Buddhist aesthetics in the Dhammapada
Aesthetics as a branch of philosophy has been concerned with beauty and the arts. More recently the aesthetics of nature has come into its own. Insofar as truth, beauty, and goodness, are correlated with thinking, feeling, and doing, aesthetics expands to embrace the spectrum of feeling, where delight in beauty occurs alongside with repulsion facing the ugly (where beauty is potential, not actual). Beauty as a supreme value is an actualizing reality that delights the soul, a reality that the will pursues.
Since Buddhism is a way of life that is designed to carry the practitioner from dukkha (suffering, dis-ease, pain) through joy to nirvana, it may be broadly classified as aesthetically oriented from the outset. The disciplines of the eight-fold path are designed to enable the practitioner to realize the truth.
Exercise. Read the following passages, and select one that you find to be a gem—or the closest to being a gem. Modify the wording if you like until the thought satisfies your own convictions. Then take five minutes to ponder the thought, let it sink in, and allow your meditation to go beyond thought if that is a natural movement for you. After our meditation, we will discuss our experience.
Aesthetic images are used to convey the flavor of truth. "Someone who is intelligent will realize the truth right away by associating with someone wise for even a while, just as the tongue discerns the taste of the soup" (V.6 [The quotations and numbering in this paragraph are taken from the Thomas Cleary translation at Bantam Books). "Giving truth surpasses all giving; the flavor of truth surpasses all flavors; the enjoyment of truth surpasses all enjoyments . . . " (24.21). "A mendicant whose pleasure is truth, who delights in truth, who contemplates truth, and who follows truth, does not fall away from truth" (25.5). "Meditative, dispassionate, settled, accomplished, free from compulsion, having reached the supreme end; that is the one I say is priestly. By day the sun shines, the moon illumines the night; the warrior shines in armor, the priestly one shines in meditation. But the Buddha shines with radiant energy day and night." (26.4-5). To a mendicant with a calm mind who has entered an empty house, there occurs an unearthly pleasure from accurate discernment of truth. Whatever one comprehends the arising and passing away of the clusters [form, sensation, perception, combination, and consciousness], one attains a joyous happiness that is the immortality of knowers. (25.12-15)
The following quotations are from the Glen Wallis translation at Modern Library (Random House). The quotations are selected to portray a series of stages moving from enjoyment of beauty on a materialistic level to idealistic and celestial enjoyment of beauty to moving into the nirvana of indifference to enjoyment.
Come, look at this world.
It is like a king’s colorful chariot
Where childish people settle in.
For those who know,
There is no attraction. (13.171)
But the person who, having once been neglectful,
Is no longer neglectful
brightens this world
like the moon freed from a cloud. (13.172)
The wise person, rejoicing in giving,
is thereby at ease in the world beyond. (13.177)
Clear and pure as the moon,
Luminous, serene,
The delight for existence exhausted,
That one I call superior. (26.413)