The previous part of this two-part essay concluded with a discussion of to what extent musical attunements are conceptual. Music listening was questioned on five main points with regard to conceptuality. With regards to musical shapes, these were suggested to stand in a non-conceptual and non-dual relationship to awareness. Concerning formal awareness, it was suggested that 'non-reflective retention' rather than 'reflective recollection' is at play when listening to music. With regards to 'thoughts', these were proposed to be a pure product of the mind's free play when in a state of non-conceptuality–a result of non-conceptuality rather than a cause for conceptuality. Regarding conceptual framing, this was argued not to prohibit non-conceptuality. Lastly, concerning modes of listening, these were described as non-dual perspectival openings of worlds, not cognitive or conceptual filters.
While non-conceptuality might be the pure nature of musical attunements, it was also suggested that music does not always work that perfectly. We have all surely felt how some pieces of music seem to call for more formal awareness, and more symbolic interpretation than others and that this feels like a form of mental doing. Rather than simply saying that music is either conceptual or non-reflective, we can acknowledge that there is a spectrum; listening to some pieces feels more conceptual because we have to relate the different parts of the composition to each other more intellectually. If we accept that there often is conceptuality involved in musical attunements, the task for the Buddhist musician becomes not to find intellectual arguments as to why music is non-conceptual, but rather to try to decrease conceptuality in their own music.
In the first sections that follow, I will therefore turn from aesthetics to poetics with regard to conceptuality. It seems reasonable that the musician who wants the listener to move closer to awakening should prefer the kind of music that calls for as little mental time travel, structural listening, and symbolic interpretation as possible. When listening to pieces that are successful in minimizing these aspects, we actually feel how it moves us closer to a state of just-sitting in meditative equipoise of non-doing when compared to listening to other kinds of pieces. In the sections below, the use of 'forgetful' forms, non-symbolism, and discontinuity will mentioned as ways of decreasing conceptuality.
After exploring conceptuality from the perspective of poetics, the focus will be turned to emotionality for a similar exploration. Only after having explored both of these two obscurations, I will try to give an answer to the question of what the distance between art and awakening is.
Decreasing conceptuality through non-symbolism
Conceptuality can be decreased by writing music that does not afford any symbolic interpretation whatsoever. This was the agenda of John Cage when he elevated the ordinary, ambient sounds of his everyday life as the 'ideal music' and contrasted it to 'Music' wherein sounds are 'pretending' to be something more than just 'surface phenomena':
"When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking. And talking about his feelings, or about his ideas of relationships. But when I hear the sound of traffic, here on 6th avenue, for instance, I don't have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting. And I love the activity of sound. And it gets louder and quieter, higher and lower, longer and shorter... it does all these things. I'm completely satisfied with that. I don't need sound to talk to me. [...] People expect "listening" to be more than listening. And so sometimes they speak of "inner listening", or the "meaning of sound". When I talk about music, it finally comes to people's minds that I'm talking about sound that doesn't mean anything, that is not "inner" but is just "outer". And people who understand that say: "you mean it's just sounds?", thinking that for something to just be a sound is to be useless. Whereas I love sounds, just as they are. And I have no need for them to be anything more, than what they are. I don't want them to be psychological. I don't want a sound to pretend that it's a bucket, or that it's president, or that it's in love with another sound. I just want it to be a sound." (In Sebestik 1992)
Cage wanted the sounds to be revealed to the listener just as they are, as empty movements without any symbolic content whatsoever. There is no meaning that is communicated with sound and there is thus a non-distinction between the sound and the meaning of sound. In the sūtra Entering the Two Truths cited by Candrakīrti, ultimate truth is characterized by such a non-distinction between what is uttered and the utterence itself: "ultimate truth .... is free of what is uttered as well as utterances" (in Tsongkhapa 2021). By removing any dualism between the medium and the message–any dualism between the sound itself and what the sound signifies–, music can intimate seeing things as they are in themselves (yathābhūtadarśana).
Giuliano d'Angiolini—a contemporary composer who can be considered to continue the legacy of this aspect of Cagean aesthetics—describes his own music as being without "acts of communication" and as being without any intention to "signify" anything. When sounds are heard without the kind of listening that Cage called "inner listening", they are heard with, as d'Angiolini says, "no interpretative filter, no prejudice, no discrimination or convention" (n.d.). What this means is that sounds are heard in a way where the only thing that remains of them is their superficial appearances, their surfaces. These surfaces are the mere dependent arising of phenomena without any imputation of 'deeper' meanings.
When Cage in the quote above calls for sounds to only be "outer", he does intend them to be heard as something 'external' (i.e., as existing in a dual relationship to the perceiver). 'Outer' just means free of any symbolically imposed meaning, which in this quote is implied to happen 'inside' of human subjects. Despite the dualistic word choices, his position is thus actually harmonizable with the classic Yogācāra position that when no symbolism or conceptuality is imposed on sounds, sounds appear nondually–as neither 'inner' nor 'outer' (Thompson 2021).
The question then becomes how one creates music that does not afford any symbolic or conceptual interpretation. With regards to the form of a piece of music, conceptuality can be decreased by not relying upon formal awareness too heavily for musical meaningfulness. Instead, an aesthetics of forgetfulness can be used. Self-forgetting listening practices decrease conceptuality by removing the burden of the listener to 'search out' the 'inner logic' or 'narrative structure' of the work by eliminating all traces in the music that such a practice is desired. Music of this kind can feel like it is content to be solely in a present moment where the need for interpreting this moment through the lens of prior musical moments is completely missing.
Music that embodies a quality of forgetfulness avoids strong connections between musical material. This principle applies both to connections between formal sections as well as to connections between individual tones. Another way to talk about forgetfulness is, therefore, to talk about non-continuity, since non-continuities between sounds will typically avoid giving rise to symbolic kinds of connections. d'Angiolini and Cage achieve music that is non-narrative, non-symbolic, non-signifying, and non-representational by juxtaposing sounds instead of using them as building blocks in a sentence. In an anecdote where Cage describes a listening experience that I interpret to be something of an ideal music to him, Cage is indeed careful to point out that "the sounds that occurred were very different from each other" (my emphasis), implying a preference for contrasts, no-continuity, and juxtapositions instead of variations and developments:
"Just a few weeks ago, I had a very odd experience in a Japanese restaurant in New York. In this restaurant, there was a tape recorder playing Japanese music ... We were conversing as usual while the music was playing. Little by little, during the gaps in our conversation, I realized that the silences included in this music were extremely long, and that the sounds that occurred were very different from each other. I was surprised by my discovery, because the extent of the tape was absolutely unusual, it was very long. And I had never run across that in traditional Japanese music. This piece wasn't destined uniquely for Japanese listeners, but for the entire universe, . . .and it was very, very beautiful. I was unable to recognize any tempo, any periodicity at all. All I was able to identify was the arrival of a few sounds from time to time. I was transported to natural experiences, to my daily life, when I am not listening to music, when sounds simply happen. There is nothing more delicious!" (Cage 1981, 119)
In his own music, Cage developed the idea of "no-continuity" as the guiding principle to dictate note-to-note progressions. In the 'discontinuous' compositions created using this principle, the progression of sounds was indeterminate of both the previous and following sounds (see, for example, "Lecture on Something" in Silence, 129-30) The result of such discontinuities is that sounds are allowed to presence as 'pure', 'fresh' and 'mere sounds'.
Parallels to contrasts in poetry
This way of thinking that it is precisely surprising contrasts that allow non-conceptual encounters with phenomena has illuminating parallels with the way contrast functions in some poetry–in particular, the theory of 'cutting' words in haiku. Even though it might seem like a detour to discuss poetry in an essay that seeks to elucidate music, I have found that explaining this quality in music through its analogous usage in poetry is surprisingly precise. Through exploring the usage of a particular kind of contrast in poetry, we are given a tool through which to demonstrate how contrasts work in music by composers like Cage.
The first poem I would like to consider is the following famous verse by Bashō, where there is a stark contrast between the second and third lines:
Horohoro to Quietly, quietly,
yamabuki chiru ka yellow mountain roses fall—
taki no oto sound of the rapids (trans. Makoto Ueda)
In this verse, we have a powerful interaction between two images: the roar of the water and the tranquility of the falling petals. The two images of the hokku are so presented in a way that is, as Thornhill comments, "devoid of any specific symbolized emotion" as the natural phenomena are allowed to "speak for themselves in their own particularity" (1998, 351). It is exactly because of the dynamic contrast between the two juxtaposed images that the quality of something freshly observed without any symbolized emotion or distortion is actualized. The 'sound of the rapids' (taki no oto 滝の音) does not provide an interpretative framework for the yamabuki flowers (山吹) as much as it functions to bring forth an immediate encounter with them. One could easily imagine that instead of taki no oto, the author could have invested the last five syllables differently by giving further descriptors of the flowers, so as to make the image of them appear with greater detail to the reader and to paint their delicacy in greater resolution. But rather than deepening the description of the flowers, the stark juxtaposition of elements brings out a sense of freshness in the encounter with the flowers. Thornhill comments that "[r]ather than overwhelming the delicacy of the blossoms, the forceful roar of the water enhances their tranquility, even as their flutter is more difficult to "hear"" (1998, 351). The images may lack detail but they have all the more vividness, and this precisely is the effect of a discontinuous flow in some of Cage's compositions.
Haruo Shirane likens the workings of these 'combination-hokku-s' to the "super-position" strategy of Ezra Pound. One of Pound's most famous poems that uses this technique, In a Station of the Metro, reads as follows:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough
In this poem, two completely different scenes are juxtaposed. The resultant effect is not one of symbolic interpretation–the two scenes do not paint a story or provide metaphors–but the effect is rather one of a free, dynamic, encounter with the freshness of phenomena.
Exactly how successful Pound's poem is in this can be illustrated by contrasting it to another couplet, from Zhèng Gǔ's poem Swallow:
I peek at the shallow liquid in the unused desk’s inkstone;
In the path of fallen flowers, I get [wind of] a muddy scent.
Both Pound's poem as well as Zhèng Gǔ's couplet juxtapose two scenes. The second scenes of both poems are even very similar; flower petals are juxtaposed with earthy, wet mud (a muddy scent in Zhèng's, and a wet, black bough in Pound's). The first lines and their relation to the second lines are, however, very different. In Pound's case, it is an urban crowd on a subway, and in Zhèng's, it's the uncompleted act of writing. The different kinds of connections between the first and second lines of these verses create very different poet effects. In Zhèng Gǔ's poem, there is a much stronger visual resonance found between the dark ink of calligraphy and the swallow's footprints in the mud. Mazanec (2017) describes how there is a common atmosphere between the lines that makes them "rhyme" with one another and imply a connection:
"...the dark, viscous traces [in mud] left behind by the swallow [as implied by the title] visually rhyme with the dark, viscous traces of ink that would have been left behind by writing a poem. However, both are absent: the poem is not written (the ink remains dry) and the swallow’s footprints are never seen (only smelled). Zhèng Gǔ’s couplet is a masterpiece of evocation" (Mazanec 2017 269).
It is, however, not merely the fact of having a shared atmosphere that makes the connection between these two lines stronger than the two lines in Pound's poem. In Zhèng Gǔ's couplet, there is also a narrative progression implied. This is the main way in which it contrasts with Pound's verse. Mazanec fills in this implied narrative with an actual story:
"the speaker cannot concentrate to write (leaving his inkstone unused) and so, to refresh his mind, goes for a walk. There he catches a whiff of mud in an otherwise clean scene" (2017, 269)
No such narrative is possible to form from Pound's poem. The juxtaposition is simply too stark. The two scenes of In a Station of the Metro have nothing to do with each other whatsoever. Taylor (1989) comments that Pound's point with such stark juxtapositions was to allow the audience "to see reality undistorted" (474). Taylor explains that art, according to Pound, "means a constatation of fact. It presents. It does not comment" (1989, 474). In order to achieve this "mere presenting" a poem can not actually be mimetic by re-presenting a scene, it has to find some other way of inviting a 'direct perception' of the scene–a way that "liberates us from the constricting conventional ways of seeing, so we can grasp the patterns by which the world is transfigured" (Taylor 1989, 474). That way is the use of super-positioning and juxtapositions.
Taylor describes how the 'Poundian epiphany' is not something that happens in the scenes, images, or the objects evoked but as something that happens between them: "Instead of an epiphany of being, we have something like an epiphany of interspaces" (Taylor 1989, 474). In these experiences, what is aesthetically relished is not a space of objects, but the very conditions for the arising of such objects to begin with—the very structures through which things reveal their existence. As such, poems such as these are not about expressing 'a deeper reality' about the scenes evoked, but rather about the epiphanic space that is opened up between these scenes, captured through their juxtapositions, and which leads to a feeling of phenomena being 'merely presented' with a directness and freshness.
While Pound's poem is extreme in lacking very little shared atmosphere between the scenes, I do not believe that one has to give upp all sense of connection between events to retain a quality of fresh perception. Indeed, if phenomena merely having a shared atmosphere meant that discontinuities and contrasts no longer would be perceived as such, then most compositions by Cage and d'Angiolini would not have contrasts. Most contrasts in the music of Cage are not as extreme as in the verse by Pound which seems to completely lack any shared atmosphere. Cage's late Number Pieces, for example, have contrasts but are also held together by a very particular atmosphere, a Stimmung or what in haiku theory is known as shared overtones (yosei). Despite the presence of an aesthetic atmosphere, Cage's pieces are not narrative but present the listener with disconnected sounds: contrasts can take place within a shared world. As Shirane notes in his analysis of juxtapositions in hokku, the shared overtones that create an atmospheric unity are by no means hindrances to creating the kind of dynamic epiphanies where the juxtaposed phenomena arise non-symbolically. The contrasts can be both juxtapositions as well as taking part in articulating a unified Stimmung. As an example, Shirane quotes the following famous example by Bashō:
chrysanthemum scent–
in Nara ancient statues
of the Buddha (trans. Shirane 1998, 89)
Shirane writes that it is true that this poem can be read as a single scene (of Buddha statues surrounded by chrysanthemum flowers) but that it "is better read as a combination poem in which the two parts are joined by scent or connotative equivalences" (1998, 90). There is a stark contrast between the lively and ephemeral scent of the chrysanthemum with the enduring ancient statues. Yet, both the chrysanthemum and the Buddhas of Nara are associated with refinement and the classical period and therefore share overtones.
It is because of the presence and importance of juxtapositioning in these kinds of verses that Haruo Shirane writes that it would be wrong to only read hokku-s such as these as sketches (shasei) of scenes even though the particular contrasts in the cited verses constitute elements that one could actually encounter in single scenes, as Bashō presumably did at Yoshino and in Nara. Rather, the value of these kinds of verses lies in their act of consciously 'cutting' the hokku because this "summons the reader to be an active performer and interpreter" (Shirane 1998, 83). The verse is not primarily about depicting a picture–although it might do that too–but is rather about creating a dynamic encounter that involves the reader's free creativity to perform the leap between the scenes. "Interpreting" the poem does not merely entail piecing the different images together as an intellectual puzzle. On the contrary, in enacting the leap between the elements of the verse, something about the mind that performs contrasting images is revealed: the mind's non-conceptual, spontaneous playfulness is foregrounded and the images appear with a freshness that lacks symbolism and conceptuality.
I take this kind of experience to exactly be the intent of Lee Ufan–an artist who shares many of Cage's och d'Angiolini's religio-aesthetic concerns–when he writes that symbolic art prevents the creation of "open structures that make space-time more lively and transparent" (Lee 2018, 249). According to Lee, constructing a symbolic object "is a kind of crime" because it "freezes space into a particular meaning and crushes its freedom" (2018, 249). When things are presented without symbolism, they are not merely 'pure' but simultaneously lively–an adjective that points to the spontaneously active nature of the mind.
Taylor concludes his brilliant analysis of Pound's poem by saying that this kind of poetry "has strong analogies to contemporary non-representative visual art" (1989, 474), which Lee Ufan's body of work is an example of. The kinds of juxtapositions that open up 'epiphanies of interspaces' are described by Taylor to be more like non-expressive "energies" rather than "expressions" and hence has much in common with the kind of non-figurative abstract art that is more about pure forms than it is about representation. Such non-representational art, at least according to Greenberg's (1940) famous way of putting it, considered music to be the "paragon of art" because it was the art form that, due to "its remoteness from imitation", most easily could actualize the mere, non-expressive phenomenality devoid of symbolism. To Greenberg (1940), music was the pure form of abstract art because it was "incapable, objectively, of communicating anything else than a sensation". However, Greenberg's characterization of music is incomplete insofar as it takes non-symbolism as a feature of all music. Even though abstraction might come 'easily' for music, the kind of abstract juxtapositions that characterize In a Station of the Metro are rare since most music tries to establish a continuum and connection between sounds. As d'Angiolini (n.d.) writes, not all music is by default like the "energies" Taylor likens Pound's poem to. Not all music is non-narrative and non-expressive. It is only some post-1950s music's "absence of a narrative" and absence of "dramatic articulation" that bring about music that "denies a listening centered on meaning so as to concentrate on the sonic event in itself" (d'Angiolini n.d.). It is in order to explain how the non-narrativity and non-symbolism of this kind of music can impact the listener that Taylor's analysis of the 'epiphanies of interspaces' gives us a fitting analogy and explanatory metaphor.
By supplementing Taylor's analysis with those of Lee Ufan and Haruo Shirane, a kind of rationale for non-symbolic art has been sketched: non-symbolic art is desirable not because we want to attend to things themselves as if that had some value in itself–as if things themselves (whatever that may be) are somehow 'better' than 'symbolic' things. Cage's and d'Angiolini's music is much more than just the mere recognition of sounds. Non-symbolic art is desirable because it offers unconditioned encounters with indeterminate (conceptually non-fixated) phenomena–it gives the audience a taste of the non-conceptual emptiness that is the true nature of reality. In performing the juxtaposition of sounds, something about the listener's mind's emptiness and spontaneous playfulness is revealed. In Cage's and d'Angiolini's music, there is often a mild intensity in the poetic encounter with these discontinuous sounds that move us by the sense of infinity that they suddenly open up.
When viewed in this light, contrasts in music can serve a purpose similar to the pebble that strikes the bamboo, leading to Xiāngyán Zhìxián's (香嚴智閑) awakening. The sound of the pebble and bamboo had this profound impact precisely because it was something of a surprise to Xiāngyán. As Dōgen comments: "At the unexpected sound, he had thorough awakening" (2013, 126). Using surprising contrasts and unexpected turns contributes to creating a mode of listening that is acutely aware and in which not only sounds but also the ground of emptiness–the epiphanic interspaces–from which sounds emerge is thematized. If the music relies too much on repetition, expected patterns, and pulse, the listener is lulled into a state of torpor and sounds will not be able to awaken. This is why Taylor's idea of the 'epiphany of interspaces' becomes valuable. It emphasizes the epiphanic quality of contrasts. Contrasts bring about a freshness and unfiltered revelation of the 'surfaces' of the mere appearance of sound while the sounds also merge into an expanded horizon of openness, or emptiness, that is the very nature of the arising sounds.
Vertical discontinuity
If the above discussion of no-continuity refers to discontinuity on the horizontal level, Cage was also interested in achieving a similar effect of freeing the listening from narrativity by working with the quality of discontinuity on the vertical level. Just as on the horizontal level, the vertical discontinuity is brought about by the lack of 'conventional' relationships between sounds. Different layers without any 'obvious' relationship to each other 'co-exist' to create an ambiguous complexity rather than work together to achieve some singular effect. Just as with the horizontal juxtapositions, the listener is called to be an "active performer" (Shirane 1998, 83), but not by trying to piece together the layers as a puzzle. It is rather something non-conceptual about the mind that enacts differences that the experience opens up.
Feldman and Cage describe listening to vertical complexity in a beautiful passage from the radio dialogues they conducted together in 1966-67:
"[Feldman:] Well, did you ever play this game eh, when you were a kid, where you filled with water right up to the top of the glass and you keep on adding pennies. And it doesn't fill over, and you have half of the glass full of pennies. And that's how I find the vertical, that no matter how many sounds I throw into it, there is a hunger for more.
[Cage:] Or a capacity.
[Feldman: ] Now I threw three pieces actually into the simultaneity and it could have much more, it is so full of space, so full of air, so breathing. There is endless.
[Cage:] It can be so thick and so full of space and air.
[Feldman:] There's transparency.
[Cage:] When did that happen for heavens sake? It certainly is one of the characteristics of present music. That things can be very thick but there it is always this sense of airiness. It's amazing. I remember for instance when David Tudor and I made the recording of my Cartridge music. We had always thought that a single performance was fairly thick, but we did see that it had space in it. Then when we made the recording we had four performances and superimposed them, and when we listened to the result we discovered that it was no thicker than one had been, and there was just as much space and airiness as ever, and you could add some more." (Cage & Feldman 1966)
In this conversation, Cage and Feldman marvel over the feeling of how extremely thick and full music by the composers of the New York school could still be so full of air, so open, and have so much transparency. The way I interpret this seeming paradox is as follows: the simultaneous presence of very different, superimposed layers of material creates a situation where the listener is free to leisurely roam around in the 'landscape' of the music. The music depends on the free play (līla) of the listener's mind to follow its own path–a kind of sportive samādhi in which the listener embodies the ideal of "roaming at will" (逍遙遊, xiaoyao you) described in the Zhuangzi. Because this roaming is free and leisurely, the co-arising aesthetic quality is always 'light' and never 'heavy' despite the fact that the vertical texture can be extremely dense. The contrast between layers functions like the contrasts between scenes in Bashō's hokku; it is not about creating a conceptually determined object as much as activating the freedom of the reader.
Jñeyāvaraṇa and kleśā-varaṇa
By working with techniques such as horizontal and vertical discontinuities and the aesthetics of forgetfulness through 'self-forgetting' forms, the burden of conceptual, mental doing can be reduced in musical attunements. When the demand for conceptualizing disappears, the possibility of hearing sounds in fresh, non-conceptual ways is opened up: it becomes possible to hear sounds as empty. Decreasing conceptuality alone is, however, not enough if we want to decrease the distance between art and awakening. The Buddhist traditions speak of awakening being obscured by both cognitive obscurations (jñeyāvaraṇa) as well as emotional obscurations (kleśā-varaṇa). While the discussion about conceptuality is primarily related to jñeyāvaraṇa, the fact that we have emotions of liking music and finding it pleasing is to be discussed in relation to kleśā-varaṇa.
In what follows, I will, therefore, turn to an exploration of emotionality. On the one hand, in parallel to our discussion on conceptuality in the first part of this essay, some important passages on emotions from the Buddhist canon will be cited throughout. On the other hand, the emotional state of 'disinterest'–central to both continental aesthetics as well as Buddhist soteriology–will be drawn upon and put in dialogue with the passages from the Buddhist canon. After an initial introduction of these themes, the text will turn to the poetics related to emotionality–how Buddhist artists can approach emotionality in their art.
Emotionality in the Pali canon
Emotional reactions to phenomena are of central concern in Buddhist soteriology. The following excerpt from the Pāli canon describes it as the very root of cyclic existence–the process whereby beings are repeatedly reborn again and again in saṃsāra:
"On seeing a visible form with the eye, hearing a sound with the ear, smelling an odour with the nose, tasting a flavour with the tongue, touching a tangible with the body, cognizing an idea with the mind [this indicates the eighteen dhatus of sense, object, and resultant consciousness for each of the six senses], he lusts after it if it is likable, or has ill will towards it if it is dislikable [dependent upon ignorance of its true nature he produces greed and hatred]. He abides without mindfulness of the body established and with mind limited while he does not understand as they actually are the deliverance of mind and the deliverance by understanding wherein those evil unwholesome states cease without remainder. Engaged as he is in favouring and opposing, when he feels any feeling, whether pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant [=the three types of feeling], he relishes that feeling, affirms and accepts it. Relishing arises in him when he does that. Now any relishing of those feelings is clinging. With his clinging as a condition, being; with being as a condition, birth; with birth as a condition, ageing and death come to be, and also sorrow and lamentation, pain, grief and despair. That is how there is an origin to this whole aggregate mass of suffering." (in Ñāṇamoli 1992, 251-252)
Here, the Buddha clearly shows how the act of "favoring and opposing" is a crucial link in the process of being continually reborn in saṃsāra. Craving what is "likable" and having "ill will" toward the dislikable is the "origin to this whole aggregate mass of suffering". To move away from saṃsāra, we must give up reacting to pleasure and pain.
When reading the passage cited above, the key question to keep in mind is to what extent the 'relishing' of pleasant or neither-painful-nor-pleasant feelings are fitting descriptions of experiences we have had of listening to music. We have to question if we honestly can say that music listening is not about feeling a pleasant feeling and relishing, affirming, and accepting that feeling. My guess is that most people would report that when we listen to music, it is not rare to like what we hear–to feel some kind of pleasure.
At the same time, we can feel that there is truth to the statement that aesthetic relishing is a feeling that is more 'wholesome' than taking pleasure in sense objects. It is widely recognized that the relishing we experience during musical attunements, as well as other aesthetic encounters, is different from 'ordinary' ways of liking: it is rooted in a certain 'detached' attitude–an attitude of aesthetic distance. It is maybe not so much a pleasure we feel but a kind of equanimous joy that is more wholesome than ordinary liking. But the Buddha also emphasizes that even the 'wholesome' joy that comes from the very act of giving up "pleasure and pain" must be abandoned. In the Sāmañãphala Sutta, the Buddha sketches a meditative progression of how giving up "pleasure and pain" first leads to a kind of "joy and happiness" but how in the end, even this "desire for joy" has to be given up in order to attain a "pure equanimity" completely beyond likes and dislikes:
"...by letting go of happiness and unhappiness, as a result of the earlier disappearance of pleasure and pain, a monk lives having attained the pure equanimity and mindfulness of the fourth absorption, which is free of happiness and unhappiness. He sits suffusing this very body with a mind that is thoroughly purified and cleansed, so that there is no part of his body that is untouched by that thoroughly purified and cleansed mind." (Gethin 2008, 29)
Beauty and disinterest
The most famous insight from European aesthetics ought to be the idea that aesthetic pleasure–in stark contrast to ordinary pleasures–is disinterested and detached. Schopenhauer, one of the most famous of the European philosophers to espouse this idea, wrote that "[e]verything is beautiful only so long as it does not concern us" (1958:II, 374). Things can only appear as beautiful to us if they do not really matter to us: we must have a disinterested attitude to phenomena for them to appear as beautiful. The experience of beauty is, therefore, beyond the kind of liking and disliking that is rooted in worldly and selfish interests–the ordinary way of approving and disapproving things.
Ordinary consciousness always discloses things in relation to their usefulness or uselessness to the ego–an ego that in ordinary consciousness always is a 'self-consciousness' in the sense that the ego is taken to be 'an object among other objects' in the projected representation of reality. Schopenhauer describes how ordinary consciousness is pushed and pulled around by desire and fear in a never-ending state of 'anxiety'–a depiction of what it means to exist as a sentient being that has a clear resemblance with the Buddha's analysis of duḥkha. Aesthetic consciousness, however, is very different from this ordinary mode of existence. We become free from valuing things according to their usefulness or uselessness in our lives because they do not even concern us. This is because we do not even exist as pragmatic individuals anymore. In aesthetic consciousness, all the self-absorbed characteristics of ordinary consciousness evaporate and we forget ourselves:
It has therefore been said that to see a rainstorm as beautiful means that we have to have a distance from it–we can not have a worldly emotional reaction to it. The practical results of the rainstorm can not concern us. If we are worried about the damage of the storm, or the result that the flooding will have on our crops, we can not see the beauty of the rainstorm. But this does not mean that moments of aesthetic relishing are completely missing from the everyday life of say, a farmer on a farm, where everything has a practical meaning to him. Yuriko Saito (2007) argues that we cannot deny that a farmer has "a rich aesthetic life while working in, on, and with his wheatfield" (37). Yi-Fu Tuan also argues that while "the working farmer does not frame nature into pretty pictures," he can still "be profoundly aware of its beauty" (1974, 97, quoted in Saito). But during those flashes of beauty, enough comfort, security, and ease must be in place for the farmer to temporarily drop his 'ordinary consciousness–the anxious object-directed approach that accompanies most of our lives–and allow for the innate detachment that transforms phenomena into beauty to shine forth. The experience of beauty means that the subject has temporarily become a 'clear mirror' and has entered a state of 'bliss and peace of mind' (Säligkeit und Geistesruhe) that is markedly nondual in character:
"in other words, we forget our individuality, our will, and continue to exist only as a pure subject, as clear mirror of the object, so that it is as though the object alone existed without anyone to perceive it, and thus we are no longer able to seperate the perceiver from the perception, but the two have become one, since the entire consciousness is filled and occupied by a single image of perception" (WR I: 179, in Young 2005, 111).
The teaching of muga belongs to the earliest layers of Buddhist philosophy and is one of the most central teachings. Seeing that there is no self is often described as the primary liberating insight for the Buddhist practitioner. Williams (2000) writes that "the Buddha explains how liberation comes from letting-go of all craving and attachment simply through seeing that things are not Self. That is all there is" (61). In the Pāli canon, the causal chain of how this works is sketched by describing how the insight that everything is no-self lead the practitioner to become dispassionate towards form, feeling, and perception. Upon having become dispassionate, "his lust fades away" and "with the fading of lust his heart is liberated" (in Ñāṇamoli 1992, 47)–in other words, he attains awakening. Disassociating with a 'self' leads to liberation from the otherwise ever-ending anxiety and duḥkha:
“Therefore, bhikkhus, any kind of material form whatever, whether past, future, or present...all material form should be seen as it actually is with proper wisdom thus: ‘This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self.’ Any kind of feeling whatever... Any kind of perception whatever...Any kind of formations whatever...Any kind of consciousness whatever...all consciousness should be seen as it actually is with proper wisdom thus: ‘This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self.’
“Seeing thus, a well-taught noble disciple becomes disenchanted with material form, disenchanted with feeling, disenchanted with perception, disenchanted with formations, disenchanted with consciousness.
“Being disenchanted, he becomes dispassionate. Through dispassion [his mind] is liberated. When it is liberated there comes the knowledge: ‘It is liberated.’ He understands: ‘Birth is destroyed, the holy life has been lived, what had to be done has been done, there is no more coming to any state of being.’" (in Bhikkhu Bodhi 2015, 891)
By combining this Buddhist insight that clinging to a self is what prevents awakening with the continental European focus on beauty as a result of disinterestedness and no-ego, Nishida brilliantly concluded that the experience of beauty is itself liberating because muga is the "essential element of beauty":
"Only this muga (ecstacy, selflessness) is the essential element of beauty; when this is lacking, no matter what kind of pleasure you feel, it cannot give rise to the sense of beauty." (in Odin 1987, 216)
If aesthetic relishing actualizes non-self, this means that it is a moment of liberation. Engaging reality in an aesthetic state gives us a valuable referent for what life would be without duḥkha. This liberation does not consist of an anesthetic way of perceiving where the senses are deadened and all feelings numbed. It is a 'heightened' awareness in which phenomena appear vividly but with equanimity (Odin 2001, 174). The aesthetic attitude enacts the middle path between being and nothingness that the Mahāyāna followers equate with liberation. Nishida's younger colleague Nishitani articulated this middle path as "absolute nothingness" (zettai mu). It is the experience of emptiness that arises from neither being attached to "being" (u) nor being attached the nihilistic nothingness that rejects objects, which Nishitani called "relative nothingness" (sotaiteki mu). Absolute nothingness, or emptiness, is characterized by a total nonattachment that nonetheless "affirms things in their concrete particularity without clinging to either being or nonbeing, existence or nonexistence, form or emptiness, presence or absence" (Odin 2001, 121). For the Kyōto school of philosophers, moments of beauty were recognized as moments in which absolute nothingness could be actualized. Phenomena appear and are aesthetically relished–there is nothing that the mind does not connect with–yet the mind does not rise to meet these phenomena. Odin expresses how the subject that experiences beauty can, therefore, be said to be
"released into the field of absolute nothingness as the boundless openness wherein emptiness is fullness and fullness is emptiness and all things presence just as they are in the beauty of suchness" (Odin 2001, 121).
Poetics of non-emotionality
Although this positive view of aesthetic perception as being freed from gross emotionality might be theoretically true, we all know from listening experiences that some pieces of music more than others conjure up more affective reactions, more strong relishing in likable sounds, more craving for pretty sonorities and so forth. Experiences such as these make us question the assumed aesthetic detachment and equanimity of experiences of art and beauty. From reading the accounts of Schopenhauer above, it seems as if aesthetic attunement is perceived by a mind that is thoroughly purified and cleansed so as to become a clear mirror in which the empty phenomenality is freely moving without causing any like, dislike, or attachment. While this might be the 'essence' of aesthetic relishing, far from most music will lead to an actualization of this kind of equanimity. Just as with conceptuality, we can say that there is a spectrum in music. While the idea of music as detached points to its ideal state, it does not always, nor by default, work that perfectly. Some pieces of music rely more than other pieces on prettiness and emotionally captivating, attractive sounds that the listeners' minds actually connect with in a mode of liking. The concession to musical attunement being able to host impurities does not mean that such aesthetic experiences are the same as 'ordinary' saṃsāric experience. Indeed, such aesthetic experiences might still be closer to the nirvāṇic mode than the saṃsāric mode of being.
In Korai fūteishō, Fujiwara no Shunzei tried to come around the insight that art can be 'impure' by quoting the Tendai statement that kleśas are nothing other than awakening (bonnō soku bodai, 煩悩即菩提), but this is to me an unsatisfactory way of dealing with it since it deals with the problem from the ultimate perspective of a Buddha rather than the praxis of humans. From the conventional perspective, the kleśās are not intrinsic to the Buddha Nature but are adventitious and something that obscures thusness. From a practitioner's perspective, it, therefore, makes sense to try to minimize the emotional reactivity of liking what we hear. In what follows, I will explore primarily different aesthetic qualities and factors of 'non-emotionality' that can be employed in music to decrease its emotionality.
Decreasing emotionality through blandness
Perhaps the most obvious way in which emotional reactivity can be reduced in music is by adopting a plain aesthetic that is not too pretty. If emotional reactivity is caused by the music being too pretty and attractive, one strategy is to simply remove this prettiness. Music that is not too overwhelming or excessive in its pretty appearance need not be non-beautiful, boring, or uninteresting. When executed well, such music can instead embody the positive aesthetic quality of blandness (淡 dàn).
The aesthetic quality of blandness has its roots in China, where its paragon was Táo Yuānmíng. When describing the beauty of Táo Yuānmíng's poetry, Sū Shì famously said that "[t]he outside is withered, but the inside is rich" (in Hinton 1993, 6). The withered surface of Tao Yuanming's poetry means that there is nothing immediately compelling, attractive, or pretty about it at first glance; it might be dismissed as something uninteresting. However, it is mistaken to search for its qualities in superficial attractiveness, and Sū Shì continues by saying: "[i]t seems bland but is actually beautiful" (quoted in Hinton 1993, 6).
Lǐ Zéhòu describes dàn as that which is without taste "but at the same time is full of flavor" (2010, xiv). As the culinary origin of this metaphor indicates, it is not about making flavorful food, but rather about trying to be as flavorless as possible. Blandness was not only valorized in the Song dynasty but became a popular aesthetic quality in Japan, where Kamo no Chōmei is said to have said that "the very highest quality of all things lies in their blandness and lack of particular attraction [awaku susamajiki nari, 淡く凄まじきなり]" (in Pollack 1986, 85). The idea behind this was that there is something soteriologically valuable in being able to savor phenomena when there are no strong flavors present to distract the senses. It is not about being subtle just for the sake of being subtle. It is about recognizing that reality perceived without the emotional distortion of attraction is to perceive reality more truly. Lǐ makes this point by mentioning the poetry of Méi Yáochén, who achieved blandness in his depictions of ordinary scenes and experiences plainly as they were. By asking the reader to find tastefulness in these seemingly unspecial and unattractive scenes, the reader of Méi Yáochén's poetry is invited to not merely re-live ordinary experiences, but, more importantly, to deeply penetrate reality and taste "the empty illusoriness of life" (Li 2010, xiv).
Lǐ's appreciation for Méi Yáochén has a parallel in Yuán Hàowèn's (元好問) admiration of the poetry of the monk Mù Ān (木 庵). Because of the blandness of Mù Ān's poetry–because it had the flavor of no flavor–, it was able to go "beyond feelings and nature" and articulate "the words of the unknowable" (Protass 2016, 147). The point is not to be bland for the sake of being bland but to point to something beyond the usual emotionality that characterizes our daily lives–beyond feelings toward something impossible to articulate with words. Protass beautifully comments that in Mù Ān's poetry, "[t]here is clarity, like water close to the source, a refreshing taste with no flavor" (2016, 148). Blandness brings the audience close to tasting the clear nature of reality–the primordial luminosity of mind–without any adventitious 'affectivity'.
Once we can find the tastefulness in that which has no taste, the need for tastes dissipates. The insight into the illusory nature of reality makes us reevaluate our previous actions that were all too often based on gaining what we like and avoiding what we dislike. Huáng Tíngjiān thus wrote about Táo Yuānmíng's poetry that
“[w]hen you’ve just come of age, reading these poems seems like gnawing on withered wood. But reading them after long experience in the world, it seems the decisions of your life were all made in ignorance” (Hinton 1993, 6).
Blandness is therefore closely connected to detachment from the world of desires. Jullien, one of the most important Western commantators on blandness, writes that
"flavor provokes attachment, and insipidity provokes detachment. The former overwhelms us, clouds our minds, reduces us to a state of dependence; the latter liberates us from the pressure of the external world, from the excitement of sensations, from all false and short-lived intensities" (2004, 43).
These quotes above make a solid argument for why blandness, as an aesthetic quality, can have an important role in constructing a Buddhist form of musical poetics.
Blandness and its supporting conditions
When it comes to music, blandness can be found when the music does not try to establish itself as a virtual reality for the listener's escape but rather finds a way to exist in the plain, ordinariness of everyday life. This is often practically achieved by the composers and musicians utilizing sparse sounds, quietness, unornamented 'plain' sounds, thin textures, and pale harmonies. In a famous verse, Bái Jūyì emphasizes slowness and sparsity as leading to blandness:
The cadence, slow; and leisurely the strumming:
Deep in the night, a few sounds, no more.
Bland, without flavor, they enter the ear;
The heart is tranquil, feelings lie beneath. (in Jullien 2004, 83)
The instrument that Bái Jūyì is playing here is, of course, the gǔqín, an instrument with a long association with blandness. In his Xi Shan Qin Kuang (溪山琴況), Xu Shang Ying (徐上瀛) describes the gǔqín as the musical instrument most suitable for expressing dan:
"The sounds produced by all other musical instruments lose their wei 'tastefulness' when they sound placid (dan). However, for guqin music, when the sound of guqin is dan, it creates a kind of tastefulness in the music. What kind of tastefulness? It is tian [恬]…When tian is complete, one does not feel bored with dan." (Tien 2015, 212)
I find this passage interesting for primarily two reasons. Firstly, it is an interesting question as to why the gǔqín sound so tasteful when played plainly. That is not true for all other instruments. When playing Sundanese suling without any ornaments or variations in sound, it sounds flat and boring, as if the instrumentalist is an amateur–what my Indonesian teachers would call baru belajar ("new to practicing"). On the gǔqín, however, there is something about the sound itself–the timbre–that does not lead to this negative characteristic.
The second aspect that is interesting in Master Xu's passage is the way he emphasizes that dan is coupled with serenity or calmness (tian 恬). Tien (2015), in his excellent study of Master Xu's treatise, comments on this passage that "[a]ccording to Master Xu, guqin music which exhibits the quality of tian also demonstrates a priori, the quality of dan" (212). Blandness necessarily goes together with calmness in aesthetic expressions–it is the presence of something other than dan that makes dan a positive quality, something that is lacking in the amateur playing suling without ornaments. Master Xu's passage reveals an insight into the dialects of aesthetic qualities and the way different qualities work together. Sparse sounds, tranquility, and blandness are intimately connected when it comes to poetics. It is not enough to adopt the aesthetics of amateurism, there must be some other aesthetic qualities in place to make this amateurism a positive quality. On the gǔqín, these multiple qualities arise idiomatically–it is what is natural to the instrument–while on the suling it will demand more of the musician/composer to transform the sound of someone baru belajar into a positive quality.
Decreasing emotionality through impermanence
While blandness is all about avoiding the use of overly attractive materials, an alternative approach could involve embracing likable sounds and inviting the listener to be at peace with their eventual disappearance. Using pleasant sounds and allowing them to fade away is an aesthetic strategy that reflects the Buddhist teaching of impermanence and the fleeting nature of pleasure and beauty. This idea is akin to how Mujū Ichien described the value of waka in his work, Shasekishū:
"if by looking at the leaves falling in the wind one forgets one's attachment to fame and wealth and comprehends the worthlessness of worldly existence [...] then waka can serve [...] as a means to understanding the Buddhist teachings." (trans. in Rajyashree Pandey 1998, 45)
Instead of finding peace in the taste of no taste as with blandness, we find equanimity by accepting the transience of tastes. Thematizing impermanence is, therefore, another way for art to turn our minds away from the worldly winds–another way in which art can be an upāya. This is also the meaning I interpret from Rujing's verse "Lingyun saw peach blossoms opening, / But I see peach blossoms scattering" (Heine 2020, 140) which Dōgen references in the "Udambara Blossoms" fascicle. Heine (2020) explains that Rujing suggests that instead of only celebrating the beauty of blossoms, their scattering can serve as a reminder of letting go of human attachments, similar to the experience of casting off body-mind and embracing the emptiness of Buddha nature.
In music, the constant fading away and temporal finitude of likable phenomena can teach us about impermanence. We can create pieces that sound like the constant coming into being and scattering of the peach blossoms' petals. When the blossom suddenly opens–when a sound suddenly appears out of nowhere–there can be an awakening through form (kenshiki monsho). When it scatters–when the pretty sound suddenly disappears to never come back–there is an awakening through impermanence.
This kind of aesthetic quality is not incompatible with blandness. In the classical repertoire for the gǔqín, I often hear unexpected movements of appealing phrases, sounds, and silences appearing momentarily to never again come back. The resignation and acceptance that come with the realization that these were momentary and passing moments of prettiness often deepen the experience of blandness in important ways. It is important to note that the ultimate goal from a Buddhist perspective should be to create a situation that goes beyond simply accepting with equanimity the fading away of beautiful things (the impermanence suggested by Mujū Ichien, it seems to me). Instead, we should strive for a view that sees no difference or duality between what is attractive and what is bland, and what is life and what is death. The ultimate teaching of impermanence (anitya) is not just that beautiful things will not last, but that there is a nonduality between existence and nonexistence. This point can only be brought home by using both attractive as well as bland sounds since merely using bland sounds cannot teach the non-duality of what is attractive and what is bland. There is, therefore, an important place for appealing sounds even within the aesthetics of blandness.
Decreasing emtionality through zōka
Another angle through which we can approach the problem of 'emotionality' is to consider the use of non-symbolism as a method to reduce not only conceptuality but also emotionality. In the previous discussion about non-symbolism in relation to conceptuality, we learned that sounds could contrast in specific ways to be "devoid of any specific symbolized emotion," allowing them to "speak for themselves in their own particularity" (Thornhill 1998, 351). Experiencing sounds in this manner was described as similar to natural experiences when one is not listening to music, and sounds simply happen (Cage 1981, 119). When sounds are stripped of symbolism, they are also stripped of a kind of 'human emotionality' and can sound like they simply happen or arise spontaneously with naturalness and ease.
When Alvin Lucier writes that the expressiveness of natural phenomena can serve as a model for music to emulate, I take him to describe an aesthetic ideal of naturalness:
"I'm not interested in self-expression. I'm interested in discovery of sound phenomena and expressivity. If I'm not interested in self-expression, I'm still interested in expressivity, the expressiveness of natural characteristics of the sound waves. There is nothing more beautiful than a river or a stream and yet it's not expressing itself." (Harder & Rusche 2014)
The 'expressivity' found in natural phenomena is not the emotionality found in self-expressive subjective, human music, but rather is the very lack of such emotion–it is a naturalness that is objective but nonetheless expressive. This quality of naturalness is captured in the aesthetic term zōka (造化 zàohuà) and there is an intimate connection between this kind of naturalness and the quality of blandness. The sounds of nature are, by nature, bland because they lack traces of human manipulation and beautification. As Tien (2015) writes, both the qualities of blandness and naturalness are about returning to "the most natural and unpretentious sonic state" (Tien 2015, 40). The spontaneous expressivity of the emotionlessness of natural phenomena is similar to talking about the taste of things without artifice. Yet, these two terms also point to different aesthetic qualities.
Naturalness can be achieved by emulating the natural experience of, for example, hearing the sounds of rivers or trees, but this does not mean that the music has to mimic the sounds of rivers and trees. It is not that art has to copy natural phenomena for the quality of naturalness to come about but rather that something about the experience of encountering natural phenomena is what is intimated. In the visual field, an aesthetic quality of naturalness is found, for example, in the work of Agnes Martin, but her paintings are far from looking like natural environments. In the words of Bell, Martin "compared the experience of looking at her work to watching clouds and never seeing any the same, or viewing waves of the sea, continuously breaking on the shore always the same but always different" (Bell 2015, 29). Martin's art has a similar expressivity to that of waves breaking on the shore, and the audience is invited to a similar mode of being as if they were leisurely looking at the clouds moving over the sky. This is why Martin's art feels like it has the non-emotionality of zōka. Much of Cage's music since the 70s does similarly not sound like the sounds we find in nature at all, but still has a kind of 'objective' 'naturalness'. The way in which sounds behave–similar to sounds in nature by the way they happen 'by themselves' without any traces of self-expressivity–gives Cage's music the quality of zōka.
Cage's music achieved a sense of zōka primarily by embracing chance. By working with indeterminate "no-continuities", his music achieved what philosopher Timothy Morton (2009) has called an "automated feel". According to Morton, Cage's music has a kind of "found quality"—a sense that it is "working 'all by itself' or 'coming from nowhere'" (38). The music sounds like it perpetuates itself and comes automatically from the creativity and free play of the world. This is what gives it a sense of zōka. The music must sound like it is working all by itself in a way that is, in a sense, aimless. d’Angiolini writes that it is about establishing a criterion "that will permit a process that allows the music to create itself all by itself" (n.d.). Zōka is achieved when this "automated feel" sounds completely devoid of any purpose. In an elucidation about zōka, James Cahill, a historian of Chinese art, explains that
"[c]reation in nature happens without planning or purpose, so everything in it looks (by definition) natural. Artist's creation can't ordinarily escape looking man-made; only if he can somehow attain state of mind that eliminates purposefulness will he create as nature does, transcend artifice, and achieve this rare effect of naturalness, rightness." (n.d.)
The music can not sound like a 'series of decisions' but must unfold organically without the audible presence of the composer’s intention. This 'process' that so to speak self-generates the work does not have to be chance-driven, as in Cage's music, and Jürg Frey recognizes this quality even in the canon of Western music:
"I do hear in his [Schumann's] music sometimes, not too often, a flow of chords without any effort of the composer. The music goes on and on, and the whole energy feels like it comes from inside the music, not as a compositional effort made by the composer. Obviously this has a strong impact on my thoughts and feelings. I also hear this 'going on by itself' in works by other composers, particularly in the pre-Baroque era, but with Schumann it’s coloured by a more personal handwriting. I don’t hear it with much of the expressionist music of the 20th century, and even sometimes not in the music of Schönberg. There a variety of expressionist gestures are used to move the music forward rather than it having this sense of 'going on by itself' with its own internal momentum. This 'going on by itself' is an issue that has concerned me for many, many years. It was even, I think, the initial spark at the beginning of my life as a composer." (Frey, J. & Sansón, G., n.d.)
In the opening of Maderna's flute and piano duo Honeyrêves–seen as Figure 1 in the first part of this two-part essay–we can see an example of music that relies on expressionist gestures to move forward. The composer uses techniques such as contrasts in register, techniques, and dynamics to create energy and momentum in the music. However, this energy feels forced and lifeless–it disappears the moment the input stops. The music is devoid of zōka and is instead full of the composer's subjectivity and thought process–full of 'purpose'.
When the Chinese aestheticians were discussing zàohuà, one of the aspects they were looking for was li (理)—the underlying principle and order of nature as reflected in organic forms. In a discussion of Huáng Gōngwàng’s Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains, Sturman describes li as "a unifying force throughout the painting. It is the logic that determines movement, evolution, and transformation". It is achieved by "the logic or principle of his forms: brushstrokes, textures, and patterns interacting to establish rhythms and thematic movements" (2016, 189). In music, Frey recognizes that classical techniques such as thematic unity are fruitful methods for achieving zōka and li. The 'going on by itself' that Frey recognizes so clearly in Renaissance music (“the pre-Baroque era”) can be achieved by totally different means than those that Cage used. For Cage, these were instances of strong forms of continuity–the very opposite of the non-continuities that he used. While Cage accessed zōka from the perspective of chance, the Renaissance composer accessed it through a strong thematic unity, and a sense that the counterpoint of imitation kept the piece unfolding 'by itself'.
Decreasing emtionality through impersonality
As was gesticulated to in the above discussion, a prerequisite for zōka is a quality of 'impersonality'. The artist must detach her art from her own personal desires and purposes in order for zōka to come about. d'Angiolini writes that the creation of the feeling that music creates itself is a result of the composer distancing himself from himself:
“The composer must distance himself, make absent, and suppress in himself all aim. He will establish the criteria that will permit a process that allows the music to create itself all by itself.” (n.d.)
Bashō as well held that in order for qualities such as zōka to be infused in poems, the poet has to forget himself and let go of the ego's grip on the artistic process. Only then can the poems attain the impersonal quality of sincerity (makoto). The poet must purge the ego from his heart-mind so that it becomes pure like a mirror. Only then will this mirror be capable of "reflecting things as they are" (Thornhill 1998, 351). Bashō famously told his students to "[l]earn about a pine tree from a pine tree, and about a bamboo plant from a bamboo plant." Learning about phenomena from phenomena was about letting go of ego and "enter into the object, perceive its delicate life, and feel its feeling (sono bi no awarete jōkanzuru)" (Thornhill 1998, 351).
This idea of the artist letting go of ego and attuning herself to the studied object–whether it's the subject of a poem or painting–has an interesting parallel in the new music of some 20th-century composers. In the music of these composers, we can see an increased interest in exploring 'sounds themselves' as raw material as well as an increased interest in exploring musical instruments 'themselves'. Morton (2013) has described how in this new music, musical instruments are no longer regarded as just 'materials-for' (human production), but rather the compositions of these composers make the listener attend to the musical instruments in and of themselves (rather than functioning as merely a means)–in other words, they have the aesthetic quality of impersonality. Rather than expressing their feelings and ideologies with the sounds of musical instruments, these 20th-century composers started to be sensitive to the agentive powers of the sounds and instruments themselves:
“Gradually the inside of the piano freed itself from embodying the inner life of the human being, and started to resonate with its own wooden hollowness” (Morton 2013, 165).
In his early compositions, Cage achieved this, according to Morton, by preparing the piano and thereby drawing attention to the uniqueness of the heterogenous sounds that were produced by the preparations. Cage did not write sounds to voice his inner being, but rather he gave sounds their own anarchic autonomy. The spectral composers turned instead their attention to the microaudial makeup of sounds by studying and manipulating their spectra. Other instrumental composers' interests in sounds led to an exploration of new extended techniques for traditional instruments. In Cage's later music, sporadic, and 'random' sounds without any direction gives rise to a heightened awareness of the music as consisting of just sounds. Yet others, like La Monte Young, worked with just intonation and thereby achieved a heightened focus on music's raw materiality:
“Instead of coming up with a new tune, Young decided to work directly with tuning […] This is the music of attunement, not of stories.” (Morton 2013, 166).
According to Morton, by stripping ‘storytelling’ away from music, the listener could attend to music's raw materials instead. Because the focus is on the sounds themselves, this music can be described as having the aesthetic quality of 'impersonality'.
Silences
If the employment of aesthtic qualities like blandness, zōka, and impersonality represent different strategies that can be employed in music to decrease its prettiness, it still remains the case that music with these qualities can be to our liking. Even Kamo no Chōmei's solitary and ascetic life as a recluse became a source of aesthetic delight and a problematic attachment for him: "It is a sin for me now to love my little hut, and my attachment to its solitude may also be a hindrance to salvation" (trans. Keene 1968, 203). In the Pāli canon, the Buddha explains that even an attachment to serenity and the Dharma itself has to be abandoned in order to actualize awakening. If someone striving for awakening
"does not attain the destruction of the taints because of that desire for the Dhamma [dhammarāgena], that delight in the Dhamma [dhammanandiyā], then with the destruction of the five lower fetters he becomes one due to reappear spontaneously [in the Pure Abodes] and there attain final Nibbāna without ever returning from that world." (in Bhikkhu Bodhi 2015, 455).
The Pāli terms dhammarāgena and dhammanandiyā refer to desire and attachment (chandarāga) to serenity and insight. It is only by discarding all desire and attachment to serenity and insight that the practitioner can be transformed into an arahant. If one is not able to discard subtle attachments, the accomplishment is still significant: one "becomes a non-returner and is reborn in the Pure Abodes" (Bhikkhu Bodhi 2015, 1254). The high achievements reached before eliminating these attachments indicate that dhammarāgena and dhammanandiyā are among the most final and subtle taints to be discarded.
Just as with the Dharma, the soteriological aspects of art–the qualities that actually lead us toward awakening–can become a source of subtle attachment. On this topic, Musō Soseki (1996) wrote that "[t]he original purpose of the arts is to tune and refine the mind. Once they become objects of personal attachment, however, their refining action is lost and they turn into occasions for perversion and corruption" (58-59). Art can, on the one hand, be an expression of how Buddha nature manifests in function; Musō speaks of how an exemplar viewer of gardens comes to "regard mountains, rivers, grass, trees, and stones to be their own original nature" (Kasulis 2018, 642). On the other hand, because it is beautiful and something that we like, we also have to be careful to not get attached. It is because of this, Musō insightfully writes, that Zen instructions oscillate between suggestions to, on the one hand, engage in the phenomenal world and worldly activities and, on the other hand, set these aside:
"It is for reasons like this that teachers of the doctrinal and Zen schools sometimes tell their students that wordly activities are not separate from practice and sometimes tell them that they should set aside all such activities when they practice. There is nothing to be surprised about in this" (Musō 2015, 249).
The above quote points to the dialectics of the path. Sometimes, we might feel that art–or any other phenomenon for that matter–truly is the expression of Buddha nature. Other times, we might feel that it is best to set phenomena aside for a while and meditate in silence. In a beautiful verse on this theme, the Buddhist nun Miaohui (秒惠) expresses the problem of attachment to art. The verse begins with four lines in which the presence of likes and attachments is confessed;
The buddha-nature is ultimately wordless,
But I still remain fond of brush and ink.
My mind has yet to become as dead as ashes,
I've not yet exhausted all my worldly karma.
The verse then continues by drawing our attention away from the brush and ink–the source of attachment for the subject in Miaohui's poem–to the silences and absences of sound between the ritual sounds that mark the monastic life:
I intuitively understand that these evergreen trees
Are in essence beyond both emptiness and form;
How could it be then that between bell and fish-drum
Is where the principles of Buddhism are to be found!
(trans. Grant 2003, 122)
In this verse, the recommendation that it can be valuable to sometimes set the phenomenal world aside is illustrated. Although the poem's speaker clearly knows that they are just as much expressive of truth as silence, neither art (brush and ink) nor the beauty of the natural world (these evergreen trees) seem to, at this very moment, express the nature of reality as well as the gaps between phenomena. The verse suggests that rather than in phenomenal forms, it is in the silences between sounds that Miaohui finds the ultimate truth. At this moment, it is these silences, not the poetry written with brush and ink nor the evergreen trees, that truly express the wordless Buddha nature.
While from the ultimate perspective—as demonstrated by the quotes from Mipam, Mǎzǔ, Musō, and Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche that have been present in this essay and its first part—, there is no distinction between appearance and emptiness. Yet, it remains the case that we usually like the experiences of being musically attuned—these experiences are still tied to our karmically conditioned mode of being. The moment we like the experience, the equanimity required to see the nature of things is lost:
“The moment attention is caught up in what is perceived, the natural seat is lost.” (Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche 2002, 89-90)
What Miaohui and Musō suggest is, therefore, that sometimes an aesthetics of silence is needed. It was the silence, not the sounds, that afforded a blossoming encounter with emptiness for the subject in Miaohui's verse. The way to approach the samarasa of meditative equipoise as intimately as possible with musical instruments might thus be to play nothing on them at all. During the musical moments where sounds are absent, we are allowed to extend our nondual awareness even when there is nothing 'attractive' perceived. The "principles of Buddhism", as Miaohui puts it, is, however, not present in all musical silences equally. This is because in most musical silences, we are 'present' with the 'mental' resonances—the aftertaste—of the sounds of music. In such silences, the atmosphere or the mood of the piece is affectively present—a presence that can be affirmed as something that we want to be in. In other words, just because there suddenly is a musical silence, does not mean that we are not still affectively tuned and still in a state of aesthetic relishing.
Atmospheres and moods are those background feeling states that transcend particular phenomena such as individual sounds. Being musically attuned is to be nondually attuned to an 'atmosphere', or what Nishida called the kokoro no kūkan, the "space of the heart/mind" as contrasted to the space of things (mono no kūkan)–the space of nonduality as contrasted to the space of phenomenal objects. This kokoro no kūkan is not some kind of 'interior' or 'introspective' state but a nondual attunement in which any difference between 'interior' and 'exterior' is transcended. Being musically attuned to a mood or atmosphere, therefore, continues even when there is an absence of sound because the attunement transcends particular sounds.
An anonymous poem in the Goshūi Wakashū from the late 11th century beautifully expresses how nondually relishing the space of mind continues even after the 'phenomenal object' that caused this relishing has disappeared. While spending the night gazing at the moon—a classic metaphor for our inherent Buddha-being—the moon disappears behind a mountain. With nothing left to look at, the poet is left experiencing a purely attunemental object-less state, with only the pure mood of the moon-as-Buddha-Nature perfuming his mind:
the moon of evening
hid
behind the mountain edge
but the bright
resonance—
O, it leaves behind! (Miller 2013, 175)]
It is precisely this lingering of the mood of the moon that keeps the poet's mind in meditation. In the same way, we are usually affectively musically attuned even when there is silence in music. Just because there is silence, does not mean that we suddenly are not listening to music, and just because there is silence, does not mean that there is still not something compelling present that can become the source of our liking and grasping. Music listening does therefore not even in silences have the true affect-less state that pure meditative equipoise has. The rasa of peace as experienced in the aesthetic attunement to silence will never be the rasa of sameness that the Mahamudra tradition so often speaks of when describing meditative equipoise—śāntarasa is not samarasa. It is not samarasa because there is still an affective mood or an atmosphere that we are attuned to and that we relish. Simply 'using silences' does, therefore, not automatically entail that "the principles of Buddhism" that Miaohui speaks of are found within them. We are still, perhaps, clinging to that serenity that the Buddha warned of.
The 20th section of Kenkō's Tsurezuregusa gives a short account of how the mere affective lingering of an atmosphere is among the hardest things to overcome, but that a monk necessarily has to release himself from them in order to taste the sameness of phenomena:
某とかやいひし世捨人の、「この世のほだし持たらぬ身に、ただ、空の名残のみぞ惜しき」と言ひしこそ、まことに、さも覚えぬべけれ
Someone who has left the world behind [i.e. a Buddhist monk or recluse] is said to have said that for him, who has rid himself of all attachments and bonds to this world, the only thing hard to give up is the lingering mood that the sky leaves behind. One can understand this sentiment.
Both Keane and McKinney, two well-known translators of Japanese poetry, translated 空の名残 as "the beauty of the sky". However, 名残 or nagori does not mean beauty; rather, it refers to the aftertaste or lingering traces that phenomena leave behind. The speaker in the poem indicates that the resonances of beauty that remain in the mind are difficult to give up. He is not talking about watching the sky turn pink at sunset and enjoying its aesthetics, but rather about experiencing the sound of the wind (空, sora, can also refer to the weather in general) and how it moves our emotions and leaves a lasting taste. In other words, how the sky and wind attune us affectively. The reclusive speaker identifies relishing this aftertaste as a subtle problem, as something that stands between him and awakening. Hearing the wind blowing is a subtle form of beauty that embodies blandness and śāntarasa. The resonance it leaves behind has the flavor of meditation. However, it is not samarasa, if there is even a subtle relishing.
While relishing the aesthetic śāntarasa, we might at times believe that we are in true meditative equipoise. But if we were in true equipoise, then any disturbing sound, such as our neighbours suddenly starting to hammer the wall, would not stir our emotions negatively because there would not be any 'mood' that the appearance of the hammering could 'disturb'. If the musical attunement was samarasa, even 'disturbing' sounds would be perceived as being of the same taste as the 'musical' sounds. Kasulis writes how there can be "no distractions in zazen" because
"[a] distraction is something present to consciousness but outside of one's desired focus. In zazen, however, presence itself is the sole content: without-thinking has no desired focus" (1981, 89).
The pure presence can not be disturbed, but musical attunements often can. Music–as a nondual, non-conceptual attunement–is engaged without-thinking and without focusing on the music as an object. Music too can be said to take 'presence itself' as its sole content, but it is a presence that is perfumed affectively in the form of a 'mood'. The fact that liking and distractions can occur in musical attunements means that it is not samarasa. The 'state' (which, of course, is the total absence of being in any 'state') of samarasa is completely free from reference points and free from accepting or rejecting anything. It is a "free vastness and unimpeded clarity, A state of translucent and wakeful openness" (Kunsang 1986, 60). Śāntarasa, on the other hand, is still an aesthetic mood, and so is the relative blandness. What I propose, however, is that among aesthetic moods, relative blandness is closest to awakened vision. It is close to samarasa and can under certain conditions feel like it becomes samarasa. This is what I take Miahui to describe in the verse above. The bell and fish drum attune Miaohui to a nondual attunement that is so bland and thin that in the silences, śāntarasa becomes samarasa.
The poetics that I extract from Miaohui's verse are therefore not the poetics of being completely silent, but that the combination of silences with carefully chosen sounds (sounds that have qualities such as blandness) can lead to the veil of mood being thin enough for us to see through it in the silences, but thick enough to establish the nondual attunement in the first place. It is an aesthetic of using phenomenality to make us hear silence as emptiness. In music, the sounds we bring forth can function like the bells and fish drums that made Miaohui hear 'the principles of Buddhism' in the silences between them. In the moments of silence between the bell and the fish drum, there is room for a sudden moment of awakening.
When used like this, musical attunement can be considered a type of meditation that, similarly to śamatha, leads the listener toward the thought-free wakefulness of vipaśyanā. It is, of course, possible to begin directly with vipaśyanā without this kind of śamatha, but that would require the music to be completely silent from the beginning–music that achieves a musical attunement coupled with the total absence of musical sounds. The traditional literature described how a musical attunement to that which lacks sounds is achieved by listening to a qín without strings. In a beautiful poem, Ryōkan takes up this image that traditionally is closely associated with the poet of bland poetry mentioned above, Táo Yuānmíng:
On a quiet evening in my thatch-roofed hut,
alone I play a lute [琴] with no string.
Its melody melody enters wind and cloud,
mingles deeply with a flowing stream,
fills out the dark valley,
blows through the vast forest, then disappears.
Other than those who hear emptiness,
who will capture this rare sound? (in Tanahashi 2012, 140)
Listening to the sound of a soundless qín is to relish the tasteful tastelessness of Mind–the ultimate blandness. For most of us, however, it is not effortless to access that nondual attunement. We often need something that guides us to that state. Guiding us there is what musical sounds can do–just like śamatha can lead the way to vipaśyanā.
According to the common metaphor, śamatha is what calms the water and removes its turbulence to make it possible to in it see the clear nature of mind. One of the reasons that śamatha only is a prelude to vipaśyanā is precisely because of the subtle fondness associated with śamatha. This fondness is perhaps similar to the desire and attachment to serenity and insight mentioned in the Pāli canon. As Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche explains,
"[w]hen training in shamatha, there is some sense of resting, of being quiet and tasting a feeling of quiet peace. There is a sense of being fond of that feeling, of being attached to it. [...] There is no freedom here because of that fondness, the clinging to the taste of shamatha. It's because we are so interested in that feeling of quietness that we are hindered from moving further" (2002, 37).
Just as there is a subtle fondness associated with śamatha, we can say that even in very long silences between musical notes in a very bland and plain piece of music, there is usually still an affective attunement to an aesthetic state. But just like śamatha functions as a prelude to vipaśyanā, musical attunements can lead beyond themselves. If the attunement is thin enough, the veil of musical attunement can dissipate, and an unaesthetic emptiness can be revealed in its place. It is only when the veil is thin enough to dissipate that the true "principles of Buddhism are to be found" (Miaohui in Grant 2003, 122). Hearing the sparse sounds that punctuate monastic life, such as fish drums and bells, musically attune the listener to a very bland musical attunement. It is so bland that many people probably even would not consider it to be music. But precisely because it is so simple, it has the potential to open up and disappear.
What can happen at that point of the music disappearing, however, is something that goes beyond what Miaohui describes. When this veil is broken, emptiness can be perceived not only in the silences but in the subsequent musical sounds as well. We will then hear sounds arising as emptiness, not only arising from emptiness. The "principles of Buddhism" might initially just be heard in between the bell and fish-drum, but if truly actualized will make subsequent bells and fish-drums arise as emptiness too. There is not in those moments any difference between hearing sounds and silence; playing music becomes "like pumping bellows into the wind" (Sū Shì in Grant 1994, 80).
The soteriological qualities of Music
In concluding the above discussions, aesthetic musical experience can be said to have many qualities. Ideally, it invites the listener to rest the mind in its natural nondual state where sounds are perceived with equanimity and as the empty movements of Mind—the union of appearance and emptiness. The presence of some conceptuality and subtle grasping–which can be more or less present depending on the aesthetic qualities of the particular piece–can cause this ideal to not be fully realized. Even when not fully realized, however, it can still be intimated very closely. What I am concluding is therefore that music can be a valuable resource on the path.
The poet Saigyo drew a similar conclusion about beauty. Even though he did not talk about music explicitly, his description of the experience of beauty was markedly attunemental in character. In a verse describing his experience of awakening, satori, Saigyo drew a causal link between being attuned to beauty and awakening:
思ひかえす悟りや今日はなからまし花に染めおく色なかりせ
Mind-changing
satori--this very day--
it would not exist
had my own color
not been dyed by blossoms. (trans. Barnhill 2011)
Being attuned—a nondual state Barnhill has Saigyō express by referring to his own color having been dyed by the blossoms' color—is something that prepares us for satori. Attuning ourselves to music, letting sounds simply be by surrendering to them, is an activity with strong soteriological value. When we listen to music, we do not do or do not not do anything. We merely leave the mind to be in a nondual attunement. In this mere being, the musical sounds arise as the spontaneous self-reflexive empty movement of Mind. Scruton writes how "[i]n hearing the movement in music we are hearing life–life conscious of itself" (1997, 353). In musical attunements, we can hear form as emptiness and emptiness as form. Stillness, occurrence, and awareness are all of but a single essence which is Mind (Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche 1986, 130).The Zen tradition in particular maintains that one can gain awakening through colors and sounds (kenshiki monsho), as when Xiangyan heard the sound caused by a pebble striking bamboo. According to Steven Heine, this is because
"great awakening (daigo) is characterized by the unity of enlightenment and delusion, as well as the beginning and end of phenomenal experiences" (2020, 204).
While the presence of affectivity is something that can cause this ideal of musical attunement to not be fully realized, the affectiveness of music is precisely its main asset. By providing an affective Stimmung, music allows us to stay focused in non-duality for long periods of time precisely because the type of relishing of the kokoro no kūkan that it affords is beautiful. This is unlike vipaśyanā meditation, where this kind of relishing is not present. In meditation, the affectivity that music perfumes the nondual attunement with is removed. Left is a complete openness to accept all affects without staying with them (what is known as the quality of 'sameness' of rasa–samarasa). This creates an exercise more difficult to sustain. In musical attunement, although we might lose some of the equanimous qualities of meditative equipoise, we gain some help in sustaining unwavering attention. Music should, therefore, not have to feel obliged to try to get as close as possible to samarasa; that is the domain of meditation. The skillful use of music is precisely to utilize its affective qualities to help us stay in nondual, disinterested attunement. In this text, I have been trying to explore techniques for how to make this veil of affectivity 'thinner' so that the wisdom of samarasa that lies beyond it is intimated, but not so thin that we are no longer spontaneously attuned by the music.
Although some pieces like Yoko Ono's Stone Piece, in which the listener listens to the soundlessness of an aging stone, really makes the veil so thin that the distance between the act of listening to music and the act of resting the mind in its natural state almost disappear, these experiences are still not enough for actualizing awakening. This is because awakening is more than just a momentary experience of emptiness. It is not enough to once in a while have empty, nondual meditative experiences when encountering art. The texts warn us that
"even though you ascertain empty luminosity during meditative equipoise, your subsequent consciousness becomes confused concerning ordinary things, so there is the stain of grasping onto them as real, and the stains of Karma are not purified" (Karma Chagmé 2000).
Having moments where we recognize the nature of the mind is not itself to actualize complete awakening. Pariniṣpannasvabhāva is itself not necessarily nirvāṇa, but nirvāṇa is attained through actively engaging in it on the gradual path. Brunnhölzl (2007) explains how
"[i]n this vein, the Seventh Karmapa, Chötra Gyatso (1454–1506), says in his Ocean of Texts on Reasoning that the perfect nature [the pariniṣpannasvabhāva] can be classified as (1) the path of purification and (2) the focal object of this path." (Brunnhölzl 2007, 61)
When a guru "points out" the nature of the mind to a student, the student is not by any means already awakened. Despite having perceived the nature nakedly and directly, she still has a long process of stabilizing that recognition and familiarizing herself with it thoroughly. What typically happens is that after moments of actualizing our awakened nature "the continuity of our innate nature, the ongoingness of that basic space, gets lost again" (Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche 2002, 107). The nature gets lost again because we still have karmic tendencies that have not been purified:
"What is it that kicks us out or makes us stray from the basic [natural] state? It is karma, which in this case is our ingrained habit of thinking." (Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche 2002, 107)
Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche illustrates this process with a beautiful verse by his father, Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche:
We try to recognize the natural state,
And for a moment or two we recognize
How it is to be free from subject and object.
This recognition is identical in nature
With the realization of a fully awakened buddha;
A small version of total freedom.
The same moment, no matter how short,
Our dualistic experience dissolves,
It is identical with the nature of complete enlightenment.
Being merely a small gap in dualistic fixation,
It gives no chance for the wisdom qualities to fully manifest.
Like a glimmer of light in the middle of a dark night,
The light is light; it illuminates.
But being so brief,
It does not dispel the enire night's darkness. (2002, 108)
In this verse, Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche writes that these short moments of actualizing awakening are "identical with the nature of complete enlightenment"–the only thing that separates them from awakening is that they do not last. Nishida made a related important distinction between the muga of beauty and the muga of religion in that the former is temporary while the latter is permanent. The muga of beauty is an ichiji no muga (一時の無我), a muga of the moment. The muga of religion is instead "eternal"–an eikyū no muga (永久の無我). This is similar to Schopenhauer, who considered aesthetic experiences to be momentary deliverance from suffering, different from the everlasting liberation achieved in nirvāṇa. In The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer writes that aesthetic experiences "does not deliver him from life forever but only for a few moments." (quoted in Odin 2001, 132) From actualizing beauty,
"we can infer how blessed must be the life of a man whose will is silenced not for a few moments as in the enjoyment of the beautiful, but forever, indeed completely extinguished, except for the last glimmering spark that maintains the body and is extinguished with it" (Schopenhauer, in Young 2005, 144).
