Promoting Buddhism through Culture and the Arts - Why Beauty Matters

From  New Lotus,  hat tip Buddhist Art News

"The experience of art often fulfills yearnings similar to the inspiration offered by religion. One more profound relationship between art and religion has historically been how it acts as a vehicle for expressing religious teachings. The worldly appreciation of cultural beauty is infused with a sincere belief that the aesthetic of religious art is not for its own sake, but to transmit ultimate truths.

After the Second World War, the global diaspora of Buddhist traditions meant that the religion itself became marketable as a new, exotic, and enlightened culture. The diffusion of Tibetan Buddhism and Japanese Zen through the West was as much due to Western interest in Tibetan and Japanese culture as much as Japanese and Tibetan religion. 

The New York-based avant-garde movement was heavily influenced by Japanese Zen ideas, and on January 12, 1951, Saburo Hasegawa wrote to Isamu Noguchi, proclaiming, 'What used to be done by Religion has to be done alone by Art.' Faith in religious institutions was at one of its lowest ever points, and the God is dead paradigm so touted by Nietzsche seemed to open the way for a human flourishing based on making meaning through culture and art - without religion.

Hasegawa's proclamation proved premature, and the world moved on from the post-war consensus to a post-2008 uncertainty about many things we took for granted. However, the mystifying connection between art and religion has not lost its allure. In the 21st century, the Buddhist teachings are now instantly accessible anywhere in the developed world, and this has meant a loss of mystique and remoteness. 

Buddhist studies are available in many universities and colleges, and some teachers have attained the status of minor celebrities in popular culture, such as Thich Nhat Hanh or Matthieu Ricard. We have approached a stage where religious seekers are no longer interested in accepting just one side of the story. We all hunger, justifiably, for a more complete picture about Buddhism.

Hasegawa was incorrect not because art cannot inspire, but because he asserted that it could fulfill the yearnings of humanity without any reference to religion. But Lee Mei Yin, Vice Chairman for Friends of Dunhuang Hong Kong, was correct when she told me in a casual conversation that it is through the arts and culture that Buddhism finds its most effective vehicle of transmission. 

Buddhism has touched and informed so much that would seem unrelated, from the fabrics of Tang-era bridal attire to breathtaking sculptures, architecture, and literary genres. We cannot disseminate Buddhist teachings in isolation from the civilizations in which they were developed.

Mrs. Lee was not simply speaking as a representative of a cultural heritage charity. Human society itself was traditionally always a vehicle for sharing the Dharma. Modern Buddhist leaders and writers are learning to co-opt and assimilate the promotion of cultural awareness into the calling of Buddhist dissemination, and in our 2600-year history, this can only be a thing to be encouraged" 

From Why Beauty Matters - Roger Scruton

"...Scruton believes that all great art has a 'spiritual' dimension, even if it is not overtly religious. It is this transcendence of the mundane that we recognise as 'beauty'.


A path out of the spiritual desert.
In Buddhist terminology we would say that true art, even when it reflects samsara (the realms of chaos, addiction, squalor and suffering), shows that there is a path out, and often acts as signposts along the path. However most of modern art merely reflects, and often wallows in squalor, without acknowledging any possibility that there may be other states of existence. It has turned its back on beauty and wanders aimlessly in a spiritual desert.

Tantra and art
We could go further and say that great art is a 'tantric' practice in its widest sense, where tantra is the mental transformation of the ordinary environment to the environment of a spiritual being. Scruton emphasised this aspect in the transformation of lust (attachment) into Platonic love, where the energy of carnal desire is channelled into spiritual objectives..."


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Eurocentric Cultural Nationalism
Cultural nationalism is on the rise in Europe.  At present this movement takes the form of rejection of Islam, which is gaining increasing support among the 'chattering classes', including the secular humanists.

Cultural nationalists at present regard Islam as public enemy number one, however we must be aware that this targeted Islamophobia may eventually spill over to become a more general Eurocentric cultural xenophobia, with even the growth of Buddhism in Europe being resented as a cultural encroachment.


Enlightenment values


So maybe the time has come to stress the shared values, civilization and history of Buddhist and European cultures going back over 2000 years to the Hellenistic period (roughly 323BC to 10AD) . Hellenistic civilization followed in the wake of Alexander the Great, extending from the Ancient Greek world to Southwest Asia as far as modern Afghanistan and Pakistan, which formed the culturally brilliant civilisation of Gandhara

Gandhara Buddha - Greek Buddhist Sculpture

Menander (Milinda) was Gandhara's most famous king. He ruled from Taxila and later from Sagala (Sialkot). He became a Buddhist and is remembered for his discussions on emptiness with a great Buddhist philosopher, Nāgasena. From Gandhara many missionaries went out to spread Buddhism to China, Korea, Japan along the Silk Road.


Cutural exchange
There was contact, communication and mutual influence between Greek and Buddhist philosophers. According to the Edicts of Ashoka, set in stone, some of them written in Greek, he sent Buddhist emissaries to the Greek lands in Asia and as far as the Mediterranean.

Buddhism prospered under the Indo-Greek kings, and it has been suggested that their invasion of India was intended to protect the Buddhist faith from the religious persecutions of the new Indian dynasty of the Sungas (185–73 BCE) which had overthrown the Mauryans.


Although the philosophical systems of Buddhism and Christianity have evolved in rather different ways, the moral precepts advocated by Buddhism from the time of Ashoka through his edicts do have some similarities with the Christian moral precepts developed more than two centuries later: respect for life, respect for the weak, rejection of violence, pardon to sinners, tolerance.


Buddhism and Christianity
One theory is that these similarities may indicate the propagation of Buddhist ideals into the Western World, with the Greeks acting as intermediaries and religious syncretists.

Scholars have often considered the possibility that Buddhism influenced the early development of Christianity.

Early 3rd-4th century Christian writers such as Hippolytus and Epiphanius write about a Scythianus, who visited India around 50 AD from where he brought "the doctrine of the Two Principles". According to these writers, Scythianus' pupil Terebinthus presented himself as a "Buddha". Terebinthus went to Palestine and Judaea where he met the Apostles ("becoming known and condemned" Isaia), and ultimately settled in Babylon, where he transmitted his teachings to Mani, thereby creating the foundation of what could be called Persian syncretic Buddhism, Manicheism. One of the greatest thinkers and saints of western Christianity, Augustine of Hippo was originally a Manichean.

In the 2nd century CE, the Christian dogmatist Clement of Alexandria recognized Bactrian Buddhists (Sramanas) and Indian Gymnosophists for their influence on Greek thought:

"Thus philosophy, a thing of the highest utility, flourished in antiquity among the barbarians, shedding its light over the nations. And afterwards it came to Greece. First in its ranks were the prophets of the Egyptians; and the Chaldeans among the Assyrians; and the Druids among the Gauls; and the Sramanas among the Bactrians ("Σαρμαναίοι Βάκτρων"); and the philosophers of the Celts; and the Magi of the Persians, who foretold the Saviour's birth, and came into the land of Judaea guided by a star. The Indian gymnosophists are also in the number, and the other barbarian philosophers. And of these there are two classes, some of them called Sramanas ("Σαρμάναι"), and others Brahmins ("Βραφμαναι")." (Clement of Alexandria "The Stromata, or Miscellanies"

The main Greek cities of the Middle-East happen to have played a key role in the development of Christianity, such as Antioch and especially Alexandria, and "it was later in this very place that some of the most active centers of Christianity were established" (Robert Linssen, "Zen living").

Artistic influences


Although there is still some debate, the first anthropomorphic representations of the Buddha himself are often considered a result of the Greco-Buddhist interaction. Before this innovation, Buddhist art was "aniconic": the Buddha was only represented through his symbols (an empty throne, the Bodhi tree, the Buddha's footprints, the Dharma wheel).



This reluctance towards anthropomorphic representations of the Buddha, and the sophisticated development of aniconic symbols to avoid it (even in narrative scenes where other human figures would appear), seem to be connected to one of the Buddha’s sayings, reported in the Digha Nikaya, that discouraged representations of himself after the extinction of his body.

Probably not feeling bound by these restrictions, and because of their cult of form, the Greeks were the first to attempt a sculptural representation of the Buddha.



Enlightenment values
Buddhist and European civilizations spent their formative years immersed in Hellenistic culture, from which they derive their shared values in art, philosophy, humanism, rationalism and love of learning. The commonality of these values needs to be emphasised and defended as both traditions come under attack from the growing forces of Jihadist barbarism.







Read more at Buddhist Philosophy

 

Why Beauty Matters - Roger Scruton, BBC2

The Birth of Venus - Botticelli

Why Beauty Matters by Roger Scruton, BBC2, 28th November 2009.

Modern art
Scruton's argument is that modern art has completely lost its way. It is self-centred and never looks beyond the basic biological animal existence of mankind, often having a puerile obsession with excretory functions.

The art of desecration and self-disgust

Mechanistic modern architecture is similarly anti-human. It attempts to reduce people to mere components of ugly utilitarian machines.

Scruton believes that all great art has a 'spiritual' dimension, even if it is not overtly religious. It is this transcendence of the mundane that we recognise as 'beauty'.

Graeco-Buddhist Art being destroyed by Jihadists

A path out of the spiritual desert.
In Buddhist terminology we would say that true art, even when it reflects samsara (the realms of chaos, addiction, squalor and suffering), shows that there is a path out, and often acts as signposts along the path. However most of modern art merely reflects, and often wallows in squalor, without acknowledging any possibility that there may be other states of existence. It has turned its back on beauty and wanders aimlessly in a spiritual desert.

Tantra and art
We could go further and say that great art is a 'tantric' practice in its widest sense, where tantra is the mental transformation of the ordinary environment to the environment of a spiritual being. Scruton emphasised this aspect in the transformation of lust (attachment) into Platonic love, where the energy of carnal desire is channelled into spiritual objectives.

Brutalism
Modern architecture reflects a materialistic philosophy which generates an environment fit only to be inhabited by automata, and is thus an expression of the philosophical doctrine of materialism , which rejects any possibility of a spiritual dimension of existence.

Brutalist Architecture - Demoralising and dehumanising to live in.

Modern art engages the mind on a purely superficial level by its constant attempts at 'originality', which usually end up as scatological attempts to 'shock' some imaginary strawman of middle class public opinion ('Épater la bourgeoisie').

But this public opinion has actually long since become jaded by the antics of the self-appointed avant-garde, which may have been shocking the first time round, but have become boring and vacuous with repetition.

Zen - Meditational art

Procedural and Mechanistic Cult of Ugliness
Scruton also attacked conceptual art and the cult of ugliness. Sculptor Alexander Stoddart claimed that conceptual art is word-bound and exhausted in its verbal description. After you have had the idea of putting half a cow in a tank of formaldehyde, the object itself can be dumped as irrelevant.

Conceptual art is mechanistic and procedural:
The concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions. This method was fundamental to LeWitt's definition of Conceptual art, one of the first to appear in print:
“In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_art

In contrast, real art engages the deeper levels of the mind by invoking qualia - qualitative experiences of beauty that are non-material and go beyond mere mechanistic proceduralism.

- Sean Robsville



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Buddhism Subject Index

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