ID Music: Dōgen I
ID Music: Dōgen I
North America's Gnarliest Mix for when you're done sifting and shuffling through other people's words
Inter-Dimensional Music airs weekly on Marfa Public Radio, LOOKOUT FM Los Angeles, and WQRT Indianapolis. Scroll down for archived shows, setlists, and broadcast times.
With this May 2022 series of shows I’m starting to get a little more organized in writing about the dharma talks and other language on Inter-Dimensional Music. Meditation started to become a regular part of the broadcast in 2016 when I took up residential practice at the Indianapolis Zen Center. By the time I started hosting Basking in Gravity – “mindfulness installations” combining video art, meditation, and yin yoga – it had become an organizing principle for the project.
ID Music is an art project that is informed by meditation, but it’s more of a deep listening experience. It might be a gateway to sitting meditation – aka zazen – but it’s not the same thing. I’m going to use the Void Contemplation Tactics newsletter to explore connections between these practices, and sometimes talk about the music too. In writing about meditation I’m also talking to myself, and making commitments to my own practice.
We’re starting with Zen Master Dōgen’s 13th Century text “The Practice of Meditation” because it’s one of the beginnings of Zen, both historically and personally. This 500 word treatise is one of the first things that Dōgen – the Japanese founder of the Soto School of Zen – wrote after returning to Japan from studying in China. It was also one of two photocopied pamphlets that I found sitting next to the sign-in sheet on my first visit to the Indianapolis Zen Center. They still have them there at IZC, or you can find the version I’m reading in Stephen Mitchell’s The Enlightened Mind, excerpted here.
Buddhism has a long and convoluted history – like any religion or spiritual practice that lasts more than a year or two – with schisms and sects and heretics and acolytes who expand, reduce, re-translate, misinterpret, illuminate, and sometimes totally reinvent the ideas at the heart of the Buddha’s teaching1. I like Zen because in theory it sidesteps gurus, religious authorities, convoluted metaphysics, and philosophical debate for praxis. “The practice of meditation is not a method for attaining enlightenment;” Dōgen writes, “it is enlightenment.”
“The Practice of Meditation” has also been translated as “Rules for Meditation” and “Universally Recommended Instructions for Zazen.” As with many trustworthy Zen texts, the authority implied by the title is cast aside almost immediately. Trve Zen heads are even better than anarchists at shirking boss labels2. “Don’t follow the advice of others; rather, learn to listen to the voice within yourself” is literally the sixth sentence from “The Practice of Meditation.” If you’re reading a Zen book and the author doesn’t suggest that they don’t know anything special, and that reading Zen books might be a waste of your time, then you might have strayed into the self-help section.
There are many ways to interpret what Dōgen is talking about here, which is why this practice appeals to me. He goes on to suggest different ways to organize your meditation space, the sort of clothes to wear, how to arrange your legs, types of breathing, and just how much you should open or close your eyes. But all of this information follows his instruction that you should do what works for you. You can learn to set the stage, but meditation isn’t something you learn, and enlightenment isn’t something you attain. It’s something that you realize about where you are when you stop wishing you were somewhere else. Other people can offer guidance and companionship, but they can’t actually sit for you. Reading books and sutras and listening to dharma talks or community radio meditation experiments featuring a mix of metal, ambient, jazz, dub, and Live Dead might help, but all of these things are about meditation. They are not meditation.
Zen instruction is like a book about avocados. I can read about the nutritional benefits of avocados, and discover new ways of preparing them. But I stay hungry until I eat an avocado. The avocado is good for me – and I’ve sated my hunger – regardless of whether or not I know why it’s good for me.
This gets lost in a lot of commercial Zen because telling people they already have everything they need – and that there’s no secret knowledge to be revealed – is not always a good way to sell books, apps, or newsletter subscriptions. But if someone is withholding secret knowledge about inner peace in the interest of getting money from you, that secret might not be as valuable as they suggest.
In my experience Zen is useful as part of a larger mental heath care regimen that also includes therapy, head meds, and stuff like diet and exercise. All of these things have helped me in different ways at different times, because they all do different things. Talk therapy and head meds are usually about making improvements, figuring things out, and getting better. Zen is about taking a break from conceptual thoughts like “making,” “improvement,” “figuring,” “getting,” and “better.” As one of my teachers at the Indianapolis Zen Center used to tell practitioners once we’d settled in the dharma room, the goal of our practice is to be in the room. I am in the room. A version of myself that is 10% happier is somewhere else.
Inter-Dimensional Music isn’t zazen, but it is an opportunity to be in the room, and a chance to let conceptual thinking lapse for an hour. As with sitting meditation, there are passages that might not be comfortable. There’s usually some kind of through-line to the disparate music that I play, but the goal of ID Music practice is to feel the sound, not to figure it out.
More Dōgen in the weeks to come. In the meantime, thank you as always for listening on the air, streaming from the archive, subscribing (amazing!), subscribing for money (outstanding!), visiting the web page (very nice), opening the email, clicking the links, and for attaining the goal of being wherever you are.
I’m also grateful when people pass this email around. We don’t do a lot of promotion, but smiles and whispers between those who know are most welcome.
blessing up and blessing down,
DC
20220506 PROGRAM NOTES
North America's Gnarliest Mix for when you're done sifting and shuffling through other people's words
For this week's practice, we'll hear collaborative electronics that are "as much Mille Plateaux as classic 80s industrial shortwave-sampling or dub," Oglala Lakota black metal, a squalling tangle of Midwestern grind, and death metal from Missouri that recognizes that “the mode of this material world is suffering."
Our session begins and ends with "de/anti-colonial ambient/noise" from Tahlia Palmer's Amby Downs project. A newly described variation on these forms that offers an opportunity for revitalization without avoidance.
Language throughout the broadcast from Zen Master Dōgen's "The Practice of Meditation."
The image for today’s broadcast is taken from the ongoing “White River, Slow Flow” project. This heavily manipulated slow-motion video of the river that runs near our home in Muncie will be compiled at the end of the month into a new installment of the Void Contemplation Tactics meditation video series, along with the dharma talks from this month’s broadcasts. Previous videos are available in the Vimeo archive.
artist – work
amby downs - from all lineage
amby downs - civilian
Sabaturin - Mourgouskus
Batu - Emulsion of Light
Raum - Restoration
Martyaloka - Righteousness
Cloud Rat - Them Bones
Closet Witch - Dogs Running
Maȟpíya Lúta - Wówačhiŋtȟaŋka
Mizmor & Thou - Drover of Man
Emma Ruth Rundle - Dead Set Eyes
amby downs - wiigunma-li
☸️ Dōgen - The Practice of Meditation
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See also The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching by Thich Nhat Hanh for a long-form exploration of these concepts.
This doesn't always play out IRL when you are arguing with the guiding teacher at the Zen commune that storing dairy products in shady corner of the garage doesn't save any money and isn't sanitary but that is also sometimes true of anarchists in my experience.