In the next days I will publish the second in a series of interviews with Buddhist teachers and practitioners on their creative practice, with Kyoun Sokuzan, the head teacher and abbot of Sokukoji Buddhist Temple Monastery. Meanwhile, here is a passage from the Imagination chapter in Stephen Batchelor’s, Buddhism Without Beliefs, that speaks to the ideas we have been examining:
“As soon as the imagination is activated in the process of awakening, we recover the aesthetic dimension of dharma practice. The cultivation of focused awareness, for example, cannot be adequately understood as a set of cognitive and affective transformations alone, because such awareness is also an experience of beauty.
As the turmoil of consciousness subsides and we come to rest in a heightened clarity of attention, the natural beauty of the world is vividly enhanced. We marvel at the exquisite reflections and ripples in a puddle of water, the deliquescent radiance of a human eye. Our appreciation of the arts is also enriched: a phrase of music, a line of poetry, a dancing figure, a penciled sketch, a clay vase may speak to us with unprecedented poignancy and depth.
Great works of art in all cultures succeed in capturing with the constraints of their form both the pathos of anguish and a vision of its resolution. Take, for example, the languorous sentences of Proust or the haiku of Basho, the late quartets and sonatas of Beethoven, the tragicomic brushwork of Sengai or the daunting canvases of Rothko, the luminous self-portraits of Rembrandt and Hakuin. Such words achieve their resolution not through consoling or romantic images whereby anguish is transcended. They accept anguish without being overwhelmed by it. They reveal anguish as that which gives beauty its dignity and depth.
The four enabling truths of the Buddha provide not only a paradigm of cognitive and affective freedom but a template for aesthetic vision. Any work of art that deepens our understanding of anguish, moves us to relax the constrictions of self-centered craving, reveals the dynamic play of emptiness and form, and inspires a way of life conducive to such ends bears the hallmarks of authentic beauty. And just as non-Buddhist works can have such an effect, so explicitly Buddhist works can fail to do so.
The same aesthetic vision inspires the imagination tasks of self- and world-creation. The ennobling truths are not just challenges to act with wisdom and compassion but challenges to act with creativity and aesthetic awareness. Our words, our deeds, our very presence in the world, create and leave impressions in the minds of others just as a writer makes impressions with his pen on paper, the painter with his brush on canvas, the potter with his fingers in clay. The human world is like a vast musical instrument on which we simultaneously play our part while listening to the compositions of others. The creation of ourself in the image of awakening is not a subjective but an intersubjective process. We cannot choose whether to engage with the world only how to. Our life is a story being continuously related to others through every detail of our being: facial expressions, body language, clothes, inflections of speech—whether we like it or not.
After his awakening, the Buddha spent several weeks hovering on the cusp between the rapture of freedom and, in his words, the “vexation” of engagement. Should he remain in the peaceful state of Nirvana or share with others what he had discovered? What decided him was the appearance of an idea (in the language of ancient India, a “god”) that forced him to recognize the potential for awakening in others and his responsibility to act. As soon as his imagination was triggered, he relinquished the mystical option of transcendent absorption and moved to engage with the world.
Thus the Buddha set out on a path that started from a vision, was translated through ideas into words and actions, and gave rise to cultures of awakening that continue to inspire today. This development is analogous to the process of creativity which likewise starts from an unformed vision and is translated through the imagination into cultural forms.”
~from Part Three, Fruition, Buddhism Without Beliefs
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