Editor’s Introduction
In May and November 2014, Subhuti, alongside Padmavajra, led two retreats at Adhisthana on the theme of ‘Eros and Beauty’, during which each gave a series of talks. Although their talks were designed to complement each other, I have long felt that Subhuti’s contributions contained material deserving more systematic presentation in written form. I am therefore grateful that he has allowed me to edit them into two articles. The first of these, based largely on his first set of talks, is presented here. Considerable rewriting and restructuring has been necessary, and the result is inevitably not what Subhuti would have written himself. Nonetheless, he has expressed satisfaction that it preserves his voice.
This important and inspiring material is now being published for the first time in Apramada, and I very much hope it will receive the attention it deserves.
Vidyaruchi
Beauty has always been a central aspect of Sangharakshita’s perspective on the Dharma. Even so, it is an aspect of his teaching that one could be forgiven for not really having ‘caught’. It was very much alive in the early days of what was then called the FWBO — partly because Sangharakshita himself was, in his own particular way, such a lover of beauty that it was inescapable for those of us who were around then. It is also evident in his writings, even if not always discussed in those terms. In the 1950s he wrote the collection of essays later published as The Religion of Art; and there is a crucial passage on beauty in The Three Jewels (published in 1967) which I will draw upon heavily in this article. He continued to speak and write on the theme in various places over the years. Notably, in the first public talk he gave after losing his eyesight in the early 2000s, he chose as his theme the ‘Six Distinctive Emphases’ of the Triratna Buddhist Community, one of which is the value of the arts. And beauty was the main subject of ‘Green Tara and the fourth lakṣaṇa’, one of the last pieces he ever wrote.
Drawing on such sources, we will further explore beauty as an aspect of the Dharma. We will first look at how this can be grounded in the Buddhist tradition and how it provides a link with the Western tradition, before looking at how we can apply these ideas in experience.
Beauty in the Pali Canon
Sangharakshita’s emphasis on beauty is one of those aspects of his teaching that is not found explicitly in the tradition, yet is fully justifiable in traditional terms (much like his teachings on the ‘Five Niyamas’, the ‘Higher Evolution’, and so on). The Pali Canon contains many references to beauty in various contexts. But significantly, the later commentaries on those passages are strikingly inadequate. It is clear, when reading Buddhaghosa and other commentators, that they have missed something vital. Sangharakshita’s theory, or perhaps it is more of an intuition, is that the early Theravada lost a whole living dimension of the tradition, fragments of which were kept preserved in the texts but not understood.
In the background to this there is a large discussion to be had about what the Pali Suttas actually are. There is a lot of discussion amongst scholars about what the Buddha really taught. Even fairly rudimentary examination reveals that parts of the Pali Canon refer to events that took place after the Buddha’s lifetime. The Suttas themselves are quite a mixed bag. As Reginald Ray argues in his important work Buddhist Saints in India, what we have is a highly selective record. For instance, there is relatively little about bhikkhunis or lay practitioners; the focus is overwhelmingly on bhikkhus and their specific way of life. The main emphasis is on the bhikkhus and their particular way of life. On the basis of sound, if suggestive, scholarly evidence, Ray argues that the picture is much richer than the Canon, narrowly interpreted, suggests.
What Ray shows—or at least offers a persuasive picture of—is that economic and social pressures began to reshape the monastic tradition. The monks needed a livelihood, and they found themselves in competition with the brahmins for the support of the laity. In response, they began to recast the Dharma in the image of the Brahminical Vedas. Increasingly, they took on the role of a scholarly elite, mirroring the brahmins. They claimed specialist knowledge and promoted the notion of being a ‘field of merit’, according to which a gift to a bhikkhu generated more karmic benefit than a gift to anyone else. In this way, the bhikkhu saṅgha became a somewhat aloof, superior, intellectual caste — to which the laity had to turn in order to secure merit, and ultimately, rebirth in heaven. In later Theravāda this became the dominant theme, the result of which was a strong tendency to interpret the Dhamma in intellectual-cum-institutional terms. And indeed, what is preserved in the Pali Canon suggests there was already the beginnings of such an emphasis.
So we shouldn’t look too uncritically at the Pāli Canon. What we have is a highly selective and interpreted glimpse of what the Buddha taught. This is why modern scholarship is so exciting: it is probing the background of the Suttas and revealing just how complex and rich the context was from which they emerged. When you read the Suttas alongside the commentaries, it becomes clear that by the time the latter were written they had lost an understanding of huge swathes of the Buddha’s teaching, only hints of which remain. We also find such hints in the Mahāyāna sūtras. Many of them are clearly later compositions, but they retain, so to speak, memories of a larger picture, and one has to read them with that in mind. We may tend to think that the Pāli Canon tells us who the Buddha really was, while the Mahāyāna texts show how later generations decorated him. But the truth is more interesting. The tradition was preserved and developed in many contexts. In the Theravāda, it developed into a more intellectualised, analytical model. In the Mahāyāna, it took different directions.
The importance of beauty as an aspect of the Dharma has perhaps been neglected in the tradition, and it is time to make it explicit
If you read the Suttas with this eye, you will see that they place a greater emphasis on beauty than you might otherwise recognize. For a start, people tend to discount, or at least minimise, the significance of the devas. They are a very strong presence throughout the Canon, but we will likely miss that element if we selectively exclude what doesn’t suit our cultural predilections. The Buddha doesn’t frame it in abstract conceptual terms, but he appears to have lived in intimate connection with the higher devic realms, which can be seen as realms of aesthetic experience.
The importance of beauty as an aspect of the Dharma has perhaps been neglected in the tradition, and it is time to make it explicit. Sangharakshita considered it one of the keys to translating the Dharma into Western culture. Not only do we have a rich artistic heritage to gain inspiration from, but beauty is a major strand in Western thought, prominent in figures such as Kant and Schopenhauer, and going all the way back to the Greeks, and especially to Plato.
Plato’s Symposium
Sangharakshita once remarked that he was by nature a Platonist. What he meant by this we shall explore, but it was not in the sense of believing in the split between the realm of ‘forms’ and the realm of ordinary things. He definitely disagreed with that version of Platonism, which in any case some scholars consider was late in Plato’s doctrine. A common distinction is made between the ‘Socratic’ and the ‘Platonic’ dialogues: the former are thought to reflect more closely the historical Socrates’ ideas, while the latter are seen as expressing Plato’s own philosophical developments. The early dialogues are generally less systematic and metaphysical than the middle and later ones, and are considered to be more faithful to Socrates’ own teaching — though this cannot be known with certainty.
Sangharakshita’s interest was mainly in the Socratic dialogues, especially The Symposium, which he described as ‘one of the most sublime works of Western literature’.1 It would usually be classified as philosophy, but it reads more like literature, or philosophy-as-literature. Sangharakshita said that one of the things that attracted him about Plato is his ability to translate his ideas into myths, such as the myth of the cave in The Republic. Plato understood that deep philosophical ideas could be most powerfully communicated through myth. The Symposium is a prime example — not a single myth, but a series of mythic and philosophical speeches woven into a stylized literary setting. It presents an account (whether fictitious or semi-fictitious) of a dinner party attended by a group of cultured Athenian gentlemen, with Socrates himself playing a leading part. It was a Greek custom for such symposia to combine food, drink, and conversation — and of course being Athenians they would talk quite brilliantly. On this occasion, the theme is love, explored from a range of perspectives, from the comic to the sublime. One of the most memorable contributions is that of Aristophanes, the comic playwright, whose account of love is that human beings were once spherical wholes, but were split in two because we irritated the gods, so that we spend our lives seeking our other halves.
When it is Socrates’ turn to speak, he recounts a teaching he once received from Diotima — an older priestess or wise woman — who, he says, initiated him into the deeper mysteries of love. According to Diotima, love begins with an attraction to the beautiful form of the loved one, initially driven by desire. But if properly guided, this attraction becomes something more profound, and has a flavour of what Buddhists might call kalyāṇa-mitratā (spiritual friendship), in which an older lover helps the younger beloved cultivate a sense of what beauty truly is. An appreciation of the form of a particular object leads to an appreciation of beauty of form in general. This broadens into an appreciation of beauty in character, beauty of virtue, beauty of mind, beauty of soul, and then to an experience of the quality of beauty that the soul expresses. In this way beauty ascends to an ultimate Beauty: the Beauty which is the source of all other beauties; a Beauty that is not separate from beautiful things, but is more than them.
It is this sense in which Sangharakshita referred to himself as by nature a Platonist. He saw spiritual life not just as an escape from mundane suffering, but as an ascent towards the highest Good, or in this case the highest Beauty. He was strongly drawn towards beauty himself, and believed not only that the cultivation of a sensitivity to beauty was inherent in the spiritual life, but that the Dharma itself could be conceived of in those terms.
Śubha, Aśubha and the Vimokṣa-mukhas
One of most important expositions of this idea is found in The Three Jewels, which is perhaps generally a neglected book. Sangharakshita spoke about it as being at a higher level of teaching than A Survey of Buddhism (often considered his magnum opus). It is a more intricate and complex work with a deeper spiritual perspective. What he has to say about the aśubha and śubha is fundamental to our approach in this article. In discussing the topic we must in effect combine three sets of doctrines: the four viparyāsas, the three lakṣaṇas, and the vimokṣa-mukhas.
It is significant that in The Three Jewels Sangharakshita approaches discussion of the lakṣaṇas by way of the less commonly known viparyāsas, which he translates as ‘perversities’, but are sometimes called the ‘topsy-turvy views’. These are the ways in which we misunderstand reality. Thus we see the impermanent (anitya) as permanent (nitya), the insubstantial (anātman) as substantial (ātman), the painful (duhkha) as satisfying (sukha), and the ugly (aśubha) as beautiful (śubha). These correspond to the lakṣaṇas, with the addition of the aśubha, which he deals with first. In a key passage, he makes explicit the connection between the Dharma and Platonism, at least as regards Beauty.
Aśubha, which means not only ugly but also horrid, disgusting, repulsive or impure, is best understood by referring to the word from which it is derived by the addition of a negative prefix. Śubha, literally purity, really means beauty, though beauty of the spiritual rather than of the sensuous order. It is Pure Beauty in the Platonic and Neoplatonic sense of something shining in a world of its own above and beyond concrete things, which are termed beautiful only so far as they participate in its perfection. When Buddhism insists that all conditioned things are aśubha, it does not mean that we have to regard a flower, for instance, as essentially ugly, but only that in comparison with the beauties of a higher place of reality those of a lower plane are insignificant. Beauty and ugliness are relative terms. We cannot really see the conditioned as aśubha until we have seen the Unconditioned as śubha. Similarly, within the conditioned itself, in order to see the ugliness and impurity of objects belonging to a lower plane it is necessary to ascend, in meditation, to one which is higher.2
We have here not only an assertion of the spiritual nature of beauty, but the notion of a gradual ascent towards an absolute Beauty. To show how this is to be understood in relation to more standard Buddhist doctrine, we can turn to the vimokṣa-mukhas. These are the positive, transcendental counterparts of the lakṣaṇas. Sangharakshita has stressed, in a way that is not commonly done, that when you contemplate the lakṣaṇas you should always contemplate the vimokṣa-mukha that corresponds to it. Otherwise the danger is that you fall into nihilism. You think ‘everything is impermanent so let’s just have fun while it lasts’; or ‘the self is an illusion, so why bother making effort?’; or ‘everything is just suffering so what’s the point?’ But the real contemplation of the lakṣaṇa consists in trying to see the relationship in experience between the lakṣaṇa and the vimokṣa-mukha. The vimokṣa-mukha that corresponds to anityatā, is animitta, which is usually translated as ‘the signless’. Because things are impermanent, there are no real entities to which our ‘signs’ may be attached, and their true nature is experienced as a continuous state of flow or becoming, which is completely beyond concepts. Then, the correspondence between duhkha and its vimokṣa-mukha of apranihita (the ‘wishless’) is that duhkha arises because we crave, and when we stop craving we experience a wonderful state of freedom from desire. Lastly, anātman means there is no fixed metaphysical self, and its corresponding vimokṣa-mukha is śūnyatā, meaning ‘emptiness’, which signifies the complete openness of reality: without boundary, without constriction.
Sangharakshita’s treatment of aśubha and śubha in this context implies that we can think of the śubha as a fourth vimokṣa-mukha, and therefore that we can contemplate it in relation to the aśubha, and this can lead to a real experience of liberation. Indeed, much later, he made this idea explicit. In his vignette, ‘Green Tara and the fourth lakṣaṇa’, composed in the last year of his life, he said,
Historically speaking, Buddhism has not developed a spiritual path in which the goal is envisaged in terms of ideal beauty and the path in terms of increasing love for that beauty. There is no reason, however, why such a path should not be developed within the general framework of Buddhist practice, especially as we have models for such an approach within the Western spiritual tradition.
I suggest we could go even further and say that if we don’t truly appreciate śubha we can’t really access the other vimokṣa-mukhas: that our contemplation of them will be effective when they are seen as beautiful. For instance, contemplating śūnyatā without śubha entails the danger of becoming overly conceptual on the one hand, and on the other, can lead to alienation, depression and so forth. These are real dangers for the modern Buddhist, shaped as we are by the nihilism of contemporary culture, which so often influences how the Dharma is presented. We are constantly exposed to both Buddhist and semi-Buddhist sources that draw us away from the kind of rich, imaginative vision of the Dharma that Sangharakshita has offered — one that includes beauty, friendship, community, and so on — towards something either highly abstract or so superficial that it has little real effect.
I would even argue that there is something about the śubha that is more compelling and immediate than the other vimokṣa-mukhas. To some extent this depends on individuals and circumstances. It may be that śūnyatā has come vividly to life for you; perhaps the ultimate ineffability of Reality is something you can strongly relate to. It may be that the idea of being completely free of all craving has become for you a living experience. But with Beauty there is a direct route to transcendence through one’s more mundane experience of it. The hierarchical nature of Beauty means that if you can grasp its tail on one level it leads you upwards to higher levels.
This ascent of Beauty is what Plato taught in the so-called Socratic phase of his dialogues. As Buddhists, however, we have to understand beauty in the context of the other lakṣaṇas. One of Sangharakshita’s reservations about Platonism is that Plato had a metaphysical doctrine of ‘Forms’ which is quasi-eternalist — though there are different ways of interpreting it. Sangharakshita dissociates himself from that metaphysical element of Plato’s teaching, yet he strongly identifies with the aspect of ascent through Beauty, which he considers to be a key to the transmission of the Dharma in the West.
But before further exploring the path of beauty— the śubha-marga, to coin a phrase — there is an important part of the picture to fill in. The idea of beauty as an ascent implies not only a higher Beauty, but a powerful attraction from us towards it. This is what I mean by the term ‘Eros’.
On Eros
The Greek figure of Eros has its roots simply in sexual attraction. But Plato, and then the Neo-Platonists, elevated the notion of Eros to indicate the strong desire for a higher Beauty. This is a very important equation or connection, since Beauty will be forever inaccessible to us unless we can connect it with our desire. To make this clearer let us now consider the nature of desire. We could say that it functions on three levels – with many gradations, sub-levels, and interactions between them.
The first kind of desire is the straightforward one of the body’s needs. Thirst, hunger, desire for sex, the instinct of ‘fight or flight’, and so on; even quite complex instincts such as those that bring the swallows from the deep South to nest in my barn: they come on the wings of desire.
The Greek figure of Eros has its roots simply in sexual attraction. But Plato, and then the Neo-Platonists, elevated the idea of Eros to represent the soul’s longing for a higher Beauty. This is a very important connection, since Beauty will be forever inaccessible to us unless we can connect it with our desire. To make this clearer let us now consider the nature of desire. We could say that it functions on three levels — with many gradations, sub-levels, and interactions between them.
The first kind of desire is the straightforward one of the body’s needs. Thirst, hunger, desire for sex, the instinct of ‘fight or flight’, and so on; even quite complex instincts such as those that bring the swallows from the deep South to nest in my barn: they come on the wings of desire.
Obviously, desire at that level is not self-aware. But in human beings, desire enters into the service of self-awareness — or self-awareness enters into the service of desire; it is difficult to say which. At this level, desire becomes focused on the preservation, expansion, and prolongation of ego-identity. With self-awareness, we become capable of thinking in terms of ‘I’. We bifurcate our experience into an ‘I’ in here that undergoes experience, and a ‘world’ out there that is experienced. We assume that this ‘I’ has some ultimate validity independent of the flow of time, and that the world exists independent of the moment of perception, as a stable, enduring field, within which our experience takes place. This sets up a tremendous tension — both within us, and between us and the world that surrounds us. Every moment reminds us that ‘I’ is not permanent, not stable, and therefore not ultimately defensible, in a world that simultaneously threatens us with extinction and tempts us with the promise of solidifying our identity.
Desires that have their origins, from an evolutionary point of view, in our animal instincts, come into the service of our assumption of a separate self. We crave; animals don’t crave — they are hungry. We hate; animals don’t hate — they instinctively defend themselves, or seize upon prey. We seek to preserve our identity by craving what we think will solidify it, by repelling or even seeking to destroy what we think threatens it, and by ignoring the reality of things.
But sometimes the objects of the senses escape our mundane, ego-based perception of them. Something about the object hints at something beyond merely self-reference, at a wider, deeper possibility within reality. That is when the third level of desire begins to awaken, which I am calling Eros. It is the point at which desire for the ‘other’, which begins in self-reference, becomes desire for the Other as pointing beyond both self and other — which we’ve been exploring in terms of Beauty.
I see the gradation between the three levels in this way, but of course it is much more complex than that in practice. When you fall in love, for example, all three kinds of desire are present. Your body wants sex; you want the other person to affirm your identity; and you intuit something of a deeper union beyond the selfish, something of a higher pleasure, something even of beauty. Moreover, there is a continuity between the levels of desire: each feeds into, and is to some extent involved in, the others. Hunger and thirst, the drive for sex, the need for protection and so forth, cannot just be eliminated. One of the wonderful things about Sangharakshita’s approach to the Dharma is that he doesn’t ask you to do that. In fact he says quite explicitly, don’t try to get rid of the lower pleasures until you have a strong grasp on the higher. Otherwise you end up with the weirdness that afflicts so much religion. The art of applying this lies in finding, within the objects of mundane desire, those that carry a gleam of the transcendent. Sangharakshita calls this the ‘intermediary’: something that stands within your experience and faces towards you, offering itself as an object of desire, but flashing with something from beyond.
Awareness of Aśubha
This is what great works of art give us: an intermediary between ourselves and Beauty. To delve further into the idea of Beauty as a path let us turn to one of the greatest works of art I know: Stalker, by Andrei Tarkovsky. The film is a meditation on desire, hope and faith, explored with extraordinary power and feeling. Tarkovsky famously said that his films don’t follow the logic of narrative, but the logic of images. So the story, if you can call it that, unfolds beneath the surface of the conceptual mind. The images speak directly to us, creating a strong sense of seeing or realising something, even if we cannot say exactly what it is. The central character, known simply as Stalker, leads people into a mysterious, forbidden Zone where, it is said, all desires are fulfilled. In the film he guides a professor (representing science), and a writer (representing art) into a desolate post-industrial landscape. As they move deeper into the Zone, one becomes increasingly sensitive to the zone’s potentialities. Approaching the final threshold — the room where all desires are fulfilled — Stalker is in despair at the attitude of his companions: their doubts, irreverence, and failure to understand the dangers of the Zone. Finally, he rounds on them and in an intense, incantatory manner recites a poem, which happens to be by Arsenie Tarkovsky, the film-maker’s father.
But there has to be more
Now summer is gone
And might never have been
In the sunshine it’s warm
But there has to be moreIt all came to pass
All fell into my hands
Like a five-petalled leaf
But there has to be moreNothing evil was lost
Nothing good was in vain
All ablaze with clear light
But there has to be moreLife gathered me up
Safe, under its wing
My luck always held
But there has to be moreNot a leaf was burnt up
Not a twig ever snapped
Clean as glass is the day
But there has to be more
This poem speaks to me of a constant underlying theme of my experience. There is always a sense that although life can be astonishingly beautiful, and at moments even seemingly perfect, there has to be more. You know that something in you remains unfulfilled. I have been arguing for Sangharakshita’s suggestion that aśubha could be added to the lakṣaṇas, and that śubha could be included among the vimokśā-mukhas — the gateways to liberation. If it is a gateway to liberation it must have something from which it liberates, and that is the aśubha: an immediate, felt sense of not yet having encountered that which is fully, deeply, fulfillingly beautiful.
For me, duhkha and aśubha are the characteristics of conditioned existence that most closely touch me. I do reflect on impermanence and insubstantiality, but those tend to be mere reflections. What really strikes me on a daily, almost moment by moment basis, is a strong sense of unfulfillment: not full happiness, not full ease, not full peace; and a sense that always the Beautiful is distant, is not fully realised. If we examine our lives closely we will recognise that the experience of a lack of final union with something both fully satisfying and completely beautiful is a powerful undercurrent. We are constantly gnawed at by it, and often we are trying to find ways to compensate, to palliate, to deaden the feeling. I sometimes think that people who become addicted to drink or drugs often are the sort of people who feel it most strongly. Dylan Thomas is an example: he clearly felt the blinding, burning, brilliance of reality in a way that he just could not bear, and eventually drowned himself in drink.
The aśubha is not simply a matter of seeing things as ugly, but recognising that, however beautiful they are, ‘there has to be more’
It is this sense of lack that we address in the practice of aśubha-bhāvanā. It doesn’t mean going out to find something ugly to contemplate. That is a practice that is used as a compensation for excessive desire, but too often in the Buddhist tradition aśubha-bhavana has been seen only in those terms. If you are obsessed with the opposite sex and can’t get them out of your mind during meditation, you might reflect upon what their bodies are like when cut open or decomposing. Sangharakshita saw this as an extreme medicine for an extreme disease, and didn’t recommend the practice for most of us. If we confine aśubha contemplation to such drastic methods, we miss much of its deeper significance. Conditioned existence is marked by the aśubha, and cultivating an awareness of that is not a tool we merely use to counteract an excessive desire in one direction — although clearly to do so is related to a more general principle. I believe the aśubha is something that any honest person will find in their daily experience, pressing up within them, bumping up against them, all the time, in every situation. What Buddhism asks us to do is to face that directly, to fully recognise that the way we live, the way we see things, is not going to reveal real Beauty. At times we may glimpse some beauty, and that may serve as an entry point into a higher beauty; but most of the time we don’t experience even that, but rather its absence.
In Buddhism the recognition of absence is a central theme. In the practice of the Buddha-Dharma we need always to start with the awareness of an absence within ourselves. The aśubha is not simply a matter of seeing things as ugly, but recognising that, however beautiful they are, ‘there has to be more’. Relatively speaking, there is a certain amount of beauty. On a Spring day, with the grass electric green, the trees in all their verdant glory, and the chestnuts bearing their candles, how can we say there is no beauty? But what we experience is only relative beauty. What aśubha-bhavana requires us to do is not cultivate the lack of beauty, but to recognise it as part of our present experience —to recognise that full beauty has not yet flowered. Unless we do that we will not take the steps that lead to its flowering.
That of course is not the end of the matter, otherwise it would be the path not to liberation but to self-destruction. We also need the śubha-bhavana.
Cultivation of Śubha
I once had a memorable encounter with a minor but not inconsiderable English poet, George Barker. I knew his son quite well and occasionally went to his Saturday-evening drinking parties, where, as his children said, he would eat people. (He ate me for sure, but that is another story). On one occasion I was sitting quietly, looking at some beautiful lilacs through the window of the National Trust rectory where he lived. He came in, made a beeline for me, stood over me and said: “Poetry is like Perseus’ shield: it enables us to stare at what would otherwise turn us to stone.”
Through poetry, or any of the arts, we are able to look obliquely at what we can’t face directly. We can’t face the aśubha too directly because we can’t accept that the things we are so attached to are by nature impure. Nor can we look at the śubha directly, because its blinding, brilliant beauty is more than we can bear. But through the śubha-bhavana we can address our immediate experience and recognise not only that full beauty has not revealed itself to us, but also that we glimpse its shadow as it disappears around the corner. We don’t see the sun, but as it sets we see its rays glowing in the sky. We see that in our experience there is some reflection of that ideal and ultimate Beauty.
I don’t mean simply loveliness; beauty can also be found in the terrible, the sublime, even the destructive. Goya’s dark paintings, for example, are indeed dark, in terms both of colour and of theme, but there is also something extraordinarily potent, even beautiful, about them. The intuitions of beauty I’m speaking of are not merely of the pretty or the lovely, but of something that suggests a full and final Beauty that is completely beyond our earthly realm, but that is reflected, to varying degrees, at varying levels and in varying ways, in our ordinary experience. The path of beauty lies in tracing these gleams. You see a sliver of light down the side of the door, and you sense that through that door is the final light, a light so intense, so overwhelming that all is resolved. By returning to that gleam again and again, you draw nearer to the door. And eventually, when you are close enough, you can open it and pass through.
Four Characteristics of Beauty
But how do we recognise beauty? Although it is an experience we all have to some extent, it is so mixed up with other responses that it may not always be clear to us how to identify it, and how therefore to develop it. In order to help us find beauty in our experience let us consider four of its characteristics.
The first characteristic is described in this extract from Kit Marlowe’s Tamburlaine.
What is Beauty, sayeth my sufferings then?
If all the pens that ever poets held
Had fed the feeling of their masters’ thoughts,
And every sweetness that inspir’d their hearts,
Their minds, and muses on admiréd themes;
If all the heavenly quintessence they still
From their immortal flowers of poesy,
Wherein as in a mirror we perceive
The highest reaches of a human wit –
If these had made one poem’s period,
And all combin’d in beauty’s worthiness,
Yet should there hover in their restless heads
One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least,
Which into words no virtue can digest.
As the poem illustrates, beauty cannot be fully expressed. It is intuited — in the sense of being felt rather than thought — so it is beyond the reach of language. When you see a sunset, you are moved without needing to analyse it. Any attempt to describe it in words feels banal, flat, and inadequate; the language fails to do justice to the experience itself. In the arts, the role of the critic should be to help evoke that direct experience, not to define or dissect it — which is where a lot of criticism goes wrong.
The second characteristic of beauty is that it is intensely pleasurable. To experience beauty is to experience delight or satisfaction, even when the object itself is not conventionally pleasant. The final scene of Hamlet, with the stage strewn with bodies, is hardly a cheerful spectacle. Yet the beauty of the dramatic unfoldment, and of what Hamlet discovers in the course of that tragedy, is deeply satisfying and leaves one with a supremely uplifted spirit. Tragedy can be pleasurable because a work of art, though it presents itself through the senses, draws us beyond mere sensory gratification toward the deeper satisfactions of the mind, in a way that overlaps with meditation.
The third characteristic of beauty is its inevitable tendency toward transcendence. When you encounter something beautiful, it evokes a pleasurable response that draws you in, but soon the object itself begins to feel inadequate as an expression of the beauty. If you know how to, and allow yourself, you move beyond the object into a deeper contemplation. After watching a really good film you may reflect a little on its plot or characters, but what lingers is a contemplative mood that transcends both the film’s content and the experience of watching it. A beautiful object gives a glimpse of something that is expressed through the object, but not confined to it. When you watch a sunset, you sense more than colours and harmony; something is communicated through these elements that exceeds them, even as it is revealed by them. In the experience of beauty, you intuit something that is more than the object, yet somehow also within it.
A fourth characteristic of the experience of beauty is that it is ecstatic. The word ‘ecstatic’ comes from the Greek ekstasis, meaning “to stand outside”. Beauty draws you out of yourself, and into it. If you’ve ever visited an art gallery, you may know the experience of elbowing your way through hordes of Japanese tourists towards the famous paintings you’ve long wanted to see, only to find that they don’t initially move you at all. You’re still caught up in the busyness and purposiveness of getting there. Then, if you’re fortunate, a painting grabs you by the lapels and pulls you into it. Everything else recedes: you forget the whole business of getting there and all the others around you; all your knowledge about art history or about the painter and his technique becomes secondary at best. You are simply entranced.
Eros, when it responds to beauty, is ecstatic in this sort of way. This is where Beauty becomes a vimokṣa-mukha, because in your ecstasy, in entering into the beautiful object, you lose yourself. In the highest objects of beauty, or when you see beauty at its highest, you finally lose yourself altogether. And you don’t come back.
Objective and Subjective
In seeking the beautiful—the ideal Beauty shining in a world of its own—we must approach it through the intermediaries of concrete things. But this raises a set of questions: Why do we find some things beautiful and not others? Why do we find some things more beautiful than others? And why do I find something beautiful that you do not? The answer has two aspects: one objective, and one subjective.
Perhaps the most powerful way in which reality presents itself to us is when we allow ourselves to respond to beauty in the world around us
There is something in the experience of beauty that feels like a claim to universality. You don’t merely want to say, ‘I find that beautiful’; you want to say, ‘That is beautiful. The universality of beauty seems to lie in the object’s capacity to mediate Beauty itself. In a sense, everything reflects that pure Beauty. If the eye is sufficiently open, beauty can be seen everywhere, even in what appears ugly. But some objects, some people, some situations, some configurations within sensuous reality, reflect pure Beauty more readily than others. It is a little like lightning: it can strike anywhere, but it is more likely to strike objects that offer a clear path to the ground. There is something about the configuration of objects themselves (including persons) that more or less adequately expresses, or becomes a channel for, ideal Beauty.
Why this is so remains, in the end, a mystery. Whenever we find something beautiful, the response is immediate and intuitive. Yet we can reflect on these responses in an effort to understand why that particular object seems to reflect ideal Beauty. Why that painting, poem, play, film, or scene, and not another? This is the concern of so much aesthetic theory, of literary and artistic criticism, and the debate is unlikely ever to be resolved. In the end, what makes something beautiful is that it evokes in us the four characteristics I have described. In principle, anything—any object, situation, or experience—can become the focus of an aesthetic response, given the right circumstances, the right state of mind, etc.
The universal nature of an object’s capacity to reflect beauty needs emphasis, because these days many people assume that aesthetic judgement is nothing more than an expression of personal preference. It isn’t. Nonetheless, there is a subjective element to the experience of beauty. Why is it that, when we walk round an gallery full of masterpieces, some works grab us while others do not? Even if intellectually we acknowledge them as great works, some paintings pull our hearts while others leave us cold. That has something to do with us, with who we are. While it is true that some objects themselves are a more adequate expression of Beauty, which of those speak to us most deeply depends, at least in part, on the configuration of our own subjectivity.
This is bound up with our very constitution as human beings. To explore this, let us step back and consider what it means to be human. You could say that the true nature of things is before us at every moment: everything is impermanent, insubstantial, incapable of providing lasting satisfaction, and always a pale reflection of ideal Beauty. This reality presses in on us at every moment. And in a sense, to be human is to defend ourselves against it. Our identity is under constant threat — undermined, even denied — by the nature of reality itself. We fight a perpetual rear-guard action to preserve the illusion of independent selfhood. Reality is always laughing at our pretensions, and we, in turn, are always struggling to hold it all together, telling ourselves the stories that reconfigure everything around our sense of identity.
My favourite neurologist, Oliver Sacks, once described a man who had lost short- and medium-term memory.3 He retained about five minutes of short-term memory, and then nothing for thirty years. Sacks called him ‘the Confabulator’ because he was constantly constructing a story that linked the last five minutes with his memories from thirty years ago. But since those five minutes were always moving forward with the arrow of time, his story was continually falling apart, and he had to keep patching it back together. It’s a really tragic case, but also salutary, because we are all doing the same thing — albeit we may have better equipment for doing it (for now!).
Reality is pressing in upon us all the time, not just in the negative form of our intimations that our attachments are inadequate, but also in the positive form of the vimokṣa-mukhas. Reality constantly urges upon us the message that it is completely open: there are no boundaries, nothing is fixed, nothing is finished. It presses upon us the sense that there is nowhere to go, nothing to do — everything is here, now. It presses upon us with this ideal Beauty. All the time we are defending ourselves against Reality, against both the lakṣaṇas and the vimokṣa-mukhas. But although we resist them, they do affect us. If we become at all sensitive we begin to let go of that resistance, to open up and allow reality at least a corner in our minds and hearts. Perhaps the most powerful way in which reality presents itself to us is when we allow ourselves to respond to beauty in the world around us.
The pursuit of beauty lies at the junction of two movements: the downward movement of ideal Beauty, and the upward movement of Eros — the deep, powerful current at the root of all our desires
Reality impacts our empirical self. Each of us is absolutely particular: we have our own unique physical makeup, personal history, family conditioning, cultural background, and so on. So the impact of Reality on us is equally particular. We can think of this in terms of ‘Chladni plates’. A metal plate is dusted with sand and made to vibrate using a violin bow. This creates strange and beautiful patterns which vary according to the note’s frequency and the plate’s shape and texture. In this analogy, the vibration of the bow represents the sound of Reality; the sand patterns represent us. Each of us receives the imprint of Reality in a unique way. There are patterns that are broadly true for everyone, but Reality also expresses itself in each of us as something utterly particular.
We respond to beauty in an object because it serves, more or less adequately, as a vehicle for ideal Beauty. But we respond to that beauty in our own particular way, because of something unfolding within us. The pursuit of beauty lies at the junction of two movements: the downward movement of ideal Beauty, and the upward movement of Eros — the deep, powerful current at the root of all our desires. What we take to be gross or superficial desires are really surface eddies of that deeper current. That’s why we shouldn’t deny our desires, but instead skilfully guide them toward their true fulfilment. Ultimately, that desire for fulfilment becomes faith in the Buddha. But it’s also accompanied by a sense of what I must do, of what draws me on towards Him. Our Dharma life is an effort to cooperate with these forces that are unknowable to us, but trying to express themselves through us. Unless we are in contact with that erotic drive, we don’t really have a Dharma life. We only have an idea of the Dharma, which is theoretical and disconnected from what is actually unfolding within us.
The path of beauty invites us to notice where we are immediately engaged—where our erotic impulses are non-conceptual, pleasurable, infused with a sense of transcendence, and take us outside ourselves. Using these four characteristics, we can ask: where is our eros engaging with beauty in our own direct experience? We need to be very honest about this, because our answers may not be on the approved list. They may not reflect what a good Buddhist is supposed to like—or even a good citizen! Of course, we shouldn’t rationalise anything unethical, but we do need to know where our interests really lie — not where we think they should lie. We are trying to elevate from within ourselves, not impose an artificial interest from without. To do the latter is alienation, which I think is a great danger of so much modern Buddhist rhetoric.
The quest for beauty is indeed a quest: you don’t know where it will lead, but you can know where it begins. You need to work from the inside up, as it were. Start with your genuine responses. Look for where those responses imply something more, and in a mindful way, allow yourself to be gradually elevated from there. In this way, within the context of your overall spiritual practice, you will ultimately transcend yourself. You will enter the vimokṣa-mukha of the śubha.
There has to be more…
I hope you have got the pith of what this path of beauty is. Though a lot of words have been used to describe it, part of its power lies precisely in the fact that it isn’t about conceptualisation. I must confess that much of what passes for insight practice — even within the Triratna Buddhist Community — strikes me as just too damned heady. Of course, the conceptual can be a gateway to something more. But the power of beauty is that it directs us to our immediate sense of imperfection — and to our intimation of a higher Beauty. That is what we need to focus on. You don’t need special equipment; you don’t need to spend a lot of money on an expensive retreat; you don’t even need a leader. You already have what you need within you. It’s simply a matter of addressing your own persistent sense that, as Arseny Tarkovsky sings, ‘there has to be more…’
Footnotes
- Sangharakshita, ‘Green Tara and the Fourth lakṣaṇa’
- Sangharakshita, The Three Jewels, Chapter 11
- Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat
