Music and Buddhism

I see my music as my ‘spiritual path’. Both spirituality and music are central to my life. It’s taken me quite a while to realise that this is what it’s about for me. I’ve been a Buddhist for many years and have tried a number of different ways to practice as sincerely as I can, and in the end, it seems to me that this is my path. I once saw a video of Joe Satriani playing guitar (and I really am not into heavy metal) and I had an Insight experience similar to what I might get on meditation retreat. And I realised how music really is a way in for people like me.

In Buddhist circles there’s quite a bit of debate as to how Buddhism can be practised most effectively in the West – ie what is ‘Western Buddhism’? After all, it’s still only a few decades old here. It is so new that the first Western masters are still alive. Historically, Buddhism has transformed massively whenever it has arrived in a new culture. It transforms the culture, and the culture transforms it. The underlying message is still the same, but the way it expresses itself varies massively. Tibetan Buddhism is very different from Zen, which is in turn very different from the Theravadin Buddhism of Sri Lanka. So what is Western Buddhism?

The West encourages alienation from the self. Either we are completely disembodied and hypnotised by mass media until we don’t really exist as individuals at all, or we conceive of ourselves as objects – a product to be marketed. The market is more real and more significant than we are. We dress ourselves in ways that appeal to the niche we have decided to target, we learn the lingo, take up the hobbies, come up with catchy strap lines and hang out in the right places. And when ‘Who We Really Are’ protests, showing itself up as various neuroses, we drown it out with more TV, more shopping, more alcohol, more drugs, more therapy, more medication. The hollowness has been there for so long that we think it is normal. We think that is who we are! We have lost touch completely with our inherent beauty, our inherent completeness. And then we discover Buddhism and think that maybe this is a way to escape the pain, and we hear about ‘not-Self’ and think ‘yeah that makes total sense’. And thus Buddhism adds to our confusion.

It seems to me therefore, that the initial challenge for Westerners wishing to practise, is to reconnect with themselves. To heal from the alienation which is the almost inevitable result of growing up in contemporary Western society. You can’t realise the Buddhist ‘not-Self’ concept before you have realised who you are as a ‘self’. And music is excellent for this.

So music is a way for me to be connected with myself, and to communicate authentically with others. And if there is ever to be such a thing as Western Buddhist art, it will not be a standard image of a Buddha sitting in the full lotus. It will not be Buddhist mantras sung in the style of a Christian choir. It will be people who are genuine Buddhist practitioners, and genuine Western artists, expressing themselves without a conscious agenda. To the extent that they have realised the teaching, their work will be genuine Western Buddhist art. As Jack Kerouac, inventor of the practice of writing ‘spontaneous prose’ once said, ‘[if] mind is shapely, art is shapely’. That was before he rejected Buddhism, returned to his Catholic roots and drank himself to death, of course, and thus gave his own answer to my Zen koan. My Zen koan is not ‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?’, or ‘Does a dog have Buddha nature?’. It is something like ‘Your life is meaningless, beautiful, and passing. Now what?’