WELCOME TO URTHONA ESSAYS

The more ethereal, evanescent, more refined and sublime part of art is the seeing nature through the medium of sentiment and passion, as each object is a symbol of the affections and a link in the chain of our endless being.

– Hazlitt, essay on The Indian Jugglers

This website contains essays and other material on the arts as bearers of spiritual values. It is the online essays site for Urthona Buddhist arts journal.

Our guardian spirits are the romantic and revolutionary writers of early 19th century London – Blake, Hazlitt and Coleridge – and the Zen poets of Japan who were similarly drawn to the open, outer reaches of mind and culture.

See below for News and Editor’s Journal…

Issue 27 is now being printed! The theme of the autumn / fall 2010 issue is Art and Ecology.

 

My article on Blake, Buddhism and Ecology takes the perhaps controversial stance that the new discipline of Deep Ecology is not so straightforwardly wholesome and ‘spiritual’ as it might at first seem. While acknowledging that a philosophical and ethical underpinning to the environmental movement is vital, I suggest that the simple revaluing of nature to the ‘the only good’ is not without its problems. Put simply it leaves the question where do human beings fit it? What are we for? Are we just an unfortunate evolutionary blip, a creature which has too much brain for its own good and which Gaia would be better of without? This might sound like a travesty of deep ecology but think the about the implications of the statement that ‘all living things are of equal value’. This means that humanity is of equal value to every single species of microbe. In fact of less value. There are some species of microbe which underpin the functioning of the entire eco-system. This is not the case with our species. As we know, the extinction of any one species of mammal will cause changes in an eco-system but not generally its collapse. The way out of this ethical impasse, I suggest, is to look towards those spiritual teachers who have put forward a balanced ‘ecological’ view of humanity’s place in the scheme of things. Views which give high value to all life forms within an interconnected web of being but which recognize the place of humanity in bringing reflexive self awareness to the processes of Mind and Nature.

Editor’s Journal 8th September 2009

Issue 26 is out and about in the shops, and we are looking into a distributor on the East Coast of the USA. We are starting to think about issue 27, which will be on the theme of Buddhism, culture and ecology. Views of nature, and the natural, are as many and various as there are human beings. In my article for the upcoming issue I will attempt to interrogate the notion that nature is the only valid category of reality, which is a reaction to the previous notion that all values must come from the human. Buddhism has an amelioritive stance, which is that man is a particular node of being within the much vaster natural cosmos, which includes the imaginal as well as the physical. I will be looking at how the romantic stance of Blake has definite affinities with this view.

Amongst Western Buddhists I notice a definite tendency to miss this middle stance and favour one or the other of those old metaphysical views.  This is exemplified in attitudes to rebirth. Some deny the idea of life before life as a leftover from more primitive atavistic eras. Others seek to validate their status as privileged ‘spiritual’ seekers by affirming a no compromise orthodox Buddhist view with no quarter given to scientific methodology unless it happens to hint at realities beyond the merely physical.

My own view is that the rebirth idea takes place on the level of the imaginal. This way of apprehending reality collapses if one tries to turn it into a subset of a physicalist view. It simply doesn’t work. Rebirth is not a poetic way of talking about the fact that all of our actions in this life will continue to affect the human community after we have gone. But the opposite stance of trying to bend science so as to potentially afirm the non-material is never going to impress a real scientist! Better to keep an essentially mythological or imaginal view of who we are on its own level without attemting to resolve it with the scientific materialist view. We are imaginally the latest manifestation of a stream of being which has no discernable beginning, and we are the product of a set of genes interacting with the environment into which we were born. Attempts to resolve one view to the other are doomed to failure!

Review of Waterhouse exhibition to follow soon – is he more than a decadent late pre-Raphaelite like those satirized on the BBC lately?

Ratnagarbha

NEWS: Issue 26 – Landscapes of the Mind

Urthona printed version issue no. 26: ‘Landscapes of the Mind’ is now out in UK bookshops and Buddhist centres around the world. If you have a local book store or Buddhist temple / meditation centre you think would like to stock it please let us know!

We are already at work on issue 27 in which, provisionally, we intend to include material on the theme of art, ecology and consciousness. Articles will include an essay on Blake, Buddhism and ecology, and a feature on the eco-artist Susan Derges by our art editor Roy Exley. We also hope to have a feature on the back-to-the-land Buddhist cultural movement known as ‘Buddhafield’.

Editor’s Journal: 26th June 2009

Last night I went to a very interesting talk here in Cambridge on the theme of Wabi Sabi as a buddhist practice. Wabi Sabi is a Japanese idea which is very hard to sum up in a few words. The speaker Vajradarshini brought together Wabi Sabi as an aesthetic quality of imperfection and transience with Wabi Sabi as an attitude to life. When you ask Japanese people what Wabi Sabi is, they may point to a tea house, or a cracked pot, or touch their chest and say ‘Japanese Heart’.

Vajradarshini managed to bring it all down to earth by talking about her own life and some of the pop music that has interested her over the years. She sees both Punk and Bjork as having a lot of Wabi Sabi!

If we can embrace the imperfection = dukkha, incompleteness = anatta, and transience of things, especially humble everyday objects, or natural forms, then we are getting close to Wabi Sabi. Fundamentally, though, it is about solitude – the beauty, the longing and the sadness of solitude.

To know Wabi Sabi we need to be alone, deeply alone, and to let ourselves go rusty… but it is also something to be shared. On Vajradarshini’s retreats she encourages people to photograph common, simple objects. Litter in the gutter, a pair of shoes by the shrine room door, a knife and fork not quite in line on a white table-cloth…. Such activity can help us to approach Wabi Sabi, which is in itself a Way to come close to the Three Vimoksas of Buddhism: Signlessness = Clarity, Emptiness = Openness, Wishlessness = Sensitivity.

Look out for more on Wabi Sabi on Urthona in future, and hopefully an article from Vajradarshini with some of her superb photographs.

Ratnagarbha

Editor’s Journal: 22nd June 2009

I have just returned refreshed from a holiday in the West Country, where I met up with old friends and went for long rambles in the Woods above Bath. I can particularly recommend Bathford Hill for its wonderful limestone woods, full of Pyramid Orchids. Don’t on any account try to climb the folly at the top of the hill however, the staircase is treacherous! I rate Bathford hill considerably over the more famous Solsbury Hill which has been partly spoiled by the new road just below it. Recommend Victoria Gallery in Bath for British paintings – especially Sutherland and Ayrton from the 1940′s – good to see the neo-Romantics getting wall space outside London. And they have the wonderful Kurt Jackson for a big show later in the summer.

Ratnagarbha