True Perception: The Path of Dharma Art

A work of art is created because there is basic sacredness, independent of the artist’s particular religious faith or trust.

Whenever no basic goodness or basic beauty is expressed, what you do is neurotic and destructive.

You don’t have to be labeled an artistic person, necessarily; anyone can work on that kind of perception. The only obstacles are hesitation and lack of interest. The sitting practice of meditation allows a sense of solidness and a sense of slowness and the possibility of watching one’s mind operating all the time.

Culture is how you behave, how you’ve been told to behave: the transmission from your parents and your friends and how you carry that out. So a work of art cannot be said to be purely cultural or purely individual.

That’s called threefold logic, and that kind of logic could be used in designing or producing a work of art. We could describe that as the heaven, earth, and human principle used in the Japanese tradition of flower arranging, or as the three bodies of the tantric art of Tibetan vajrayana Buddhism—dharmakaya, sambhogakaya, and nirmanakaya.

In order to realize unconditional symbolism, we have to appreciate the empty gap of our state of mind and how we begin to project ourselves into that non–reference point.

I think the problem is that people are afraid they might be ignored, they might become failures, so they end up explaining everything they know, all the reference points at once. That attitude of poverty or failure makes your theater dirt, your poetry dirt.

Such regret usually relates to the past. But in this case, we are talking about regrets of all kinds: regrets of the future and regrets of the present, as well as regrets of the past. There is a very slick but at the same time very deep-rooted depression taking place, which looks back and forth all the time.

The problem there is that you are not relating with either the heaven or the earth principle, so you can hardly create a human principle at all.