Читать книгу Rilke, Zen Master: On Awakening to Beauty. Part 1. About a Broken Nose - - Страница 6

Two Masters of Zen

A Paradoxical Meeting

And now it is time to return to our main characters, Gautama Buddha and Rilke, and ask ourselves again: ́Is there really anything that unites these two names? Isn’t such a ́rapprochement́ just a spectacular play on words, an extravagant fantasy of the author?́

Really, putting them together feels rather artificial at first, but then, as you delve into the ́themé, something unexpected emerges between them that is worth thinking about, and eventually it becomes something exciting and grandiose that takes your breath away. For behind each of these names lies a universe of insight. All the more surprising when they

come together!

This book is an attempt to capture the vastness of that encounter. The author spent a long time working on the idea for this book, essentially asking himself a single question: ́What is the mysterious and omnipresent force that spiritualises these two such different names? What is the universal law that unites them?́ And at one point he even gave up the idea, realising his utter helplessness… Until one day ́enlightenment́ came upon him and he heard a single word, as simple and clear as God’s day:

Beauty!

An inviolable principle

Surely someone will find such a ́glimpsé of thought deliberately far-fetched, or even trivial. For ́beautý is a lofty and all too tempting word. Especially as the sacramental immediately comes to mind:

Beauty will save the world.

It would seem that the great Russian novelist had already established beauty as an immutable moral principle. Is there really anything to add to these winged words? The author of this book is convinced that there is, and from an unexpected angle: it turns out that Fyodor Mikhailovich’s aphorism also has a hint of Buddhist meaning. It is hard to resist paraphrasing the Buddha:

Beauty is Truth! Beauty is the sacred Law! Beauty is the Teachings!

Two Masters of Zen

And it is hard to avoid giving Dostoyevsky’s visionary statement a new sound:

Beauty in itself brings us freedom from delusion, suffering and death!

If the reader is still in doubt, the words of the teacher Tho Idi will clarify the meaning of the above:

All things perish, but beauty endures! A mind established in beauty needs no more salvation!

Beauty Breathes Where It Wants To

We can recall another famous statement about beauty, although it sounds like an echo of Dostoyevsky’s aphorism. We are talking about the words of Nicholas Roerich, who said,

Awareness of beauty will save the world.

Disagreeing with the Russian classic, the author of the Living Ethics doctrine was convinced:

It is wrong to say: ́Beauty will save the world́.

As we can see, in Roerich’s understanding it is not beauty in itself, which is unchanging and eternal, that saves, but the awareness of it. In essence, the philosopher-theosophist subjected beauty to consciousnes. He also truly believed that it was possible to create beauty:

Man inexorably approaches the knowledge of truth and ascends to light through art, which creates beauty.

The patient reader who has read the dialogues carefully will easily come to the conclusion that Roerich’s ideas about the nature of beauty are profoundly… wrong! How can one be aware of, let alone create, beauty which, as Rilke succinctly and accurately put it, has

no image, no meaning, no trace of a name?1

To be ́awaré or to ́creaté beauty, doesn’t that simply mean to be bound by ́beautý, by its form, its attributes, its visibility? And therefore,

the artist who is guided by this knowledge does not need to think about beauty; he knows as little as the others what it is made of,2

the poet continues, formulating the fundamental aesthetic principle that the artist should follow:

No one has ever created beauty.3

This paradoxical principle of the non-man-made essence of beauty is what the Master of Chan would have called ́non-thought́ about beauty. For true beauty rises to the impersonal, where there is no ego. On this point Master Tho Idi gave his explanation:

If you allow images, meanings, names for beauty there is a danger that you will begin to create an illusion. The causeless is not consciously graspable. It cannot be created. Beauty breathes where it wants to.

Two Masters of Zen

Is Beauty Not Prelest?

Beauty is often confused with prelest4, which is ego-generated and a substitute for beauty. Therefore, spiritually immature minds are often ́enlightened́ by the idea that beauty is something man-made, and that it can be improved and even appropriated if one makes enough effort and learns its principles. Only the truly awakened know how irresistible and pernicious the spiritual prelest can be, and how skilled it is in the art of deception. In the soul-saving tradition of the Orthodox Church there are many examples of how even holy silent ascetics imbue beauty with false attributes peculiar to delirium (netvarnal ́radiancé, angelic ́illuminationś and other high mountain ́lightś), which they regard as ́garments of their deificatioń. Alas, the souls of such ascetics revel in ́glorý and clothe themselves in the ́splendour of the highest beautieś, often forgetting that

1

«nichts Dargestelltes, nichts Gemeintes, keine Spur von einem Namen»

2

«Der Künstler, den diese Erkenntnis lenkt, hat nicht an die Schönheit zu denken; er weiß ebensowenig wie die Anderen, worin sie besteht»

3

«Niemand hat je Schönheit gemacht.»

4

Prelest (a word of Russian origin, known as flattery, charm, seduction, deception) is an Orthodox Christian term that, according to the Holy Fathers of the Orthodox Church, refers to a false spiritual state, a spiritual illness, a spiritual delusion.