—— < The Vimalakïrti Sütra·Entering the Gate of Nondualism >
The Gate of Nondualism as a medicinal spiritual medium
More than 2,000 years ago, the Vimalakirti Sutra revealed the profound and mysterious the Gate of Nondualism. In this sutra, the term "Nondualism" refers to the coexistence of "trouble and bodhi", the two sides of the same coin, which are fundamentally a flower in the air, a moon in the water, a phantom in a dream bubble. If one can realize such a state, he or she can attain the most complete wisdom of Buddhahood, which is free from words and images.
Today, more than two thousand years later, the world is entering a paradoxical wave of Accelerationism, in which Heidegger asserts that the Gestell of technology will uproot people and eventually make them wanderers with no way to return home. In this context, can the ancient " the Gate of Nondualism" play the role of Heidegger's "der letzte Gott" to save us? The answer becomes another "no words and no language".
Nevertheless, when we look at stations, airports, and bookstores around the world, Buddhist books represented by the "the Gate of Nondualism" are being preserved in the form of Bernard Stiegler's "Tertiary Retention" technology, and are high on the list of best-selling paper media. This shows that even if the "the Gate of Nondualism" cannot promise salvation in the age of technology, it may be able to serve as a medicinal medium for the birth of a new "phantom in a dream bubble" and recreate a different kind of aura in the age of technological reproduction.
In a small foreign house on the third floor of the Gene Gallery in the bustling Sichuan Middle Road, four artists from China and Japan are using "the Gate of Nondualism" as a spiritual medium to weave a new "phantom in a dream bubble" in the modern city of Shanghai, the magic capital.
Phantom is the key of Aura
Since the Enlightenment, the search for rational sunshine has become the first priority of modern civilization. Soon, philosophers such as Nietzsche and Theodor Adorno also saw all the drawbacks of modernity in seeking only light, and their philosophies then called for the return of shadows, and also looked forward to the coming of night. In fact, in the ancient Indian view, day and night were originally a duality of interactive movement.
In the modern city where "Taoism has split under the sky" (in the words of Zhuangzi) and where the Nondualism has become a duality, Liu Lu dismantles the absolute barriers of truth and falsity, precision and ambiguity, and she uses acrylic on canvas as the material to conjure up a poetics of shadow and night. In "Rhetoric of Shadows", Liu Lu uses romantic brushstrokes, overlapping light and shadow, and the rhythm of shadows to ask what is the reality of existence. In "Midnight Web", she tries to break through all the rules of the net with the throbbing fiery red of the late night. Sometimes overkill has to be overdone,Liu Lu's phantom poems may be the key to the aura.
The surreal aura after the transformation of consciousness into wisdom
According to the Sutra on the Causes and Beginning of the World which belongs to Hinayana Buddhist on "Becoming, Living, Destroying and Empty", everything in this world is made up of the four major natures of earth, water, fire and wind, which are constantly in flux and change, and cannot be fixed at any moment, and eventually return to emptiness. Wang Shiwen's series of works capture the ever-changing natural elements such as wind, earth and gold, and use them as a source of inspiration to construct a surreal dream world in her subconscious.
Since Sigmund Freud proposed the subconscious, the study of the surrealist school of painting has often taken it as a guiding principle. In Buddhism, close to the subconscious is the Arya consciousness, which refers to the storage of all past thoughts, actions, etc. in the form of seeds, and which will re-produce results under proper karma. Wang Shiwen's works such as "Light Spin" and "Falling Debris Rained On Us From Above" try to explore the seeds of memory fragments and how they can be folded and transformed into surreal and fantastic works such as light cones. Rabindranath Tagore loved birds in the summer, and Wang Shiwen was perhaps inspired by this, rehearsing it as a magical play: a bat that is indistinguishable from the real one will be far away. Of course, the Arya consciousness is only a convenient illusion, not a real one. This is also reflected in Wang Shiwen's "The Overthinker", in which the scene begins to break up, with the intention of transcending any established thinking, which is similar to the Buddhist teaching of turning (mortal) consciousness into (holy) wisdom in order to reach the state of Nondualism.
Building the eternal land of fantasy in a flash
In the Vimalakirti Sutra, there is a koan of the"Heavenly Goddess Scattering Flowers":at that time there was a heavenly being, a goddess, in Vimalakirti's room who, seeing these great men and hearing them expound the Law, proceeded to make herself visible and, taking heavenly flowers, scattered them over the bodhisattvas and major disciples.When the flowers touched the bodhisattvas,they all fell to the floor at once, but when they touched the major disciples, they stuck to them and did not fall off ……So long as one has not done away with all such entanglements, the flowers will stick to him. But they will not stick to someone who has eliminated them all.When a Bodhisattva attains enlightenment and attains the state of non-duality, he no longer suffers from the seven emotions and six desires, and can "pass through all the flowers without a single leaf touching his body".
In recent years, Guo Yage's works are often based on literature, poetry and mythology, and the present work is often implicitly in line with the " Heavenly Goddess Scattering Flowers". She likes Camus's The Outsiders, and like Meursault, contemplates the absurdity and futility of the times. She is also inspired by Hermann Hesse's Buddhist novel "Siddhartha," a rich and varied series of blues that sometimes create a dreamy stillness and indistinctness, and sometimes reveal a faint sentimentality and solemnity. However, Guo Yage does not carry the scars and decadence to the end, but tries to discover and break the absurdity of consciousness and desire themselves through the misty and spirituality of the floral clusters surging. She pins her hopes on Aurora, the goddess of the dawn, and perhaps with the wings of an angel, one can fly to the eternal land of fantasy in a flash.
Real person without a place before the birth of his mother
Vimalakirti, who was a Buddhist monk, gave a distinctive expression to the "the Gate of Nondualism", which is free from words and images, through "silence without words". This negative and deconstructive expression left an excellent model for the teaching of Zen Buddhism in China and Japan more than a thousand years later. Yixuan in the Temple Linji uses the metaphor of "a real person without a place on the bare flesh", and Zhixian in Mountain Xiangyan invents the beginning of the conversation "the original face before the birth of the mother", which provide a starting point for Zen practitioners. These straightforward, in-the-moment Zen styles have also inspired artists.
Kyoto-born Akiko Ueda specializes in using painting as a medium for capturing the meteoric moments of life. Some of the inspiration for Ueda's current works comes from the more relaxing moments on the playground. The seemingly uneventful spinning of the wooden horse becomes a perfect fitting opportunity for her to "realize" the inversion of the mirror image and to rethink the illusion of the center and the edge. She is also attentive to the growth and death of plants and animals, the gathering and dispersion, and the separation, and then allows the natural brushstrokes to wander freely, and eventually, like Zhuang Zhou dreaming of a butterfly, she transforms into a jazz of unity and Non-duality. Such improvisation is also similar to the main theme of the Zen branch of Dharma Eye Buddhism, "everything is ready". In "Barehanded Pilgrimage", Ueda has the boldness of Zen Buddhism, which is to untangle and unbind, and to go straight to the original nature before the birth of his mother, as a naive "real person without a place".
The above is the contemporary context in which the four Chinese and Japanese female artists have jointly composed a quartet of variations on the theme of "A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream" from the Diamond Sutra. At the end of Faust, Goethe gave the highest eulogy to women: "The eternal woman, who leads us up". However, in the light of the ultimate "the Gate of Nondualism", the phases of male and female are, by nature, illusory. Perhaps the more important question is whether we modern people can still rekindle the aura of beautiful life under the guidance of the"the Gate of Nondualism".