Introduction
The previous part of this two-part essay concluded with an inquiry into the extent to which musical attunements are conceptual. This question is crucial because the essay as a whole explores the possibility that listening to music may be soteriologically beneficial—if being musically attuned to a piece of music resembles, closely enough, resting the mind in its natural state. Since resting in the natural state is a non-conceptual experience, musical attunement must likewise be either non-conceptual or at least significantly less conceptual than ordinary consciousness, thereby intimating—if not actualizing—the same condition.
In Part I, five objections to the idea of music as non-conceptual were raised. Although each was grounded in strong theoretical arguments, it proved possible to respond to them in ways that defended music’s potential non-conceptuality. Against the claim that musical shapes are products of conceptual cognition, it was argued that such shapes do not result from an act of assembling external sense data but stand in a non-conceptual, non-dual relation to awareness itself. Regarding formal awareness, listening was shown to rely on non-reflective retention rather than reflective recollection. Concerning thoughts that arise while listening, these were reinterpreted as expressions of the mind’s free play—a result of non-conceptuality rather than a cause of conceptuality. The conceptual framing of music—titles, program notes, interpretive texts—was found not to preclude non-conceptual experience. Finally, musical modes of listening were described as non-dual perspectival openings of worlds, not cognitive or conceptual filters.
While non-conceptuality may be the pure nature of musical attunement, it was also noted that music does not always operate in this ideal manner. We have all experienced pieces that seem to call for greater formal awareness or symbolic interpretation, and this feels like a kind of mental doing. Rather than claiming that music is either conceptual or non-reflective, it is more accurate to recognize a spectrum: certain works invite a more conceptual mode of engagement, requiring intellectual relations among parts, while others invite a state of forgetful, non-conceptual dwelling.
If we accept that conceptuality is often present in musical attunement, the task for the Buddhist musician is not to prove that all music is non-conceptual, but to discover how conceptuality might be lessened in musical practice itself. The following sections therefore mark a turn from aesthetics to poetics. For the musician who wishes to guide listeners closer to awakening, it seems reasonable to favor music that minimizes mental time travel, structural listening, and symbolic interpretation. Listening to pieces that succeed in this often moves us palpably closer to the meditative equipoise of just-sitting—a state of effortless non-doing—than listening to others. The discussions that follow will examine the poetic use of non-symbolism, discontinuity, and forgetful forms as ways of decreasing conceptuality in musical practice.
After exploring conceptuality from this poetic perspective, attention will then turn to the second of the two obscurations that hinder awakening: emotionality (kleśāvaraṇa). Musical experience, after all, frequently gives rise to feelings of attraction and aversion. Part II will therefore conclude by bringing these two lines of inquiry—conceptuality and emotionality—together to ask, finally, what the distance between art and awakening truly is.
Decreasing conceptuality through non-symbolism
Conceptuality can be reduced by composing music that affords no symbolic interpretation whatsoever. This was precisely John Cage’s agenda when he elevated the ordinary sounds of everyday life to the status of ideal music, contrasting them with the kind of 'Music' in which sounds pretend to be something more than surface phenomena. Cage’s aim was to strip sound of representation, to let it exist without reference—to hear sound as activity rather than as expression:
"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 sought for sounds to reveal themselves to the listener just as they are—as empty movements without any symbolic residue whatsoever. No meaning is communicated through sound; rather, sound and meaning are undivided. In the Sūtra on Entering the Two Truths, cited by Candrakīrti, ultimate truth is described precisely in such terms: "ultimate truth ... is free of what is uttered as well as utterances" (in Tsongkhapa 2021). By removing any dualism between medium and message—between the sound itself and what the sound is thought to signify—music can intimate the direct seeing of things as they are in themselves (yathābhūtadarśana).
Giuliano d’Angiolini—a contemporary composer who continues this aspect of the Cagean aesthetic—describes his own music as being without "acts of communication" and without any intention to "signify" anything. When sounds are heard without what Cage called "inner listening", they are apprehended, as d’Angiolini writes, with "no interpretative filter, no prejudice, no discrimination or convention" (n.d.). In such listening, sounds appear only as themselves; nothing remains of them but their surfaces. These surfaces are the mere dependent arising of phenomena, unaccompanied by any imputation of hidden depth or symbolic meaning.
When Cage, in the quotation above, calls for sounds to be only "outer", he does not mean that they should be heard as external—as existing in a dual relation to the perceiver. "Outer" here simply designates freedom from symbolically imposed meaning, which, in his account, arises "inside" human subjects. Despite the dualistic language, Cage’s position can be brought into harmony with the classical Yogācāra view. According to this view, when no symbolism or conceptuality is imposed upon sounds, they appear nondually—as neither "inner" nor "outer" (Thompson 2021).
The question, then, is how one might create music that does not afford symbolic or conceptual interpretation. With regard to musical form, conceptuality can be diminished by reducing reliance on formal awareness as a source of meaning. Instead, one may cultivate an aesthetics of forgetfulness. Self-forgetting listening practices lessen conceptuality by relieving the listener of the burden to "search out" an inner logic or narrative structure—by eliminating all traces within the music that such a search is desired. Music of this kind feels content to exist solely in the present moment, where the impulse to interpret the now through the memory of what came before has fallen away.
Music that embodies a quality of forgetfulness avoids forming strong connections between its materials—whether between formal sections or between individual tones. Another way to describe forgetfulness, therefore, is through the notion of non-continuity, since discontinuities between sounds tend to prevent the emergence of symbolic or narrative associations. Both d’Angiolini and Cage achieve music that is non-narrative, non-symbolic, non-signifying, and non-representational by juxtaposing sounds rather than using them as building blocks in a sentence. In an anecdote where Cage describes a listening experience that I take to represent his ideal of music, he is careful to note that "the sounds that occurred were very different from each other" (my emphasis)—implying a preference for contrast, discontinuity, and juxtaposition over variation and development:
"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 compositional practice, Cage developed this principle of "no-continuity" as a guiding method for determining note-to-note progressions. In such discontinuous works, each sound is independent of both the preceding and succeeding ones, their sequence governed not by causal or formal logic but by indeterminacy (see, for example, "Lecture on Something" in Silence, 129–30). The result of this compositional stance is that sounds are permitted to presence as pure, fresh, and mere sounds—appearing without telic connection, like momentary phenomena arising and vanishing in the flow of dependent origination.
Parallels to contrasts in poetry
The principle that surprising contrasts can open onto non-conceptual encounters with phenomena finds a striking parallel in certain poetic traditions—most clearly in the function of 'cutting' words (切れ字) in haiku. Although turning to poetry may at first appear a detour in an essay concerned with music, the analogy is in fact remarkably precise. The poetic cut operates much like Cage’s discontinuities: it separates while at the same time joining, creating a moment in which two images or sensations coexist without being synthesized conceptually. Exploring this device in poetry thus offers a particularly clear way to understand how contrast can work musically in the compositions of Cage and others.
The first poem I would like to consider is this well-known verse by Bashō, in which a stark contrast unfolds between the second and third lines, separated by the cutting word ka:
Horohoro to Quietly, quietly,
yamabuki chiru ka yellow mountain roses fall—
taki no oto sound of the rapids (trans. Makoto Ueda)
In this verse, two images interact powerfully: the roar of the water and the tranquility of the falling petals. As Thornhill observes, the hokku is "devoid of any specific symbolized emotion", allowing the natural phenomena to "speak for themselves in their own particularity" (1998, 351). It is precisely through the dynamic contrast between these juxtaposed images that the quality of something freshly observed—free from symbolized emotion or conceptual distortion—is actualized.
The phrase taki no oto (滝の音, 'sound of the rapids') does not provide an interpretative framework for the yamabuki flowers (山吹); rather, it brings about a direct, immediate encounter with them. One could easily imagine the poet using the final five syllables to describe the flowers in greater detail, heightening their delicacy through additional modifiers. Yet, instead of elaboration, Bashō offers juxtaposition: the sheer contrast intensifies the freshness of perception. As Thornhill notes, "[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 both descriptive detail and contextual development, yet precisely because of that absence they possess an even greater vividness. This poetic effect closely parallels the aesthetic of discontinuous sound in Cage’s music, where contrasting elements appear without narrative connection and thereby allow phenomena to presence in their pure, unmediated clarity.
Haruo Shirane likens the workings of these "combination-hokku-s" to the "super-position" technique employed by Ezra Pound. One of Pound’s most famous poems to use this method, 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 entirely different scenes are juxtaposed. The resultant effect is not one of symbolic interpretation—the two images neither explain nor complete one another—but rather one of a direct, dynamic encounter with the freshness of phenomena as they appear. The poem does not narrate; it simply presents. As in Bashō’s verse, vividness arises from discontinuity: the sudden leap between disparate perceptual fields reveals a moment of pure, unmediated seeing.
Exactly how successful Pound’s poem is in achieving this quality can be illustrated by contrasting it with another couplet, from Zhèng Gǔ’s 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 and Zhèng Gǔ’s couplet juxtapose two scenes. In each, the second image involves flower petals set against the damp earth—Pound’s "petals on a wet, black bough" and Zhèng’s "fallen flowers" mingled with the scent of mud. Yet the relations between the first and second lines differ profoundly. In Pound’s case, an urban crowd glimpsed in the metro is set against the natural image of petals; in Zhèng’s, the uncompleted act of writing is set against the petals and the swallow's footprints in the mud. The kinds of connection these lines establish create distinct poetic effects.
In Zhèng Gǔ’s poem, a strong visual and conceptual resonance binds the two scenes: the dark ink of calligraphy echoes the imagined footprints of the swallow in the mud. As Mazanec (2017) observes, a common atmosphere unites the images, causing them to "rhyme" with one another and to imply a subtle, poetic correspondence:
"...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 not merely the presence of a shared atmosphere that strengthens the connection between the two lines in Zhèng Gǔ’s poem compared to those in Pound’s. In Zhèng’s couplet, there is also an implied narrative progression. This is the key point of contrast. As Mazanec explains, we can almost reconstruct a story behind the images:
"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 can emerge from Pound’s poem. The juxtaposition is simply too abrupt. The two scenes of In a Station of the Metro have nothing to do with one another whatsoever. As Taylor (1989) observes, Pound’s purpose in employing such stark disjunctions was to enable the reader "to see reality undistorted" (474). For Pound, art "means a constatation of fact. It presents. It does not comment" (1989, 474). To achieve this kind of mere presenting, a poem must not imitate reality by re-presenting a scene; rather, it must find another means of inviting direct perception—a mode that, as Taylor writes, "liberates us from the constricting conventional ways of seeing, so we can grasp the patterns by which the world is transfigured" (1989, 474). That mode is precisely the use of super-position and juxtaposition.
Taylor notes that the Poundian epiphany does not occur within the scenes, images, or objects themselves, but between them: "Instead of an epiphany of being, we have something like an epiphany of interspaces" (Taylor 1989, 474). What is aesthetically relished here is not a world of objects but the very conditions that make objects appear—the structures through which things reveal their existence. Such poems are therefore not about the deep examination of the scenes they evoke, but about the epiphanic space opened between them, a space made perceptible through juxtaposition. In that interval, phenomena seem to be merely presented—appearing with a directness and freshness unmediated by symbolic meaning or narrative connection.
The same can be said of Cage’s music. In his discontinuous works, freshness of perception arises not from any quality inherent in the sounds themselves. It is not by refining the subtleties of a violin’s tone—stipulating the precise motion of the vibrato, the speed of the bow, or its placement on the string—that sound comes to embody mere presentation. Rather, fresh perception emerges through the contrasts that form between sounds—in the interspaces that gesture toward the emptiness from which, and as which, sound arises.
Contrasts with shared overtones
While Pound's poem is extreme in lacking any shared atmosphere between its scenes, one does not have to give up all sense of connection to retain a quality of fresh perception. On the contrary, going too far in the direction of randomness introduces its own problems, which I will address below. Indeed, if the mere presence of a shared atmosphere meant that discontinuities and contrasts could no longer be perceived as such, then most compositions by Cage and d'Angiolini would contain no contrasts at all. Yet the discontinuities in their music are rarely as stark as in Pound’s verse, which almost entirely lacks a unifying tone or mood. Cage’s late Number Pieces, for example, contain striking contrasts yet are held together by a very particular atmosphere—a Stimmung, or what in haiku theory is called yosei (shared overtones). Despite the presence of such an atmosphere, Cage’s pieces are not narrative: they present the listener with disconnected sounds, revealing how contrasts can unfold within a shared, resonant world.
As Shirane notes in his analysis of juxtapositions in hokku, the shared overtones that create an atmospheric unity are by no means obstacles to producing the kind of dynamic epiphanies in which juxtaposed phenomena arise non-symbolically. Contrasts can both stand in tension and simultaneously participate in articulating a unified Stimmung. As an example, Shirane cites the following well-known verse by Bashō:
chrysanthemum scent–
in Nara ancient statues
of the Buddha (trans. Shirane 1998, 89)
While this poem can be read as a single scene—ancient Buddha statues surrounded by chrysanthemums—Shirane suggests that it "is better read as a combination poem in which the two parts are joined by scent or connotative equivalences" (1998, 90). The poem holds a vivid contrast between the transient, lively fragrance of chrysanthemums and the enduring stillness of the statues, yet both images share a field of resonance. Because chrysanthemums and the Buddhas of Nara alike evoke refinement and the classical past, they participate in a network of shared overtones that binds the contrast into a single, luminous atmosphere.
It is because of the presence and significance of juxtaposition in such verses that Haruo Shirane cautions against reading hokku merely as sketches (shasei) of scenes, even when the contrasting elements depicted could plausibly coexist in a single setting—as Bashō likely observed at Yoshino and in Nara. The value of these verses, Shirane argues, lies in the poet’s deliberate act of cutting the hokku, a compositional gesture that "summons the reader to be an active performer and interpreter" (Shirane 1998, 83). The verse is therefore not primarily a depiction of a scene as it appeared to Bashō, nor is 'interpreting' the poem a matter of intellectually piecing together its images to reconstruct a coherent picture from the bottom up. On the contrary, in enacting the leap between the poem’s elements, the reader participates in the mind’s non-conceptual, spontaneous play. Whatever phenomenal gestalt arises from this process appears with a vivid freshness—free of symbolism, free of conceptual elaboration.
Energies rather than expressions
Taylor concludes his brilliant analysis of Pound’s poem by noting that this kind of poetry "has strong analogies to contemporary non-representative visual art" (1989, 474). The juxtapositions that open onto epiphanies of interspaces are, as he writes, better understood as non-expressive energies rather than expressions. They share much with non-figurative abstract art, which concerns itself less with representation than with the presencing of pure form. A particularly apt example is the work of Lee Ufan. His minimal paintings and sculptures eschew symbolic interpretation in favor of direct encounters with phenomena. In his sculptural installations, this is achieved through the simple juxtaposition of contrasting elements within empty space—a steel plate and a stone placed together in a bare room. In his writings, Lee (2018) explicitly rejects symbolic art, describing it as inimical to the creation of "open structures that make space-time more lively and transparent" (249). To construct a symbolic object, he writes, "is a kind of crime" because it "freezes space into a particular meaning and crushes its freedom" (249).
The earliest artists working in non-representational art, according to Greenberg’s (1940) famous formulation, regarded music as the "paragon of art" because, through its "remoteness from imitation", it most readily actualized pure, non-expressive phenomenality devoid of symbolism. For Greenberg, music was the purest form of abstraction because it was "incapable, objectively, of communicating anything else than a sensation". Yet this characterization is incomplete insofar as it takes non-symbolism to be a universal feature of music. While abstraction may come more easily to music than to painting or sculpture, the kind of abstract juxtaposition exemplified by In a Station of the Metro is rare, for most music seeks to establish a sense of continuity and connection between sounds. As d’Angiolini (n.d.) notes, not all music embodies the "energies" that Taylor likened to Pound’s poem; not all music is non-narrative or non-expressive. Only some post-1950s works, he writes, achieve an "absence of narrative" and "dramatic articulation" that "denies a listening centered on meaning so as to concentrate on the sonic event in itself".
But to focus merely on the sonic event "in itself" is a limited way of describing what makes this music meaningful. Non-symbolic art is not valuable because it turns our attention toward things themselves, as if mere phenomena were inherently better than symbolic or representational objects. Cage’s and d’Angiolini’s works are much more than mere recognitions of sound’s purity. It is precisely because their own writings so often emphasize that purity that we must turn to the insights of Taylor, Lee Ufan, and Haruo Shirane to articulate a deeper rationale for non-symbolic art. Taylor’s notion of "epiphanies of interspaces" clarifies why the non-narrativity and non-symbolism of this music feels rich rather than barren, while Lee’s account of "open structures" reminds us that when phenomena are presented without symbolic fixation, they do not become sterile but vividly alive—a liveliness that mirrors the dynamically active nature of mind itself.
When viewed in this light, contrasts in music can serve a purpose similar to the pebble that struck the bamboo and led to Xiāngyán Zhìxián's (香嚴智閑) awakening. The sound of the pebble striking the bamboo had this transformative effect precisely because it arrived as a surprise. As Dōgen comments, "At the unexpected sound, he had thorough awakening" (2013, 126). In the same way, surprising contrasts and unforeseen turns in music cultivate a mode of listening that is vividly awake—one in which not only sounds but also the ground of their arising, the epiphanic interspaces of emptiness, are revealed. When music depends too heavily on repetition, predictable patterns, or pulse, the listener is lulled into a state of torpor, and sounds lose their capacity to awaken.
This is why Taylor’s notion of the "epiphany of interspaces" is so valuable: it foregrounds the revelatory power of contrast itself. Non-symbolic art is desirable because it offers unconditioned encounters with indeterminate, conceptually unfixated phenomena; it gives the listener a direct taste of the non-conceptual emptiness that is the true nature of reality—something Lee captures when he describes his solid stones and steel plates as transparent. In performing the juxtapositions of sound in the music of Cage and d’Angiolini, something of the mind’s own emptiness and spontaneous playfulness is revealed. Contrasts in music can thus summon a freshness—a sudden, unfiltered revelation of sound’s mere appearance as it opens into an expanded horizon of resonance, or emptiness, that is the very nature of its arising.
Taking randomness too far
While the mind’s playfulness points to its capacity for creating meaning out of contrasts, this is certainly not all there is to these verses—or to the music of Cage or d’Angiolini. Their works are not barren games for the intellect. Although I have been valorizing the foregrounding of the mind’s play as a positive quality, it is also possible to take randomness too far. When that happens, what arises is not a series of epiphanies but a sequence of empty “pops in the mind,” what Jan Zwicky (2019) calls the poetry buzz: “the energy release associated with the exercise of gestalt intelligence” (24–25).
Zwicky introduces this concept as a critique of contemporary poetry that relies too heavily on the reader’s capacity to fabricate coherence from randomness. Echoing Merleau-Ponty’s remark that "we are condemned to meaning", she argues that the mind naturally seeks patterns—it is what it does. As she puts it, this search is an "evolutionary pleasure": "the mind naturally reaches for gestalts, and it comes up with them, warranted or not" (25). Thus, when confronted with random words or disjointed images, we instinctively attempt to assemble them into a coherent whole.
"So, confronted with an apparently random assortment of words and phrases, or what seems to be a grab-bag of private images and jottings, we nonetheless try to form a gestalt – especially if we've been cued that what we're looking at is 'a poem' and not a grocery list. Often we're successful: Aha! We experience what Sharon Mesmer, a leading flarfist, is reported to have described as "a little pop in [the] mind." The more problematic the initial array, the more powerful the release, the louder the pop. The bigger poetry buzz." (2019, 25)
Zwicky (2019) likens the poetry buzz to "a sugar high—empty ontological calories that tell us nothing about the world." The consumption of this kind of poetry, she writes, is essentially harmless “unless we become addicted, refusing real lyric food in preference to stuff that doesn’t nourish us" (27). This critique is crucial to keep in mind, for it captures what happens when randomness is taken too far. As with most artistic or contemplative practices, working with the poetic quality of discontinuity requires finding a middle way between extremes.
Too much continuity can make the listener feel as though she is being carried along on a predetermined journey, rendered passive, with no say over the outcome—the music becomes like propaganda, telling the listener too forcefully what to experience. As Lee Ufan warns, such art "freezes space into a particular meaning and crushes its freedom" (2018, 249). Too much randomness, on the other hand, produces only the sugar high of barren meaninglessness: the flower of meaning that could have blossomed from the mind’s free play is never allowed to open.
When the balance is right, however, a gestalt emerges—a "resonant structure", as Zwicky calls it. The seemingly disconnected parts become attuned to one another: "when one part sounds, other parts sound as well" (64). This, after all, is what emptiness points toward—the radical interpenetration and interdependence of parts and wholes, of sounds and silences, where each element calls forth the others not through causality or narrative sequence but through mutual resonance within a shared field.
In music, the arising of such a resonant structure often manifests as the shared atmosphere or mood of a piece—the quality we earlier explored under the term shared overtones. This does not suggest the presence of a conceptual framework that organizes the phenomena; rather, it means that the phenomena themselves resound within one another. In such resonant balance, a gestalt appears with a freshness that is free of symbolism and conceptuality.
Vertical discontinuity
If the discussion above of no-continuity concerned discontinuity on the horizontal level—the succession of sounds through time—Cage was equally interested in freeing listening from narrativity through discontinuity on the vertical level. Just as on the horizontal plane, vertical discontinuity arises through the absence of conventional relationships between sounds. Distinct layers that bear no 'obvious' relation to one another coexist, producing an ambiguous complexity rather than converging toward a single expressive goal.
As with horizontal juxtapositions, the listener is invited to become an "active performer" (Shirane 1998, 83)—not by intellectually piecing the layers together as though solving a puzzle, but by allowing them to coexist in awareness without synthesis. This layered simultaneity generates a field of perception too complex to grasp conceptually, and in doing so, it opens space for the mind’s non-conceptual free play. Sounds are thus perceived with renewed freshness, each one presencing as if for the first time.
Feldman and Cage themselves described this experience of vertical complexity with remarkable precision in their 1966–67 radio dialogues. Their conversation evokes exactly the kind of resonant spaciousness that emerges when multiple, unrelated sonic layers coexist without collapsing into density or narrative:
"[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 at the paradoxical quality of the New York School’s music: how works that are so dense and full can nonetheless feel open, spacious, and transparent. The way I understand this is as follows: the simultaneous presence of multiple, superimposed layers of sound creates a situation in which the listener is free to leisurely roam within the musical landscape. The music relies on the free play (līlā) of the listener’s mind, which wanders its own path—a kind of sportive samādhi in which the listener embodies the ideal of “roaming at will” (逍遙遊, xiāoyáo yóu) described in the Zhuangzi.
This is why even the densest passages in Cage’s music, which sometimes amass extraordinarily thick textures, often convey an aesthetic of lightness rather than heaviness. The listening itself is light: the mind moves freely and effortlessly, without compulsion. The contrasts between layers function like the juxtapositions between scenes in Bashō’s hokku; their purpose is not to construct a conceptually unified object but to awaken the listener’s freedom in encountering each sound afresh.
This quality of nonconceptual freshness is not confined to experimental music. Even traditional polyphonic approaches can produce a similar effect through complex layering. McGilchrist (2021) suggests that such a phenomenon occurs when listening to the intricate fugues of J. S. Bach. Even professional musicians—who, due to the nature of their training, tend to rely more on the left hemisphere (which represents the world through symbols, concepts, and language) than on the right (in which the world presences directly)—"still rely almost entirely on the right hemisphere" when "dealing with fugal material" (113). This is a remarkable finding. The very impossibility of attending to a fugue "in its entirety", since "a range of melodic contours needs to be maintained in awareness simultaneously", means that the listening becomes "effectively new on every encounter" (113). The polyphonic complexity of Bach’s fugues, much like the layered simultaneities of Cage and Feldman, overwhelms conceptual tracking and instead induces a mode of listening that is open, vivid, and freshly non-conceptual.
Jñeyāvaraṇa and kleśā-varaṇa
By working with techniques such as horizontal and vertical discontinuities, and by cultivating an aesthetics of forgetfulness through 'self-forgetting' forms, the burden of conceptual, mental doing can be reduced in musical attunement. When the demand for conceptualization falls away, the possibility of hearing sounds in fresh, non-conceptual ways opens up: it becomes possible to hear sounds as empty. Yet decreasing conceptuality alone does not suffice to close the distance between art and awakening. In Buddhist thought, awakening is said to be obscured by two veils: the cognitive obscurations (jñeyāvaraṇa) and the emotional obscurations (kleśāvaraṇa). While the discussion so far has concerned the first, the fact that we find music pleasing—or develop attachments and aversions toward it—belongs to the second.
In what follows, I will therefore turn to an exploration of emotionality. In parallel with the discussion of conceptuality in the first part of this essay, key passages from the Buddhist canon concerning emotion will be cited and examined. At the same time, the emotional state of disinterest—central to both continental aesthetics and Buddhist soteriology—will be brought into dialogue with these canonical sources. After introducing these themes, the text will turn to poetics: how Buddhist artists might approach emotionality in their art and cultivate forms that loosen the grip of affective attachment.
Emotionality in the Pali canon
Emotional reactions to phenomena occupy a central place in Buddhist soteriology. They are described as the very root of cyclic existence—the process by which beings are endlessly reborn in saṃsāra. A passage from the Pāli canon traces how an ordinary person, upon seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, or cognizing—that is, perceiving through any of the six senses—"lusts after it if it is likable, or has ill will towards it if it is dislikable." The Buddha describes such a person as one "engaged in favouring and opposing" to the extent that "when he feels any feeling, whether pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant, he relishes that feeling, affirms and accepts it." This relishing, the Buddha continues, sets in motion the process that binds beings to cyclic existence:
"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)
The Buddha thus makes clear that the act of "favoring and opposing" (chanda–dveṣa) constitutes a crucial link in the cycle of continual rebirth within saṃsāra. Craving what is "likable" and harboring "ill will" toward what is dislikable give rise to upādāna—clinging—and thereby to the "whole aggregate mass of suffering." Liberation, therefore, requires relinquishing the reflex to react to pleasure and pain, to like and dislike. Only by suspending this emotional reactivity can one begin to dissolve the karmic machinery that perpetuates cyclic existence.
When reading these words of the Buddha, the key question becomes to what extent the "relishing" of pleasant feelings describes our own experience of listening to music. Can we truly claim that listening to music does not involve taking pleasure in what we hear, or that it is free from the act of relishing, affirming, and accepting pleasant sensation? In most cases, the answer is surely no. For most listeners, musical experience often includes liking what is heard, taking delight in sound, and perhaps even seeking to prolong or repeat that delight.
At the same time, there is truth in the intuition that aesthetic relishing is somehow more wholesome than the ordinary pleasure taken in sense objects. It is widely recognized that the delight we experience in musical attunement—or in any genuine aesthetic encounter—differs from habitual forms of liking. It arises from a certain detached stance, an attitude of aesthetic distance. What we feel may not be pleasure in the ordinary sense but an equanimous joy, a quiet gladness that seems purer, more refined. Yet the Buddha reminds us that even the wholesome joy that comes from renouncing coarse pleasure and pain, must itself eventually be relinquished. In the Sāmaññaphala Sutta, he outlines a meditative progression in which letting go of "pleasure and pain" first gives rise to "joy and happiness", but in the end even this "desire for joy" must be abandoned in order to enter the “pure equanimity” beyond all 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)
The goal of the Buddhist path is a mode of experiencing that is thoroughly purified of attachment and approval—a state in which even attachment to equanimity itself is relinquished. The question, then, is to what extent musical attunements can lead us toward such a state. To begin addressing this, we must look more closely at the nature of the so-called aesthetic distance that characterizes musical experience: what kind of detachment does it really cultivate, and how far can it carry us along the path toward non-attachment?
Beauty and disinterest
Perhaps the most enduring insight of European aesthetics is the claim that aesthetic pleasure differs fundamentally from ordinary pleasure in being marked by disinterestedness and detachment. Schopenhauer, among the most eloquent exponents of this view, writes that "everything is beautiful only so long as it does not concern us" (1958: II, 374). Things can appear beautiful only when they do not matter to us in a worldly or utilitarian sense; we must approach phenomena with a disinterested attitude for their beauty to be revealed. The experience of beauty thus stands beyond the realm of ordinary liking and disliking—it transcends those habitual movements of approval and aversion that bind us to our worldly concerns.
According to Schopenhauer, ordinary consciousness always discloses things as useful or useless to a self-consciousness—that is, to an idea of self taken to be an object among other objects within the projected representation of reality. This ego is perpetually driven and constrained by desires and fears, caught in a restless state of anxiety—a depiction of sentient existence that closely parallels the Buddha’s analysis of duḥkha.
Aesthetic consciousness, by contrast, differs radically from this ordinary mode of being. In aesthetic perception, we are freed from evaluating things according to their utility in our practical lives. The objects illuminated by aesthetic attention no longer participate in the economy of use, and the perceiver, for the duration of that experience, no longer exists as a pragmatic individual. In aesthetic consciousness, the self-absorbed characteristics of ordinary awareness fall away; we forget ourselves.
It has therefore often been said that to see a rainstorm as beautiful, we must stand at a distance from it—we cannot be entangled in a worldly, emotional reaction to it. If we are anxious about the damage it might cause to our property, the rain can no longer appear beautiful. Yet this does not mean that moments of aesthetic relishing are absent from the everyday life of, say, a farmer, for whom everything ordinarily carries practical meaning. Yuriko Saito (2007) observes that we cannot deny that a farmer has "a rich aesthetic life while working in, on, and with his wheatfield" (37). Likewise, Yi-Fu Tuan notes that while "the working farmer does not frame nature into pretty pictures", he may nonetheless "be profoundly aware of its beauty" (1974, 97).
During such flashes of beauty, however, a certain ease, comfort, and security must be present—enough for the farmer, if only for a moment, to release ordinary consciousness: the anxious, object-directed stance that governs most of daily life. In that release, the innate detachment through which phenomena appear as beautiful is allowed to shine forth. To experience beauty, the subject must temporarily become a 'clear mirror', entering a state of Säligkeit und Geistesruhe—bliss and peace of mind—marked by a nondual clarity:
"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).
In Schopenhauer’s description, the experience of beauty culminates in this moment of unity, when the distinction between perceiver and perceived collapses and consciousness becomes a transparent medium—'a clear mirror of the object'. What remains is pure awareness without self-reference: perception unobstructed by will or desire.
If Schopenhauer’s depiction of ordinary existence parallels the Buddhist analysis of duḥkha, then his description of aesthetic consciousness resonates with what Buddhism calls the realization of no-self (無我, muga; Skt. anātman). It was, I believe, Nishida who first drew this connection between the European notion of aesthetic disinterestedness and the Buddhist idea of muga when he wrote that "the feeling of beauty is the feeling of muga (no-self) [...] beauty can be explained as the discarding of the world of discrimination and the being one with the Great Way of muga; it therefore is really of the same kind as religion" (in Odin 1987, 217).
The teaching of muga (no-self) belongs to the earliest strata of Buddhist philosophy and stands among its most essential doctrines. Insight into the absence of a self is repeatedly described as the primary liberating realization for the Buddhist practitioner. As Williams (2000) summarizes succinctly, "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 sequence through which this insight leads to liberation is clearly articulated. Upon seeing that there is no enduring self behind form, feeling, perception, or consciousness, the practitioner becomes dispassionate toward them. Through this dispassion, lust fades; and with the fading of lust, the heart is liberated (Ñāṇamoli 1992, 47). To disassociate from any notion of "I" or "mine"—to regard every phenomenon, perception, feeling, or moment of consciousness with the recognition, "This is not mine; this I am not; this is not my self"—is to initiate the following chain of transformation:
"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 uniting the Buddhist insight that clinging to a self prevents awakening with the European conception of beauty as disinterestedness or egoless perception, Nishida reached a brilliant conclusion: 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 no-self, then it is a moment of liberation. To engage reality in an aesthetic state is to glimpse how life might be without duḥkha. This liberation is not a numbed or anesthetic mode of perception in which the senses are dulled and feeling suspended. Rather, it is a heightened awareness in which phenomena appear with vivid clarity yet are received with perfect equanimity (Odin 2001, 174). The aesthetic attitude thus enacts the middle path between being and nothingness that Mahāyāna thinkers identify with liberation.
Nishida’s younger colleague Nishitani Keiji would later describe this middle path as "absolute nothingness" (zettai mu). It is the experience of emptiness that arises from being attached neither to being (u) nor to the nihilistic negation of being that he called "relative nothingness" (sōtaiteki mu). Absolute nothingness—or emptiness—is marked 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 philosophers of the Kyōto School, moments of beauty were thus recognized as moments in which absolute nothingness becomes manifest. Phenomena arise and are aesthetically relished—nothing is excluded or resisted—yet the mind does not grasp at them. As Odin writes, the subject that experiences beauty is
"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 affirmative view of aesthetic perception—as freed from gross emotionality—holds in theory, listening itself teaches us otherwise. Some pieces of music, more than others, stir affective reactions: they invite us to relish certain timbres, crave beautiful sonorities, or take pleasure in unfamiliar rhythms. Experiences such as these prompt us to question the assumed detachment and equanimity of aesthetic perception.
From Schopenhauer’s descriptions above, aesthetic attunement appears as an immaculate state of mind—thoroughly purified and cleansed, a clear mirror in which the phenomena of sound arise and vanish without stirring attachment or aversion. Yet in practice, not all musical experiences actualize this kind of equanimity. As with conceptuality, we may think of emotionality as existing along a spectrum. While the ideal of music as detached points toward its highest possibility, not all music, nor all listening, fulfills it.
Some works rely on prettiness and emotionally captivating sonorities that draw the listener’s mind into liking, while others suspend such tendencies and open toward equanimity. Yet the presence of these 'impurities' does not render musical experience identical with ordinary saṃsāric pleasure. Even when affect arises, aesthetic experience may still stand closer to the nirvāṇic mode of being than to the saṃsāric. What matters is not the absolute absence of emotion but the degree of its refinement—the variability through which music can trace subtler gradations between attachment and release.
In the Korai fūteishō, Fujiwara no Shunzei sought to reconcile the problem of art’s potential 'impurity' by invoking the Tendai dictum bonnō soku bodai (煩悩即菩提)—that the defilements (kleśas) are themselves none other than awakening. Yet this solution, while profound from the ultimate standpoint of a Buddha, seems unsatisfactory from the standpoint of human practice. From the conventional perspective, the kleśas are not intrinsic to Buddha-nature but are adventitious afflictions that obscure suchness. For practitioners, therefore, the task is not to embrace emotional reactivity as already enlightened, but to gradually refine and reduce it—to cultivate a mind that does not rise in liking or disliking what it hears.
In what follows, I will explore a number of aesthetic qualities and musical strategies that can support such non-emotionality—approaches that diminish the stirring of affect and guide perception toward stillness, clarity, and release.
Decreasing emotionality through blandness
Perhaps the most immediate way to reduce emotional reactivity in music is by cultivating a plain, restrained aesthetic—one that is not too pretty. If emotional arousal arises when music is overly attractive or sensually gratifying, then one effective strategy is simply to temper that prettiness. Yet music that resists seductiveness need not be uninteresting or devoid of beauty. When handled with care, such restraint can reveal a distinct and luminous quality: the beauty of blandness (淡, dàn).
Lǐ Zéhòu describes dàn as that which is without taste, "but at the same time full of flavor" (2010, xiv). As its culinary metaphor suggests, the aim is not to intensify taste but to approach flavorlessness—and to discover savor precisely there. Rather than signifying dullness or indifference, dàn names a refined neutrality in which value is found in the very absence of overt attraction. Hence Kamo no Chōmei’s remark 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).
While it later became popular in Japan, the aesthetic of blandness has its origins in Chinese thought, where its exemplar is the poet Táo Yuānmíng. In praising Táo’s poetry, Sū Shì famously remarked that "[t]he outside is withered, but the inside is rich" (in Hinton 1993, 6). The 'withered' exterior of Táo’s verse suggests that nothing in it immediately captivates the senses—there is no overt prettiness, no deliberate charm. At first glance, it might even seem plain or uninteresting. Yet this surface austerity conceals a quiet depth: as Sū Shì continues, "it seems bland but is actually beautiful" (quoted in Hinton 1993, 6).
The underlying idea here is that there is something soteriologically valuable in learning to savor phenomena when no strong flavors are present to distract the senses. Subtlety is not an end in itself; rather, it points to a way of perceiving reality freed from the emotional distortions of attraction—a seeing more faithful to things as they are (yathābhūta-darśana). As Jullien observes, "flavor provokes attachment", whereas blandness—or insipidity—"provokes detachment" (2004, 43):
"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).
Lǐ underscores this soteriological dimension of blandness through the example of the poet Méi Yáochén, who achieved it by depicting ordinary scenes and experiences plainly, just as they were. By inviting the reader to find tastefulness in what appears unspecial or even unattractive, Méi Yáochén’s poetry does not merely re-present daily life, but instead draws the reader to penetrate reality more deeply and to taste "the empty illusoriness of life" (Lǐ 2010, xiv).
Lǐ’s appreciation for Méi Yáochén finds a parallel in Yuán Hàowèn’s (元好問) admiration for the poetry of the monk Mù Ān (木庵). Because Mù Ān’s verse possessed the 'flavor of no flavor', it could move, as Yuán suggested, "beyond feelings and nature" to articulate "the words of the unknowable" (Protass 2016, 147). The aim is not blandness for its own sake, but to gesture beyond the habitual emotionality that colors daily life—beyond feeling itself, toward what cannot be expressed in words. As Protass beautifully remarks, in Mù Ān’s poetry "[t]here is clarity, like water close to the source, a refreshing taste with no flavor" (2016, 148). Blandness thus brings the listener or reader near the taste of reality’s clear nature—the primordial luminosity of mind—untainted by adventitious affectivity.
This may be understood as another version of the water metaphor we have encountered before—now approached through a different sensory modality. In the Huáyán tradition, Fǎzàng explained that seeing the nature of reality occurs when the waves of ignorance subside, revealing the unbroken reflection of light on a perfectly still lake: "once the wind stops, the surface of the ocean becomes clear and still and there is no form that is not reflected upon it" (in Gregory 1991, 160). Here, tasting the clear flavor of water parallels seeing its clarity: to taste what has no taste is to taste the nature of reality itself.
Once we have become habituated to find tastefulness in what lacks flavor, the craving for strong tastes quietly dissolves. The insight into the illusory nature of reality prompts a reevaluation of our former actions—those so often driven by the pursuit of what we like and the avoidance of what we dislike. Huáng Tíngjiān expressed this transformation in his remarks on Táo Yuānmíng’s poetry:
“[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 and its supporting conditions
In music, blandness arises when the work does not attempt to establish itself as a virtual world for the listener’s escape, but instead finds a way to exist within the plain ordinariness of everyday life. Composers and performers evoke this quality through sparse sounds, quiet dynamics, slowness, unornamented or 'plain' timbres, thin textures, and pale harmonies.
In a famous verse, Bái Jūyì identifies slowness and sparseness as pathways 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 plays here is, of course, the gǔqín—an instrument long associated with the aesthetic of blandness. In his Xi Shan Qin Kuang (溪山琴況), Xú Shàngyíng (徐上瀛) describes the gǔqín as the instrument most perfectly suited to express dàn:
"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 compelling for two reasons. First, it raises the question of why the gǔqín retains its tastefulness even when played with utmost plainness. This is not true for every instrument. When playing the Sundanese suling without ornaments or variations in tone, the result can sound flat and lifeless—as if the performer were a beginner, what my Indonesian teachers would call baru belajar ("new to practicing"). On the gǔqín, however, the same simplicity yields the opposite effect. Its timbre possesses an inherent richness: rather than sounding impoverished, its plainness resonates with quiet depth and subtle beauty.
The second aspect of Master Xú’s passage that stands out is his emphasis on the coupling of dàn (blandness) with tián (serenity, calmness). Tien (2015), in his excellent study of Xú’s treatise, notes that "[a]ccording to Master Xú, gǔqín music which exhibits the quality of tián also demonstrates, a priori, the quality of dàn" (212). Blandness, in other words, necessarily coexists with serenity. It is the presence of something other than dàn, in this case tián, that transforms dàn from mere plainness into an aesthetic virtue.
Master Xú’s passage reveals the dialectical nature of aesthetic qualities and how they interact and depend upon one another. Sparseness, tranquility, and blandness are interdependent when it comes to poetics. It is not sufficent to play 'like a beginner' and assume that this will lead to dàn; there must be some other aesthetic qualities in place to make this simple way of playing become expressive. On the gǔqín, these multiple qualities arise idiomatically—they belong to the instrument’s very nature—whereas on the suling, realizing such serenity demands greater artistry from the musician or composer to transform the sound of baru belajar into something that resonates deeper than its mere surface simplicity.
Decreasing emotionality through impermanence
While dàn involves avoiding overly attractive materials, a complementary approach—often coexisting with blandness—embraces pleasing sounds yet cultivates a mode of listening that is at peace with their eventual disappearance. To use beautiful sonorities and allow them to fade is to enact an aesthetic of impermanence: an attunement to the fleeting nature of pleasure and beauty themselves.
This idea echoes how Mujū Ichien described the value of waka poetry in his 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 in the essence of dàn, we find equanimity here by accepting the transience of taste itself. To thematize impermanence is thus another way for art to turn the mind away from the worldly winds—another mode through which it can serve as upāya, a skillful means toward awakening. We find beauty, as Rujing did, not only in peach blossoms opening but also in "peach blossoms scattering" (Heine 2020, 140). Their falling becomes a reminder of release: a letting go of human attachments akin to casting off body and mind, embracing the boundless emptiness of Buddha nature.
In music, the constant fading and temporal finitude of beautiful sounds make impermanence audible. We can compose pieces that unfold like the continual coming-into-being and scattering of peach blossoms. When the blossom opens—when a sound suddenly appears out of nowhere—there is awakening through form (kenshiki monshō). When it scatters—when that lovely sound vanishes, never to return—there is awakening through impermanence.
Hesse, in The Glass Bead Game, identifies this quality as a hallmark of Western Classical music: its "serenity and resolution, its quality of being constantly present, its mobility and unceasing urge to hasten on, to leave the space it has only just entered" (2000, 354). This quality is indeed distinctive of much Western music, and I remember having to adjust to its ephemerality when I first encountered it as a child. Not all music moves in this way. There are static, repetitive, or drone-based traditions that dwell within a single space, where the sense of transience is minimal. In contrast, the mobility and "unceasing urge to hasten on" that Hesse describes give Western Classical music a peculiar spiritual character: it embodies impermanence itself.
In The Glass Bead Game, this quality is linked to the moral dimension of Classical music—what it can teach us spiritually—even as the book denies that music conveys explicit lessons. Music’s teaching, rather than being overt, is non-conceptual: we do not interpret it symbolically. The perpetual movement itself—the restlessness of the music, its refusal to remain for long in any single space—constitutes the very world of the music. To be attuned to such a world is to dwell, however briefly, in the rhythm of arising and passing away—a musical enactment of impermanence itself. What we take with us from having been attuned to that world is different from what remains after dwelling in a static one.
This quality is not unique to Western Classical music; it also appears in gǔqín music, where it coexists with dàn (blandness). A bland mode of listening rarely consists of tasteless sounds alone. When more beautiful sonorities or melodic gestures arise, however, they do not appear as sudden gems that one wishes to hear repeated or prolonged. Instead, they are received with a kind of serene resignation toward their passing. In the classical, dàn-inflected repertoire for the gǔqín, one often hears fleeting phrases—appealing tones and silences that emerge briefly and never return. The awareness of their transience, accepted without grasping, deepens the experience of blandness itself.
Because these passing moments arise within a mode of listening not centered on those attractive sounds, the effect differs from a mere equanimous acceptance of fading beauty (the impermanence suggested by Mujū Ichien, it seems to me). Instead, it establishes a perspective in which the attractive and the bland, life and death, are not opposed but mutually implicative. The ultimate teaching of impermanence (anitya) is not simply that beautiful things do not last, but that being and non-being are nondual. Yet the fact that this insight is best revealed through the interplay of both pretty and plain sounds shows that even within the aesthetics of blandness, there remains an essential place for beauty.
Zōka
The aesthetics of blandness and impermanence already point toward a wider principle that runs through much of East Asian thought: the value of naturalness, spontaneity, and unforced occurrence. In both the savor of dàn and the acceptance of impermanence, beauty arises precisely when things are allowed to emerge and fade in accordance with their own nature. This same sensibility leads us to the idea of zōka (造化, zàohuà)—the generative spontaneity of the natural world.
Although zōka and dàn refer to distinct aesthetic values, they share an inner kinship. The sounds of nature are, by nature, bland—they bear no trace of human manipulation or beautification. As Tien (2015) writes, both blandness and naturalness gesture toward "the most natural and unpretentious sonic state" (40). When Alvin Lucier writes that the expressiveness of natural phenomena can serve as a model for music, he articulates an aesthetic ideal of naturalness. And as anyone familiar with his work knows, his sound worlds are often pale, still, and simple—in other words, bland:
"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 of natural phenomena, as Lucier suggests, is not the emotionality of self-expressive human music, but the absence of it. It is a naturalness that is impersonal and objective, yet still eloquent. The spontaneous expressivity of nature’s emotionless phenomena is akin to the taste of things without artifice—the pure savor of what is. This connection between the "tasteless" and the self-arising quality of naturalness is beautifully expressed by Bái Jūyì in the following verse, translated by Hinton (1999):
"Shu t'ung-wood true to the quick,
Ch'u silk rings out pure and clear:
harmony swelling slowly into deep
night, a scatter of sound. Listen:
pure and tasteless, a recluse mind
heartfelt calm, it appears of itself,
then returns of itself into nothing,
not the least need for human ears." (Hinton 1999, 81)
The tasteless quality that Bái Jūyì evokes opens an experience in which phenomena 'appear of themselves' and 'return of themselves' into emptiness. For music to achieve this, it must not sound like a series of decisions, but unfold organically—without the audible presence of the composer’s will. In this sense, the principle of zōka resonates with what was earlier said of non-symbolism and conceptuality: sounds may be juxtaposed or contrasted so that they appear "devoid of any specific symbolized emotion", allowing them to "speak for themselves in their own particularity" (Thornhill 1998, 351). Experiencing sounds in this way parallels the experience of natural phenomena when one is not listening to music at all—when sounds simply happen, as Cage put it (1981, 119). To strip sounds of symbolism is to strip them of a certain human emotionality, allowing them to arise with naturalness and ease, as if by themselves.
Naturalness can be cultivated by evoking the experience of encountering natural phenomena—hearing the sound of a river, the wind through trees—without directly imitating those sounds. Lucier’s music, for instance, never imitates nature. Quite the opposite: his bare, minimal compositions, with their carefully tuned sine waves and precise beating patterns, sound nothing like the natural world. Yet art need not mimic nature to share in its quality of zōka; what matters is that it intimates something of the experience of naturalness itself.
A parallel sensibility can be found in the visual arts, particularly in the paintings of Agnes Martin. Her paintings, like Lucier’s music, are far from literal depictions of natural environments. As Bell notes, 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). Her art invites the viewer into a state of open, ungrasping attention—a mode of being akin to quietly watching clouds drift across the sky. It is this attunement, rather than any resemblance to natural forms, that gives Martin’s work the non-emotionality of zōka.
Much of Cage’s music from the 1970s onward achieves a similar quality. These works do not sound like rivers, wind, or rain, yet they share their manner of being. The sounds unfold as if by themselves, without any trace of self-expression or compositional will. Like the movements of waves or leaves, they behave with an objective, spontaneous naturalness. In this sense, Cage’s late music exemplifies zōka: an art that sounds not as nature, but with nature.
Cage’s music achieved its sense of zōka primarily through the embrace of chance. By working with indeterminate "no-continuities", his compositions acquired what Timothy Morton (2009) calls an "automated feel". According to Morton, Cage’s music possesses a "found quality"—a sense that it is "working all by itself" or "coming from nowhere" (38). The music seems to perpetuate itself, to arise spontaneously from the world’s own creativity and free play. This is what grants it the quality of zōka: it sounds as though it is composing itself.
d'Angiolini describes a similar aim in his own practice, writing 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 emerges when this "automated feel" becomes wholly free of human intention—when the music appears to unfold purposelessly, as aimless and natural as a breeze moving through trees.
Being devoid of purpose does not mean being random. This is true both of art that embodies the quality of zōka and of nature itself. Cage’s use of chance does not produce chaos but gives rise to its own self-organizing principle—a principle that lends his music its distinctive naturalness. The sounds in Cage’s works 'fit together' even though they arise through discontinuities.
Nature, too, does not appear to operate randomly or without direction. On the contrary, it has been described as composed of living organisms that "without exception" are "endowed with a purpose or project, which at the same time they show in their structure and execute through their performances" (Jacques Monod, quoted in McGilchrist 2021, 477). McGilchrist clarifies, however, that purpose does not entail determination:
"Importantly, the idea of teleology, or purpose, does not entail determination: no prior plan, involving a sequence of predetermined steps to bring it about, is required. It is exactly that that is avoided.... A purpose here is not a plan. It is a tendency inseparable from–woven into, as it were, the fabric of–a life, which leaves all the detail, and even the final outcome, undertermined" (478).
McGilchrist’s argument opposes a mechanistic reading of biology and evolution, proposing instead that teleology, intentionality, and sentience permeate the entire world. The world he describes is not random or chaotic, yet it is also undetermined—without a prior plan. It lacks purpose in d’Angiolini’s sense of the word, but it does not lack teleology.
This intertwining of purposelessness and order recalls how Chinese aestheticians conceived of creative naturalness—not as randomness, but as a spontaneous unfolding guided by an inner principle. The art historian James Cahill elucidates the quality of zōka as arising when an experience appears unplanned and purposeless, yet still follows a subtle order—a seeming principle of li (理), a sense of "rightness":
"[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.)
Li (理)—the underlying principle and order of nature as reflected in organic forms—was one of the primary aspects sought by Chinese aestheticians when discussing zàohuà. It was believed that artists could become so attuned to li that their work would naturally manifest this principle. Discussing Huáng Gōngwàng’s Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains, Sturman (2016) describes li as "a unifying force throughout the painting. It is the logic that determines movement, evolution, and transformation". He argues that this effect is achieved through "the logic or principle of [the artist’s] forms: brushstrokes, textures, and patterns interacting to establish rhythms and thematic movements" (189).
This last point is especially noteworthy. In music, classical techniques often dismissed by Cage—such as thematic unity and motivic development—can in fact serve as fruitful means for achieving zōka and li. They need not imply that a composer is attempting to express personal emotion; on the contrary, they establish a system in which the music determines its own continuation, rather than being directed by the composer’s will. It is, as d’Angiolini said, about allowing "the music to create itself all by itself" (n.d.).
Jürg Frey heard in motivic and thematic work a self-generating principle that gives certain Classical works the impression of being natural processes:
"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 & Sansón, n.d.)
In other words, a state in which music is "going on by itself" can be achieved in many different ways. The Renaissance composer, as Frey explains, accessed it through strong thematic unity and through counterpoint whose imitative logic allowed the piece to unfold by itself. Cage, by contrast, attained it by setting up systems in which music evolves through chance operations. Although one approach is grounded in continuity and the other in discontinuity, both achieve an autonomous quality—a sense that the music, as Bái Jūyì wrote, "appears of itself, then returns of itself".
The opposite of naturalness is thus not found in the chance-driven music by Cage, but rather in gesture-driven modernist, classical music. In the opening of Maderna's flute and piano duo Honeyrêves–as seen in Figure 1 in the first part of this two-part essay–we saw an example of music that relies on expressionist gestures to move forward. The composer uses stark contrasts in registers, timbres, and dynamics to create energy and momentum in the music. However, this energy feels forced and lifeless; the momentum is contrived, disappearing the moment the external input ceases. The music is devoid of zōka and is instead full of the composer's subjectivity and thought process–full of 'purpose' and a determinate plan.
Decreasing emotionality through impersonality
As was suggested 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. As the sentence quoted by d’Angiolini above reads in full, the creation of the feeling that music creates itself is the 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 likewise held that for qualities such as zōka to be infused into poetry, the poet must forget herself and loosen the ego’s grip on the artistic process. Only then can the poem attain the impersonal quality of sincerity (makoto). The poet must purge the ego from the 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 meant letting go of the ego and "enter[ing] into the object, perceiv[ing] its delicate life, and feel[ing] its feeling (sono bi no awarete jōkanzuru)" (Thornhill 1998, 351).
This idea of 'entering into the object' to express its inner life had to wait until the twentieth century before becoming a guiding principle of musical creation. In the music of twentieth-century composers, we see a growing interest in exploring sounds themselves as raw material, as well as in exploring musical instruments themselves. Morton (2013) describes how, in this new music, instruments are no longer regarded merely as "materials-for" human production; rather, these compositions invite the listener to attend to the instruments in and of themselves—not as means to an expressive end, but as entities possessing their own agency and resonance. In this sense, they embody the aesthetic quality of impersonality. Instead of using instruments to express personal feeling or ideology, these twentieth-century composers became 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 heterogeneous sounds produced by the preparations. Cage did not use sounds to voice his inner being; rather, he granted them their own anarchic autonomy. The spectral composers, in turn, directed their attention to the micro-audial makeup of sound by studying and manipulating its spectra. Other instrumental composers’ fascination with sound led them to explore new 'extended techniques' for traditional instruments.
In Cage’s later music, sporadic and seemingly 'random' sounds without direction give rise to a heightened awareness of the work as consisting of just sounds. Others, like La Monte Young, worked with just intonation, thereby achieving an intensified 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 its raw materials instead. Because the focus is on the sounds themselves, such music can be said to embody the aesthetic quality of impersonality.
Leaving sounds behind
If the cultivation of aesthetic qualities such as blandness, zōka, and impersonality represents different strategies for reducing the 'prettiness' of music, it nevertheless remains true that music embodying these qualities can still please us. Even Kamo no Chōmei’s solitary and ascetic life as a recluse became a source of aesthetic delight—and, for him, a problematic attachment: “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 attachment to serenity—or to the Dhamma itself—must ultimately be abandoned in order to actualize awakening. If a person striving for liberation does not eradicate all taints because of a desire for the Dhamma (dhammarāgena) or delight in the Dhamma (dhammanandiyā), that practitioner cannot yet become an arahant. Only by discarding all desire and attachment (chandarāga)—even to serenity and insight—can one be transformed into an arahant.
If one cannot yet relinquish these subtlest attachments, the attainment remains significant, for such a practitioner "becomes a non-returner and is reborn in the Pure Abodes" (Bhikkhu Bodhi 2015, 1254). These achievements, reached prior to the elimination of attachment itself, show that dhammarāgena and dhammanandiyā are among the final and most refined taints to be discarded:
"But if he 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).
Just as with the Dhamma, the soteriological aspects of art—the very qualities that can lead us toward awakening—can themselves 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, express how Buddha-nature manifests in function. Musō speaks of how an exemplary 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 art is beautiful—and because we take delight in it—we must also take care not to become attached. For this reason, Musō insightfully observes, Zen instructions oscillate between urging engagement with the phenomenal world and advising its renunciation:
"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 quotation points to the dialectics of the path. At times, we may feel that art—or any phenomenon, for that matter—truly expresses Buddha-nature. At other times, we may sense 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) addresses the problem of attachment to art. The poem begins with four lines in which she confesses her lingering fondness for poetry ('brush and ink'):
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 turns our attention away from brush and ink—the source of attachment for the speaker—toward the silences and absences of sound that punctuate the ritual life of the monastery:
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 poem, the value of occasionally setting the phenomenal world aside is illustrated with delicate precision. Although the speaker recognizes that artistic creation and natural beauty are equally expressive of truth, at this moment neither art nor the evergreen trees seem to convey the nature of reality as directly as the gaps between phenomena. The verse suggests that it is within these silences—between the sounds of the bell and the fish-drum—that Miaohui glimpses the ultimate truth. Here, silence itself, rather than poetry or natural beauty, becomes the truest expression of the wordless Buddha-nature.
While from the ultimate perspective—as demonstrated by the passages from Mipam, Mǎzǔ, Musō, and Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche cited throughout this essay and its first part—there is no distinction between appearance and emptiness, it nevertheless remains the case that we usually like the experience of being musically attuned. These experiences are still bound to our karmically conditioned mode of being. The moment we take delight in 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, therefore, is that at times an aesthetics of silence is needed. In Miaohui’s verse, it was the silence—not the sounds—that afforded the blossoming encounter with emptiness. The way to approach the samarasa of meditative equipoise as intimately as possible through musical instruments may thus be to play nothing at all. During the musical moments when sounds are absent, we are permitted to extend nondual awareness even when there is nothing 'attractive' to perceive.
Resonances
In most musical silences, we remain 'present' with the resonances—the aftertaste—of the preceding sounds. Within such silences, the atmosphere or mood of the piece continues to be affectively present—a presence that we may even wish to linger in. In other words, the sudden arrival of musical silence does not imply the cessation of aesthetic experience; we are still affectively attuned, still dwelling within 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'—what Nishida called the kokoro no kūkan, the "space of the heart–mind", as contrasted with the mono no kūkan, the "space of things". It is the space of nonduality, as opposed to the space of phenomenal objects.
This kokoro no kūkan is not an 'interior' or introspective state, but a nondual attunement in which the distinction between 'inside' and 'outside' is transcended. To be musically attuned to a mood or atmosphere, therefore, is to dwell in a field that continues even in the absence of sound, because such attunement already transcends particular sonic events.
An anonymous poem in the Goshūi Wakashū from the late eleventh century beautifully expresses how nondual relishing of the space of heart-mind continues even after the phenomenal object that occasioned it has vanished. While spending the night gazing at the moon—a classic metaphor for our inherent Buddha-nature—the poet watches it disappear behind a mountain. With nothing left to look at, the poet remains in a purely attunemental, objectless state, suffused only with the lingering mood of the moon-as-Buddha-nature perfuming the 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 mood of the moon that sustains the poet’s meditative state. In the same way, we are usually affectively attuned to music even when silence arises within it. The presence of silence does not mean that we suddenly stop listening to music, nor does it mean that nothing compelling remains—something may still be present that invites liking and grasping.
For this reason, musical listening, even in silence, may not possess the truly affectless equipoise of meditation. The rasa of peace (śāntarasa) experienced through aesthetic attunement to silence is not the rasa of sameness (samarasa) so often described in the Mahāmudrā tradition when depicting meditative equipoise. Śāntarasa is not samarasa because an affective mood or atmosphere still remains—something to which we are attuned and which we continue to relish.
Thus, simply using silences does not automatically entail that "the principles of Buddhism", as Miaohui writes, are found within them. We may still be clinging, however subtly, to the serenity that the Buddha warned against.
The twentieth section of Kenkō’s Tsurezuregusa offers a brief reflection on how the mere affective lingering of an atmosphere is among the most difficult things to overcome—and yet, for a monk, it must be released in order to taste the sameness of all 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 had left the world behind [i.e., a Buddhist monk or recluse] is said to have remarked that for him—who had rid himself of all attachments and bonds to this world—the only thing hard to give up was the lingering mood that the sky leaves behind. One can well understand this sentiment.
Both Keene and McKinney, two well-known translators of Japanese poetry, render sora no nagori (空の名残) as “the beauty of the sky.” Yet nagori does not mean beauty; it refers to the aftertaste or lingering trace that a phenomenon leaves behind. The speaker in Kenkō’s passage is not admiring the sky’s outward beauty but acknowledging how the resonances of such beauty remain in the heart-mind–they attune us affectively–and are difficult to relinquish. He is not speaking of watching the sky turn pink at sunset and taking pleasure in its appearance, but of hearing the sound of the wind—sora can also mean "weather" in general—and sensing how it moves the emotions and leaves a subtle aftertaste. In other words, he describes how the sky and wind affectively attune us.
The reclusive speaker recognizes that this relishing of aftertaste is a subtle obstacle, something standing between him and awakening. Hearing the wind blow is a delicate form of beauty that embodies blandness and śāntarasa—an insipid flavor of serenity. The resonance it leaves behind has the taste of meditation. Yet it is not samarasa if there remains even the faintest trace of relishing.
While relishing the aesthetic śāntarasa, we may at times believe that we are resting in true meditative equipoise. Yet if we were genuinely in such equipoise, a sudden disturbing sound—such as a neighbor beginning to hammer on the wall—would not unsettle us emotionally, for there would be no 'mood' to be disturbed. If a musical attunement truly was samarasa, even the so-called disturbing sounds would be experienced as having the same taste as the musical ones.
Kasulis explains that 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 itself cannot be disturbed, but musical attunements often can. Music—as a nondual, non-conceptual attunement—is engaged without-thinking and without focusing on music as an object. It, too, can be said to take 'presence itself' as its sole content, yet it is a presence affectively perfumed in the form of a mood. The fact that liking and distraction can still arise within musical attunement means that it is not samarasa.
The 'state' (which is, of course, the complete absence of being in any state) of samarasa is free from reference points, 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, remains an aesthetic mood—and so does blandness. Yet among aesthetic moods that we have explored in this text, I propose that blandness lies closest to awakened vision. It approaches samarasa and, under certain conditions, may even seem to become it.
This, I take it, is what Miaohui describes in the verse above. The bell and fish-drum attune her to a nondual field so bland and thin that, within its silences, śāntarasa merges into samarasa.
The poetics I draw from Miaohui’s verse are therefore not those of complete silence, but of combining silence with carefully chosen sounds—sounds possessing qualities such as blandness. These sounds allow the veil of mood to become thin enough to see through in the silences, yet thick enough to establish nondual attunement in the first place. It is an aesthetic of using phenomenality to let us hear silence as emptiness.
In music, the sounds we bring forth can function like the bells and fish-drums that enabled Miaohui to perceive "the principles of Buddhism" in the silences between them. Within those intervals—between bell and fish-drum—there is space for a sudden moment of awakening.
Vipaśyanā and śamatha
When approached in this way, musical sounds can be regarded as something that, like śamatha, brings the listener into meditation and toward the thought-free wakefulness of vipaśyanā. In this metaphor, to begin directly with vipaśyanā would require the music to be completely silent from the outset—music that brings about musical attunement together with the total absence of musical sound.
In Chinese and Japanese literature, such a musical attunement to what lacks sound is described as listening to a qín without strings. In a beautiful poem, Ryōkan takes up this image—traditionally 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 savor the tasteful tastelessness of mind. We might call this 'ultimate blandness' in contrast to blandness as an aesthetic quality–relative blandness. For most of us, however, access to that nondual attunement is not effortless. We often need something that guides us toward it. Providing that guidance is precisely what musical sounds can do—just as śamatha leads the way to vipaśyanā.
According to a common metaphor, śamatha is what calms the mind. Just as a turbulent body of water, once stilled, allows us to see through it and to perceive reflections on its surface, śamatha stills the mind and makes it possible to perceive the clear nature of mind—an achievement that belongs to vipaśyanā.
One reason śamatha is regarded only as a prelude to vipaśyanā is because of the subtle fondness associated with it. This fondness is perhaps akin 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, even in the 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. Yet, just as śamatha serves as a prelude to vipaśyanā, musical attunements can also lead beyond themselves. When the attunement becomes 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. Yet precisely because it is so simple, it carries the potential to open outward—and finally to disappear.
What can occur at the point where music disappears, however, 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 then hear sounds arising as emptiness, not merely arising from emptiness. The "principles of Buddhism" may at first be heard only in the silence between the bell and the fish-drum, but when truly actualized they render the later bells and fish-drums themselves as emptiness.
In such moments there is no longer any difference between hearing sound and hearing silence since they now have the same flavor. Playing music becomes "like pumping bellows into the wind" (Sū Shì in Grant 1994, 80). I take this transcendence of any distinction between sound and emptiness to be the intent behind an enigmatic line by Meng Haoran. After a long period of "closed-gate meditation", he climbs "into open vistas" and gazes "across distant peaks". At that moment, he says: "With a creek’s windswept sound so crystalline, who needs the tune of a silent mountain sage?" (Hinton 2004, 30). Here he abandons every hierarchy between silence and sound, asking: who needs the silent mind of a meditation master when one can experience emptiness in the sound of the wind?
The soteriological qualities of Music
Aesthetic musical experience has so far been described as encompassing many qualities. Ideally, it invites the listener to rest the mind in its natural, nondual state, where sounds are perceived with equanimity—as the empty movements of Mind, the union of appearance and emptiness. The presence of some conceptuality or subtle grasping—which may vary depending on the aesthetic qualities of a particular piece—can prevent this ideal from being fully realized. Even when not fully actualized, however, it can still be intimately intimated. And because being musically attuned gestures toward the wisdom of resting the mind in its natural state, it can serve as a valuable resource on the path.
The poet Saigyō drew a similar conclusion about beauty. Although he did not speak explicitly of music, his descriptions of aesthetic experience are markedly attunemental in character. In a verse describing his experience of awakening (satori), Saigyō draws a causal link between being attuned to beauty and awakening itself:
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 that Barnhill has Saigyō express through the image of his own color being dyed by the blossoms’ color—is what prepares one for satori. Attuning ourselves to music, letting sounds simply be by surrendering to them, is an activity of profound soteriological value. When we listen to music, we neither do nor do not do anything; we simply allow the mind to rest in nondual attunement. In this mere being, musical sounds arise as the spontaneous, self-reflexive, empty movement of Mind.
Scruton writes that "[i]n hearing the movement in music we are hearing life—life conscious of itself" (1997, 353). In musical attunement we can hear form as emptiness and emptiness as form. Stillness, occurrence, and awareness are of but a single essence, which is Mind (Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche 1986, 130). The Zen tradition in particular maintains that one can awaken through colors and sounds (kenshiki monshō), as when Xiangyan attained realization upon hearing the sound of 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 can prevent the ideal of musical attunement from being fully realized, affect is also music’s greatest asset. By providing an affective Stimmung, music enables us to remain focused in nonduality for long durations. In the accomplishment of true vipaśyanā, such affectivity is absent; what remains is a complete openness that accepts all affects without staying with them—a quality known as the sameness of rasa (samarasa).
Yet sustaining the samarasa of true vipaśyanā is often difficult, whereas sustaining musical attunement is often effortless. Although we may lose some of the equanimity of meditative equipoise, we gain the support of an affective continuity that helps sustaining unwavering attention. Music, therefore, need not feel obliged to approximate samarasa as closely as possible—that is the domain of meditation. The skillful use of music lies precisely in utilizing its affective qualities to help us remain in nondual, disinterested attunement.
In this essay, I have sought to explore techniques for thinning the veil of affectivity—thin enough for the wisdom of samarasa beyond it to be intimated, yet not so thin that we cease to be spontaneously attuned by the music itself.
The distance between art and awakening
Although certain works—such as Yoko Ono’s Stone Piece, in which the listener attends to the soundlessness of an aging stone—render the veil so thin that the distance between listening to music and resting the mind in its natural state almost disappears, such experiences are still not sufficient for the actualization of awakening. Awakening is more than a momentary experience of emptiness. It is not enough to encounter occasional glimpses of empty, nondual awareness through art.
Buddhist teachers repeatedly remind us that even if we "ascertain empty luminosity during meditative equipoise", our "subsequent consciousness becomes confused", and "the stains of karma are not purified" (Karma Chagmé 2000). Having moments in which we recognize the nature of mind is not the same as fully actualizing awakening. When a guru points out the nature of mind to a student, the student is by no means already awakened. Despite perceiving this nature nakedly and directly, one must still undergo the long process of stabilizing that recognition and becoming thoroughly familiar with it.
Typically, 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). It is lost because karmic tendencies have not yet 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 brief moments of actualized awakening are "identical with the nature of complete enlightenment". The only difference is that they do not endure.
Nishida made a related distinction between the muga of beauty and the muga of religion: the former is temporary, the latter enduring. The muga of beauty is an ichiji no muga (一時の無我)—a muga of the moment. The muga of religion, by contrast, is eternal—an eikyū no muga (永久の無我).
Schopenhauer made a similar distinction when he described aesthetic experience as a momentary deliverance from suffering, different from the everlasting liberation achieved in nirvāṇa. In The World as Will and Representation, he writes that aesthetic experience "does not deliver [one] from life forever, but only for a few moments" (quoted in Odin 2001, 132). Yet even these moments of beauty grant a glimpse of what true liberation must be like:
"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).
We can, of course, follow Dōgen’s insistence that, ultimately, there is no distinction between the 'one-time muga' and the 'eternal muga.' In keeping with his nondual approach to the unconstructed view of awakening—as something that can have no beginning, middle, or end—Dōgen’s perspective is that of a temporally non-linear unfolding, more akin to a circle (dōkan, 道環) than to a linear progression. Awakening is not merely something that will occur 'in the future', for "[b]etween aspiration, practice, enlightenment, and nirvana, there is not a moment’s gap; continuous practice is the circle of the way" (1999).
For Dōgen, a phenomenology of zazen is, therefore, a phenomenology of awakening. The 'one-time muga' realized in zazen and the 'eternal muga' are one and the same. Kasulis writes that, for Dōgen, "[a]s long as one maintains a pure state of without-thinking, one is a Buddha" (1981, 84):
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