Buddha vs.aesthetics

Although Buddhism has many wonderful things to offer everyday aesthetics one should not be uncritical of this tradition.  I have been reading a fascinating book, Buddhist Romanticism by Thanissaro Bhikkhu (Geoffrey DeGraff) that is available for free and comes out of the Metta Forest Monastery in Valley Center, CA, 2015, where Bhikkhu is the abbot.  I highly recommend the book which is an elaborate critique of most versions of Western-style Buddhism as being overly influenced by the Romantic tradition which Bhikku traces back to such figures as Frledrich Schlegel, Schleiermacher, Holderlin, Schelling Kant, Fichte, Schiller and Herder, and then on to Emerson, James, Jung and Maslow. 

Bhikku's understanding of Romanticism is excellent and his case is well made.  Unfortunately, his own brand of Buddhism is probably equally Western-influenced in ways that he himself does not recognize.  He attacks Romantic Buddhism on a number of fronts but mainly he seems to be opposed to their monism.  In contrast, he accepts a version of dualist idealism that goes back to Plato, quite possibly projecting this onto Buddha.  Thus, rather than rooting out Western assumptions in the interpretation of Buddhist texts he may simply be emphasizing one Western tradition over another and thus one Western way of reading Buddhism over another. His way of reading insists on a transcendent realm much like that accepted not only by Plato but by most of Christian philosophers (e.g. Aquinas), precisely the position that was being attacked by more monistic thinkers like Spinoza and the Romantics. 

Bhikku claims that his own position is derived mainly from the Pali Canon which he takes to be "the best available primary source for learning what the Buddha taught." (9)  The Appendix of the book, titled "Unromantic Dhamma," contains what he takes to be the relevant Pali passages.  We find on pg. iv that the all of the translations are by Bhikku himself and are based on the Royal Thai Edition of the Pali Canon (Bangkok:  Mhamakur Rajavidyalaya, 1982).  Much of this material is available in a larger online translation titled Handful of Leaves: Vol. 3, An Anthology from the Auguttara Nikaya, 2003 which also easily available here.  The Appendix is selected from this and other translations including from the Digha Nikaya, Majjhima Nikaya, and Samyutta Nikaya. Any teacher who wishes to use the Appendix in a class should also include pg. iv which indicates the meaning of the citations at the end of each paragraph. The paragraph numbering in the Appendix, is Bhikku's own.  

For the sake of this post I will simply assume that these are Buddha's actual views, or at least those of the earliest Buddhists.  I haven't compared Bhikku's translation with anyone else's, although it is striking that when Buddha and his followers refer to release from "stress" in this translation I find myself preferring the more usual term "suffering."  I think "stress" a problematic translation since it is so associated with contemporary feelings that combine worry and tension: as in "I am under a lot of stress." Dictionary.com defines stress as "state of mental or emotional strain or tension resulting from adverse or very demanding circumstances."  Is that all Buddhism is about? Stress relief?  

But here is what really interests me for now.  If Bhikku's translations are correct then Buddha was deeply anti-aesthetic. 

1.  We have long associated Plato's cave with the idea that the world of appearance is like the world of movies:  that all of the figures in the cave are looking at a movie.  Actually, in Plato, they are looking at a puppet show.  Buddha does something similar when he compares the world we must escape to a moving picture show:  "Monks, have you ever seen a moving picture show [an ancient show similar to a shadow puppet show]?  (331)  "That moving-picture show was created by the mind.  And this mind is even more variegated than a moving picture show.  Thus one should reflect on one's mind with every moment:  'For a long time has this mind been defiled by passion, aversion and delusion.' From the defilement of the mind are beings defiled.  From the purification of the mind are beings purified."  The point, of course, is not the same as Plato's, but clearly the moving picture show is defiled by the passions of the mind that created it, and purification would involve leaving this world, much as with Plato.  [So perhaps my earlier complaint is unfair.  Perhaps Bhikku has found that Buddha really has much the same metaphysics as Plato.]  

2.  Against aesthetics, Buddha further says:  "Therefore, monks, that dimension should be experienced where the eye [vision] ceases and the perception of form fades.  That dimension should be experienced where the ear ceases and the perception of sound fades.  That dimension should be experienced where the nose ceases and the perception of aroma fades.  That dimension should be experienced where the tongue ceases and the perception of favor fades.  That dimension should be experienced where the body ceases and the perception of tactile sensation fades.  That dimension should be experienced where the intellect ceases and the perception of idea fades.  That dimension should be experienced."  (336) If anything, aesthetics requires attention to the senses and to sense experience, as well as sense experience enhanced by ideas. Buddhism seems to require escape from these.  This is made even more clear in the following.

3.  Buddha [who I assume is the person addressing the Monks here] distinguishes between a low level attainment called "unbinding property with fuel remaining" and a higher one called "unbinding property with no fuel remaining."  It is clear that the second involves escape from any domain that is aesthetic.  "And what is the unbinding property with fuel remaining?  There is the case where a monk is an arahant whose effluents have ended, who has reached fulfillment, finished the task, laid down the burden, attained the true goal, destroyed the fetter of becoming, and is released through right gnosis.  His five sense faculties still remain and, owing to their being intact, he experiences the pleasing and the displeasing, and is sensitive to pleasure and pain.  His ending of passion, aversion, and delusion is termed the unbinding property with fuel remaining."  But the monk who has achieved "the unbinding property with no fuel remaining" has escaped the senses. Such a monk has achieved all that the first has, and, in addition, "For him, all that is sensed, being unrelished, will grow cold right here." When no fuel is remaining "all becoming totally ceases."  (337)

So, much to my surprise, I have discovered that Nietzsche was right about Buddhism, at least about this earliest form of Buddhism (maybe not right about Zen Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism or Romantic Buddhism.)  It is a denial of life, of the senses, of becoming, of pleasure and pain.  

3.  It is not the Buddhism of this earliest sort rejects all pleasure, simply sense pleasure:  "Now it's possible, Ananda, that some wanderers of other persuasions might say, 'Gotama the contemplative speaks of the cessation of perception and feeling and yet describes it as pleasure.  What is this?  How can this be?  When they say that, they are to be told, 'It's not the case, friends, that the Blessed One describes only pleasant feeling as included under pleasure..."  So, it is "pleasant feeling" that is rejected, i.e. the pleasures of the senses, the aesthetic pleasures.

4.  Attack on the arts.  Buddha likes to make a contrast between what he calls "two assemblies":  one pays attention to the Tathagata which is "deep, deep in their meaning, transcendent, connected with emptiness" and what he calls "bombast," which is, in reality, the literary arts.  He complains about monks who attend to the latter:  "But when discourses that are literary works - the works of poets, elegant in sound, elegant in rhetoric, the work of outsiders, words of disciples - are recited, they listen, they lend ear, they set their hearts on knowing them, and regard them as worth grasping and mastering....This is an assembly trained in bombast, not in cross-questioning."  (345)  

This sounds very much like Plato:  the arts are rejected in place of the cross-questioning characteristic of philosophy.  The cross-questioning involves asking questions like "How is this?  What is the meaning of this?"  (346)  The early Buddhists seemed incapable of a life in which philosophical questioning and paying attention to literary work could be integrated in a fully cultured life.