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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Roger Scruton on Algorithms, Data Structures and Mental Attribution

This is a datastructure in the form of a two-dimensional array of 24 bit integers, processed by the algorithms in your PC.  Any appearance to the contrary is purely a projection of your own mind.     http://www.flickr.com/photos/90664717@N00/145257237/

In Buddhist philosophy, all functioning phenomena are said to exist in three ways, known as the three modes of existential dependence:

• Causality
• Structure
• Mental Designation ('Imputation') or Meaning

Causal dependency can be modelled as algorithms, and compositional/structural dependency can be modelled as datastructures, but where does that leave conceptual dependency?

According to Buddhist philosophy, the function of the mind cannot be reduced to physical or quasi-physical processes. 

The mind is clear, formless, and knows its object.  Its knowing the object constitutes the conceptual dependency, which is fundamental, axiomatic and cannot be explained in terms of other phenomena, including algorithms and datastructures.

The question that separates the Materialist from the Buddhist is whether there is anything left to explain about reality once algorithms and and data structures have been factored out.

The Materialist would answer that algorithms and datastructures offer a complete explanation of the universe, without any remainder.  The Buddhist would claim that a third factor, mind, is also required.

Computer algorithms cannot interpret their data
In a recent article, 'Brain Drain', philosopher Roger Scruton has given a vivid illustration of the need for this third aspect of reality - mental imputation or designation - in addition to algorithms and data structures.

"...So just what can be proved about people by the close observation of their brains? We can be conceptualised in two ways: as organisms and as objects of personal interaction. The first way employs the concept ‘human being’, and derives our behaviour from a biological science of man. The second way employs the concept ‘person’, which is not the concept of a natural kind, but of an entity that relates to others in a familiar but complex way that we know intuitively but find hard to describe. Through the concept of the person, and the associated notions of freedom, responsibility, reason for action, right, duty, justice and guilt, we gain the description under which human beings are seen, by those who respond to them as they truly are. When we endeavour to understand persons through the half-formed theories of neuroscience we are tempted to pass over their distinctive features in silence, or else to attribute them to some brain-shaped homunculus inside. For we understand people by facing them, by arguing with them, by understanding their reasons, aspirations and plans. All of that involves another language, and another conceptual scheme, from those deployed in the biological sciences. We do not understand brains by facing them, for they have no face.

We should recognise that not all coherent questions about human nature and conduct are scientific questions, concerning the laws governing cause and effect. Most of our questions about persons and their doings are about interpretation: what did he mean by that? What did her words imply? What is signified by the hand of Michelangelo’s David? Those are real questions, which invite disciplined answers. And there are disciplines that attempt to answer them. The law is one such. It involves making reasoned attributions of liability and responsibility, using methods that are not reducible to any explanatory science, and not replaceable by neuroscience, however many advances that science might make. The invention of ‘neurolaw’ is, it seems to me, profoundly dangerous, since it cannot fail to abolish freedom and accountability — not because those things don’t exist, but because they will never crop up in a brain scan.

Suppose a computer is programmed to ‘read’, as we say, a digitally encoded input, which it translates into pixels, causing it to display the picture of a woman on its screen. In order to describe this process we do not need to refer to the woman in the picture. The entire process can be completely described in terms of the hardware that translates digital data into pixels, and the software, or algorithm, which contains the instructions for doing this. There is neither the need nor the right, in this case, to use concepts like those of seeing, thinking, observing, in describing what the computer is doing; nor do we have either the need or the right to describe the thing observed in the picture, as playing any causal role, or any role at all, in the operation of the computer. Of course, we see the woman in the picture. And to us the picture contains information of quite another kind from that encoded in the digitalised instructions for producing it. It conveys information about a woman and how she looks. To describe this kind of information is impossible without describing the content of certain thoughts — thoughts that arise in people when they look at each other face to face.

But how do we move from the one concept of information to the other? How do we explain the emergence of thoughts about something from processes that reside in the transformation of visually encoded data? Cognitive science doesn’t tell us. And computer models of the brain won’t tell us either. They might show how images get encoded in digitalised format and transmitted in that format by neural pathways to the centre where they are ‘interpreted’. But that centre does not in fact interpret – interpreting is a process that we do, in seeing what is there before us. When it comes to the subtle features of the human condition, to the byways of culpability and the secrets of happiness and grief, we need guidance and study if we are to interpret things correctly. That is what the humanities provide, and that is why, when scholars who purport to practise them, add the prefix ‘neuro’ to their studies, we should expect their researches to be nonsense."

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Pixel art
Pixel art uses the minimum number of pixels needed to give a recognisable object.  Looked at closely it appears as an 'abstract art' style set of color blocks.

Looked at from a distance, cherries appear.   But where does the appearance of the shiny cherries and their stalk originate?   From a few dozen pixels, or from your mind?

Cherries and pixels

Pixel art long predates computers, and can be found in counted stitch embroideries, where the minimum configuration of counted stitches is used to invoke the mind's projection of an object. 

Pixel embroidery

- Sean Robsville



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Buddhism Subject Index

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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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