by Rebecca Lemov, PhD
The word Nirvana is well known even among people who don't sit in meditation or consider themselves followers of the Buddha. Like many of the more intriguing states of mind encountered by humanity (Arrested Development, The Moody Blues, Fear), Nirvana has also been a rock band -- in this case, a singularly self-destructive one. At the very least, this fact makes Nirvana count as a popular term, one that has a meaning widely enough understood so that it didn't necessitate a translation. Its meaning, in fact, is taken to be fairly simple: the Buddhist "Nirvana" means something close to "nothingness," with perhaps a tinge of nihilism and a tablespoon of bliss mixed in. The term Nirvana seems to many people (including practitioners, sometimes) to be about negation: the negation of all vexing desires, the falling away of habitual significance, and the withdrawal of the self into some state of non-definition and non-recognition. As the beat poet Jack Kerouac believed, Buddhism was about embracing this state of negation: "His attitude," according to his ex-girlfriend in a recent interview, "was 'Why do anything? We're all heading for the void.'" Nirvana in this view seems to be about giving up the things of this world, and this common understanding leads often to a concomitant misunderstanding: that the Buddhist meditator must be set on joylessness and on renouncing the pleasure one can take in being alive on this "good green earth" (as a friend put it).
In fact, this opinion that all-leads-to-negation and that therefore Buddhism is a negative path (in the sense of "life denying" or "joy denying") can be found as far back as the West has wrestled with and tried to understand the Buddha's path, that is, long before a 1990s grunge band put it on a stage. Thomas Merton gave an etiology of the misunderstanding: "Buddhist enlightenment, or Nirvana, the highest goal of man, has been completely misunderstood in the West. Perhaps this is because the concept of Nirvana first reached the West in translations of ascetic text of the Little Vehicle, which emphasized the extinction of desire and the negative aspect of Buddhist enlightenment. This was taken up by romantic pessimists like Schopenhauer, and as a result the Western stereotype of Buddhism is that of the world-denying religion par excellence, in which the ideal is to spend one's earthly existence in a trance in order that after death one may pass away into pure nothingness. According to this view, all positive value in earthly existence is merely negated." Given this stereotypical view, Merton continued, it is difficult to see how such a "supposed cult of inertia and death" could have inspired the flowerings of Buddhist art and culture found all over the Far East, and indeed in the West as well.
Here is the crux, then: how does the giving up and attenuation of habitual desires and pleasures actually lead to a form of true pleasure and delight in earthly things? How can this "letting go" lead, as it in fact does, to a fuller immersion in experience? There is a way in which the path to Nirvana, or Nibbana, to use the Pali term, requires acts of renunciation through the observation of reality as it is -- that is, the more one is able to see things as they are more clearly, the more the renunciation of old deluded patterns of seeing naturally follows. In turn this leads not to dullness or ghostliness but rather to joyful presence and, in a word, to art. The resulting connection between the making of visual arts -- painting and drawing, largely, here -- and the practice of meditation may be counterintuitive, but is worth elaborating on.
This is the project of Art Pariyatti: to explore the connection between Vipassana meditation and the practice of art. The work of Art Pariyatti gets its inspiration from a connection drawn to a Vipassana trust legal protocol. The crux of this fragment, it seems to me, is in its focus on art that moves toward, or has the intention to move toward, a triple good: "Art is most meaningful in the Society when it has threefold completeness of Truth, Beauty and Goodness in its content," states this document. Thus the project of Art Pariyatti is to move toward these goods, and to use the clarity of mind generated by such meditation to do a better job of it. In each case, the artists involved have experienced a great flowering of their own perceptual abilities, gratitude, and sense of grace. The art that follows out of this mutual development is its by-product.
And yet there is another paradox. These paintings are testaments to expanded seeing, and to presence-in-the-world, even though they are generated by and from an extinguishing of the seer's usual or conventional desires. At the same time, the works are best seen as intimations -- they point toward something else, something not-quite-glimpsed, something at the very edge of visibility, at the endpoint of expressive possibility. They are the finger that points at the moon, and bespeak what C. S. Lewis named "joy": intimations of something else. They are aspirational, in short. As Wordsworth wrote, they point towards
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods.
Rebecca Lemov is a visiting researcher/lecturer at Harvard University, and the author of World as Laboratory.