Music is definitely dependent upon the five skandhas. This can clearly be seen in cases of severe tone deafness. In a documentary I saw, a lady was so tone deaf that a pretty piano concerto sounded like pots and pans falling down stairs. Music is just modulated vibrational frequencies which tickle the ears, and the brain interprets this as music. Music does not exist outside of the brain. What we experience is a representation of what is. I was practicing music long before I knew what Zen was. Started playing drums in 5th grade, then I took up guitar, keys and bass before finally taking music theory classes. If you understand music, you can understand other phenomena. Of course this is true for all things. The same Nature that moves through music, moves through everything else as well. The point here is that yes, music is empty. Its dependent up on conditions and is only experienced as an indirect representation, but so what? This is the stance toward all this illusion nonsense in Buddhism. So what? Gautama Buddha was also an illusion, as is the Dharma. Buddha was a result of the five skandhas, as were the words he spoke, but does this make them any less inspiring? Does the fact that music is vibrations make a song any less beautiful or terrible? Of course not, and of course saying something is beautiful or terrible is also just perception. So what? If this realization makes us plug our ears and close our eyes then it is not really a realization, its only further pushing us into delusion. Ryokan knew his poems were only constructs, only representations, but did this stop him writing? Did this dry up the creative reservoir in his mind? The point is not to push these things away, but to let them be and flow through the mind unhindered. To not grasp, to not push, and to see that while a song has no inherent existence, it does in fact exist.
Posted on: Mon, 07 Apr 2014 19:35:33 +0000
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