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Abstract
From 1987 to 1994, Zhou Long composed in a manner he declared ‘Buddhist’. A work that exemplifies this period—and its aesthetic preoccupations—is the quintet Dhyana. This article investigates that work in close technical detail, exploring how key concepts inherent in the term ‘dhyana’ are reflected in the music. Most centrally, ‘dhyana’ implies the oneness of concentration of thought and expansion of consciousness—and concentration and expansion prove to be primary opposites in Zhou Long's compositional technique. Buddhism (especially Chan Buddhism) asserts the inseparability of these opposites. So does the great Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu, in whom Zhou Long has had an abiding interest. And so does Aesthetic Realism, the philosophy of the arts founded by Eli Siegel, which serves as the methodological framework for this article. Central to Aesthetic Realism is Siegel's statement: ‘In reality opposites are one, art shows this’.
Notes
[1] Biographical detail is based on conversations with the composer (see also Green, 2004 – 2005).
[2] For a compact overview of Buddhist influence in China over the last two millennia, see Wright, Citation1959, p. 959.
[3] One of the earliest masters of Chinese Buddhism to insist on the simultaneity of wu and you was Jizang (
) (549 – 623).
[4] See citations included in Blofeld (Citation1959, pp. 58 – 59). See also Heine and Wright (Citation2004, esp. Chapter 4 ‘The Huang-po Literature’, pp. 107 – 136).
[5]Wu Ji (
) joins an ideogram implying ‘nothing’ or ‘the lack of’ with another meaning both ‘polarity’ and ‘infinity’. Together they indicate that which is always present, beyond the particularities of space and time. The composition was first scored for piano and tape (1987), and later was rearranged for piano, zheng and percussion (1991), and then for piano and percussion (2002 and 2004).
[6] In most schools of Mahayana Buddhism, dhyana is just one among a larger group of equally important Paramitas. For the typical placement of ‘Dhyana-paramita’ in the over-all ‘training of a Bodhisattva towards Enlightenment’, see Gard (Citation1962, esp. pp. 145 – 150).
[7] That duality and non-duality are equally real has been asserted by certain schools of Buddhism. A great scholar of the Sanlun school of the Sui-Tang era, Jizang, noted: ‘At the first stage [of training], existence is identified as conventional truth, while emptiness is the absolute truth. Next, emptiness and existence are both taken to represent the conventional truth, while neither emptiness nor existence is the absolute truth. At the third stage, both duality and nonduality are understood as conventional truth, whereas neither duality nor nonduality is the absolute truth’ (cited in Poceski, Citation2007, p. 213).
[8] See his unpublished book The Aesthetic Nature of the World, written in the late 1960s. The manuscript reposes at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York City.
[9] See Siegel (Citation1981, pp. 81 – 122). The work was originally written in the early 1940s.
[10] Cf. Siegel (Citation1981, pp. 117 – 118): ‘There is a tremendous correspondence between the very unlimited depths of personality and the astonishing universe in its suddenness, its ordinariness, its surprisingness, its concreteness, its boundlessness. The depths, the real depths, of self, are the world’.
[11] The term itself, however, originated with Taoism.
[12] Zhou Long himself has noted that while silence is not a general characteristic of his overall musical style, it was characteristic of his ‘Buddhist’ period (see Green, Citation2004, p. 70).
[13] As Yang Ye (Citation1996, p. 14; emphasis in original) points out, Chinese poets typically use their final words ‘to point to what is beyond the text itself’.
[14] Cited in Siegel (Citation1997, p. 13). Originally from his lecture of 5 August 1949 entitled ‘Aesthetic Realism and Beauty’.
[15] Cited in Ye (Citation1996, p. 19; translation is Ye's). It may be useful to note, as William Hung (Citation1972, p. 265) did, there is ‘ample evidence of Tu Fu's fondness for Buddhism’. (Hung's article was a review of A. R. Davis, Tu Fu (New York: Twayne, 1971).)
[16] Such, too, Eli Siegel explained, is the nature of wonder when that emotion is sincere—and wonder is inseparable from enlightenment. (See the concept of ‘miao’ (
), which is central to Mahayana Buddhism, and can be found prominently in the Lotus Sutra.) In his Definitions and Comment: Being a Description of the World (Siegel, Citation1945, p. 2), he noted: ‘Wonder is knowledge making the unknown more immediate . … The self has a hugging propensity and an extending propensity. When, concentrating on something, the self sees extension, new territory, the hitherto unseen … wonder has come to be . … The fact that knowledge has to be before there can be wonder holds good all the time. The sense of otherness, the unknown, the unpatterned, the uncaptured, must be solid, and wide, and deep. If there is not knowledge, the unknown is taken casually—even though there may seem to be excitement. For what makes wonder about the unknown a bigger thing, nearer complete as wonder, is the feeling that the unknown can be known—even while it isn't. And this feeling that the unknown can be known is big in proportion to how much we know already’.
[17] To a certain extent, this technique was foreshadowed in various earlier compositions by Chou Wen-chung, Zhou Long's teacher—a fact Zhou Long happily and gratefully acknowledges. Dhyana is dedicated to Dr Chou.