meditation
Chögyam Trungpa
Photo: © Zsolt Zsoló Kóté
Due to copyright issues, only an excerpt of this text is published by Dharma/Arte. Excerpt from “Meditation”, chapter of True perception: the path of dharma art
Awareness is very important. We are here, nowhere else. Since we are here, why not be here?
According to Buddhism, art is something produced by a student rather than by an isolated person. You might think that sounds very stuffy; however, it is true. Art is produced by a student with an interest not only in his own creation, but in the basic necessity of expression—that is, what needs to be shown to others. Beyond that, the Buddhist approach to art is anti-garbage. You don’t keep churning out scruffy things; they go into the garbage and are burned.
The basic Buddhist approach to art comes from a sense of student-ship, which is also a sense of teachership, because even though teachers may be highly developed, they are still always students themselves. One of the reasons that art has never died is that successive teachers have continued to study works of art, rather than just proclaiming themselves as models. Usually what happens to those who proclaim themselves as models is that they lead decadent lives and become cynical and aggressive and indulge themselves unnecessarily.
Basically, when we talk about art, we are talking about a form of some kind that we could work on. So it is like the practice of meditation. But what is that form, and how does meditation go along with it? The obvious answer according to the Buddha is that form doesn’t actually exist, and dharma also doesn’t exist; therefore, form and dharma could mix together. It’s like spreading cheese on bread: you can’t distinguish between the cheese and the bread anymore. In order to do that, we need a lot of meditative discipline. Absolutely nobody can become a good craftsman or a good artist without relating with the practice of meditation.
By meditation I mean shamatha-vipashyana practice, not hunting peacefully in the jungle with your rifle or fishing peacefully, sitting beside the lake with your fishing rod. I’m talking about the sitting practice of meditation. Nobody can create a perfect work of art or understand a perfect work of art without understanding the practice of meditation. So the sitting practice of meditation is the basic ground.
But what do we mean by the sitting practice of meditation? For instance, Beethoven, El Greco, or my most favorite person in music, Mozart—I think they all sat. They actually sat in the sense that their minds became blank before they did what they were doing. Otherwise, they couldn’t possibly do it. Just coming out of the market and plopping down at the dining-room table and writing a play—that’s impossible. Some kind of mind-less-ness in the Buddhist sense has to take place.
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