Art Reboot

50 Unsurprisingly for a culture that not only values enlighten- ment but aims directly and efficiently towards it, Chinese records of transcendent experience are legion. Hanshan Deqing (1546– 1623), an influential Ming-dynasty Buddhist monk and poet, records a visit to a mountain monastery. On arrival, he asked the monk Miao Feng why he didn’t find the constant noise of roaring wind and rushing water disturbing, and was told: You should listen without judgement, concentrating on the act of merely hearing so that no thoughts of any kind can arise in your mind. Thereafter, Hanshan Deqing went every day to a wooden bridge to try to master this technique, until one day he became able to step beyond his interpreting mind: My thoughts ceased to surge like water. The noise and my existence were gone. Serenity enveloped my mind. After that, whenever I heard a sound that previously would have annoyed me, all I had to do was concentrate on the sound without mentally grasping it, and I would be lulled into the same serene state . . . One day, while I was walking , I happened to stop and stand still, and in that blissful moment I entered samadhi [enlightenment] . Soon I ceased to be aware of anything except a great brightness . . . It seems that the first experience of rising above meaning may have been a glimpse of the transcendent state, while the ‘great brightness’ is the full transcendent experience of casting aside self