The distance between art and awakening - Part I

Modes of engagement

The goal of the Buddhist practitioner is nirvāṇa—the awakened, unconditioned state, free from the suffering (duḥkha) associated with repeated rebirth in conditioned existence (saṃsāra). Although traditional depictions sometimes present these modes of existence as radically different landscapes—for example, in the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa, where buddhas and bodhisattvas perceive the world as a Pure Land while unawakened beings perceive a defiled, tainted world—saṃsāra and nirvāṇa are not two distinct ontological realities. As Nāgārjuna explains, "nothing of saṃsāra is different from nirvāṇa". Rather than representing different realities, they are two epistemic orientations to the same ontologically indeterminate reality—a primordial ground about which nothing can definitively be said, sometimes simply called tattva. In other words, the difference between the delusion of saṃsāra and the awakening of nirvāṇa lies in praxis: how tattva ('reality') is actualized and enacted. As Kasulis (2018) observes, "the state of existence remains the same, but the mode of engagement changes when one moves from delusion to enlightenment" (84).

Awakening consists in recognizing the nonduality of saṃsāra and nirvāṇa. Because of this, these terms function primarily as heuristic devices—useful for those at the early stages of the path but gradually ceasing to be necessary as one progresses toward awakening. Lama Shabkar expresses this insight poetically: from the perspective of awakening, “all the concepts of saṃsāra and nirvāṇa are liberated into the primordial ground, like clouds vanishing into the sky” (in Kunsang 1986, 80). Engaging tattva as nirvāṇa rather than as saṃsāra is the root of liberation (mokṣa). However, because this engagement must occur without reifying nirvāṇa as ontologically distinct from saṃsāra, nirvāṇa is actualized precisely when one does not strive for it or conceptualize it as the ‘goal’ of practice. Instead, awakening involves recognizing that awakening is already the nature of delusion, and allowing this insight to transform how tattva is enacted. As the Dàshéngqǐxìnlùn (大乘起信論) states, if beings "are freed from [the fixed notion of] enlightenment, then there will be no such thing as unenlightenment" (Hakeda 2006, 48).

That mokṣa is defined as a way of engaging and enacting tattva makes Buddhism an especially compelling framework for musicians. Musical practice, after all, is fundamentally concerned with transforming perception—with creating new ways of enacting phenomena and new modes of listening. A piece of music is not merely an arrangement of sounds but a way of enacting a world. These worlds differ not only in how they sound but in the modes of being and perceiving they afford—the embodied orientations that the listener inhabits during the unfolding of the music. The idea I want to explore in this text follows naturally from this: just as there are ways of enacting tattva that accord more closely with awakening than others, there may also be modes of musical attunement and perception that align more closely with awakening.

Because I am primarily interested in how modes of perceiving art relate to awakening, I will not, in this text, engage the fertile discussion of how modes of making art might lead to it. During the late Heian period, Buddhist poets such as Saigyō, Kamo no Chōmei, and the two Fujiwaras—Teika and Shunzei—grappled extensively with the question of how poetic composition could function as a path, or mārga (Jp. dō or michi), to awakening. They found predecessors in the poet-monks of the Tang and early Song dynasties and drew upon doctrinal developments from the Tendai and Shingon sects of Buddhism to support their claim—most famously expressed by Saigyō in his declaration that “it is through poetry that I have mastered the law [dharma]” (Rajyashree Pandey 1998, 48)—that the composition of poetry is itself a valid path to awakening.

In this text, however, my focus lies elsewhere: on how the audience of Saigyō’s poetry might come to "master the law". I am more interested in art experiences as upāya-s than in art making as mārga-s. Yet I do not mean to imply that mārga and upāya can be fully separated. The artist who creates art as upāya has that upāya work upon herself, thereby transforming it into a mārga. The first listener to any piece of music is always the composer or musician. Conversely, art created as mārga will likely bear qualities conducive to the path—qualities that render it an effective upāya for its audience.

Soteriological poetics

The idea that certain ways of perceiving—facilitated by art experiences—are more conducive to, or more in accord with, awakening than others was articulated early on in the work of Abhinavagupta. For him, relishing the aesthetic mood of śāntarasa, the rasa of peace, intimated a state of awakening because it, too, was liberated from gross emotionality. Abhinava therefore placed śāntarasa at the apex of aesthetic emotions, describing it as "the highest of human aims and [that which] results in spiritual liberation" (Dhvanyāloka, trans. Reich 2016). In his view, a work of art that enabled the relishing of this particular rasa possessed greater soteriological value than one evoking the more mundane rasa-s.

This basic idea of Abhinava finds a continuation in the work of Schopenhauer, for whom certain aesthetic states were likewise considered more conducive to awakening than others. Schopenhauer famously regarded the mode of perception and outlook on life elicited by tragedy as more awakening than those afforded by other theatrical genres. Tragedy, he argued, is uniquely effective in urging us "to turn our will away from life, to give up willing and loving life" (Young 2005, 142), and instead to direct our minds toward renunciation and resignation (Odin 2001, 44). From Schopenhauer’s soteriological perspective, it would therefore be wiser to attend a performance of a tragedy rather than a comedy—just as Abhinava would recommend art that evokes śāntarasa over that which evokes vīrarasa (heroism).

Another philosopher who articulated a similar idea was Theodor Adorno. He observed that certain modes of listening and the cognitive acts they enable could either keep listeners trapped in habitual patterns and volitional formations or guide them toward a form of 'enlightenment'. Although Adorno’s understanding of enlightenment and the means to attain it diverges sharply from Indian traditions, his classification of music according to its transformative potential resonates with Abhinava’s discussion of the soteriological significance of different rasa-s.

As the references above make clear, the idea that modes of perception can relate to soteriological models is by no means novel. Every Buddhist musician has likely had to confront the question of how listening to music fits within the path (mārga) to awakening—how the particular ways of perceiving and modes of listening afforded by aesthetic experiences relate to the goal of actualizing reality as nirvāṇa. Because answering this question necessarily produces a highly normative form of poetics, it must be remembered at the outset that the Buddha taught 84,000 different gates to the dharma, recognizing that each person requires teachings suited to their particular afflictions. The same applies to art and music: what is soteriologically valuable for some may not be so for others. There is an enormous—indeed, infinite—variety in the kinds of musical enactments that can be soteriologically valuable. It is not unlikely, and we probably already know such people, who, contrary to Schopenhauer’s claim, might be more susceptible to revelatory insights into the futility of saṃsāra from attending a comedy rather than a tragedy.

What makes some music more 'awakening' than others depends greatly on individual karma—the experiences, contexts, and practices unique to each listener. Because of these differences, the same musical work may be enacted in widely varying ways. How a practitioner of soteriological poetics can relate to these subjective variations is an important topic that I explore more fully in "Like rain from the mountain". In this text, however, I take a more general approach: rather than analyzing particular musical passages, I focus on qualities that music can afford, such as the enaction of non-conceptuality, discontinuity, impersonality, and non-symbolism. These qualities may manifest differently for different listeners and in different musical contexts. Even though I will occasionally mention musical works or passages associated with these qualities, the goal is not to claim that any specific musical instance produces them universally, but to explore the value of the qualities themselves and their potential relationship to the 'state' of awakening.

Ultimate and conventional

To begin this discussion, it is useful to recall the basic idea that the difference between nirvāṇa and saṃsāra is not ontological but practical: nirvāṇa and saṃsāra represent different orientations to the same ontologically indeterminate realm. The Buddhist tradition expresses this fundamental insight in various ways, emphasizing that 'reality' can be engaged either through an 'awakened' praxis or through a 'delusional' praxis.

Nirvāṇa and saṃsāra express this idea from an existential perspective. Saṃsāra is often described as the condition we “exist” within, as in the familiar image of the bhavacakra, or 'wheel of life'. Another way of gesturing toward this dyad is to speak of two distinct epistemic orientations: one grounded in conventional, or relative, truth (saṃvṛti-satya), and the other in ultimate, or absolute, truth (paramārtha-satya). The relation between these two truths—and the distinction between saṃsāra and nirvāṇa—is clarified by Mipam, who writes:

"It is suitable to posit that all phenomena of nirvāṇa, which are attained through the power of appearance in accord with reality, are ultimate; and that all phenomena of saṃsāra, which arise through the power of appearance that does not accord with reality, are relative." (quoted in Duckworth 2008, 12)

For Mipam, when the two truths are understood in this way, they indicate the difference between a praxis that either accords or disaccords with "reality"—that is, with how things truly are. In this usage, ultimate truth is hierarchically superior to conventional truth. Conventional truth articulates the misguided 'reality-habit' of saṃsāric beings, in which words and concepts are taken to refer to independently existing entities, while in fact they are empty of “own-being” (svabhāva). The authors of Knowing Illusion describe saṃvṛti-satya in a similar vein, as that which

"exists as it appears within the framework of everyday experience, and so is conventionally non-deceptive. Nonetheless, conventional phenomena appear to exist independently; hence, their mode of existence and mode of appearance are discordant" (Yakherds 2021, 22). 

For Mipam, conventional truth in this context designates inauthentic experience, characterized by a discordance between the mode of appearance and the mode of existence. In contrast, ultimate truth denotes authentic experience—a direct seeing of undistorted reality (Duckworth 2008, 12).

While the use of conventional and ultimate truth to describe non-accordance or accordance with reality derives from texts such as the Uttaratantra, which focus on articulating the authentic experience of reality, there is a second important context that stems from Madhyamaka philosophy. In this latter context, the two truths serve to describe the arising of phenomena—the 'objects' of perception—rather than modes of experience. Here, no hierarchy exists between ultimate and conventional truth, or between what Mipam calls emptiness and appearance. As he writes, “both appearance and emptiness are such that one is impossible without the other; if there is one, there is the other” (quoted in Duckworth 2008, 8). Everything that appears is empty, and there is no non-appearing emptiness:

"There is no ultimate apart from the relative,

There is no relative at all other than the ultimate.

Whatever appears is necessarily empty,

Whatever is empty necessarily appears

Because appearance that is not empty is impossible

And emptiness as well is not established without appearance." (in Duckworth 2008, 10)

This point is also emphasized by the translators of Candrakīrti’s Madhyamakāvatāra, who succinctly summarize the Prāsaṅgika position when describing how the conventional and ultimate are not separate but "merge and coincide" within phenomena:

"The ultimate is what the conventional really is; the conventional is the way the ultimate appears. The two truths are never separate; they merge and coincide in phenomena. The difference is not ontological but epistemic" (PTG 2002, 19). 

This context emphasizes the earlier point that the difference between the ultimate and the relative is one of epistemic praxis, not ontology. When speaking ontologically about the objects of perception, there can be no separation between the two truths. From the Prāsaṅgika perspective, treating the ‘two truths’ as distinct in this second context is only a heuristic device employed when speaking from a conventional standpoint. From this standpoint, the distinction between emptiness and phenomena—the ultimate and the relative—is a conceptual construction employed by the Svātantrikas, whose approach, as Mipam describes, is ‘gradual’. They teach the ultimate from within the relative, speaking from a post-meditative perspective that remains within the realm of language and thought. Mipam contrasts this gradual approach with that of the Prāsaṅgikas, who attempt to enact the ultimate directly (Duckworth 2008, 48). Their approach is ‘sudden’ because it points to the “uncategorized” ultimate from the perspective of meditative equipoise, where no two truths can be posited (Duckworth 2008). While the Svātantrikas often speak of the two truths as distinct, the Prāsaṅgikas consistently deny any such distinction (Duckworth 2008, 36).

The Svātantrikas’ and Prāsaṅgikas’ relationships to language are therefore quite different. The Prāsaṅgikas aim to deconstruct conventional language directly, revealing the view accessible through meditative equipoise, whereas the Svātantrikas operate firmly within the relative. The difference between these schools is primarily pedagogical: whether or not to actively engage with relative truth. The goal of both perspectives, however, is a state in which the two truths are not regarded as ultimately separate. Both schools would concur with Candrakīrti, who, quoting a scripture in his Madhyamakāvatārabhasya, writes: “On the ultimate level, O monks, there are no two truths. This ultimate truth is one” (PTG 2002, 41).

Prāsaṅgikas and Svātantrikas agree that the entirety of human intellect is grounded in epistemic practices aligned with relative truth. All concepts articulated within this framework of deceptive 'realism' point only back to aspects of conventional truth and are thus incapable of denoting absolute reality, or suchness (tathatā). From the ultimate perspective, words are provisional and lack validity, as the ultimate truth cannot be captured by the dichotomies inherent in language. The ultimate can only "be revealed beyond the borders of language" and "between existence and non-existence" (Harris 1991, 1). For this reason, words and concepts must be abandoned to actualize ultimate truth. Even describing ultimate truth as emptiness is ultimately false, as it relies on conceptual frameworks. Accordingly, the conventional epistemology of emptiness will "naturally dissolve as the liberating effects of the Buddhist path manifest" (Yakherds 2021, 25).

The origin of delusion

The idea that the two truths are ultimately just one would later be expressed more cosmogonically as Buddhism developed outside of India. Zōngmì’s Huáyán tradition speaks of the one mind (一心)—the true dharmadhātu and wondrous mind of perfect awakening (圓覺妙心)—as the ultimate source (本源) of all pure as well as impure dharmas. It is the "nature" (xìng, 性) and the "ontological ground" (Gregory 1991, 181) of both nirvāṇa and saṃsāra. Zōngmì writes that “there is no other dharma outside of the nature”, because all the “myriad dharmas” are simply the inherent functioning of the nature and are therefore identical with it. In other words, the nature is inseparable from its functioning. Since "all mundane and supermundane dharmas originate wholly from the nature" (Gregory 1991, 190), this model is typically referred to as nature-origination (性起)—an idea captured by the four-character phrase lǐ shì wú ài (理事無礙). There is a total non-obstruction (wú ài, 無礙) between phenomena (shì, 事) and ‘principle’ (lǐ, 理)—a term synonymous with emptiness, ultimate truth, or nature.

In this vein, the Dàshéngqǐxìnlùn, a key text in this tradition, describes the one mind as having two dimensions, or 'aspects': one corresponding to ultimate truth, suchness, or awakening, and the other to ignorance or unawakening. The latter persists because beings, through deluded thoughts (妄念), mistakenly reify it and fail to realize "oneness with Suchness" (Hakeda 2006, 48). They do not see that the unawakened mind is not separate from the original enlightenment (Hakeda 2006, 48), but is simply a manifest expression of it.

One of the scripture's most celebrated metaphors likens ignorance to the waves of the ocean. Just as waves arise from the still ocean, ignorance arises from original awakening. The waves have no independent substance, yet they are of the same nature as the ocean. When the waves subside—which Buddhist practice ultimately leads to—it is as if they were never there. They vanish, yet one cannot locate a point of disappearance, for they are never separate from the ocean. In this sense, the arising of waves unfolds within a fundamental state of non-arising, just as ignorance emerges from the basic state of original awakening.

Similarly, the Yuánjuéjīng (圓覺經), another key scripture in Zōngmì's Huáyán tradition, explains the insubstantiality of ignorance through the metaphors of dreams and illusions:

"Good sons, this "ignorance" actually lacks substance. It is like a man who is dreaming. At the time of the dream, there is non-existence, until he awakens and finds that there is nothing for him to hold on to. Similarly, when the sky-flowers disappear from the sky, you cannot say that there is a definite point of their disappearance. Why? Because there is no point at which they arise. All sentient beings falsely perceive arising and ceasing within this condition of non-arising. Therefore, they say that there is "transmigration through life-and-death"." (Muller 1999, 80)

Zōngmì highlights nature-origination as what sets the Huáyán tradition apart from Fǎxiàng. In Fǎxiàng, suchness is considered "totally inert" and "unchanging", with impure dharmas arising from the ālayavijñāna (storehouse consciousness), which is regarded as "unconnected with suchness" (Gregory 1991, 189). In this framework, as Hamar (2007) explains, “that which is originated appears as the [impure] conditions" (242); impure dharmas do not arise from suchness itself but rather from causes external to it. By contrast, in Huáyán’s nature-origination, "that which is originated is a pure function (jingyong 淨用), and is in accordance with the realization of absolute nature (zheng zhengxing 證┌性)" (Hamar 2007, 242), meaning that all phenomena, pure or impure, manifest as expressions of the fundamental nature itself.

That all phenomena are ultimately pure and in accordance with nirvāṇa does not negate a meaningful distinction between purity and impurity, or between awakening and delusion. For this reason, the Dàshéngqǐxìnlùn carefully preserves these two poles in its analysis of the ālayavijñāna, avoiding the erasure of delusion while still affirming that delusion is not ontologically separate from awakening. The storehouse consciousness is thus described as the unification of the mind of suchness with the arising-and-ceasing mind of saṃsāra (Lee 2019) in a 'neither the same nor different' relationship. Unlike the Fǎxiàng school, which regards the ālayavijñāna as separate from suchness—that is, entirely of the nature of saṃsāra—here it is described as the locus in which saṃsāra and nirvāṇa "diffuse harmoniously" with each other:

"The Mind as phenomena (saṃsāra) is grounded in the Tathāgatagarbha. What is called the Storehouse Consciousness is that in which "neither birth nor death (nirvāṇa)" diffuses harmoniously with "birth and death (saṃsāra)," and yet in which both are neither identical nor different. This Consciousness has two aspects which embrace all states of existence and create all states of existence. They are: (1) the aspect of enlightenment, and (2) the aspect of nonenlightenment." (Hakeda 2006, 43)

On the one hand, there is one mind and one nature from which everything arises; in this sense, nirvāṇa and saṃsāra are 'the same'. On the other hand, the states of existence experienced as nirvāṇa and saṃsāra are not identical. Their ways of being are thus neither completely identical nor entirely different, and any account of their relationship must accommodate this subtle tension.

Empty, cognizant and intersubjective

While the Dàshéngqǐxìnlùn implies a soteriological hierarchy between the two 'aspects' of the one mind, other Buddhist traditions have proposed similar dyadic metaphors to describe the mind’s dynamic workings and evolution—though in these cases, neither aspect is inherently more virtuous than the other. Yongjia Xuanjue and Zhiyi described the mind, respectively, as quiescent yet wakeful, and quiescent and luminous (Guo Gu 2021, 10). Similarly, the 11th-century Tendai monk Chūjin characterized the nature of mind—which is also the nature of all things (dharmatā)—as having the two inseparable aspects of quiescence and illumination. More recently, Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche has described the mind as empty cognizance, emphasizing its inseparable aspects of emptiness and cognizance.

Calling the nature of mind empty or quiescent emphasizes its formlessness: the mind does not "come into being as any concrete thing" and "does not assume any particular form" (Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche 2002, 44). This aspect is sometimes identified with the dharmakāya—or, as the Śrīmālādevī Siṃhanāda Sūtra describes it, thusness when completely undefiled (Wayman & Wayman 1974, 98). Describing the mind as cognizant or luminous, by contrast, emphasizes its unobstructed awareness and knowing. In these models, the two aspects—emptiness/quiescence and cognizance/luminosity—are inseparable and non-dual, constituting the primordial purity of mind itself.

These dyadic metaphors illustrate that Buddha nature is, on the one hand, free from afflictions (quiescent/empty) and, on the other hand, aware and capable of engaging with the conventional world (wakeful/cognizant/illuminating). Without invoking the language of nirvāṇa and saṃsāra, these metaphors indicate that the nature of mind transcends any duality between the two. Yet, similar to the Dàshéngqǐxìnlùn’s dyadic model—which, though harmonious, links one side to delusion—the models of Chūjin, Zhiyi, and Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche also suggest that one aspect of primordial purity is more causally connected to saṃsāra than the other. Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche explains that it is the cognizant quality of mind that gives rise to saṃsāra:

“[s]amsara evolves from this empty cognizance that is mind when the cognizant quality fixates and gets involved in clinging...It is because of mind’s cognizant quality that we experience. And it is in the act of experiencing that we become confused. It is not through the empty quality that confusion arises—only through cognizing." (Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche 2002, 64 & 46) 

That it is the cognizant aspect that gives rise to saṃsāra is logical, since it is this aspect that engages with and illuminates phenomena. A one-sided focus on the quiescent aspect leads toward annihilationism and non-existence, whereas a one-sided focus on phenomena leads to saṃsāra. However, it is important not to interpret this as implying that it is merely my own luminosity—or my personal 'cognizance,' in Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche's terminology—that generates clinging and the construction of saṃsāra. The mind that becomes the object of clinging is not a private, solipsistic mind.

When Chūjin states that the illuminating aspect of mind "is the 3,000 realms of being" (LaFleur 1973, 105), he does not merely mean the phenomenal world as it appears to, or is illuminated by, a single consciousness. Rather, the 3,000 realms constitute the shared, intersubjective world. In every thought-instant (一念), Chūjin teaches, all 3,000 realms are simultaneously present: each phenomenon contains all other phenomena (the '3,000 realms') within it—ichinen-sanzen (一念三千). There is thus a total interfusion of microcosm and macrocosm:

"[t]he principle that the 3,000 realms (i.e., all phenomena) are contained in one thought means that the mind (kokoro) is all things and all things are the mind. Trees-and-plants as well as sentient beings both possess all things. This is why sentient beings can conceive of trees and plants. If this were not so, there could be no cognition." (Chūjin trans. in LaFleur 1973, 105).

The final two sentences are particularly noteworthy because they offer a rationale for why total interpenetration must be the case: without it, we could not have cognition of things at all. This insight simultaneously addresses the problem of substance dualism—how the mental nature can interact with the material nature if they are fundamentally different—and the problem of knowing other minds. By positing that everything is contained in 'thought'—indicating a dissolution of the dualism between mind and matter—and that every moment of thought contains everything, Chūjin shows that all phenomena arise from the same principle and are interdependently related. In doing so, these philosophical difficulties are resolved, making the perception of an intersubjective world possible.

The one mind is thus not merely an individual's private mind, but the point at which all distinctions and dualisms—such as interior and exterior, subject and object, self and other, or idealism and materialism—dissolve. Tsele Natsok Rangdrol emphasizes this, writing that the mind-essence that underlies all phenomena is "not something that exists within the mind-stream of just one individual or just one buddha. It is the actual basis of all that appears and exists, the whole of samsara and nirvana" (1989, 5). Rather than a private mind, the foundation of the world is relationality, or intersubjectivity. One way to interpret Chūjin’s statement that the quiescent aspect of dharmatā "is the one mind and its illuminating aspect is the 3,000 realms of being" (quoted in LaFleur 1973, 105) is to see the one mind as the principle of intersubjectivity—or emptiness—and the illuminated aspect as the phenomena that appear as the 3,000 realms. It is when attention becomes fixated on what is illuminated that confusion arises; as one loses sight of the underlying emptiness, one becomes caught in appearances.

The perspectives of Chūjin, Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche, and the Dàshéngqǐxìnlùn offer three different, yet closely related, dyadic metaphors for how saṃsāra arises from primordial purity. Their basic idea is that mind has two inseparable aspects, and saṃsāra emerges when this unity is forgotten. Beings fail to realize oneness with suchness, and it is through this ignorance that the aspect of saṃsāra comes into being. In other words, beings develop avidyā—delusion or fundamental misunderstanding—regarding the nature of reality. They do not perceive that all things, whether pure or impure, are expressions of the one mind—the ground for both awakening and delusion—known as suchness (Hakeda 2006, 39).

From the perspective of saṃsāra, it is natural to speak of two truths because the primordial unity has already been obscured. Emptiness and phenomena are reified into two seemingly distinct orientations. Liberation, then, becomes the process of 'reintegrating' these two truths, ultimately arriving at a state in which speaking of "two" no longer makes sense—the perspective emphasized by the Prāsaṅgikas. This reintegration requires clearly perceiving that delusion regarding the nature of things arises from original awakening and is not separate from the one mind that serves as the ground for both awakening and delusion.

The content of awakening

To illustrate the concept of nature origination, the Dàshéngqǐxìnlùn employs the image of waves arising from water. Just as waves emerge from the ocean, ignorance arises from the pure mind. Waves share the same wetness as the ocean, and ignorance shares the same awakened nature as the pure mind. The Huáyán school extends this image with an additional water metaphor to explain the total interpenetration of phenomena—the mutual containment of microcosm and macrocosm—that Chūjin’s Tendai school expressed through the idea of ichinen-sanzen (一念三千), the notion that all phenomena are present in every moment. In this Huáyán metaphor, phenomena are likened to reflections appearing on the surface of a body of water when it becomes calm and clear. A text traditionally attributed to Fǎzàng explains:

"When delusion is brought to an end, the mind is clear and the myriad forms are simultaneously reflected. It is like the vast ocean: waves arise because of the wind; once the wind stops, the surface of the ocean becomes clear and still and there is no form that is no reflected upon it."  (in Gregory 1991, 160)

Fǎzàng explains in Reflections of the Dharmadhātu (Huáyán yóuxīn făjiè jì) that the myriad images reflected on the water’s surface interact harmoniously, such that within any single reflection, all other reflections are simultaneously present—in any phenomenon, all 3,000 worlds are contained. On the still surface of the water,

"various reflections multiply endlessly and their limit is impossible to fathom. To investigate one of them thoroughly is to pursue the infinite, for, in any one of them, all the rest vividly appear at the same time. [...] all the images appear simulaneously within it without distinction of past and present. The myriad diverse kinds [of images] penetrate each other without obstruction. The one and the many are reflected in one another without opposing each other" (in Gregory 1991, 155)

The interpenetration of phenomena, Gregory explains, is "the content of enlightenment" (1991, 158)—what a Buddha sees upon awakening, when the water is no longer agitated by waves. This total interpenetration, perceived in awakening, is also expressed as shì shì wú ài (事事無礙), the mutual non-obstruction among phenomena. According to Zōngmì’s Huáyán school, the ontological basis that makes this content of awakening possible is the principle of nature origination: the interpenetration of phenomena is possible only because all phenomena share the same nature.

The purity of phenomena

If the origin of delusion lies in a mistaken grasping of the one mind’s cognizant quality, the question then becomes: what is the origin of awakening? How does an adept transform delusion into the wisdom of a Buddha? This is, of course, the purpose of the entire Buddhist path: through practicing the six perfections, accumulating merit, and purifying negative karma, the practitioner gradually approaches awakening. Yet Buddhist scriptures also seek to explain what motivates a sentient being to begin this path at all. Where does the initial impulse to turn away from saṃsāra arise?

The Dàshéngqǐxìnlùn teaches that it is suchness itself that leads beings toward awakening:

"[Suchness] causes the deluded mind to loathe the suffering of saṃsāra and to aspire to nirvāṇa…Thus a man comes to believe in his essential nature, to know that what exists is the erroneous activity of the mind and that the world of objects in front of him is nonexistent, and to practice teachings to free himself [from the erroneously conceived world of objects]" (Hakeda 2006, 60-61).

Hakeda comments on this passage:

"Suchness within, i.e., original enlightenment, is constantly asserting itself in order to be actualized by breaking through the wall of ignorance. This intrinsic inner dynamics of Suchness is suggested by the term "internal permeation." " (Hakeda 2006, 61). 

This idea of suchness "asserting itself in order to be actualized" is closely connected to the theory of Buddha nature (tathāgatagarbha). The 'seed' and cause of awakening already exist within sentient beings; awakening does not need to be produced but revealed. Buddha nature thus refers to suchness as it abides within deluded beings—obscured yet present, capable of expressing itself once purified. The Śrīmālādevī Siṃhanāda Sūtra describes Buddha nature as suchness still defiled, or "not free from the store of defilement" (Wayman & Wayman 1974, 98). When purified and undefiled, Buddha nature manifests as dharmakāya—which, as discussed above, corresponds to the formless aspect of the mind’s nature: thusness when completely undefiled.

If delusion, in Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche's model, arises when clinging fixes upon the cognizant quality of mind’s nature, then awakening can be said to be instigated by its complementary, empty, space-like quality—what may be called dharmakāya when referring to the authentic nature of mind, or tathāgatagarbha when referring to that same nature as obscured by afflictions in an unawakened state. I take this to be the intent behind Kūkai’s doctrine of 'the dharmakāya expounding the dharma' (法身説法, hosshin seppō). Importantly, this does not mean that dharmakāya exists merely as a hidden substratum behind phenomena, calling out from some inaccessible depth. Rather, it teaches the dharma through the very fact that everything that appears is necessarily like space—through the phenomena themselves. The metaphor of waves and ocean illustrates the non-duality of mind and its appearances: phenomena are not external to a mind apprehending them, but are the very way the mind functions. It is only through phenomena themselves that dharmakāya can manifest the dharma; there is no non-appearing emptiness. As the Middle-Length Prajñāpāramitā states, "[i]n themselves, phenomena are like space. One can find in them no center and no boundary." Longchenpa cites this passage in his autocommentary to Finding Rest in Illusion to underscore the teaching:

"Sure it is that all things in phenomenal existence,

In saṃsāra and nirvāṇa,

Are in their nature equal and they all resemble space.

Understand that all are unborn,

Pure from the beginning." (Longchenpa 2019)

As the dharmakāya is an aspect of all phenomena, all forms and perceptions can be understood as its manifestation of the dharma. Appearances and phenomenality are not something to be eliminated or overcome; on the contrary, without them, emptiness could not be recognized, for there is no emptiness apart from its appearing. Phenomena themselves teach the dharma. The realization that the world’s appearances—the colors, forms, and sensations—are not opposed to awakening but constitute the very medium through which awakening is recognized, has inspired many poets. One of these was Kojijū (小侍従)–a contemporary of Saigyō–who in a beautiful verse in the Shinkokinshū expresses how she no longer needs to feel any regret for enjoying the colors of the world. She has realized the heart of the Heart Sūtra (心経の心をよめる); that form is emptiness and emptiness is form:

The heart dyed only

in the colors of the world: its regret is turned

to joy as the Buddha's Law resolves it all as emptiness (Barnhill 2011)

This insight lies at the heart of Rongzom Chökyi Zanpo's Establishing Appearances as Divine According to the Secret Mantra, the Vajra Vehicle, in which he argues for the purity and awakened nature of all phenomena. He grounds his reasoning in sūtras such as the Viṣayāvatārajñānālokālaṁkāra, where it is written that "[p]henomena, always unborn, are the Thus-gone-one" and are "like the Bliss-gone one" (Köppl 2008, 99). The opening of Rongzom's text begins by extolling that

"all mundande and supramundane phenomena, without any distinction, are primordially enlightened as the maṇdala of vajralike body, speech, and mind. Thus [the maṇḍala] is not accomplished through a path" (in Köppl 2008, 95).

In the Nyingma tradition, emptiness is often described in positive rather than neutral terms. Phenomena are not only empty, space-like, or expressions of dharmakāya; they are also imbued with bliss and, most importantly, described as pure. Although 'pure' might at first seem value-neutral, many other Buddhist traditions would hesitate to characterize emptiness in this way. If anything, they would insist that it is neutrally 'neither pure nor impure', devoid of any quality that could carry affective value. Longchen Rabjam, however, notes that expressions such as "primordial purity" (ka dag) are standard Dzogchen synonyms for emptiness (Köppl 2008, 54). Mipam further clarifies that this view is not a matter of esoteric revelation, but one that follows naturally from Madhyamaka reasoning: the recognition that all phenomena are fundamentally pure arises from the Prāsaṅgika view itself. In the following verses, Mipam explicitly links the concept of purity to Prāsaṅgika reasoning and to the teachings of Rongzom Chökyi Zanpo and Candrakīrti:

"To conclusively settle upon primordial purity

One needs to perfect the view of Prāsaṅgika;

From only the aspect of being free from constructs

The two are said to not be distinct." (in Duckworth 2008, 39)

"The glorious Candrakīrti in India

And Rongzom Chözang in Tibet

With one voice and one intent

Established the great emptiness of primordial purity.

Because these phenomena are primordially pure,

Or because they are primordially without intrinsic nature,

They are not born in either of the two truths." (Köppl 2008, 53)

For Mipam, purity is simply emptiness correctly understood. Describing things as 'pure' or 'divine' helps prevent the misunderstanding of emptiness as a mere negation of phenomena—as nothingness. It is easy to interpret Madhyamaka in this nihilistic way, yet its actual intent is to affirm that appearances are equally empty and apparent, since the two truths are not separate but coincide as phenomena. What appears is empty, and what is empty appears. As Köppl explains in her commentary on Rongzom’s work, because the Madhyamaka view rests on the "unity, or inseparability, of the two truths qua appearance and emptiness", it necessarily entails "a sense of purity, for appearances are primordially pure in being equally empty and apparent" (2008, 53).

According to Kūkai and the Dàshéngqǐxìnlùn, this purity has a way of asserting itself even through the illusion of saṃsāra. Phenomena themselves expound the dharma that guides sentient beings toward awakening. Yet these very phenomena are also what lead beings astray in the first place. In a circular movement, thusness gives rise both to its mistaken delusion and to its awakening. The entire unfolding of the triple world—everything we experience now, and everything we have experienced in past lives—is the nondual movement of Mind itself:

"The Buddha realms, the demon realms, Buddhist temples or polluted ground, sentient beings or nonsentient ones, grass and trees growing in thick profusion—all of this is a single Buddha Mind" (Hakuin, in Rouzer 2016, 12). 

The cognizant quality mistakes itself and leads the mind astray, while the empty quality brings it back. Sthiramati thus observes that, from the ultimate perspective, there has in awakening been no transformation of consciousness at all (Williams 2009, 100). What occurs at the point of awakening is not a transformation but a reintegration. As Hakeda (2006) writes, “the process of actualization of enlightenment is none other than [the process of integrating] the identity with the original enlightenment” (43). The movement from delusion to awakening is therefore nothing other than a re-acquaintance with original awakening.

Nature manifests in function

If masters like Rongzom Chökyi Zanpo emphasized the purity of phenomena, the Tang-dynasty Chan master Mǎzǔ Dàoyī emphasized that among these phenomena are also functions and activities. Mǎzǔ built upon the same idea mentioned above: in the nature-origination model, what arises is a pure function (jingyong 淨用) in accordance with the absolute nature (Hamar 2007, 242). At first glance, it may seem one thing to say that the nature of a certain phenomenal form—say, a vase—is by nature empty and the Thus-gone-one, and quite another to say that activities and actions also share in that same purity. This seems especially so if we think of forms as referring to ākāra-s and action as referring to karma. As Kachru (2021) states in his study on Vasubandhu: "perceptual experience is not itself  considered a form of action (or even activity by Vasubandhu (nor indeed, by any other Buddhist philosopher in his orbit, as far as I know)." (123) Yet, as contemporary philosophical perspectives like the enactive one has shown us, accepting the former necessarily entails accepting the latter, for the perception of form is never actionless but itself a form of doing. As I explore more closely in "Like Rain from the Mountain", perception is not merely passive but an active construction. To accept the purity and emptiness of percepts is therefore to accept the same for activities. Mǎzǔ insisted that it is precisely through this “external functioning” of the mind that its essence is revealed:

"seeing, listening, sensing, and knowing are inherently your original nature, which is also called original mind. There is no Buddha other than the mind" (Jia 2006, 77).

Just as ordinary phenomena are pure, so too are ordinary functions. And just as emptiness is revealed in phenomena, so too is it revealed in ordinary actions. Jia Jinhua (2006) explains that for Mǎzǔ, "instead of contemplating and seeing the internal essence of the true mind, Mazu stressed that it is through the external functioning of the mind that its essence is seen" (2006, 78). Accordingly, Mǎzǔ declared—echoing the Viṣayāvatārajñānālokālaṁkārasūtra cited above—that "all living beings have since beginningless kalpas been abiding in the samādhi of the Dharma-nature" (Poceski 1992, 22). To search for the nature of mind behind functions is to fall into dualism, as though the absolute were something hidden beyond or beneath relative phenomena and activities.

Zōngmì wrote that, according to members of Mǎzǔ's Hongzhou school, "[t]he total essences of greed, hatred, and delusion, of performance of good and evil actions, and the corresponding retribution of happiness or suffering of bitterness are all Buddha-nature" (in Jia 2006, 69). While this accurately describes the Hongzhou school's position, Zōngmì regarded this radical way of equating actions conducive to saṃsāra and those conducive to nirvāṇa as a distortion of the Buddha's teachings: if greed and compassion are equally already awakened activities, what is the purpose of the Buddhist path? As noted above, Zōngmì’s preferred scripture, the Dàshéngqǐxìnlùn, carefully articulates a distinction between saṃsāra and nirvāṇa to prevent them from collapsing entirely.

The difference between Zōngmì and the Hongzhou school, however, is not necessarily large if their statements are read as addressing different contexts of speech. The Hongzhou school’s equation of saṃsāra with nirvāṇa occurs on an ontological level, from the perspective of ultimate reality as perceived in meditation. Zōngmì, by contrast, differentiates them from the standpoint of conventional reality, after meditation. In other words, Zōngmì's perspective emphasizes practical implications rather than ontological identity. He illustrates this with a metaphor extending the water imagery from the Dàshéngqǐxìnlùn:

"[saying that there is no difference between greed and compassion] is like someone who only observes the wet nature [of water] as never changing, but fails to comprehend that, since water can carry both a boat or sink it, its merits and faults are remarkably different" (Jia 2006, 69).

The difference between Mǎzǔ and Zōngmì is similar to what Mipam above considered to be the difference between Prāsaṅgikas and Svātantrikas. Zōngmì’s perspective, like that of the Svātantrikas, is gradual, while Mǎzǔ’s, like that of the Prāsaṅgikas, is sudden. The difference is largely one of emphasis. Ontologically, both perspectives agree that delusions are of the same nature as awakening. From the standpoint of praxis, however, both Zōngmì and Mǎzǔ acknowledge a difference. In fact, both would likely concur with Dōgen when he articulates this distinction between ontology and praxis, writing that the Dharma-vehicle is

"utterly free and untrammeled. [...] It is never apart from you right where you are. [...] And yet if there is the slightest discrepancy, the Way is as distant as heaven from earth" (Waddell & Abe 2002, 2). 

The first sentence expresses an ontological truth: awakening is never apart from you, right where you are. The second addresses praxis, showing how even a slight misalignment can hinder the actualization of awakening: "If there is the slightest discrepancy, the Way is as distant as heaven from earth." Mǎzǔ explicitly makes this point when he notes that the nature itself is undifferentiated, yet its functioning differs:

"In ignorance it functions as [the storehouse] consciousness; in awakening it functions are [Buddhist] wisdom. [...] When ignorant, it is the ignorance of one's own original mind, when awakened, it is the awakening of one's own original nature" (in Jia 2006, 71). 

No Buddhist perspective holds that we automatically engage with phenomena in an awakened manner simply because the ordinary mind is ultimately of the same nature as the awakened mind. As discussed in the comparison between Mǎzǔ and Zōngmì, critics often conflate Mǎzǔ’s statements about the ultimate nature of things (paramārtha-satya) with claims about praxis and conventional reality (saṃvṛti-satya). While Mǎzǔ emphasizes that delusion and awakening share the same ground, he does not imply that ordinary conduct or perception is itself fully awakened—practical cultivation remains essential.

We return, then, to the opening insight: saṃsāra and nirvāṇa are inseparable in their ultimate nature. The difference lies not in being but in praxis—in how the world is lived and perceived. Something 'remains' between awakening and delusion, yet this continuity does not imply that everything remains unchanged. Rather, a transformation at the basis (āśrayaparāvṛtti) occurs, and what remains is perceived anew—like waves subsiding to reveal the unbroken reflection of light on a perfectly still lake. Awakening is not the creation of something foreign but the clear recognition of what has always been present.

Trisvabhāva

If nirvāṇa and saṃsāra designate existential categories, while saṃvṛti-satya and paramārtha-satya mark epistemological ones, we are still left with the question of how these distinctions are experienced from a first-person point of view. We can be more precise than simply saying, as we have above, that the experience of saṃvṛti-satya is one that disaccords (or, as Dōgen put it, involves a "discrepancy") with how things truly are, whereas the experience of paramārtha-satya accords with them. To approach this question, we turn to the Yogācārins, who, in the doctrine of the three natures (trisvabhāva), articulated this fundamental dyad from an experiential—or even phenomenological—perspective. By closely examining "different ways in which mind can function" and "different modes under which experience can appear to the experiencer" (Griffiths 1986, 85), the Yogācārins analyze the experiential dynamics that distinguish saṃsāra from nirvāṇa. The framework of the three natures is therefore particularly relevant to the present discussion, as its detailed account of how beings experience delusion and awakening provides a reference point against which we can later evaluate the soteriological value of certain aesthetic modes of perception.

In the doctrine of trisvabhāva, the basis for that which receives one of the two aforementioned praxical articulations (saṃsāra/nirvāṇa, saṃvṛti/paramārtha) is called by the Yogācārins the dependent or relative nature (paratantrasvabhāva). The Trisvabhāvanirdeśa explains this paratantrasvabhāva as "that which appears, in opposition to the way in which it appears" (Williams 2009, 90). The paratantra is, according to the Saṃdhinirmocana Sūtra, "the dependent origination of dharmas, that is, the causal flow" (Williams 2009, 90). It is called dependent because it is, as Asaṅga says in the Mahāyānasaṃgraha, reliant upon causes and conditions:

"[It is 'relative'] because it issues from the seeds which are its own tendencies, and is thus dependent upon conditions other [than itself]. It is called 'relative' because as soon as it has arisen it is incapable of enduring by itself for even a moment." (in Griffiths 1986, 85)

What 'remains' between awakening and delusion is, in one way of putting it, the paratantra. For this reason, it is spoken of as either defiled (sa_kleśabhāgapatita-paratantrasvabhāva) or pure (vyavadānabhagapatita-paratantra) (Hubbard 2008). This distinction arises because the perfected nature (pariniṣpanna), as we will see below, is described as the paratantra empty of the conceptualized nature. At that point, however, it is no longer paratantra in its original sense.

When Mipam, in his commentary on the Madhyāntavibhāga, speaks of a "basic field" that "cannot be one-sidedly explained as either pure or impure" (in DTC 2006, 45), I take him to have the paratantra in mind. Asaṅga writes: "[i]n one mode of being of being (parayana) paratantra is itself dependant on others. In another mode of being, it is parikalpita, and in another mode of being, it is pariniṣpanna" (quoted in Hubbard 2008). Paratantra is, in other words, the basis for both awakening and delusion.

As Harris explains, paratantra is both the "bedrock" of the saṃsāric condition—since it is from here that distorted appearances cohere into saṃsāric views of ‘reality’—and at the same time “signifies those moments of pure sensation at the base of everyday experience which may be met with more powerfully in meditation" (1991, 108–109)–since it is just the mere flow of that which appears. 

Unawakened beings take this mere flow of of appearances and perceptions (vijñaptimātra) of the paratantra and divide it according to deluded concepts and categories—dualistic notions such as experiencer/experienced or grasper/grasped (grāhaka/grāhya). The result is an "erroneous partition into supposedly intrinsically existing subjects and objects" (Williams 2009, 90). The Yogācārins call this deluded mode the conceptualized or imagined nature (parikalpita-svabhāva).

While the dependent nature is "beyond language", the conceptualized nature can be understood as the realm of language. As such, it conjures up a world that, in a certain sense, is unreal—a world in which subjects and objects are taken to truly exist. Language is partly responsible for this imaginary world, since "[l]anguage necessarily falsifies. It constructs supposedly intrinsically existing entities" (Williams 2009, 90). Yet language is not the sole cause: even beings without language construct a conceptual world.

Griffiths explains that for Vasubandhu, the conceptualized nature is

"the way in which things appear [to un-awakened being], the way in which experience constructs a world for itself, in contrast to the fact of its functioning which he identified with the relative aspect of experience. [...] The imagined aspect of experience consists essentially in dualism, a subject-object structure which does not reflect the way things (according to this theory) actually are" (Griffiths 1986, 86). 

These appearances are mere imagination and do not reflect things as they truly are—they are, in this sense, unreal (abhūta). Yet they nevertheless appear to awareness and are phenomenologically present. They exist (asti). As the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra states:

Entities neither exist as they are seen, 

Nor are they nonexistent. (In Yakherds 2021, 238)

The opening of the Madhyāntavibhāga succinctly summarizes this point:

The false imagination [abhūtaparikalpa] exists.

In it, the two do not exist. 

Emptiness exists here, 

And within it, that exists as well. (2006, 25)

The abhūtaparikalpa in the Madhyāntavibhāga is commonly glossed as another way of describing the paratantra (Keenan 1982, 13). It is the dualism of the parikalpitasvabhāva that is removed in awakening—not the paratantra or abhūtaparikalpa. Rather than being eliminated, the abhūtaparikalpa "remains" in emptiness. This is also the conclusion reached by Gadjin M. Nagao (1991) in his influential study of the Madhyāntavibhāga. According to him, abhūtaparikalpa

"is the subject of both "is not" and "is," of both nonexistence and existence. The duality of subject and object, which is essential to abhūtaparikalpa, is negated; hence, śūnyāta is. And that very emptiness of what is empty is never negated, is never nonexistent. It is in this sphere of śūnyāta that abhūtaparikalpa takes its shape anew; hence, "existence of nonexistence." In such a case, one and the same thing possesses a kind of "double structure" of being and non-being. This double structure will be seen both in abhūtaparikalpa and in śūnyāta;  in its aspect of 'non-being,' the abhūtaparikalpa necessarily turns out to be śūnyāta,  while in that of 'being,' śūnyāta itself naturally becomes abhūtaparikalpa." (Nagao 1991, 58)

Saying that the false imagination exists without the imagined nature (parikalpitasvabhāva) indeed sounds like speaking of the "existence of nonexistence": the imagined exists without its imagined nature. What is rejected are the imaginary constructs, not the pure paratantra. Sthiramati explains:

"The term 'imagination of the unreal' [abhūtaparikalpa] means either that in which the duality [of subject-object] is imagined, or, alternatively, that by which such a duality is imagined. The use of the word 'unreal' indicates that one imaginatively constructs this [world] through the categories of subject and object, when [in fact] it does not exist [according to those categories]. The use of the word 'imagination' indicates that external objects do not exist in the way that they are imagined. In this way it had been made clear that the defining characteristic of this [imagination of the unreal] is completely free from [the duality of] subject and object." (in Griffiths 1986, 87)

According to Mipam, both "the conventional imagination, as well as the thoroughly established emptiness that exists as its intrinsic nature", remain present in the final analysis. To deny either is to fall outside the Middle Way, in which what appears is empty and what is empty appears:

"These two must be asserted and accepted to be existent. If one asserts the non-existence of the imagination, cyclic existence will become absolutely non-existent and one will incur the fault of denigrating conventions. If one refutes emptiness, failing to comprehend that it exists in terms of its being established in relation to that subject, the imagination, then the apprehended and apprehender will end up being existent and one will incur the fault of exaggerating their status as ultimate" (DTC 2006, 27).

Because the paratantra, in a sense, remains, the accomplished nature (pariniṣpannasvabhāva) is usually described as 'the complete absence, within paratantrasvabhāva, of the parikalpitasvabhāva'. To actualize the paratantra without the conceptualized or imagined parikalpita is precisely what it means to realize the pariniṣpanna. Experiencing the pariniṣpannasvabhāva means that things are "seen as they are" (yathābhūtam). According to the Saṃdhinirmocana Sūtra, this is Suchness or Thusness (tathatā)—an ontologically indeterminate domain. It "represents a level of knowledge in which independent existence of self and other are precluded and there is perfect union of knower and known, epistemology and ontology" (Harris 1991, 147). This is the fact of nonduality: "there is neither subject nor object but only a single flow" (Williams 2009, 91). The state cannot be expressed in words, and a term such as Suchness (tathatā) merely signals "the limit of verbalization, wherein a word is used to put an end to words" (Hakeda 2006, 40). For, as Harris notes, pariniṣpanna "corresponds to the end of the path, in which nothing but pure sensation exists and there is no knower and nothing known. This is nirvāṇa" (1991, 108–109).

These different ways of engaging the basic field—either with or without the veil of the conceptualized nature (parikalpitasvabhāva)—give rise to the two orientations mentioned above. To not actualize the perfected nature (pariniṣpannasvabhāvam), or suchness (tathatā), is to remain within saṃsāra. It is thus in relation to the goal of realizing pariniṣpannasvabhāvam that we should analyze aesthetic experiences. By correlating musical modes of listening with pariniṣpannasvabhāvam, we may approach our question of how closely musical attunement approximates this mode of experiencing. Although the scriptures emphasize that the perfected nature cannot be described in words, a comparative analysis with art experiences nevertheless requires that we attempt to specify what it means to engage reality in this way. From the discussion above, we can already discern two essential features of suchness: non-conceptuality and nonduality. The state of suchness appears to be characterized by these two non-characterizations. The question for us, then, becomes: to what extent can musical attunement be regarded as non-conceptual and nondual?

Schopenhauer's analysis of music listening

In identifying these two key ideas, we see an immediate link to Schopenhauer's musical aesthetics. In Schopenhauer's works, music listening is precisely described as nondual and non-conceptual. This common focus of Schopenhauer and Yogācāra Buddhism on the themes of conceptuality and dualism provides a fertile ground for further exploration. Buddhist thinkers have generally said very little about music—and what they have said has mostly been negative (see "Music and Buddhist Monastics" for a brief overview)—which makes Schopenhauer’s reflections an especially valuable counterpart. Schopenhauer was not only a musically sensitive thinker but also shared with the Buddhists the view that the purpose of life is liberation from the suffering (duḥkha) of our ordinary mode of existence. For him, listening to music offered an intimation of that very liberation.

Schopenhauer saw music as something direct and immediate, and considered it to be a manifestation of the impersonal and abstract Will itself. What distinguishes music from all other art forms, according to him, is that it is not a 'copy of Ideas'. Whereas Ideas are the objectifications of the Will—that is, its conceptual representations—music embodies the pure, non-conceptual movement of the Will directly. In Schopenhauer’s philosophy, the Will is the thing-in-itself, "the reality underlying and bringing into being the appearances of the world" (Cross 2013, 183). Music listening, as the direct apprehension of the Will as noumenon without the mediation of concepts or representations, thus becomes for Schopenhauer a potential source of liberating insight into the nature of reality.

The postulation of the Will shows fascinating resonances with Buddhist thought, even though no single Buddhist concept maps neatly onto it. On the one hand, Schopenhauer’s soteriological aim—the extinction of the Will—resembles the early Buddhist notion of the cessation of karma, whose final "blowing out" (nirvāṇa) marks the end of the cycle of suffering. Understanding Schopenhauer’s Will as analogous to karma becomes plausible when we recall Chang’s (1971) formulation: "Karma is the creator, maintainer, and destroyer of both history and the universe" (xxiii). In this statement, one could almost substitute Will for karma without distorting Schopenhauer’s intent.

On the other hand, Schopenhauer’s Will can also be seen as analogous to the paratantrasvabhāva as understood by the Yogācārins. This analogy makes sense because it is precisely the paratantrasvabhāva—when perceived directly, without the overlay of conceptual construction (parikalpita)—that authenticates the pariniṣpannasvabhāva. This corresponds to Schopenhauer’s notion of the liberating insight into reality that arises from a non-conceptual and direct apprehension of the Will, which, according to him, takes place in musical attunement.

While the account above treats Schopenhauer’s goal as analogous to nirvāṇa, other commentators have offered a more pessimistic interpretation. The German philosopher Martin Seel, for instance, regards Schopenhauer’s aesthetics as fundamentally nihilistic. According to Seel,

"the aim of aesthetic perception is not a transformed encounter with, but an epistemic overcoming of, the empirical world. This is the world in which the principle of causality drafted by human understanding [Verstand] prevails; it is also the world in which we are herded about without any prospect of fulfilling our desires." (Seel 2005, 7)

While Seel’s description of the empirical world as one governed by human understanding—through language and concepts—maps easily onto saṃsāra as we have used the term here, art holds value for Schopenhauer, in Seel’s view, only insofar as it facilitates "the acquisition of theoretical and ethical insight" (2005, 7) and an overcoming of, rather than a transformed encounter with, the empirical world. For Seel, Schopenhauer’s aesthetics turn away from celebrating the appearance of sensuous phenomena toward an obsession with their cessation. In this respect, Seel’s interpretation of Schopenhauer diverges sharply from the view of awakening we have explored in this text so far.

On Seel’s account, Schopenhauer’s aesthetics aligns more closely with early Indian Buddhist thought than with the later Mahāyāna. The early Buddhists, we must remember, more readily regarded all sensuous appearances as defiled and described awakening primarily as a cessative state—a state of extinction. For the later Mahāyāna, this kind of language became problematic. As we have seen, Mahāyānists such as Rongzom Chökyi Zanpo describe phenomena not as defiled but as divine. From the Yogācāra perspective, an epistemic overcoming of the empirical world means only overcoming the tendency to reify that world’s "reality" through conceptual projection and dualistic perception. This overcoming leads to a transformed encounter with what has been the nature of that world all along—not its extinction. Sensuous appearances do not need to be abandoned for liberation to occur. While Seel interprets Schopenhauer as arguing for a cessation of existence, one can equally well argue (just as later Buddhists reinterpreted the words of the Buddha) that Schopenhauer’s goal is not nihility, but a transformation at the basis (āśrayaparāvṛtti) that enables a direct encounter with phenomena. In this text, this is how I am reading Schopenhauer.

Before we can relate Schopenhauer’s account of non-conceptual musical listening to the experience of pariniṣpannasvabhāva, we need a clearer understanding of what Buddhists mean by 'conceptuality'. In particular, we need to determine what is meant when they speak of the obscuration of Suchness by concepts. In what follows, I will provide a brief overview of contrasting Buddhist views on conceptuality across different traditions. Once we have a sense of these varying accounts, we can return to the act of listening to music and consider the validity of Schopenhauer’s claim that music listening is non-conceptual. As we will see, not all Buddhist philosophical perspectives are easily harmonized with Schopenhauer’s.

Views on conceptuality in Candrakirti's Madhyamaka 

In the Madhyamaka school, conceptuality (vikalpa) is regarded as lying at the very root of delusion. As Harris summarizes Nāgārjuna’s view,

"the unenlightened mind, through thought construction (vikalpa), creates false dichotomies (prapañca) leading to the belief in a world constructed of building blocks (dharma) possessing own-being (svabhāva)." (Harris 1991, 124) 

Whether or not this was Nāgārjuna’s original intent, later Madhyamaka thinkers often adopt an all-encompassing view of conceptuality, holding that perception is fundamentally conceptual. By default, all sensory perception is saturated with conceptuality; there is no perception free from thought construction. Candrakīrti, for example, denied the existence of any mind (citta) or mental states (caitta) in awakening that could apprehend ‘things’ unconstructedly (Yakherds 2021, 28). As Thompson (2020) notes, Madhyamikas in this vein are

"relentlessly critical of both the positivist idea that sense experience is immediately given to us, uncontaminated by concepts, and the realist idea that there is a way that the world essentially is in itself independent of any conceptual framework and that the mind can know this world." (Thompson 2020)

In this all-encompassing view, conceptualization encompasses not only what developmental psychology terms 'primary metaphors'—pre-linguistic mental constructs such as 'up', 'down', 'in', and 'out', upon which language is subsequently built—but also prapañca, the structural frameworks required for forming concepts in the first place, such as space and time. It further includes inescapable features of our cognitive systems, like object selection and edge detection—the processes through which perceptions are integrated and bound together (Dunne 2020, 582). 

Since sound, at least from a realist information-processing perspective on perception, involves the mental act of binding together milliseconds of auditory data—heterogeneous in spectral content—into continuous strands or layers that extend over time, nonconceptual perception of sound would seem impossible on the Madhyamaka account. Consider the processes described by "auditory stream analysis" (Bregman 1990): we can pick out the call of a white wagtail on the beach, even though each millisecond of sound has a completely different spectral composition. Recognizing it as the sound of a white wagtail, or even just as a 'bird,' is a form of gross conceptualization. In some Buddhist analyses, this gross form of conceptualization is precisely the type that must be overcome to actualize nirvāṇa. The Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra states:

"conceptual thought is that what finds expression in words such as 'This is an elephant, a horse, a chariot, a pedestrian, a living being, a woman,' and so on. Thus a conceptualization is that which illuminates the warrant for applying a term to an object, as when one thinks 'It is this kind and not another'" (in Thupten Jinpa 2020, 66).

This type of gross conceptuality is sometimes referred to as vicāra—seeing something and knowing what it is. It is a cognition that involves a universal. However, the application of labels is not the only form of conceptuality from which one must become free, according to philosophers who maintain that all perception is conceptual. At the most radical level, even merely 'merging' each 'soundbite' into a segregated sound—distinguishing the white wagtail from surrounding sounds as its own auditory stream—or perceiving a sequence of tones as forming a musical movement or an auditory Gestalt, constitutes conceptualization. Simply performing this kind of 'edge detection' around phenomena, before even applying a universal, is itself a conceptual activity. Even animals without language perceive through such conceptual processes. On this view, considering pre-categorical grouping and edge detection to be conceptual implies that nearly all perception is conceptual.

If all such perception is conceptual, then a person who has experienced freedom from concepts would not be able to pick out her own name from the 'flow of pure perception' if it were called. It would not make sense to say that this person 'hears' at all. From this perspective, the awakened Buddha, free from conceptuality, would not perceive the common world nor the beings that inhabit it. Candrakīrti writes in his Madhyamakāvatārabhāṣya that for the Buddha, "the fluctuation of mind and mental functions has completely ceased" (trans. Dunne 1996, 544). Dunne explains that "at the highest state of understanding, where one’s knowledge is completely non-conceptual, nothing appears at all" (1996, 544). It is only in the eyes of others that the Buddha seemingly perceives. As Taktsang Lotsawa writes:

"The path of seeing does not contain multiple instants. 

Because, from one's perspective, all appearances of cognitive objects have faded, 

The inconceivable activities are a play in the perception of others. 

These are the foremost among the uncommon, special assertions . . . 

For proofs, see the scriptures of the Great Madhyamaka." (In Yakherds 2021, 272)

For a Buddha, there are no "multiple instants"; there is no perception because all "cognitive objects have faded". The activities of the Buddha only continue "in the perception of others". After a Buddha's awakening, the Buddha is no longer "really present with us" (Tashi Tsering in Yakherds 2021, 290) but functions, as Śantideva wrote, like a wish-fulfilling jewel or a wish-fulfilling tree. These inanimate wish-fulfilling objects "fulfill the expectation of sentient beings, in the same manner sentient beings can see the bodies of the Buddha in the virtue of his own previous prayers" (Tashi Tsering in Yakherds 2021, 290). In the Introduction to the Middle Way, Candrakīrti writes:

"Just as a powerful potter makes his wheel turn for a long time, so also one can see that things like pots are produced without futher effort. Similarly, in the present, one who attained the embodiment of truth is impelled by the excellent virtues and aspirations of beings without any further effort, but is no longer motivated by any intention" (in Yakherds 2021, 291).

This view of Candrakīrti seems, to me, at odds with Mipam’s interpretation, which ascribes a shared intent between Candrakīrti and Rongzom Chökyi Zanpo, as introduced above. When correctly understood, emptiness is not annihilation; yet this account of Candrakīrti leans clearly toward an annihilationist perspective. In contrast, Rongzom and Mipam, as I understand them, regard the Middle Way as a state in which phenomena are experienced as "primordially pure" because they are "equally empty and apparent", rather than "born in either of the two truths" (Köppl 2008, 53). I will return to this point below; for now, I will let Candrakīrti stand as a representative of an all-encompassing view of conceptuality.

Views on conceptuality in the Abidharma and Pramāṇa-vāda

The move toward Candrakīrti's all-encompassing definition of conceptuality can already be seen in some Abhidharma schools, which argued against the more mainstream Abhidharma belief that "prior to the conceptual recognition of a sense object by mind-cognition, the object is grasped non-conceptually by sensory cognition" (Sharf 2018, 835). This postulated non-conceptual 'raw' quale amounted to 'knowing blue' without knowing that "this is blue." Such a 'raw' quale was pre-linguistic and pre-categorical; it was said to involve no "general characteristic" (sāmānyalakṣaṇa). However, the Vaibhāṣika school claimed that even merely grasping the transient particular (sometimes referred to as the svalakṣaṇa) required "some minimal discriminative capacity" (Sharf 2018, 837). As Sharf explains:

"eye-cognition can differentiate blue from yellow or red or white, and [..] this occurs in the perceptual stream prior to the application of concepts such as "blue" and "yellow" and "red" and "white"." (2018, 837-838) 

The idea that even this 'edge-detection' between colors involves some conceptual activity initiated a line of theoretical inquiry that increasingly framed almost all appearances as conceptual. Sharf further explains:

"[t]he Vaibhāṣikas went on to devise a specific discriminate mechanism, namely "inherent discrimination" (svabhāvavikalpa) to account for this capacity, and they explained it with reference to two mental factors, vitarka (jue 覺, xun 尋) and vicāra (guan 觀, si 伺), which might be rendered "coarse discernment" and "fine discernment." " (Sharf 2018, 837-838). 

The reason why not all Abidharma schools considered all perception to be conceptual may be difficult to grasp, 

Given the discrepancy that all Abidharma schools postulate between how things really are—imperceptibly brief and spatially non-extended dharmas—and how they appear—as singular objects—it might be surprising that only some schools, such as the Vaibhāṣikas, edged toward the idea that all perception is inherently discriminatory. Spatially, "all cognitive images appear to have spatial extension (sthūlatā)" (Dunne 2004/2022, 112), yet this extension is absent in the final Abidharma analysis. Temporally, Abidharma theories were based on causal chains between momentary instants, kṣaṇa-s, in which arising and ceasing occur instantaneously, and we mistakenly construct false continuities from these fleeting, unique events. From this perspective, it might seem natural to defer all experiences of Gestalts—the bundling of particles into singularities—to conceptuality. Yet, as Dunne (2004/2022) explains when describing Dharmakīrti's 'External Realist' level of analysis—still very much within the realm of mainstream Abidharma—"such an admission would render Dharmakīrti's system unworkable" (112). Abidharma theorists therefore devised a way to work around this problem.

Building on the Abidharma concern with non-conceptual perception, Dharmakīrti (at least when speaking on this penultimate level of analysis) proposed that while the "actual objects of a single perception are multiple infinitesimal particles", these work together to create a 'singular effect' that is itself non-conceptual (Dunne 2004, 112). A similar point is made by Śubhagupta, who observes that the individual oscillations constituting the stimulus of a 'sound' are too brief to be registered; instead, the actual, non-conceptual stimulus of a sound consists "in a series of instantaneous events that together bring it about that one hears the sound" (Siderits 2022, 137). The resultant 'stimulus' need not be a conceptual construction because what one hears is not the individual oscillations which could be the subject of conceptual superimposition. As Dunne puts it, "the singularity of appearance at the mental level corresponds to singularity of effect at the physical level" (2004, 112). In this way, one can avoid treating all appearances as conceptual, allowing 'shapes' and 'forms' to appear nonconceptually.

This argument, however, seems to me to resemble the third argument refuted by Dignāga in the Ālambanaparīkṣā: the claim that it is the 'combined features' (saṃcitākāra) of aggregated individual dharmas that give rise to a percept (ālambana). In his commentary, Mingyu explains that "the particles help each other", since "the particles constitute the collective and are able to serve as a percept condition for the five sensory organs" (in Duckworth et al. 2016, 18). This is analogous to five people being able to move a tree only when they push together rather than sequentially, or to producing sesame oil by pressing many sesame seeds at once. While such a theory can differentiate between effect and volume—since combining more dharmas would yield greater mass or power—it cannot account for differences in configuration. As Vinītadeva notes, "you could have awareness of pots of different sizes but no awareness of a cup" (in Duckworth et al. 2016, 115). In other words, one could explain differences in size but not differences in kind: why a cup appears distinct from a pot, given that both are composed of the same dharmas. For such distinctions to hold, differences in configuration would have to be located at the level of the dharmas themselves, the ultimately real existents that, on this model, possess causal efficacy. As Vinītadeva observes, "these characteristics would also have to be shared by fundamental particles" (in Duckworth et al. 2016, 114). Yet dharmas are said to be partless "spheres", devoid of internal structure or variation. Consequently, they cannot account for the diversity of configurations seen in macro-objects. As Vinītadeva concludes, "Whatever has parts can be configured in various ways, but things that are partless cannot" (in Duckworth et al. 2016, 19).

The conclusion of Dignāga’s analysis is that, on a dharmic External Realist view, one cannot adequately account for the ālambana. This is because, within that framework, percepts must be explained in terms of imperceptible dharmas; yet since such dharmas never actually appear, the view fails to satisfy the classical philosophical requirement that the ālambana must both be the cause of perception and be what appears (Duckworth et al. 2016, 14). For this reason, the External Realist position must be abandoned. One must instead acknowledge that appearances are merely appearances—not the appearances of anything external—since "it contains no information regarding externality or material constitution" (Duckworth et al. 2016, 22). Under this interpretation, the perceptual appearance itself can serve as both the cause of perception and what appears.

Since perception is no longer explained as the aggregation of ultimately real, external existents, it also becomes unnecessary to regard the arising of ālambana as conceptual. Rather than being constituted by particles, intentional objects possess "a unity and integrity that defy that kind of decomposition" (Duckworth et al. 2016, 30).

The epistemological tradition of Dignāga and Dharmakīrti is well known for the claim that "direct perception is free from conceptualization that attaches a name, a type, and so on" (Compendium of Valid Cognition, quoted in Thupten Jinpa 2020, 65). In other words, they hold that sense consciousness is nonconceptual. As Harris explains, for Dignāga and Dharmakīrti,

"perception (pratyakṣa) consists of one pure moment of sensation immediately followed by subsequent moments of thought activity in the minds of the unenlightened. While the first moment is uncontaminated and in the enlightened provides true knowledge, further moments will distort the image in a direction determined by the past actions and predilections of the perceiver" (Harris 1991, 108). 

Harris thus draws a clear parallel between this theory and the doctrine of the trisvabhāva. The pure initial moment of perception corresponds to the paratantrasvabhāva, while a continuum of such moments without conceptual distortion would correspond to the pariniṣpanna. As Dunne (1996) explains, unlike the buddhas envisioned by Candrakīrti, "Dharmakīrti’s buddhas still participate in our world; they still see what we see—we just have the misfortune of superimposing our immediate experience with an unreal web of concepts" (535). 

This is also the account that Gihwa (기화, 己和) offers in his commentary on the Yuánjuéjīng. In the sūtra, the state of "fully perfected" awakening is likened to vision free from conceptuality and duality:

"It is like vision seeing an object. The vision completely pervades without experiencing attraction or aversion. Why? Vision, in essence, has no duality, therefore it has neither attraction nor aversion." (Muller 1999, 114)

Gihwa explicitly connects this passage to the Buddhist epistemological account of perception, in which there is nonconceptual content for only a single moment before it is interpreted by the conceptual mind. He takes the sūtra to mean that for fully awakened beings, all moments are like that:

"The clause "It is like vision seeing an object" refers to the time when vision meets its objects but sentiments regarding the object have not yet arisen. This is the meaning of the saying "aware of only the single step in front of one." In the vision of a great worldling it is only at the first instant of his perception of form that there is no discrimination. Immediately after that, he manifests affected views and produces like and dislike. Therefore it is said: "When first abiding in perfect direct perception, floating dust has not yet arisen; subsequently you fall into the perception of the stage of the mano­consciousness, and the concealment and disclosure of the external world takes place." At the time of no­discrimination, even though you meet beautiful and ugly, you do not know them as beautiful and ugly; therefore there are no views of attraction and aversion or grasping and releasing. The participation in the world of differences by the practitioner of enlightenment, without having the view of difference, is like this." (Muller 1999, 115)

Gihwa thus aligns with Dignāga, Dharmakīrti, and the non-Vaibhāṣika Abhidharma schools in arguing that perception is not, by default, conceptual. Even though the theory of Abidharma claims that the world is constituted by imperceptily brief dharmas, we do not merely combine these 'in our heads' through a conceptual framework. We see the singularity rather than composite nature of phenomena, and this singularity is non-conceptual.

Views on conceptuality in early Yogācāra

As mentioned above, the Vaibhāṣikas—who came to regard all perception as inherently conceptual and discriminatory—explained this ‘inherent discrimination’ (svabhāvavikalpa) through the two mental factors vitarka and vicāra. In the Mahāvibhāṣā, these are said to accompany every sensory cognition: "The five sense cognitions such as the eye and so on arise always in association with vitarka and vicāra" (in Sharf 2018, 840).

Already in the Pāli canon, however, it was recognized that vitakka (vitarka) and vicāra subside (vūpasamā) upon entering the second dhyāna (Lusthaus 2002, 89)—a point repeated both in the Suttas and the Abhidhamma. This point is retained in the subsequent Sanskrit literature: Vasubandhu, in the Abhidharmakośa, maintains that these mental factors fall away as one ascends the stages of dhyāna, and this view is reiterated in the Yogācāra text Yogācārabhūmi. Commenting on this text, Kragh (2013) notes that vitarka and vicāra "play a crucial role in saṃsāric bondage, and what characterizes a successful Buddhist meditation (samādhi, dìng 定, ting nge 'dzin) is said to be the pacification and absence of these particular mental factors" (72).

Kragh glosses vitarka as "discernment" and vicāra as "discursiveness": 

"Discernment [vitarka] is said to be the cognitive operation that is responsible for ascertaining what is perceived by the senses by initially labeling it with a name, while discursiveness [vicāra] is explained as being the subsequent conceptual operation of deciding whether the perceived sense-object is desirable and what course of action one might want to take in relation to it" (2013, 72)

To Vasubandhu, these mental factors are characteristic of ordinary, everyday perception, but they fall away already in meditative absorption and are certainly not operative in a Buddha:

"The five sensory cognitions of the eye etc. have both vitarka and vicāra. They always arise in association with vitarka and vicāra because their mode of activity (ākāra) is coarse and directed toward external objects. To clarify this, the verse [kārika 1.32 from the Abidharmakośa] uses the term “limited to.” The “latter three” are the mind-faculty, dharmas, and mind-cognition, because among the faculties, spheres, and cognitions, those [associated with manas] come last. These last three elements can be of three kinds. [1] The mind faculty and mind cognition and its associated dharma element, with the exception of vitarka and vicāra, when in the realm of desire or in the first dhyāna, are with both vitarka and vicāra. [2] In the intermediate dhyāna they lack vitarka and have only vicāra. [3] The second dhyāna and above—all the stages up to and including the highest stage (bhavāgra)—lack both vitarka and vicāra." ([T.1558: 29.8a11-18] in Sharf 2018, 840)

Of special note in the passage above is the point made in its opening lines: "Sensory cognitions […] arise in association with vitarka and vicāra because their mode of activity (ākāra) is […] directed toward external objects." As I interpret this, conceptuality brings about a subject-object orientation to experience, or coversely, a mode of activity directed toward externality itself implies conceptual activity. Conceptuality, in this sense, creates the illusion of externality itself.

This position differs from Dharmakīrti's, for whom duality was a non-conceptual error. According to early Yogācāra, by contrast, duality and conceptuality are inseparable. As Thompson (2021) notes, since "conceptual experience necessarily has a subject–object structure", it follows that "any experience lacking the subject–object structure must be nonconceptual" (4). In this way, early Yogācāra articulates a distinct perspective on "the scope of the conceptual", one in which nonduality and conceptuality are mutually exclusive.

Sthiramati, commenting on Vasubandhu’s Triṃśikā in the Vijñaptimātratāsiddhi, expresses this with striking clarity:

" 'Because there is no grasping in the absence of what is to be grasped'. There is a grasper if there is something to be grasped, but not in the absence of what is to be grasped. Where there is no thing to be grasped, the absence of a grasper also follows, there is not just the absence of the thing to be grasped. Thus there arises the extra-mundane non-conceptual cognition that is alike without object and without cognizer." (in Siderits 2007, 176)

I take this extra-mundane non-conceptual cognition not to imply that, for Vasubandhu, the cessation of vitarka and vicāra entails the cessation of phenomenality itself. Rather, as is characteristic of Yogācāra thought, meditative cultivation—such as reaching the second dhyāna, where these two mental factors drop away—does not mean the absence of appearances. In Maitreya’s Madhyāntavibhāga, śūnyatā is said to have several synonyms, one of which is "the basic field of phenomena" (trans. DTC 2006, 38). As we saw earlier in Mipam’s commentary, even "unreal imagination" (abhūta-parikalpa) remains in emptiness. Nagao (1991) goes so far as to suggest that, because this unreal imagination in some sense "represents the world of delusion" and is a form of disturbance (daratha), "enlightenment is deepened only to reveal that disturbance cannot be banished even at the final stage" (58). Thus, awakening does not entail the disappearance of phenomenality, but its purification from conceptual distortion.

Reading Vasubandhu’s and Sthiramati’s commentaries to the Madhyāntavibhāga, Urban and Griffiths (1994) conclude that the unconstructed nimittāni, vijñaptayaḥ, and pratibhāsāḥ "remain in śūnyatā". The consciousness of a Buddha, they write, "would not simply rest in an imageless void, but would continue to experience a flow of mental images (nimitta), appearances (pratibhāsa), and representations with phenomenal properties (vijñapti)." The Buddha "still perceives the pure flow of phenomena which constitutes the paratantrasvabhāva, but without the dualities and distinctions which constitute the parikalpitasvabhāva." In other words, the Buddha perceives without engaging in "any sort of conceptual construction (vikalpa), since this necessarily involves the reification of these illusory appearances, the separation of their phenomenal properties, the formation of names and categories, and their bifurcation into subject and object" (Urban and Griffiths 1994, 19–20).

The early Yogācārins thus concur with Dharmakīrti and the non-Vaibhāṣika Abhidharma schools that perception is not, by default, conceptual. Yet they arrive at this insight not through an epistemological analysis of cognition, but through a soteriological concern with the transformation of experience itself. In contrast to Dharmakīrti's and the Abhidharma analysis of non-conceptual instantaneous moments, Yogācāra’s view allows a continuity of phenomenality purified of conceptual imposition—a point that will prove crucial for analyzing the possibility for nonconceptual experience in art and music.

Debates in Yogācāra

While the earlier Yogācārins such as Vasubandhu and Sthiramati clearly regarded awakening as an experience involving phenomenal content, not all later Yogācārins held this view. Within the tradition, a debate emerged between the Sākāravāda Yogācārins, such as Jñānaśrīmitra and Ratnakīrti, and the Nirākāravāda Yogācārins, such as Ratnākaraśānti. The latter maintained that consciousness is ultimately devoid of content, while the former held that consciousness possesses content even in its purified form. Kazuo Kano summarizes the disagreement as follows:

"The Sākāravādin [...] asserts that when a person is emancipated his knowledge is accompanied by ākāras (blue, etc.), though these do not enter into conceptual construction [..] To the Sākāravādin, thus, the image (ākāra) is ultimately existent (Jñānaśrīmitra equates the ākāra with Buddhas’ saṃbhogakāya [...]). To the Nirākāravādin, on the other hand, the image is merely a product of the false imagination, and only the innate illuminating function of cognition (prakāśa) is of the ultimate (Ratnākaraśānti equates the prakāśa with Buddhas’ dharmakāya)."  (2016, 9) 

The Nirākāravādin view ("without form") is therefore almost as extreme as that of Candrakīrti, with the crucial difference that what still appears is mere nondual self-reflexive luminosity (prabhāsvaratā; Tib. འོད་གསལ་བ།; Ch./Jpn. 光明). For the Nirākāravādins, "the Buddha’s omniscience would be aware of no more than its own nature" (Williams 2009, 102). As Śākyabuddhi put it:

"The bodhisattvas who have realized that dharmas are selfless only know (mkhyen = √jñā) mere reflexive awareness (rang rig pa tsam = svasaṃvedanamātra) which is devoid of duality." (in Dunne 2004, 406)

According to this interpretation, perception lacking conceptuality entails nothing more than the self-reflexive knowingness of mind, devoid of phenomenal content altogether. Even within the Yogācāra, then, we find a tendency toward denying phenomena in awakening—a movement toward an extreme form of non-conceptuality.

Views on conceptuality in later Madhyamaka

Parallel to the debate between the Sākāravādins and Nirākāravādins, there are related discussions within Mādhyamaka, where not everyone shares Candrakīrti’s interpretation encountered above. Some Mādhyamikas came to argue that phenomenality is indeed present in awakening. One of these discussions is that between the Tibetan shentong and rangtong interpretations of emptiness, where the former holds that emptiness should be correctly understood as an 'other-emptiness' in which some kind of awakened experience—one that is empty of 'other' relative phenomena but not empty of its own awakened qualities—persists.

Another point of debate within later Mādhyamaka concerns whether Buddhas perceive conventional truth. Tsongkhapa’s Mādhyamaka, for example, famously claimed that Buddhas do perceive conventional truth. Here the question is not whether phenomena can be non-conceptual, but whether conventional (that is, conceptual) phenomena can exist within awakening. Tashi Tsering summarizes this debate within Mādhyamaka as follows:

"All the Prāsangika-Madhyamaka scholars agree that the extraordinary excellent quality of the Buddha is the fact that he never abandons the equipoise of meditation on emptiness. But there is dispute regarding whether he sees conventional phenomena. Some scholars say that from the perspective of the Buddha himself there is no conventional appearance; he only appears to be aware of conventional appearances from the viewpoint of other sentient beings. Other scholars disagree and argue that if there is no conventional appearance for the Buddha, then the Buddha cannot be omniscient; thus, omniscience would be impossible." (in Yakherds 2021, 271-272)

The persistence of debates over whether conventional phenomena are present to the Buddha across nearly all major Buddhist philosophical traditions suggests how counterintuitive the idea of awakening as a cessation of sensory and phenomenal experience has been to practitioners throughout the ages.

Views on conceptuality among contemporary commentators

Among contemporary Western academic commentators, new readings of the classical literature have provided fresh perspectives on this issue. Harris (1991), for example, argues that the cessation of vijñāna characterizing nirvāṇa for Nāgārjuna does not imply a state devoid of phenomenality, but rather one in which tattva is seen as it is. The Buddhist tradition repeatedly speaks of "seeing things as they are" (yathābhūtadarśana), and to interpret this seeing as a non-conscious state in which nothing appears at all would fall into the extreme of annihilationism. Harris supports his argument by citing two key passages from the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. The first defines tattva as follows:

"Not conditionally related to anything in a conditional way, at peace, not elaborated by dichotomous thought, free of thought construction, undifferentiated. Such are the (true) characteristics of reality (tattva)." (in Harris, 1991, 115)

The second shows that tattva can be seen:

"Thus the ignorant create the mental predispositions which are the root of saṃsāra. One who creates (such predispositions) is ignorant. The wise person is not (one who creates) because he sees reality (tattva). When ignorance ceases mental predispositions do not come into existence. The cessation of ignorance comes about through the cultivation of jñāna." (in Harris, 1991, 54)

For Harris, seeing tattva entails more than a state in which "nothing appears at all". He writes: "Nowhere are we told that nirvāṇa is a non-conscious state. Rather it is always defined as a state free from those mental factors which are associated with vijñāna" (1991, 56). In his reading, awakening involves transcending

"the commonsense (vyavahāra) world view which sees things (dharmas) with respect to their characteristics (lakṣaṇa) and own-being (svabhāva). He or she opens a field of cognition in which, ultimately, these things do not exist in the way they were formerly imputed but rather, are empty (śūnya) of such defining marks as lakṣaṇa and svabhāva" (Harris 1991, 15).

Lastly, I want to note that these perspectives—which argue that tattva can be engaged through some kind of non-conceptual seeing—resonate with Nishida Kitarō’s early-period work Zen no kenkyū (An Inquiry into the Good). I mention this here not because Nishida is traditionally considered a Buddhist authority, but because his writings on muga (no-self) will play a central role later in this essay. It is therefore important to establish his stance regarding the status of phenomenality.

Zen no kenkyū revolves around the elucidation of "pure experience" (junsui keiken). For early Nishida, pure experience means to "know reality exactly as it is…without the admixture of any thinking or discrimination… [P]ure experience is identical with immediate experience." In this "purest form of experience", there is "neither subject nor object; knowledge and its object are entirely one" (Sharf 1995, 248). Nishida was inspired by William James, who posited a "primal stuff", a "big blooming buzzing confusion", an "aboriginal sensible muchness" out of which attention "carves out objects, which conception then names and identifies forever—in the sky ‘constellations,’ on the earth ‘beach,’ ‘sea,’ ‘cliff,’ ‘bushes,’ ‘grass’" (Carter 2013, 18).

This "stuff" is still entirely pre-conceptual and meaningless, but as I read it, there remains a kind of phenomenal content within it—unlike the mere self-reflexive luminosity posited by certain Nirākāravāda interpretations of Yogācāra. Attention carves objects from this "stuff", and conception names and fixes them. It may thus be tempting to equate James’s "big blooming buzzing confusion" or Nishida’s junsui keiken with the paratantrasvabhāva (the dependent nature). If so, Nishida’s claim is that perceiving this phenomenal flow nonconceptually and nondually is indeed possible.

Conceptuality in musical attunement

The purpose of the preceding overview has been to show how our understanding of conceptuality determines how closely musical attunement can be related to awakening. According to Candrakīrti’s view, even if we, like Schopenhauer, regard musical absorption as offering a temporary release from the suffering of ordinary life—a fleeting moment of 'awakening'—Madhyamaka would insist that we can never truly taste awakening so long as we still hear sounds at all. From this perspective, hearing is inseparable from conceptual construction (vikalpa), and therefore any experience of musical attunement necessarily remains within the domain of conceptuality.

However, if we follow the views of the early Yogācārins—or modern philosophers such as Nishida—who maintain not only that perceptual Gestalts can be apprehended nonconceptually, but also that continuous flows of phenomena can be perceived nondually and without conceptual mediation, Schopenhauer’s claim becomes far easier to reconcile with Buddhist thought. From this perspective, musical attunement may indeed resemble awakening: it involves perceiving the phenomenal flow nonconceptually and nondually. To be attuned to musical form is, on this view, not fundamentally different from being attuned to the empty movements of the paratantrasvabhāva—the dependent nature—which, in its purified apprehension, is nothing other than the realization of the pariniṣpannasvabhāva, the perfected nature.

My intuition when reading such claims, however, is that it would be an idealization of music to call it by default non-conceptual—to assume that all music is always non-conceptual. This seems to go against listening experiences I have had in which concept formation and symbolic interpretation were important parts of the experience. Some pieces of music appear to call for a certain kind of "mental doing", as Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche calls it, in order to become meaningful. We can recall musical experiences that do not unfold as a pure flow of audible emptiness but instead require a measure of conceptual engagement. Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche writes that such "mental doing" can be extremely subtle, but that it must ultimately be released:

"In order to engage in the real practice, we must leave behind mental doing. In the very moment of being totally free of mental doing, the real state of Mahamudra is seen. We can check and see by ourselves whether or not we are recognizing the natural state. It all depends on whether or not we are still involved in mental doing, conceptual fabrication, to even a subtle degree. When all mental doing has been released, dissolved, there is nothing further to do." (2002, 111)

If we wish to approach the question of to what extent musical experience can intimate liberation, we must first examine whether music listening is in fact free from subtle forms of mental doing. The issue cannot be settled by assumption; it requires a closer analysis of the ways in which conceptual activity may quietly structure or accompany the act of listening. In what follows, I will explore several aspects of musical experience where conceptuality may play a significant role. Five dimensions of music listening will be considered in terms of their possible conceptual nature, the first two continuing directly from the discussion above:

1. Is the perception of sounds as musical shapes a conceptual activity? 

2. Is the perception of form–the construction of relationship between musical events in time–a conceptual activity? 

3. Are thoughts that arise when listening to music a form of mental doing? 

4. Does the conceptual 'framing' of musical experiences necessarily make the experience itself conceptual?

5. Is hearing sounds occurring within a musical world–the construction of a mode of listening in which sounds relate in certain ways–a conceptual activity? 

1. Expressive shapes

Our first lens for examining subtle conceptuality is the perception of musical events themselves. For some theorists, music is entirely non-representational, consisting only of immediate, pure sensations. On Clement Greenberg’s (1940) modernist account of music listening, music is "incapable, objectively, of communicating anything else than a sensation". In other words, music concerns sounds in themselves—the immediacy of their medial presence rather than any representational or symbolic content:

"Because of its 'absolute' nature, its remoteness from imitation, its almost complete absorption in the very physical quality of its medium, as well as because its resources of suggestion, music had come to replace poetry as the paragon of art. It was the art which the other avant-garde arts envied most, and whose effects they tried hardest to imitate. [...] [Music] was an 'abstract' art, an art of 'pure form.' It was such because it was incapable, objectively, of communicating anything else than a sensation, and because this sensation could not be conceived in any other terms than those of the sense through which it entered the consciousness." (Greenberg, 1940)

A related view has been articulated by Roger Scruton (2009), who describes the act of grouping musical notes into an auditory Gestalt as pre-conceptual or nonconceptual. His use of 'pre-conceptual' can, in fact, be brought into close resonance with the early Yogācāra understanding of nonconceptual perception. Scruton writes that the formation of a musical Gestalt "does not require us to conceptualize the sequence as a scale, as musical movement, or indeed as anything else" (2009, 57).

The notion of music as consisting of sequences of pure sensations or pre-conceptual movements has been critiqued from several perspectives. From a socio-cultural standpoint, Kim-Cohen (2009) argues that it is impossible to hear musical sounds in themselves—that is, stripped of signification, historical contingency, or social import (2009, 13). Indeed, Kim-Cohen would be deeply skeptical of the Sākāravāda Yogācārin notion of a nonconceptual phenomenal flow, since, much like Candrakīrti, he would deny the possibility of any listening experience wholly free from semantic or semiotic activity—that is, from conceptualization.

From a different angle, Greenberg’s modernist position has also been challenged by cognitivist thinkers such as Swanwick (1999). According to this critique, Greenberg’s idea of music as pure sensation fails to account for the cognitive processes through which musical sounds come to be heard as movements, phrases, or gestures. On Greenberg’s account, these 'shapes' remain entirely pure despite being composite; yet for Swanwick, such perceptual organization already entails a cognitive and symbolic act. Even the transformation of mere tones (single sounds) into tunes (1999, 13)—hearing sounds as connected at all—constitutes, for Swanwick, a transformation of sense data. It is a composition of sounds into composite events that happen in the mind of the listener. The raw immediacy of sound is reconfigured by the listener into music through symbolic and metaphorical structures that generate a level of meaning beyond the merely perceptual–beyond the 'pure sensation'. For this reason, Swanwick rejects Greenberg’s modernist claim that music is an art of pure sensation alone.

Swanwick’s model is dualistic: 'pure', external sounds are conceptualized into internal gestures, expressive shapes, and tunes. It is an information-processing account of listening, in which the transformation of sounds into shapes is a learned activity. Musical perception, on this view, appears conceptual and artificial. If this were true, music listening would, from a Buddhist perspective, be inherently saṃsāric.

In studies on children’s acquisition of musical understanding, theorists such as Serafine (1988) and Swanwick present empirical evidence suggesting that very young children have not yet developed the 'cognitive skills' required to transform sounds into music. Yet, as Cox (1989) observes in her review of Serafine’s work, such evidence does not prove that music is a learned intellectual activity. Cox invites us to question the ontological and epistemological assumptions that make Serafine’s and Swanwick’s models possible—and what prevents them from inverting the relation altogether. Why not say, she asks, that it is the transformation of tunes into tones that constitutes conceptual construction? From the same data, one could just as well propose that "there could be something that prevents the very young or untrained from seeing something real that others can see" (1989, 89).

Hearing music, in this alternative reading, might be an ability acquired through unlearning rather than learning—through non-doing and effortlessness rather than effort. What blocks Serafine and Swanwick from entertaining such a possibility is their commitment to scientific materialism. Within a realist framework, the shapes and forms of music do not exist in the auditory data—the sound waves that reach the ear—but only as mental transformations 'inside' the human subject. Hence, they must involve cognition and internal structures that map or organize sensory input. For Swanwick, music is a "symbolic form" and "an integral part of our cognitive processes" (1999, 7)—an art in which ideas are communicated:

"Music persists in all cultures ... because because it is a symbolic form. It is a mode of discourse as old as the human race, a medium in which ideas about ourselves and others are articulated in sonorous shapes" (Swanwick 1999, 2, my emphasis).

It is interesting to note that, contrary to his insistence on the conceptual nature of music, Swanwick often describes the experience of hearing tunes as effortless and intuitive. He writes, for instance, that "[h]earing sounds as expressive shapes occurs when analytical filtering gives way to intuitive scanning" (1999, 47). It is only when the learned, analytical mode of listening—naming notes and intervals, identifying chords, reading rhythmic patterns—comes to rest that we begin to hear shapes rather than mere materials:

"If we always or even mostly insist on naming notes and intervals, identifying chords, reading rhythm patterns, and so on, we may get stuck at the level of materials" (1999, 47).

It is when we listen analytically—when we perceive music as a sequence of discrete phenomenal objects—that the intuitive, detached tunefulness of perception is lost. Swanwick can even be read as expounding a view of listening as nonconceptual when he describes musical understanding as a form of "acquaintance knowledge", a tacit, non-verbal knowing that stands in contrast to conceptual "knowledge how" or propositional "knowledge that" (Swanwick 1994). If musical experience were truly the articulation of ideas, as Swanwick elsewhere claims, then we should be able to possess a conceptual grasp of them—a knowing that. My reading is that Swanwick, as a sensitive listener, intuits that musical attunement involves perceiving shapes and forms in an immediate, non-analytical way. To some extent, he seems to align with the notion that aesthetic perception is marked by disinterestedness—a state in which conceptual fixation is released (Seel 2005), since nothing is desired from the world and there is thus no need to conceptually determine it. Yet Swanwick’s ontological commitments ultimately prevent him from allowing this non-conceptual mode of being to become a genuine possibility.

In the Buddhist epistemological tradition, conceptualization arises from interests and desires—the wish to make determinate judgments about what is perceived. Concepts are employed when we want something from the world. When this interest is absent, phenomena manifest vividly on their own. In his Exposition of Valid Cognition, Dharmakīrti states that "a cognition connected to concepts does not have a clear appearance of the object," and therefore, "any cognition that has a clear appearance is nonconceptual" (quoted in Thupten Jinpa 2020, 66). As Dunne (2006, 511) explains, Dharmakīrti’s "main criterion for distinguishing the conceptual from the nonconceptual" is precisely this vividness: conceptual appearances are vague, while nonconceptual phenomena are clear and sharply present.

This resonates closely with experiences of listening to music. Listening, after all, is not a matter of being uninterested in phenomena; rather, it is the absence of a determining interest—of the impulse to classify, judge, or extract meaning—that allows phenomena to appear in their full clarity. Moments of musical attunement are those in which we become acutely aware of the vividness of phenomena precisely because we do not attempt to conceptually determine them. This, I take it, is the root of Greenberg’s description of music as being purely about sensation: the unique presencing of phenomena is, indeed, what such experience is 'about'.

According to Dharmakīrti, one way conceptuality obscures the vividness of phenomena is by imposing causal relations upon them. Concept formation commonly manifests as the act of discerning or imputing causal capacities in things. In music, however, we do not pick up any such causal or telic efficacies in phenomena—the perception of expressive shapes in sound does not involve the perception of agency or purpose. In ordinary language, we may speak as if telic efficacies were present: in Figure 1, for example, we might say that the fortissimo on the long accented A causes the staccato fortissimo B, or that in tonal music a Dominant chord leads to the Tonic. Yet if genuine telic efficacy were involved, a condition for conceptual cognition on Dharmakīrti’s account would be met; this, however, is merely a way of speaking. Scruton (2009), in calling musical sounds 'virtual', highlights precisely this feature of musical attunement: musical shapes arise without telic efficacy. They do not act upon one another, but appear like illusory rainbows—vivid, coherent, yet without causal force.

Figure 1

Telic efficacy, externality, and vagueness are three defining traits of conceptuality according to Dharmakīrti (Dunne 2004, 141; 2006, 511)—and these traits are absent in musical attunement. From this we may conclude that the 'expressive shapes' of music do not appear as anything other than the mind’s own nondual, nonconceptual play—as emptiness. They are not the sounds of anything that acts, functions, or exists in an 'external world'. As Nāgārjuna writes in Chapter 4 of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā: "Aside from so-called form, / No cause of form can be observed" (IV.1c–d). When forms arise, their causes are not there to be found. Musical shapes likewise arise nondually as the free play of mind. Yet this free play is not arbitrary. Nāgārjuna immediately adds: "There are no objects at all / That do not have causes" (IV.2c–d; in Mabja Jangchub Tsöndrü 2011, 14). This addition clarifies that forms, while appearing uncaused, arise within the ceaseless web of dependent origination. In other words, they appear as emptiness itself. Being empty, they do not share the vagueness that marks conceptual phenomena, but instead manifest with vividness and clarity.

From a view that acknowledges the nondual character of musical attunement, we may say that we transform tunes into tones only when we lose our detached, nondual mode of being—not the other way around. The hearing of tunes is thus more nonconceptual than the hearing of tones. At the same time, we can meet Swanwick and Kim-Cohen halfway by acknowledging that, upon the field of expressive shapes, much music constructs symbolic systems that invite the listener to decode them. While we may not want to agree with Swanwick and Kim-Cohen that shapes themselves are conceptual by default, we can recognize that certain musical compositions call for the comparison, categorization, and classification of shapes in order to make symbolic or narrative points. In those pieces, conceptuality is indeed involved in the cognition of shapes. We may therefore recognize a continuum between symbolism and non-symbolism within the musical repertoire—one that explains why Cage’s remark about sounds being like buckets makes sense. Some pieces afford a more symbol-coding, narrative-like mode of listening; in them, sounds appear symbol-like because they seem to possess narrative drive or meaning. In these pieces, sounds appear as wanting to be something they are not, such as buckets. Other pieces invite a more forgetful listening—completely 'meaningless', content simply to be present—where sounds, lacking narrative form, are perceived not as symbols but as 'just sounds', or rather, 'just tunes'.

2. Formal awareness

If the first way of understanding conceptuality concerns how we perceive expressive shapes, a second concerns how we perceive temporal relations—how we remember and anticipate sound. When we listen to music, we can become aware of the relationships that sounds form within the unfolding structure of a piece. We recognize shapes as similar to what we have heard before and sense their interrelations. In musical compositions, events typically refer to or resonate with other events. Describing this feature of listening, Serafine (1988) portrays music perception as an "active organizing and constructing of the temporal events heard in a composition" (71). According to her, musical understanding involves recognizing similarities and differences between moments and arranging them along a temporal grid. Serafine takes this to be a form of conceptual cognition—a kind of thinking with the sounds–a "development of thought in sound"–that is active rather than passive (1988, 71).

This perspective is challenged by Wallrup (2012), who in his phenomenology of musical attunement demonstrates that we need not think of formal awareness as an active, conceptual organization. In his careful descriptions of listening, Wallrup distinguishes between active recollection and non-reflective retention, arguing that musical experience is most often characterized by the latter. Even in something as overtly narrative as a Romantic symphony, he writes, "there is no need to take reflection and recollection into account" in order to explain how we perceive meaningful events in music. For example, he discusses the "ecstatic moment of tragic affirmation" in the first movement of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony. This moment gains its force precisely because, in the recapitulation, the music takes a different turn from the same thematic material presented in the exposition. The meaningfulness arises precisely from being aware of the similarities and differences between two formally separated events, "the climactic resolution in the exposition and the climax in the last measures of the recapitulation" (2012, 325). Although these events are temporally distant, Wallrup argues that their relationship is not perceived through what Husserl called secondary memory—that is, either actively recollecting the past or anticipating the future as a form of "awaiting disengaged from the present". Rather, it arises from primary memory: the "living memory of retention", a non-reflective awareness that does not engage in conceptual formation. 

Wallrup notes that the difference between the musical events in Bruckner’s movement "lies within the reach of retention, which bridges even greater temporal distance than that which just has passed" (2012, 325). Because this relation lies within retention’s reach, it does not depend on active organization or recollection—it remains a non-reflective process. In phenomenological terms, retention allows the continuity of sense to unfold within the present. It is not about engaging in mental time travel that takes us away from the present by conceptual recollection or anticipation. Rather, it is a living anticipation or retention that unfolds within the present, not by re-presenting the past or future but by letting the three times of past, present, and future resonate with each other and harmoniously interpenetrate.

Music, then, can remain non-reflective even while the ramifications of the past are experienced in the present. Experiencing this "living memory of retention" is itself a form of nonconceptual attunement. When Copland famously stated that "[a] composition must have a beginning, middle, and an end; and it is up to the composer to see to it that the listener always has some sense of where he is in relation to beginning, middle, and end" (1939, 26), he may not have been advocating for analytic or structural listening. Rather, he may have been referring to this non-reflective sense of orientation within the flow of sound—the way we intuitively dwell within form as it unfolds. 

3. Thoughts that arise

A third way of approaching conceptuality is to consider the phenomenon of thoughts that arise while listening to music. Seel (2005) has given insightful accounts of how aesthetic modes of being often serve as starting points for aesthetic imaginations and representations, which can indeed have a conceptual dimension. When listening to music, we do not, pace Greenberg, only experience the 'pure sensation' of sound; images, thoughts, associations, and other imaginative contents often arise. From a Buddhist perspective, an important question is whether such occurrences should be understood as a kind of unnecessary 'mental doing'—a distraction from the immediacy of perception—or whether they may themselves participate in the unfolding of awareness.

As Tiffany Bell (2017) beautifully observes in her reflections on the minimal paintings of Agnes Martin, “a contrast between material presence and the suggestion of something other—a memory or feeling—is always present” (29). In other words, Martin’s art is never purely about the painted surface. According to Bell, art can be both abstract and minimal—drawing the viewer’s attention to its raw materiality—while simultaneously opening onto poetic evocations and metaphorical imaginings that reach beyond the material. I take this to be a defining feature of much minimal art that we find deeply meaningful, whether visual or aural.

These creative imaginations do not stand in a dualistic or malign relation to sensation. When they appear in the act of listening, they do not arise as thoughts about the music, as they would in analytical listening. Rather, they arise precisely because of the non-conceptual basis of musical attunement. Resting in this non-conceptual state allows the mind’s innate capacity for free play to unfold, and this play can naturally express itself through conceptual formation. Yet these formations are not of the same kind as the conceptual activity that renders sounds vague or less vivid. They are better understood, paradoxical as it may sound, as non-conceptual ideations—manifestations of thought that emerge from, and remain continuous with, the immediacy of sensation itself.

It is true that Buddhist traditions often describe liberation as a state of freedom from thoughts. Earlier, we saw how vikalpa must be eliminated to reach awakening. Yet the mental sense (manas) is recognized as one of the six sense bases (ṣaḍāyatana) of human perception. Just as one can directly perceive the five non-mental senses (indriya-pratyakṣa)—the visual (rūpa), auditory (śabda), olfactory (gandha), gustatory (rasa), and tactile (spraṣṭavya)—so is it also possible to directly perceive the phenomena of the mental sense (mānasa-pratyakṣa). When Williams (2009) describes the pariniṣpanna-svabhāva as a nondual state in which "there is neither subject nor object but only a single flow" (91), it would be mistaken to think that this "single flow" consists solely of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, or tactile sensations. Included within this flow are also the phenomena of the mental sense—those same appearances that, in an unawakened state, are bound up with discursiveness and conceptualization, but which in awakening are purified.

The Yuánjué jīng makes this point explicit, stating that in enlightenment the mental consciousness that produces concepts and symbols becomes completely pure together with the other five senses:

"all perception is pure, and so it is true for smell, taste, touch and conceptualization as well" (Muller 1999, 108).

In awakening, the activity of mental consciousness is perceived as the empty movement of mind itself. This view resonates with the work of Dharmakīrti, who recognized that even conceptual formation—arising from the mental faculty—must be able to appear nonconceptually for his analytic system to hold. Indeed, he based his soteriologically significant notion of yogic perception on precisely this insight (Dunne 2006).

These considerations invite us to re-evaluate the role of thoughts and ideations in musical attunement. It seems that a certain form of nondual "thinking" can accompany musical experience without rendering it conceptual in the saṃsāric sense. In such moments, thought does not stand apart from sound as commentary or judgment, but moves within the same field of attunement—an echo of that purified mental activity that, in awakening, is seen as no different from the flow of dependently arising phenomena.

4. The conceptual scaffolding of modes of listening

A fourth issue to consider is whether musical attunements are conceptual because they are scaffolded by conceptuality. We must acknowledge that our experiences of listening to music are often shaped by conceptual factors—by titles and program notes, by what we know of a composer’s biography, or by what critics and scholars have written about the work. In his aesthetic theory, Seel (2005) suggests that what we take to be non-conceptual experiences in aesthetic encounters are, in fact, enabled by concepts: they arise within a conceptual framework that makes them possible. The question, then, is to what extent such prior conceptualization constrains—or perhaps conditions without constraining—the possibility of genuinely non-conceptual experience in listening.

Seel (2005) argues that although aesthetic perception is grounded in conceptual frameworks, this does not mean that it is itself necessarily conceptual. As he puts it, "a sense of the particular is a conceptually developed sense that abandons a fixation on conceptual fixation" (53). Artworks, though surrounded by and mediated through conceptuality, "make present in and on things what evades conceptually determining fixation" (2005, 115). In other words, aesthetic modes of being can lead us beyond conceptuality even though they are, in part, conceptually constructed.

This fundamental idea—that conceptuality can serve as a path to the nonconceptual—is deeply rooted in Buddhist thought. Khedrup Jé (2022) argues that it would be absurd to claim that "by merely having relation with a contaminated cause, things become contaminated" (117), for without the possibility of transforming concepts into non-concepts, the Buddhist path would be incoherent. On the path, the adept must initially rely on her teacher’s conceptual instructions, constantly recalling these verbal descriptions of how things are. Yet when the path reaches fruition, a state utterly free from conceptuality is actualized. The adept is then no longer in need of such instructions, for the conceptual understanding has been transformed into direct seeing. As Dignāga expressed it, "On the part of the adepts, there is the seeing of the mere thing (arthamātra) unmixed with the guru’s instructions" (in Dunne 2006, 505).

Dharmakīrti elaborated on Dignāga’s statement by outlining a sequence through which an adept progresses from conceptual understanding to nonconceptual realization. As Dunne (2006) explains, this progression "requires a movement from a linguistic expression of a teaching to some other form of understanding that no longer relies on linguistic expression" (509)—that is, a transition from conceptual comprehension to direct, nonconceptual insight. The practitioner begins by relying on concepts, such as the formulation of the Four Noble Truths, but ultimately actualizes a direct seeing unmediated by thought. This culminating mode of knowing is what Dharmakīrti called yogic perception.

Yet we need not invoke such refined states as yogic perception to make this point. Even the analysis of ordinary, everyday perception reveals the necessity for nonconceptual moments to follow conceptual ones. According to the Buddhist theory of perception developed by Dignāga and Dharmakīrti, for any moment of consciousness to arise there must be a previous moment of consciousness—what is termed the "immediately preceding condition" (samanantara-pratyaya). As we saw earlier, their analysis of the chain of events involved in perception (pratyakṣa) shows that the immediately preceding condition for a conceptual perception is a "pure moment of sensation" (Harris 1991, 108). Since every first moment of perception is pure, the alternation of pure and conceptual moments unfolds continuously within ordinary experience itself.

From a Buddhist perspective, there is nothing at all unusual about the idea that the freedom from "conceptually determining fixation" attained in aesthetic perception might itself be made possible by conceptual scaffolding. The presence of a conceptual framework does not necessarily render aesthetic perception conceptual. This is because moments of nonconceptual consciousness can arise directly from moments of conceptual consciousness. (For a further discussion of this dynamic—which closely parallels the Buddhist debates over gradual and sudden awakening—see "Music and Buddhist Monastics")

5. Modes of listening as selective awareness

In texts such as "Pointillism", "Like Rain from the Mountain", and "Varieties of Just Intonation", the idea that different pieces of music are heard through distinct modes of listening is developed in detail. There, modes of listening are described as modes of perceiving in which certain aspects are emphasized in hearing while others are downplayed or not even discernible. In "Pointillism", an excerpt from Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie is contrasted with the gǔqín composition Shuǐxiān to illustrate two contrasting orientations: on the one hand, a mode of listening in which attention operates at the level of sweeping gestures, where individual sounds within these gestures are downplayed or even interchangeable; and on the other, a mode of listening in which each sound is heard in great detail.

In "Like Rain from the Mountain", Western common-practice symphonic music is contrasted with John Cage’s Number Pieces (the mode of listening to which is further explored in "Notes after Listening to John Cage's Number Pieces" and "Cage's Ordinariness"). This comparison serves to illustrate the difference between a mode of listening in which the sounds of music are transformed into a separate, virtual reality—one in which the 'smooth tonality' of sounds is attended to while contemporaneous ambient sounds are ignored—and a mode of listening in which simultaneous environmental sounds are granted equal presence alongside the sounds of the music.

In "Varieties of Just Intonation", I describe how different styles of using just intonation afford distinct modes of listening. In these modes, pitches are enacted in different ways, since each style brings about hierarchies of varying strength in which pitches are ordered according to relative prominence. Within such hierarchies, certain pitches become more salient and are therefore retained for longer durations—they remain more "stable in the memory trace" (Krumhansl 1990, 148).

If these examples reveal that a defining feature of modes of listening is selective awareness—the arrangement of sounds into hierarchies of relative importance—then musical sounds are not perceived purely, in the non-conceptual state that the Zen tradition calls non-obstruction (muge, 無碍), since this requires phenomena to be free from "the sort of discriminating mind that would seek to arrange phenomena into hierarchies of relative importance" (LaFleur 1983, 88). From the descriptions of different modes of listening above, it does indeed seem that such modes are involved in precisely this activity: a mode of listening conceptually guides what we attend to and what we choose to emphasize in hearing.

There is, however, another way to think about 'modes of listening'. Wallrup (2012) suggests that listening to music involves attunement to musical worlds in primordial, pre-reflective ways. On this view, the sounds of music are heard as part of the nondual and nonconceptual world that each piece brings forth. That a musical world is brought forth means that the listener enacts phenomena from a certain perspective and praxis: the world is a particular way, and the events within it behave accordingly. Yet this world is not a schema that actively orders the importance of things. Worlds are not structures that organize phenomena according to hierarchical or cognitivistic grids. Rather, a world is the fundamental attunement from which events—such as sounds—can arise and become intelligible in the first place. Worlds are the pre-reflective, nonconceptual 'backgrounds' that shape how phenomena appear. Different pieces of music thus attune listeners to different worlds, each emphasizing distinct aspects of appearance.

By explaining the differences between pieces of music as differences in fundamental attunement rather than in cognitive filtering, we can understand that distinctions between pieces and their corresponding modes of listening need not arise from distinct conceptual operations. This perspective shares affinities with Dōgen’s understanding of zazen and awakening. Rather than conceiving zazen as a kind of perspectiveless 'view from nowhere', Davis (2011) describes Dōgen’s view as a "nondual perspectivism" (6). The perspective taken in zazen is egoless rather than self-centered, but nonetheless a way of experiencing rooted in praxis.

Dōgen illustrates this through the image of being on a boat at sea: "what reaches my own eyes as an individual is, for the moment, nothing but the visible circle" (in Kasulis 2018, 228), referring to how the horizon appears circular from that vantage point. The perspective that makes the horizon appear as a circle can be likened to the mode of listening that makes certain pitches appear more salient than others. In both cases, the field of appearance is warped by the standpoint from which it is perceived, yet this distortion is not due to conceptuality. Rather, it is an effect of attunement itself. Kasulis comments on this passage:

"Dōgen's point is that what appears in any moment depends on one's standpoint. And that standpoint–positioned as it is in the experiential flux of phenomena–could change. This is what we might call Dōgen's form of contextualism or perspectivism. [...] Things do not appear (to an undeluded person) as something other than what they really are. Yet, as-they-appear is not all that things are: in any appearance there is "something more left out." The circular ocean is simply "what reaches my own eyes as an individual ... for the moment" " (Kasulis 2018, 229)

Even in awakening, we do not see something other than what appears as a circle. What is perceived is not nothingness, nor a triangle or rectangle, but a circle. In the same way, awakening would not make us hear modal music as if all pitches were equal or as if distinctions between their roles were erased. Engagement, as Davis (2011) summarizes Dōgen’s view, is always possible only from a "perspectival opening within the dynamically interweaving web of the world" (6). As Kachru (2021) adds, a world is never a mere "inventory of objects picked out from some unspecified point of view" (131). The world is not a collection of 'stuff' but "a mode of subjectivity, a certain experiential point of view" (131). What changes in zazen and awakening is not that we begin seeing things from no perspective or outside of any world, but that the attitude with which we "participate in perspectival delimitation" (Davis 2019, 333) is transformed. The perspective does not—and cannot—change; what changes is the way we take up that perspective as we move from delusion to awakening.

This view of perspectivism means that Maitreya’s flow of appearances (pratibhāsa) is not a flow of meaningless phenomena in which nothing stands out as more important than anything else. Rather, it is a flow perceived from a perspective—but without a self. Such a perspective does not arise from ego-centric motivations. This is what distinguishes it from the perspectives we ordinarily take as saṃsāric beings, those fabricated by the self that "goes out and posits a horizon that delimits, filters, and schematizes how things can reveal themselves" (Davis 2011, 6) in order to fulfill its desires.

Modes of listening are not of this kind. They do not arise from conceptually transforming auditory data by a subject seeking to use sounds for some goal. Instead of acts of interpretation or manipulation, these modes of listening constitute worlds that nonconceptually attune the mind to a state of giving itself up to the world. From this relinquished state, sounds are perceived as movements of the mind’s own free play—a play that reveals itself only when a basic, purposeless attunement to a world is in place. Phenomena come forth as emptiness precisely when we do not want anything from them.

Yet it would be wrong to call this passive listening. We do not simply sit and observe phenomenality as detached spectators—that would already be a dualistic way of hearing. At the same time, it is not something we do. Being musically attuned is an action that is "not forced by you or others" (Dōgen 1999, 114). Such activity transcends any division between 'passive' and 'active' listening: it is action unstained, pure. Within this attunement, phenomena reveal themselves as they are—seen from within the world itself. "Things are allowed to reveal themselves through nondual events in which the self has 'forgotten itself' in its pure activity or egoless engagement" (Davis 2011). It is just like being on a boat on the open sea and looking at the horizon: what reaches the eyes is nothing but the visible circle.

Summary

In the preceding sections, music has been examined through five key questions concerning conceptuality. First, we asked whether perceiving sounds as musical shapes constitutes a conceptual activity. Second, we considered whether awareness of musical form—the construction of temporal relations between events—is conceptual. Third, we inquired whether thoughts that arise while listening to music indicate the presence of conceptuality. Fourth, we examined whether the conceptual framing of music necessarily entails conceptual experiences. Finally, we asked whether constructing modes of listening in which sounds relate hierarchically is itself a conceptual activity.

In relation to these five points, I have offered arguments for the non-conceptual character of musical experience. Musical shapes were proposed to stand in a non-conceptual and non-dual relation to awareness. Formal awareness was described as arising through non-reflective retention rather than reflective recollection. The thoughts that emerge during listening were interpreted as expressions of the mind’s free play—results of non-conceptuality rather than causes of conceptuality. Modes of listening were understood as non-dual, perspectival openings of worlds rather than cognitive or conceptual filters.

The implication is that we can agree with Schopenhauer that the essence of music may justly be described as the non-conceptual, empty movement of Mind. Yet, even if this represents the ideal nature of musical attunement, music does not always, nor by default, function in this perfectly non-conceptual way. We have all felt that some pieces of music seem to call for more formal awareness or symbolic interpretation than others, and that this feels like a form of mental doing.

In some works, listeners are invited to 'figure out the inner logic of the piece'—a practice celebrated by Adorno as structural listening. In such pieces, listening entails a deliberate interpretive act—a mode of mental doing. In others, we are allowed simply to dwell, free from mental time travel, in a state of forgetfulness and non-doing. Rather than declaring that music is either conceptual or non-conceptual, we can acknowledge a spectrum: some works elicit a more conceptual mode of engagement, requiring us to relate their parts symbolically, while others invite a more immediate, non-reflective attunement.

If we accept that conceptuality is often involved in musical attunement, the task for the Buddhist musician is not to argue that all music is non-conceptual, but to find ways of decreasing conceptuality within musical practice itself. The next part of this essay—Part II—will therefore mark a turn from aesthetics to poetics. Given that conceptuality can arise in musical experience, I will investigate how composers and performers might diminish it, cultivating musical attunements that intimate awakening. Since conceptuality is traditionally held to be one of the two obscurations (āvaraṇa) to awakening, understanding how to reduce conceptual obscurations (jñeyāvaraṇa) becomes a task of great importance.

After exploring conceptuality from this poetic perspective, Part II will turn to the second of the two obscurations that hinder awakening: emotionality (kleśāvaraṇa). Equally significant in relation to music is the way musical experience often evokes feelings of attraction and aversion. Part II will therefore devote equal attention to emotionality, examining how such affective responses can either obscure or illuminate the experience of awakening.

Finally, having examined both conceptuality and emotionality, Part II will conclude with a synthetic discussion on the distance between art and awakening, addressing to what extent aesthetic experience can truly intimate the awakened state.