experience was not anything mystical, indeed it happens every time we listen to music; all musical listening is in fact nondual. Musical sounds are not attended to as 'objects' out there nor as something solely 'mental' in a mind. In the same way, they are neither something we do nor are they something that we observe passively. In both of these ways, they are attuned with nondual awareness. What was particularly remarkable about this Number Piece, however, was that in the long moments of musical rests, this nondual mode of awareness was extended into nothing-in-particular. Above, I wrote how the music was co-existing with the ambient sounds happening simultaneously with what Cage had notated, but what I mean with this is not that ambient sounds became Music (with capital M), but rather that a musical, nondual mode of listening was allowed to exist with them. I did not start to hear the wind and crickets as equally musical as the pitches from the instruments (as can be the intention with some 'outdoors pieces' of composers associated with the Acoustic Ecology ideologies, e.g. the outdoor pieces of John Luther Adams), and neither were the ambient sounds opposed to the Music in a dualist manner as 'non-Music'— unimportant or irrelevant to the 'art' experience (as is the case in much Western Classical music). The ambient sounds were thus neither Music nor non-Music, and therefore also neither noise nor not-noise. What I am trying to get at with the formulation 'nothing-in-particular' is that the ambient sounds were allowed to exist as a primordially undifferentiated mass of phenomena perceived with true nondual equanimity. From this mass, nothing was chosen as the object of perception and, equally important, nothing was rejected from the perceptual experience; it was nothing because it was undifferentiated and not turned into objects by the discriminating consciousness, and it was something because it was not perceived as pure silence or ignored by consciousness. It was like the state of 'without-thinking' (非思量 hishiryō) described by Dōgen; neither thinking nor not-thinking but an open state in equipoise that recognizes the wisdom of the Heart Sūtra–that form is emptiness and emptiness is form: rūpaṁ śūnyatā, śūnyataiva rūpaṁ.
The sounds from the instruments were intimating the state of 'without-thinking' by way of taking on some of its qualities: they were behaving like an environment rather than a musical line; they were heard as 'just sounds' rather than functioning within a symbolic system; they embodied a calm, organic breath of zàohuà rather than sounding 'composed' by a human subject; they were bland and plain rather than artful and artificial; and they were forgetful and purposeless rather than narrative and intentional. Because of that, the sounds from the instruments gradually, throughout the slow unfolding of the listening experience, started to be perceived with the same kind of equanimity as the silences-as-emptiness. At certain moments, there was even no qualitative difference between hearing instrumental sounds and the presencing of environmental sounds in emptiness. At these moments, the sounds can be said to have become emptiness—not just intimating it. When particular sounds, articulated as just sounds, 'stood out' from emptiness by not hiding emptiness, they were shining forth as audible thusness (tathātā). The mode of listening was an embodiment of what in the Huáyán tradition is referred to as the non-obstruction between universal principle (emptiness, suchness) and particular phenomena (form)—lǐshì wú ài (理事無礙).
Aestheticized equanimity as upāya
Based on this description above, we can recognize an obvious soteriological value of the music. But I do not want to overemphasize this soteriological value either. Certainly, it did at times feel like I was resting the mind in a natural, unanesthetized state, and the music certainly intimates such a state, but the attunemental mode of listening that was extended into nothing-in-particular when listening to Cage's piece was primarily still made possible by the peaceful affectivity produced by the instruments. As such, it was still a poetic mood (similar to śāntarasa, or dàn 淡) that we as listeners find beauty in and that we consequently like. Of course, we do not crave it the way we crave objects in everyday life. There is truth to the theory of aesthetic detachment that says that a certain 'disinterest' (or more precisely, neither interest nor non-interest) is needed to perceive things as beautiful. However, because of the presence of a beautiful atmosphere, the equanimity felt was often an aestheticized equanimity; one that we subsequently 'like' and approve of—one that we grasp more than we reject.
There were important moments, not only in the silences, where I felt like the experience of listening to music dissolved, and the equanimity was disclosed unaesthetized, but these moments, albeit important, were far from constituting the majority of the piece. A true recognition of the nature of the mind has to be made completely without subtle grasping. It is difficult in aesthetic experience to enter into true equanimity. It is for this reason that Mahimabhaṭṭa, the 12th-century Kashimrian aesthetician famous for his Vyaktiviveka, considered art to be only an upāya, a skillful means used to bring the listener further on the path, but something that has to be left behind when no longer need it.
At the same time, these moments of unaesthetized equanimity that I experienced in Cage's piece would not even have been possible without the affectivity of musical sounds. The music was what enabled the moments of emptiness. The 35th chapter of the Dàodéjīng illuminates in this way how musical sounds can lead to an experience of something beyond the likable sounds that caused us to listen to it in the first place:
[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)
Music, in this passage from Lǎozi, is a skillful mean, an upāya, that has the power to make the listener (or 'passerby' 過客) stop (止 shǐ). The character for stop can also be read as referring to the Buddhist meditation practice of śamatha (止 shǐ). On this reading, the likable sounds of music function as the śamatha-aspect of music–they are what lead to the standstill of thoughts and emotions. 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 from this stoppage does something imperceivable become perceivable.
The standstill that the fleeting sounds of music enable makes it possible for the insipid and flavorless thusness to be relished. Since this text is from the Daoist tradition, thusness–the nature of the mind and reality–is here referred to as the way things are (dao, 道). From a Buddhist perspective, the musical sounds are the śamatha that makes the clear seeing of vipaśyanā arise–makes it possible to taste the flavorless way of things. If only vipaśyanā were presented, without the preceding music and "things dear and delectable", it would be hard to taste the insipid way, which, as Hinton's translation of the fourth line of the passage above has it, "isn't even the thinnest of bland flavors" (Hinton 2008, 339). Since the way by itself is so flavorless, it is difficult for it to assert itself without some kind of upāya. It alone would not necessarily cause a traveler to stop.
Unlike the bland qualities that we can imbue musical sounds with, the bland and flavorless way of things (道) is not just an 'aesthetic' mood or a lack of color. It is an 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 like blandness, lead the way to this non-conceptual and unsayable vipaśyanā by first leading the listener to a state of standstill or śamatha, and then, by extending this state of standstill to sparsity, thin textures, and sonic absences, intimate the wisdom of vipaśyanā. Once we arrive at the state of vipaśyanā, we must leave 'music' behind. We will no longer need it because we will find flavor in that which is truly flavorless. This blandness that the Dàodéjīng speaks of is the ultimate blandness, not the blandness that expresses itself as an aesthetic quality (which we might call relative blandness), but a blandness about which we can say nothing at all–a blandness that is completely beyond like or dislike. The relative blandness serves as an upāya that helps us authenticate ultimate blandness. Once ultimate blandness is authenticated, we will no longer need relative blandness. Cage’s music indeed serves as such an upāya; in the end, we will no longer need it.
Using sounds to stop the clinging to sounds
As alluded to above with Fǎzàng's metaphor of saying 'be quiet', using music in this way mirrors how Buddhists think of language's capability of stopping conceptualization. Within the Buddhist soteriology, one of the primary objects of clinging that needs to be overcome is prapañca. We must overcome our endless conceptualization and inauthentic use of language that is discordant with how things truly are. This is important not only because of the problem with addiction to concept-formation itself but because everything expressed with words necessarily is false. The world as expressed by words is one of categories, essences, and existent objects, but that is not how the world truly is. As it is 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 in order to obtain liberation, but this seeing is not brought about by simply staying quiet and trying to suppress all thoughts. Instead, it is about using some kind of technique or method. These techniques and methods will necessarily be grounded in a saṃsāric framework, but this will not stop them from being effective in leading beyond this framework. The Yuánjué jīng speaks of "using illusion to remedy illusion" and uses 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 used in such a skillful way, as John Dunne often has pointed out, "in order to try to unlearn the reality-habit about language and concepts" (2016). Engaging in Buddhist contemplative philosophical practices (such as studying Madhyamaka), practicing kōans, or composing and intoning poetry, are examples of skillful usages of language. It is the very use of language that leads to the end of language. The ultimate truth can then be revealed beyond the borders of language. As Yán Yǔ beautifully described it: "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).
With the music of Cage, we, in a very analogous manner to such an approach to language, arrive at a view of aestheticized perception that does not try to perpetuate aestheticized perception. The musical purpose of the Number Pieces is actually to halt our craving for music and sense pleasure altogether, and it is remarkable how far the musical experience actually can take us toward this goal while still operating like 'music'. The difference between listening to some of the long silences in Cage's Number Pieces and truly resting the mind in its natural state can be extremely subtle indeed. But in the end, the music is a raft we have to abandon once having crossed the river. Then, we will no longer feel any need for music or aesthetic experiences whatsoever. Because of this, we can say of Cage's music that it is music that intimates emptiness and that it carries with it the very end of music.
