Transcription
Okay, hello everyone. I thought I would follow up the seminar from the other night, the "Art and Dharma" [Part 1] seminar, and try and clarify a little bit more some of the things we were talking about, fill out a few things, elaborate on a few things that seemed to me to perhaps warrant a bit more elaboration, that might be helpful. And in doing that, to use a few more examples to illustrate kind of what I mean. So I hope it's helpful. I hope it's interesting. But more than that, I hope that it's more than interesting, in that, as we said last time, there's something, I think, potentially very important here -- really very important -- about the relationship with art, the relationship of art to Dharma, and our relationship with existence. Those three have a very significant relationship.
So if we entertain the possibility that, you know, some of the sort of profound crises and global problems we face are, in part at least, crises of cosmology, crises of anthropology -- meaning how do we, -logy, how do we think about, and more than that, how do we think about, conceive, and sense the cosmos, the world, the earth, nature, a human being, our own selves, the soul (if we even use that word)? There's something in the way we've been taught to think about that, and therefore how we perceive it. And one could say that that, at least in part, supports the kind of destructive and uncareful relationship that we have with existence. So if that is there, and that needs addressing, how can it be opened up? Maybe not for everyone, but for some people, how can it be opened up? How can it be made fertile, made profound? How can it be healed, and it be made to be healing of selves, of human beings, but also of world, and of relationship?
And in that possible question about how do we view, how do we think of and sense existence, world, self, human being, we said that the Dharma is implicated. How we think about what we want from the Dharma, and what we want from art -- all these three are implicated. So what kind of cosmos, what kind of self am I wanting to find myself in? What's the picture I have painted of the world and reality and self? And if I'm doing art, or if I'm doing Dharma, what am I then creating, painting for myself and for others? And what then does that do to my whole view and then how we treat each other, self, and world? So I hope you can see that this is actually important, these three -- at least potentially important.
Last time we said anything we say about art and the intentions of art is probably going to be too small. We're always going to find something that, "Oh, that didn't quite capture that bit, or it didn't quite reach to that intention, or that way of thinking about it." So I think there's a case for saying that art will always exceed human understanding. There's something about art and the human need to make art that's sort of more than we can get our heads around, ever, and more than the totality of humanity and the totality of time can ever get their heads around. I like that. I like that kind of thing. [laughs] I like it when things exceed us and have a mystery beyond what the mind can contain.
Just recapping a bit now. So we said that. When you're listening tonight -- and I know for a fact that whatever I will say, there will be something that later on I could think, "Oh, I didn't -- that's outside, and that's outside." That's a given. It's a danger of the territory, an occupational hazard. So please bear that in mind. We also said, what is art? And actually that it's very hard to come up with a definition -- certainly very hard to come up with a definition that everyone's going to agree on. That's pretty much taken for granted. We could also ask the same thing about Dharma, what is the Dharma? It seems easier to decide what the Dharma is, define it, describe it, but actually, there are lots of different Dharma traditions, and once you really start exploring your own psychology in relationship to Dharma, you might find -- and I've talked about this in plenty of talks -- that actually, what you're doing, or what you want from the Dharma, or how you're approaching it, doesn't quite fit into the boxes that you've been given. So even defining or describing what Dharma is isn't that easy.
So both of these terms, art and Dharma, are somewhat mysterious, somewhat complex and, in a way, infinite -- potentially, at least. And I know that's a controversial view, especially with regard to the Dharma. But with the different traditions and the different sort of psychologies involved, there's a whole wide range of possibilities of what the Dharma could be. Then we talked about -- again, just recapping; I want to point to some places where you could get some more info -- we talked about, okay, you've got Dharma and art, both of which are kind of interestingly problematic or open terms, and we could say, "Well, I can have a relationship between the two of seeing Dharma, and seeing my Dharma practice, as art." Okay, so that's one way I could go -- Dharma as art. And I mentioned it the other day, but I didn't really fill it out, because I've talked about it elsewhere. So I was trying to get through a lot of material, and too quickly, probably. So all I'm going to do right now is mention, say a little, tiny bit about that, and mention where you can get some more info on that.
So there are a couple of talks. I know there's a three-part series -- the first one is called "Questioning Awakening," the second one is "Buddhism Beyond Modernism," and the third one is "In Praise of Restlessness" [2014 November Solitary]. So somewhere in there, it unpacks this idea of a very different view of Dharma practice and seeing it as art. And I think also the series of talks "What is Awakening?" [The Mirrored Gates] -- I think also in there. Other places too. That's all I can think of right now. So if it's something you're interested in, you could go there and fill it out more, rather than me spending time tonight kind of repeating what I've said elsewhere. But I'll just mention -- part of what we said there was just what we said before: that art is always going to be, and Dharma is always going to be, bigger than our definition or our defined intention. It's going to hold more than our definition. It's going to hold more than our defined intention for us. And especially the more we love it and the more we get into it, it kind of begins to overflow its boundaries, just like art.
What does it mean, Dharma as art? One of the key differences there is that art is open-ended, okay? And I think in some of those talks I contrasted art, and the movement of art, and the whole human endeavour of art, contrasted that with, say, the human endeavour of science or religion. So religion, in a way, or the religious movement, tends to look backwards, to the past of authority, unlike science, which rests on the past but moves forward to new discoveries. Religious discovery tends to be rediscovering what the founder or whatever has done. We talked about that. So seeing Dharma as art might mean also escaping from or liberating oneself from that idea of replicating the Buddha's awakening -- so quite a radical idea. But with that, art is also open-ended. It doesn't, as I said, "Now I've finished the path. I'm an arahant. I'm this or that. I'm liberated. It's done. I've now realized what the Buddha has realized. That's the end of the path." Art doesn't have an end. Human art, if humans are still around, will just keep evolving, keep going. And it has a particular relationship with tradition and the past. So all that's there to explore in those talks.
I also mentioned the other day that we could look at particularly Soulmaking Dharma practice as almost like quintessentially artful. It's the art of perception. And we've talked about the poetry of perception, the poiesis of perception. We're learning inner and outer perceptions to create and discover works of art in them, or them as works of art. So I mean this in much more than a sort of glib, trite, metaphoric way. There's incredible sophistication and subtlety there, and all the sort of nuances, and endless discovery and creativity that's possible in actual art forms that's possible also in Soulmaking Dharma practice. I think there is an actual talk called "The Art of Perception" [Re-enchanting the Cosmos], if I remember. I don't actually remember what's in it, but judging by the title, it sounds like it's probably the right one, if you want to explore that. But actually the whole Soulmaking Dharma body of teachings.
Just recapping now a few things before I want to move on. The other thing we said the other day, that when we explore our own relationship with Dharma practice and the path, and are really honest, and don't squeeze it into boxes and predefinitions of what we're doing, we might notice that different people, or we ourselves at different times, have different fantasies of the path -- different fantasies of where we're heading, what we're heading towards, and different fantasies of the self as the practitioner or one who is walking the path. I think there are two talks: one is called "In Love With the Way" [Eros Unfettered], and the other is called "On Blessed Ground: Fantasies of the Self on the Path" [Of Hermits and Lovers]. So you can find those if you're interested in this. But one of the fantasies is the artist fantasy. So there's a whole -- what does it mean to actually relate to my path, and fantasize (in the best sense) myself as artist on the path? Not in the medical model, not in the scientific research[er] model, etc. So that's all there if you want. So Dharma as art.
Then we talked about art as Dharma, the other way around. We mentioned that. And one of the things I shared was that it's common for people -- what I hear quite regularly is people having a notion or a sense or a view of their art, whatever that art is (painting or whatever it is), and viewing that as Dharma, as part of their Dharma practice. Oftentimes -- not always, but oftentimes what I hear in that is that the way it becomes Dharma practice for them, art, is that the process is primary. The product, the final product, the art product, the work of art, is secondary, but there's something in the process -- and usually a person talks about getting into a flow, or freeing themselves from any preplanned intention, or any concept, just working without concept, or without will -- "I'm letting it come, there's no will involved, there's no intention." And that, when one enters into that space of that kind of process, sometimes people feel like, "Oh, now that's like practising. Now I'm in that kind of mode of practising, and the product is secondary." So that's a kind of view.
But what I want to say -- that's absolutely fine and wonderful, but I do want to add to that: careful that we don't get locked into a view around that, so that that very view can become a kind of prison and a little bit blinkered in the sense that it hasn't considered other possibilities so well. Why is going with the flow, or being without a plan, or without a kind of will or effort, or without a concept, why is that regarded as spiritual and more kind of Dharmic? Why is that regarded as better or more authentic? And if I am regarding it as more spiritual, better, or more authentic in some way, am I not creating a duality there? Oftentimes the people will have that kind of view either of art or of practice and they're rationalizing it to themselves as, "I'm being non-dualistic. Because I'm not trying, because I'm not planning, because I'm not conceiving, because there's not much will in it, it's just a flow happening, I'm not being dualistic, because I'm not setting up any goal, there's no self," etc., like that. You get the same kinds of rationalization sometimes for people not wanting to do in meditation, not wanting to, for instance, develop samādhi, and work at that, or put the effort in, and have the sense of a goal, of jhānas or whatever it is. And the whole sort of concept of the path can be very much about non-doing, and given the rationale of non-duality.
Part of the problem with that, seeing it as a sort of total view of what practice is and believing that it rests on the view of non-duality, is it actually ends up being very dualistic in terms of our life, because our life is filled with all kinds of things where we have to make an effort, we have to plan, we have to conceive, we have to bring our will to bear, etc. There isn't a flow, and we have to kind of work and struggle with this and that, and stay with this thing that we're fussing with, or whatever. So what you get is a practice -- whether it's a meditative practice or an art practice -- that then doesn't seem to address a large portion of our life, which does involve all those other things (effort, and doing, and goals, and all this) inevitably. So you've actually ended up with a huge duality between practice and a whole realm of both life and potential practice that is dualistically shoved off, out of the window.
So this is just something to consider as a view, and questioning that view. Is it possible that we've got locked into a certain view, and not really thought it through very well? In Soulmaking Dharma, we have the opportunity to play and entertain different conceptual frameworks, different logoi, different concepts. The whole concept of what my effort is, this effort that I'm making, or this desire, this wanting to achieve something, or wanting to get something, or my thinking, or my conceiving, all of that can be seen, I can entertain the idea, that these are divine: this is, let's say, the Buddha-nature thinking through me; this desire, this eros, this wanting to open up new vistas is God, Buddha-nature, dharmakāya, using my body, and my being, and my mind, and my effort, and my desire as instrument, or it's the divine's will, desire, etc. So you can play with that whole view, and then the whole duality collapses. There's every justification, then, for slogging and being very careful, putting a lot of effort in, all that stuff.
Okay. Again, just recapping. We also said that an artist -- and again, any form of art -- when they're in their groove, when they're inspired and working on something, whatever piece they're working on, that part of that will, unless it's one of those very brief Zen kind of arts, where a haiku just comes, if that ever happens in that -- haiku have very, what's the word, formal syllabic structure, so it's not just anything that comes into your mind. Or -- and I keep forgetting the word -- those calligraphic Zen circles; they have a Japanese word for them [ensō]. So those things I think, I suppose, can just be done in one brushstroke, so the whole thing takes -- I don't know what -- one and a half seconds or something like that. [18:51] But especially when it's anything longer than one and a half seconds, something needs to happen where it's not that the self disappears so much; it's more that there comes in, as we talked about the other day, a double eros. One is in love with, in erotic relationship with, what one is working on, the form itself as it's coming. And one might fuss with it and get frustrated and all that. There's still eros there, and kind of reflexively with the self, and that eros constitutes the self as image -- so the image of the self as artist, and that becomes an erotic-imaginal object for oneself. So you get a doubly directed eros. And all of that is part of the kind of fertile imaginal soul-ground that gives the whole artistic process fertility, and onward movement, and beauty, and sacredness, and necessity, and all the rest of it.
So we mentioned that the other day. Of course, like all these things, like working in soulmaking practice, in meditation, etc., it's, as I said, a double-edged sword. You're playing with something that can be grasped in a way that it isn't that, it isn't fertile. How? Well, we could ask, what tells me when this sort of sense of myself as artist is soulful, and what tells me when it's actually problematic? One of the things is: is the self reified? How reified has it become? And if you know the Soulmaking Dharma, you get very tuned to these things, and it's so key, it's so central in terms of, am I navigating towards more soul and more fertility, or is something going to kind of grind to a halt and lock down? Or perhaps it might be one's in the art, and doing all these pieces, and then one looks at what one has, and one kind of sees, "Oh, it's all about me. All this art is about me, or about my unconscious," or whatever, or "my process," or "my healing," or "my this or that." So one might have an image in all that, in making that, of the artist, but the question is: is it an imaginal image? Again, is it reified, or is it just encapsulated and a little bit self-obsessed?
Like all things, you know, sometimes some people need to be encouraged: "Don't worry about this. Just trust. Just go for it." People question me, "But I have this sense of myself. I kind of think I'm cool being an artist," and they're not articulating it very well, and actually what is there is an incipient imaginal image of self. I say don't worry about it, just trust your process. Other people actually need to maybe bring a little more care and careful looking, because the image of their self is beginning to get reified or has been reified and it's a little bit self-obsessed. So it's asking, as always, for a careful discrimination and sensitivity, and open-mindedness about what's actually going on, and then it's possible, "Well, how can I right the boat, if it's actually tipped up a little bit?"
Okay, so all that's review. One more tiny bit of review, and then I want to [move on]. So then we talked about, okay, there's process, art as Dharma and this sort of interest in or preoccupation with process over product. [22:33] What about art product as Dharma? Okay, so not so much process, but the product. How does one consider, or what are the possibilities for considering the product of art, the work of art, as Dharma somehow, or as Buddhist or whatever? Now, we could have the most sort of facile thing: "Well, it's Buddhist art because it's a picture of the Buddha, or it's a picture of Kuan Yin," or whatever. That, to me, doesn't make it Dharma, or Buddhist, or anything; it's just a superficial form. What's more -- well, I don't know if it's more or less common, but another possibility is what I described last time. I described a colleague, a fellow teacher -- actually it was Stephen -- and he'd written an essay called An Aesthetics of Emptiness.
And he was kind of describing his relationship with art, and how he makes the connection between Buddhism and art, and why art can be Dharma for him, etc. In a way, it was sort of describing what we might kind of expect to find when we think, "What would make Dharma art, or Buddhist art?" It's a concern with portraying impermanence, pointing to impermanence, pointing to dukkha, and dukkha as the finitude and the limitation of human existence, the poignant tragedy of our existential situation. And so, for him, these were the kind of things that were characteristic -- if I understood him correctly -- both of Buddhist art, but also of any art that he was really interested in. And again, there's going to be a parallel there: what are we looking to the Dharma for, what are we looking to art for? If we care about art, they're going to be very similar. And all of that has everything to do with how we look at existence. In this case, again, a preoccupation with depicting and insisting on, "This is our existential situation. This is what we must face. This is what's most significant about it -- its impermanence, its tragedy, its limitation, our finitude." And he was also using these words 'negative capability' and the 'sublime' -- both sort of Romantic concepts. But interestingly to me, [he] was taking quite complex concepts and only focusing on one half, the half that had to do with existential threat, or limitation of human consciousness in the face of not knowing.
So this is where I want to go a little bit more, and see if we can fill this out a bit more. So he uses the word 'transcendence.' If I just quote a little bit, he says:
A successful work of art is transcendent. The haiku, sonata, or sculpture transcends the raw materials of which it is composed. The work is neither reducible to the sum of its parts nor could it possibly exist without them. It is something 'more.' Yet the exact nature of this 'more' is difficult if not impossible to articulate.[1]
Okay, does that make sense? Yeah? So no quarrels with that. It has to be transcendent, and in that sense at least, more than its elements. But it's really hard to put your finger on what that transcendence is. So this is exactly what I want to go into a little bit and unpack a little bit.
As an example, Stephen used -- I'm going to see if this works. [displaying an image on another computer's screen] Actually, I'll say something first. So he then talks about Carl Andre's sculpture, Equivalent VIII, which I'm going to show you a picture of in a sec. And he says, "which was derided in the British press when it was bought by the Tate Gallery in 1972 as an egregious waste of public money." And he says that sculpture "is more than a stack of 120 rectangular firebricks. But exactly how its transcendence is achieved is not easy to say." Let me show you this, if I can get this set up right. [displaying copyrighted image on screen from the [Tate website]{.ul}; see Figure 1 for a similar image with a Creative Commons license]
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Andre, Tate
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Okay, so this is Carl Andre's sculpture, Equivalent VIII. Just look at it for a little bit and notice as you're looking at it, taking it in, what arises in you? Certainly what arises in the mind, but what arises in the heart and soul as you look? I want to say right away: I'm not concerned right now at all with the sort of -- or what used to be the typical complaint about this kind of art, "Oh, anyone could do that. Any bricklayer could do that. My 7-year-old daughter could do that." I'm not interested in that kind of critique. I actually think it is visually pleasing, at a certain level, at least, and I think it's done with a good artist's sort of tasteful and discerning eye for form and proportion and all that. There's something else I want to draw attention to right now. As I said, as you look at it, notice what arises in the heart and soul as you look. I don't know how much time to give you for this. Is it okay if I say something now? Yeah?
I can tell you what arose for me. It was a slight sense of nihilistic and oppressive limitation. Something in me kind of sighs and despairs. But I'm only despairing at the art, at the sense of things I'm sort of being hemmed into. I'm not sighing at existence. I'm not sighing at the truth of life, "I'm being reminded of something." I'm sighing because I feel I'm being boxed into a certain view, or someone else's kind of sense of things, which, for me, feels too small and too flat. Okay. You don't have to buy any of this; I'm just sharing. Like I said last time, this is my ... But at any rate, there's, for me, a sense of nihilistic and oppressive limitation.
Let's play a little game. Can you see that it's two bricks high? Yes? All these sculptures are the same height; that's part of what the 'equivalent' means. There are eight -- I don't know how many there are; I think there are eight. Imagine it if you can. Just play with your imagination. This is a little strange thing to do, but imagine it one brick height. Can you do that? Now, again, I'll just share what happens. If I do that, with one brick, nothing is really built yet. Nothing is really essayed. Nothing is really tried yet. There's a foundation. Perhaps it's a foundation of something. But there's a kind of openness there, and so I don't get the same kind of sense of limitation, of oppressive limitation.
Imagine it now three bricks high. Just add another one on top. Again, I don't get such an oppressive feeling of limitation. It's three bricks high. I'm really talking about subtle things here! [laughs] But something about it being two bricks high, and the height it is, etc., gives me at least a feeling and sense of limitation, and somehow I get the sense that it echoes or points to some sense of existential limitation. And this is, as I said, to me, this sort of conveying or portraying or depicting or pointing to our existential limitation is quite common in a lot of contemporary art. It's quite a dominant theme. And when it's portrayed, it's portrayed without anything else. There is only that sense of limitation; there's nothing else being portrayed.
So if we go back to what Stephen was saying about transcendence, he was saying yeah, a work of art is transcendent; it's hard to say what it is. But something in what is transcendent here is the sense of limitation, okay? Now, that might be, in this case, deliberate, or conscious, or unconscious evocation or depiction of our supposedly true existential situation. It might be not deliberate at all. But I find this kind of thing certainly deliberately evoked and portrayed in a lot of contemporary art, and sometimes kind of almost inadvertently or unwittingly. Either way, I think it's interesting.
If you listen to the display caption, the gallery label -- this is next to it in the Tate.[2] [reads description from website] So what that little caption is describing is that the art is also invoking or pointing to the dependent arising of our perception of the surrounding space. Yeah? Did you get that? So this is also a concern of a lot of contemporary art, that there's this interest in the art being seen in the context of the environment or the gallery or whatever, and somehow showing us how it changes our relationship with the space, our relationship with space or our spatial relationship with the art -- all of that changes perception. So it's pointing to the dependent arising of various perceptions, including the surrounding space. We could say it's pointing to emptiness and dependent arising -- at a certain level. Again, I'm just sharing personally: I kind of feel like, "So what?" It's not a particularly profound kind of level of emptiness or dependent arising there that's being shown. So I'm personally left with a feeling like, "Yeah, that's interesting, but so what?"
Carl Andre has another piece. I'm not going to show you. I actually prefer it. But it's called 144 Magnesium Square -- 1969, because it was done in 1969. I'm going to read you this description.[3] [reading description from the Tate website]
Then the director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery wrote about this and compared it with 144 Lead Square, okay? Same deal, different material. And he wrote:
Comparison of two squares of differing metals focuses attention on the properties of the material. The 144 lead and magnesium squares look the 'same' but the lead square weighs nearly 3,300 lbs while the magnesium square weighs only 500 lbs. Colour is quite different and before oxidization the magnesium square reflected and diffused light, while lead absorbed all the light that played on it. Walking on them one hears different sounds and can feel different textures and on close examination the resilience of the magnesium with its sharp edge contrasts with the soft and increasingly rounded edges of the lead.[4]
[In a 1970 interview Andre claimed] The forms of my work have never particularly interested me. What has been my search really is for a material, a particle of a material. It's finding a material or a unit of material like a brick of the right size and the right shade and density and so forth -- from finding this particle, I would combine it with others to make a work.[5]
Again, if I read the display caption, the gallery label, it says Andre's metal floor sculptures are intended to be walked on. Okay, so this is what's there in the gallery when you go see it. [reads gallery label again] How do you feel? This is what's said about the work of art. This is the explanation of it. And there are a million examples, probably literally a million examples possible. The explanation, so-called, of the art, and of the artist's concerns, are purely sensual -- if there even is such a thing. They're limited to a concern with the texture of sense contact as flatly conceived, if that's even possible. Or the material or elements, "This is lead, and this is magnesium," or whatever. Or the formal, he says he's not interested in other works, so it's the form that they talk about. Carl Andre, actually, when talking about his art in an interview, he said, "Works of art don't mean anything." Actually some works of art do mean something, and some don't. There's music, poetry, theatre which includes intended meanings, and there's abstract painting, abstract sculpture, dance, or wordless music, which don't necessarily mean anything. Both, to me, can be profound art, whether there are meanings included or no obvious meanings included or no meaning included.
[39:50] What I want to say -- and again, what I want to try and do here is say, is there an alternative? Is there an alternative from considering Dharma art as either pictures of Buddhas and kind of Buddhist figures or a concern with the poignant tragedy of humans' existential situation, impermanence, dependent arising at a pretty superficial level? Is there an alternative view of Dharma art? For me, in that alternative possibility, it's like, either way, whether it's got a meaning in it (whatever the form of art is), or it hasn't got a meaning in it, without meaningfulness, without dimensionality, I would say, is it art? Is it art? If I put it personally, it's not what I need or look for or consider worthwhile, okay, without those, without dimensionality, without meaningfulness, etc. Okay? So now this transcendence, we're looking for something different. In Stephen's essay, it says it's very hard to say what the transcendence is, but when he points to -- without saying, "This is what it is," when he actually points to it, it's always pointing to impermanence, finitude, limitation, existential tragedy, the poignancy of that. And I want to say: yes, transcendence. Yes, it's hard to describe. But is there a possibility of looking for something else and finding something else in the transcendence -- another kind of transcendence? And that is the job, partly, of the artist, and that's what we receive from the art.
So I want to try and point to another possibility of conceiving Dharma art, what would make Dharma art. You listen to, this is Carl Andre's depiction of what the art is, and this is the gallery's depiction -- this is so rife, in visual art particularly. It's, as we said, limited to materials and sense contact, at a sort of textural, purely flat level. But any seriously engaged artist is going to be kind of preoccupied with creating and discovering, with an exploration of particular materials, the elements of their art. At any time, they're going to be excited about some aspect of that, because that's their material, or some formal or compositional considerations. They change over time as one develops and goes on one's particular artistic journey. But in this other view of art, there should be a double-levelled concern, both for the artist and for the reader or audience or viewer of art. So one concern is with elements. For example, as a composer of music, you started to get in the twentieth century at a certain point, maybe about the sixties, works of music where the primary concern in terms of the material was with timbre. It wasn't with pitch and rhythm and melody. It was with timbre and texture. So the whole form, that was what was primary. It might have had pitch and even melody and rhythms in it, but actually timbre became primary rather than the other.
An artist doing that might get very excited with the possibilities -- it's like you've discovered something new. I remember as a composer, even just within certain -- like writing a piece where the kinds of harmonies I used were very new for me. Now, they may or may not have been new in the whole history of music, but for me, it was super exciting because they were new. I remember writing another piece a little later which used kind of harmonies and musical material, if you like, that, for me, was not new at all. I was in graduate school at the time, and I showed it to my professor, and he thought it was amazing and incredibly new and original and da-da-da. But, for me, it wasn't. It was ... not half-dead, but it just wasn't anywhere near as exciting as the other one. So one is concerned as an artist with what are the particular elements that I'm excited about now.
But at the same time, or, for example, in writing poetry, you can get poetry that's really about the meaning: what is conveyed in this poem? It's a story, or it's an image that's depicted, or whatever. And you can get poetry where the concern of the poet is actually about the sound, or even the visuals on the page. So you're reversing, or you're getting very interested in a different element comes to the fore. What is it, a poem as pure sound? And then it's more like music, you know? More like a kind of abstract music. And it might even end up having meanings in it, but the hierarchy is reversed. So all that's part of what comes alive in any, I think, journey of artistic exploration. But, for me, it can't be only that, as these kind of display captions and artists describing what they're doing in their art. It has to be something else.
And this is where the transcendent meaningfulness comes in -- which means more than "meaning," okay? More than "It means this," "This refers to that," or "It's a depiction of that." It might include that. We talk about this a lot in the Soulmaking Dharma. Meaningfulness is a kind of infinite pregnancy. We might include clear, individual meanings; maybe even a whole range of individual meanings. But it always exceeds that, it's always more than that. And part of it is hazy, and that's where the transcendence comes in. So it's very related to dimensionality shading into divinity. At some point, it gets hazy, but in a beautiful way, in a rich way, in an evocative, poignant way, one in which or with which we have a relationship with eros, and we have a sense of meaningfulness and importance and necessity, not a kind of confusion that just reflects back to us our own limitation of not being able to understand something. And that pregnancy and that beyond there is evocative of divinity eventually, in the broadest sense of the word. It's not cold and meaningless sort of endless, expansive space, or whatever, or threatening in some way.
If we come back to the icon I showed the other day. [displaying painting for camera, Figure 2 below]
{width="2.785416666666667in"
height="3.4694444444444446in"}(Figure 2: Andrei Rublev's The
Hospitality of Abraham, also called The Trinity)
So I'm just going to very briefly -- I just want to make a point here, so I'm not going to go ... This is The Hospitality of Abraham to the three angels who were travelling in the desert. He takes them in, he feeds them, he gives them a place to rest and slakes their thirst. It also has the title of The Trinity, so it's got that double meaning. And we pointed to that actually some of what's really beautiful and amazing here is the space between the angels. They're sitting in a triangle or a circle, and the space between them is, if you like, the thing that's most pregnant and most central -- not just spatially, but central spiritually, let's say. And we get that sense from looking at it, even if I hadn't said that. When I point that out, you sort of notice it after I say it ... hopefully. So it's the relationship between, let's say, the persons of the Holy Trinity, the space, and that's already pregnant with mystical meaning and meaningfulness.
We pointed out the cup, the chalice, which is reminiscent of -- it's a wine cup; it's reminiscent of the Eucharist, the blood of Christ, mystical wine, drunken, mystically drunk, all these kinds of things. What I just want to point out -- and hopefully this is obvious, but I just want to really make it clear -- when we see, for example, the cup, the cup is not an object in the image. It comes to our consciousness in a shift of perception. It's a sort of negative image, if you like. But this is not something like what happens in an Escher painting, or rather it's much more than something like, "Oh! Oh, that's cool. I can just flip it and see it the other way." We're pointing at something much more than just a sensual or perceptual shift, right? We're pointing at something that's much more profound than that, much more pregnant than just a flat shift of sense and perception. Yeah?
What it's also not is just a finite number of meanings. So I said Eucharist, I said -- what's here, depicted? There's the pointing to the Eucharist, the pointing to what does it mean to be hospitable to the angel, the cup, the sacrifice, all this, the space. It's not that the shift is into recognizing a finite number of meanings, okay? [sets painting down off camera] Here the Eucharist, the wine, the sacrifice, the hospitality to angel, the Trinity, that space between the persons of the Holy Trinity, they need to be open concepts for this to work. It's not like, "Oh, I know that thing. I know it's the Eucharist. Oh, yeah, the Eucharist," or it's not a closed label we're talking about. And -- I've put it down now, but I don't know; I think when we did it the first time I asked, can you actually notice when your mind views it in a closed way, and grasps at a meaning that you think you know, that's limited, that's circumscribed, what happens in the energy body, what happens in the heart and soul? Should we do that, take a minute to do that, or is it okay? Yeah? [picks painting up again, Figure 3]
{width="3.2979166666666666in"
height="1.85in"}(Figure 3)
So again, let's take that space between the angels, so the mystery of the Holy Trinity, and the mystery of an emptiness, a space between them, if you like, or at the centre of them. And that space is somehow also a cup filled with wine, filled with sacrifice, etc. Now, as you're looking, can you bring your whole energy body into relationship with this icon, and notice what happens moment to moment in the heart and the soul and the energy body as you do so? And there may be times where the mind does circumscribe or narrow down or fixate upon what something means, or what it is. And there may be other times where it's still in touch with a depiction, the Eucharist, the space, etc., but that thing itself is open. It has unfathomability in it. It has these mysterious depths and meaningfulness as opposed to just a meaning. And if you notice your mind going back and forth like that, and your perception going back and forth, what's the difference? What's the difference in your heart and soul and energy body? Again, it's quite subtle. But is it possible?
When it's open, when our concept is open and we're in touch with the image there, these things are open -- the energy body is open, the heart is open and in touch with those profundities, even if we don't even know exactly what they mean -- we couldn't write a thesis on the Trinity or anything like that. Something comes alive in the soul and the heart in relationship to this. We're called into relationship. We find ourselves, energy body, heart, and soul, in relationship with these mysteries, and it's alive, and there's almost a palpable connection and aliveness and openness in that relationship. And then at other times, we've shrunk down the meaning, or we've fixed it and circumscribed it, and that whole depth and aliveness and soulfulness of the relationship goes out of the experience. And it can happen in the blink of an eye. Are you getting a sense of this? Very good.
So this is partly what I want to point at. Notice in what we just did, you could feel it, your sense of the relationship, your sense of your soul, your sense of the icon, your sense of the mystery, that whole field there. How it was experienced and what it was experienced as and what it opened to was partly dependent on how you related to concept. Do you understand? How do I relate to Eucharist? Again, "Oh, it's the Eucharist. Oh, it's the Trinity. Oh, it's the empty, and the space," or whatever. I know what that is, and I've delimited it, and in so doing, in freezing the concept that way, the soul-connection, the 'transcendence,' if we borrow Stephen's word -- and it's a good word -- and use that, the transcendence shrinks. The meaningfulness shrinks. The whole relationship shrinks. It doesn't have those infinite depths, those unfathomable depths of mystery, that opening out. The eros shrinks and collapses -- all of it.
But what this means is that for that sense to open up with a work of art or with anything, it doesn't just take the sensitivity, the energy body, heart, soul, and attention, and all of that. It also takes a certain poise in relationship to concept. Because without that, if I fix the concept, I lose that whole opening, right? So we participate in the art. We, as viewer in this case, participate in making it art, or what I would call art. In a way it's not art, it's not alive art, until I've found the right relationship with it. So the mind and the soul create and discover. It's not just me; it's an amazing painting there, it's an amazing icon. But it takes my participation to make it art. Similarly with beauty. So all this, of course, brings us to questions of ontology. What's the reality here? What is the ontology of beauty? Does beauty have an independent existence of my opinion of it? Do values -- aesthetic and also ethical -- have an independent existence, independent of my participation?
So I've talked about this a bit in the past -- again, trying to remember the talks. I think there's a talk called "Beauty and the Buddha" [Of Hermits and Lovers]. And there's now, from the new series, which is called Four Circles, Four Parables of Stone and Light, there's a nine-part series called "Sila and Soul" within that, and part of that is talking about the ontology. I hope to follow it up with more talks, particularly about the ontology of this. Usually we think if a thing is real, it has objective, independent existence -- it's objectively beautiful, no matter what anyone says, or it's objectively right or wrong, or it's objectively whatever it is, a work of art. Or we tend to think if it's not that, then it's just subjective. But actually, are there other ways of thinking about ontology that don't fall into either of these two extremes of being just objective or just subjective? The clue is in that notion of participation, and also eros and other things. I hope to get to that in the future in other talks.
Are we doing okay for energy? Yeah? So transcendence as such, in art, needs, for me, to point to more than limitation. So the transcendence doesn't just point to impermanence, just point to the poignant tragedy of our existential situation, etc., but also points to what we might call 'divinity,' if you want to use that word (and I mean it in the broadest sense). But also, meaning it in the broadest sense, I mean that divinity, too, is not limited. Sometimes we think, "Oh, divine is like this, or it looks like that," or whatever. But we're not limiting the possible forms and faces of the divine, okay? So that that transcendence, or potential transcendence, can also potentially be infinite, infinite in its range and variety.
So poignancy of impermanence can be included, of course, but not only that. I think what doesn't sit so well with me [is] when I feel like that's all that's being pointed to. There's only that; there's no ... I feel bricked in by someone else imposing their sense of reality on me, and trumpeting it as if it's a truth, and squashing what I sense as a many-dimensioned existence down to one-dimensional, flattened. It hurts, actually, if I'm just speaking personally. It actually hurts me. But we can include impermanence and the poignancy of impermanence, but not only that, so that if it's there, it's not the be-all and end-all of the work of art or what it's pointing to or what the transcendence elicits, evokes, portrays.
So somehow, in the work of art, if there is tragedy and impermanence and fragility and all that, there's also a kind of context around that of divinity, of dimensionality, of transcendence which contains, if you like, or 'opens out to' would be a better word, opens out to divinity, dimensionality, sacredness, as well as the immanent sense of limit or tragedy or whatever, impermanence and all that. And sometimes that context, what I'm calling this context of divinity, can be very subtle, and it's more in the background -- very, very subtle, and it's actually really even hard to say where is it, how is it being evoked? So as I said, those bricks, Carl Andre's Equivalent VIII, to me, they refer and convey to me only limitation, and I find that in a lot of cases. Or, and again, not to offend anyone, but in some poetry, a lot of modern poetry almost takes as its either obvious theme or background, implicit theme an evocation of impermanence, of the fleetingness and again the tragedy, etc. And of course, some people do that better than others, etc., but I struggle with that, personally. So for example, a poet like Philip Larkin, I find just very limited and very flattening. Something is missing for me. The fullness of the pregnancy, of the opening, the infinite opening out of the transcendence, the calling me into relationship with the divine, is just not there.
[1:02:34] So when we say 'divine,' really wanting to stretch what that word -- it can be funny. A work of art can be funny, or a poem can be silly. It can be completely nonsensical. A poem or a work of art or a piece of music can be dark -- and I mean that in multiple meanings. There can be death as a theme, impermanence as a theme, fragility, loss, not knowing as themes. But we could say around that, somehow or other, the more significant transcendence is a kind of halo around that, and that divinity can have many, many faces. So similarly, like we talk in Soulmaking Dharma, you know, we talk about beauty as an element of the imaginal. Every time I say it, it's like: not just what you're used to thinking [of] as beauty. It's opening up the sense of beauty, as much as opening up the sense of what's sacred. So you get the sense now how much in what I'm saying about art is similar to what I would say about Soulmaking Dharma. It's not a coincidence. How much of what Stephen was saying about art is similar to what he would say about Dharma? As I said, it's not a coincidence. And how much of that, for both of us, is connected with how we perceive the world and selves and humanity and soul or self, but also how we want to perceive all that? All this goes together. But I really want to make this point about the possible infinite widening of what divinity and sacredness can be like, and beauty. We tend to limit those concepts, and there's something in our relationship with those concepts -- and if you know Soulmaking Dharma, you'll know this from the Soulmaking Dharma -- that as we enter into a relationship, it will grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, stretch and deepen, both.
Okay. I want to give another example. Here's a poem by Mary Oliver, and it's called "Robert Schumann." Robert Schumann was a composer. I don't know if you know the biography of Robert Schumann, but I'll just mention very briefly. So he was a composer in the nineteenth century, and he's considered one of the great composers and, you know, amazing. When he was in his twenties, I think, he met a young woman called Clara, and asked for her marriage. Her father refused, and so they waited until she was of age, and then they went to a court and got married anyway, and they lived together in love, etc., and had a beautiful life together -- for a period. Because at quite an early age, he began hallucinating, and was subject to different kinds of forms of psychosis, etc. Tried to commit suicide at some point, I think in his forties. Tried to commit suicide, and then asked to be put into an asylum, a mental asylum, and died in the asylum at I think the age of 46. So I'm partly saying that because I think she is assuming that we know something about his biography. The poem is called "Robert Schumann."[6]
[1:06:09 -- 1:06:55, poem]
So that's the poem, and I find that just a gorgeous poem. You may or may not. That's, in a way, not so important. But tragic, okay? Tragic given his biography. There's tragedy implicit in the poem -- it's there and explicit. A life cut short, the poignancy of that. But there's more there, I feel, more. What's the 'more,' okay?
There's a little Dharma talk in the middle there about how the mind clings to what it knows, etc. Is that the transcendent piece of the poem? No. More potent than that, more potent also -- again, we're talking about the halo around the tragedy, the divinity suggested around the prominent tragedy or impermanence in this case. Neither, to me, is that halo contained or most potently contained in the lines, "Everywhere in this world his music explodes out of itself, as he could not."
So it's acknowledging that he could not; he was trapped by madness, etc., mental health issues, but his music could. That's not the potent thing either. What's the potent thing? The potent thing, for me, is the image at the end. There's something about that. She's saying all this, and then, "Hardly a day passes I don't think of him ... he runs up the dark staircase, humming."
So you've got an image there, and what I want to say is that image has eternality in it. It's a moment in time, but it has eternality in it. And it's more than the fact that, "Oh, there was a nice moment, because in all the difficulty of his life, at least he got a nice moment because he just fell in love and it was spring and probably nice weather. And maybe he had a nice new theme for his sonata or whatever." It's not like, "Oh, well, at least he had a nice moment." In that image, other dimensions are present but not explicit, okay? So we're talking about the transcendent -- where's the divinity, where's the dimensionality, where's the transcendent? It's not necessarily obvious, but there's something in the image that what we get is this hit of eternality. And right at the centre, or, if you like, around the centre of impermanence, of a life cut tragically short, a few moments of an impermanent moment, but it's pregnant with eternality. And like all the elements of the imaginal, come eternality, this element gets triggered -- what other elements get triggered as well? And the whole thing has that transcendence, that echoes of divinity, etc., in it.
Okay. Another example. I mentioned the other day this novel, Sophie's Choice. I'm not sure how many people read it. I agree with someone or other who said it was one of the most underrated novels of the twentieth century. For me, I think it's really, really profound. But a couple of things I want to say about it. It's a novel. It takes on, it addressees, if you like, it includes huge, unspeakable levels of suffering. That's the material for the novel, and it's about that, and horror, evil. But there's still something redemptive about it, if we use that word. Even if it has a tragic denouement -- so they commit suicide, basically; the lovers commit suicide. Even if it has that tragedy, and they commit suicide because they cannot escape, in each case, the horrors and the guilt of their past, their perceived guilt of their past, and the evil inflicted on them, or, in this case, schizophrenia, mental health issues; they cannot escape that, yet still the whole thing has this immensely sad but immensely kind of -- somehow it's redemptive. Somehow it effloresces into the most beautiful affirmation of life. Evil is there, as I said. Despair is there. Suicide is there. Death is there. Loss is there. But somehow there's this halo around it.
If I'm constrained to a purely kind of secular view of existence, then death is only tragic, and the only alternatives to that tragedy are a sort of life after death possibility, or some kind of resurrection, or some kind of happy ending that I don't die or something. But if we're not constricted to a secular view, then we can have the death, and we can have the loss, and we can have the tragedy of a person dying young and all that, and the loss and the poignancy of all that, but there's this halo around it, through it. We don't have to avoid that; we don't have to have a happy ending. The novel actually ends, Sophie's Choice actually ends, if I remember, with a line that could be construed as a happy ending. It's a quote from, a line from Emily Dickinson, a poem from Emily Dickinson. But actually it's not a happy ending. That comes after 500 pages [laughs] of pretty difficult stuff. It's not a happy ending.
I first read that novel, I found it on my friend's parents' bookshelf, and I somehow was attracted to it, and asked them if I could borrow it. I was 17 at the time. I think I felt all this reading it, but I couldn't have articulated it. It's very hard -- what Stephen says; it's hard to put your finger on what the transcendence consists in and how it comes about. But I think we sense these things implicitly. So it's a bit, actually, like Soulmaking Dharma: it's actually hard to put your finger on and articulate what is actually going on when something feels really imaginal, so we've been trying to do that in the teachings.
I think, again, this sort of dependent participation that we have ... So that first copy that I had of Sophie's Choice, one of the reviews on the back, the short reviews, I can't remember the exact words but the reviewer said something like, something like, "A reader will appreciate this novel to the degree of the capacity of their own compassion in their heart," or something like that. It takes a big heart to appreciate it. So we're back to this kind of participation in the work of art, the reader's, in this case, participation. It's dependent on a certain sensitivity, on a certain capacity, on a certain openness, poise, and quality of heart to actually, I think, sense the depths of certain works of art.
Okay, another example. Last one. I'm going to play a piece of music in a second, and it's by John Coltrane. It's sometimes called his "Classic Quartet" from the sixties. The piece is called "Alabama." Some of you may know it. There's a story behind it. In 1963, in Birmingham, Alabama, in a Baptist church, which was basically an African American church, some Ku Klux Klan people planted a bomb there and detonated it with virtually no warning, a few seconds' warning -- and cryptic; actually no warning, it was a cryptic warning. They detonated it on a Sunday morning when there was a church service going on. And four young African American girls were killed. Martin Luther King presided over the funeral services and spoke about it, and it was a huge moment in the whole civil rights unfolding. So really ugly, brutal, tragic, etc.
Soon after that, John Coltrane wrote this piece, which is called "Alabama." And I want to play it to you. It's maybe four or five minutes long, if that's okay. Yeah? So I'm just going to play it. So again, here we have tragedy, loss, impermanence, darkness, all that. So this is four or five minutes, John Coltrane, "Alabama," written after this and in response to that, you could say, racist murder, really. I'm going to ask you to listen in a particular way, which is with your energy body, okay? And also with your heart and soul. So that's included in the energy body, emotional body, sensitivity and awareness. Particularly listen to how your energy body, heart and soul, are affected by the music, but also listen to his sound, so his saxophone, and the quality of the sounds there. And again, see if you can just kind of make yourself open and sensitive to that, your whole instrument in relationship to their instruments, particularly his sound and the whole play of it.
[1:18:50, music plays / 1:21:06, music ends]
I apologize, I made a mistake. It's okay -- I'm not going to play it again. I started it from two-thirds of the way through by accident. So an interesting thing happens in the middle: it starts like that, and then they get into a kind of groove, but then it abruptly stops the groove, because John Coltrane realized, "Oh, we've lost the vibe now. I mean, it's still great music, but we've lost the vibe," so he brings it back to that. So apologies, and this is all clearly a very low-tech affair, so. [laughs] But I don't know -- could you get a sense of the music? Yeah? Good. Where's the transcendence? Hmm, hard. And going back to what I said at the beginning, whatever we say, something in art is always going to escape us, and part of what I want to say as well later is part of a great work of art is it will always escape whatever we can say about it and whatever we can kind of point to within it.
But I think that part of it is, here, actually, in the depth of compassion, and prayerfulness, and love that are in the music, in his sound, etc. -- that that compassion, prayerfulness, and love are also so deep, somehow communicated in/through the material of music, they're so deep that they're more than flatly human. They're conceived, the sense of them is almost that they're divine. Something else is coming through, in this case, human beings, and human compassion, and human prayerfulness, but it's got this infinite depth to it. Somehow that's in the music, and somehow that's in the sound. So it's possible that that's actually where some of the transcendent halo around this tragedy, etc., is there. But this is key -- compassion is compassion; it's great, it's a good quality, it's very good; but compassion as an almost like more than human quality, or rather, the human having depths that are more than the flat dimensionality of what we often consider a human, or even a kind human, or a loving human, or a praying human, or a compassionate human. Compassion and human compassion open up to unfathomable depths. They can come from unfathomable depths, but come through us as human beings, potentially. To capture that in a work of art is really something.
So again, where's the transcendence? Do we need to not have impermanence, loss, finitude, tragedy, fragility and all that that we talked about? No. You can have all that. But there's this other thing, other qualities, other openings out in the transcendence that it's pointing to, and to me, that's what makes a work of art.
Interestingly, the examples I've given -- Sophie's Choice, this piece by John Coltrane ("Alabama"), the poem by Mary Oliver -- to me, they all have, they all emphasize or at least include compassion. So we say, "Ah, compassion, that's what makes Dharma art, because compassion is one of the brahmavihāras, right? So therefore that would make it Dharma art." But actually it's more than that, as I said, because partly the compassion is, as I said, more than human as flatly conceived. There's depth, mystery, soul, divinity in that compassion. So compassion itself doesn't make it Dharma art for me. It's this unfathomability, this mystery, this depth, this dimensionality, etc.
So in all these examples I've given, it's not that there's some kind of resurrection, as I said, or we've sort of avoided or escaped what's difficult, what's dukkha, what's impermanent, what's limited, what's poignant. As we say in Soulmaking Dharma, beware of the kind of image where the princess gets rescued in the end. We don't have to go into a kind of happy ending to get the divinity there, and the sacredness, and the beauty, and the redemption, and the healing of all that, or the art. It can be in, through, behind, around, with the difficulty. Yeah? So, to me, all these, as I pointed out most clearly in the Mary Oliver poem, there's, we could say, an atemporal multidimensionality that's there, and that's a quality in all of these in one way or another, somehow conveyed, somehow evoked, somehow pointed to. That's what the transcendence is portraying in different ways. And that, to me, is a necessary ingredient of Dharma art.
Almost done. Also, all the examples I gave, I realized afterwards, they were all kind of emotional. So that's an emotional piece of music about a very emotionally evocative, troubling thing that happened. Sophie's Choice, Mary Oliver poem, maybe even the icon. But again, it's not that art needs to concern itself with emotions necessarily. More than emotions. So this transcendent could not have any obvious emotion in it. It can be beyond emotion. So that's an important point. Interesting, also, playing John Coltrane -- you know, we go back to the idea of what is divinity? Sometimes people, when they think about spiritual music, want [or] imagine it's going to be simple and spacious, it's going to be consonant as opposed to dissonant, and kind of calm, and often it's kind of repetitive. But why? Why does it have to have those qualities? Why is that spiritual? Why, again, are we limiting our sense of what spiritual music is -- someone like Arvo Pärt or New Age music or whatever? Again, the theophanies, the faces of God, of the divine, of Buddha-nature, of dharmakāya -- infinite, infinite possibilities there.
Most Coltrane music is actually very complex, very dense, very high energy. So that's quite a rare piece. So it could be the opposite of all those. It could be not simple -- complex, dense, dissonant, very energized, doesn't repeat much at all, and no obvious emotion in it. And sometimes, you know, if you listen to some abstract music, you can't say, "Oh, it's this emotion or that emotion." There's too much happening too quickly. It's getting into our energy body and our souls at a whole other level than the emotional. It's too quick, too dense, too complex. It's going in, as I said, and touching our soul at a level other than just emotion.
So I think the transcendence, in this sense of what I'm talking about, the transcendence of what's a great work of art, the transcendence of a great work of art is infinite, it's unfathomable, these dimensions shading into divinity -- again, parallels with Soulmaking Dharma, of course. So it's infinite not just laterally, in the sense of, "Well, we could get a thousand different people, and they would all have a slightly different meaning that they would extract from, say, an abstract piece of music or an abstract piece of art." So not just infinite that way, but infinite, let's say, vertically, in terms of the depths, the infinite, unfathomable depths that it unfolds. And that, to me, is central to or constitutive of what makes a great work of art. It's almost that you cannot exhaust it.
And I think Dharma needs to be infinite, similarly. Any Dharma that I'm interested in, or that I consider worthwhile, its job is to help us open out to, help us discover, help us realize an infinite transcendence, infinite depths, an infinite unfolding of depths that we create/discover. It's also potentially, potentially infinite laterally, in that any object or any image or any sense perception can become -- well, maybe not any, but there are an infinite amount of sense perceptions that could become doorways to sacredness, so it's infinite laterally, like that. That's not the same as to say every object in itself is a potential divine doorway, but we'll leave that for now. Anyway, there's an infinitude laterally, and this infinitude vertically, depthwise, more and more. And that's the job of the Dharma, as I would see it. Or at least that's what I care about for my Dharma, my practice. Of course if I'm working with someone and they just want this or that piece of suffering to end, then that's my job as a teacher, to relate to that. But if I talk about what do I really want, what do I really care about in Dharma, it's that. I want a conception of Dharma and a body of practices that will serve as a raft to open out those depths, the potential infinitude laterally and the potential infinitude in terms of depths and dimensions and divinity. So not just to realize impermanence and to be with that, but something else.
So this is the crux of what I wanted to say. The Dharma and the art -- I want the same things from them, no surprise. We said that before. So Dharma art, for me -- and again, going back to an alternative to just pictures of the Buddha, pictures of Kuan Yin, an alternative to "Dharma art concerns itself with impermanence, or the brahmavihāras, or finitude, or dukkha, or whatever." Is there another alternative way we can think of? What would Dharma art be? And to me it's this. It's this somehow opening out, the possibility of opening out for us the sense of divinity, infinitely and also in infinite objects of art or sense perceptions, opening the endless dimensions and faces, theophanies of the divine, of the Buddha-nature, of the dharmakāya. Art, Dharma, life as well, existence as well. So the three are related, yeah? What I want from any of those three, it's the same. And how I look at them, what I look to for each of them, will be what I look to and find in the others.
So that's what I wanted to say. I actually had a whole bunch of other examples with all kinds of abstract art and stuff, but I tried it with the tech and it really won't work, and anyway I think we've been very long already. [laughs] So I apologize for the length. I'm not going to show any more. But what I really wanted to do was show, and again, ask you to be with the energy body, and the soul-sensitivity there, and notice what you notice. But in my very low-tech house it's not really possible. So we'll end there. I hope that this made sense and clarified some things. Bless you all. Thank you for your listening.
Stephen Batchelor, Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 241. ↩︎
"Equivalent VIII." Tate, London, [www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/andre-equivalent-viii-t01534]{.ul}, accessed 9 November 2019. ↩︎
"144 Magnesium Square." Tate, London, [www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/andre-144-magnesium-square-t01767]{.ul}, accessed 9 November 2019. ↩︎
Nicholas Serota, 'Matter,' in Whitechapel Art Gallery 1978. ↩︎
Carl Andre, Cuts: Texts 1959--2004, ed. James Meyer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 99. ↩︎
Mary Oliver, Dream Work (New York: Grove/Atlantic, 1986). Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20201031170900/https://classicalbeaver.wordpress.com/2011/12/05/robert-schumann-a-poem-by-mary-oliver/, accessed 31 Oct. 2020. ↩︎
