Inter-Dimensional Music 20210903
North America's Gnarliest Mix for illuminating your original face
stream | download | instrumental
Inter-Dimensional Music is heard weekly on the airwaves of Marfa Public Radio, LOOKOUT FM Los Angeles, and WQRT Indianapolis.
Our series looking at the "Original Face" koan continues this week, as the Sixth Patriarch politely suggests to an envious monk that hidden meanings within the dharma are contained within his own damn self. You can find the first installment of our series, including the full text of the koan, as part of ID Music 20210827:
Koans are usually presented as-is. They’re not supposed to be easily resolved or unpacked with reason and logic, but many collections will offer a teacher’s commentary as follow-up. The San Francisco Zen Meditation blog has two such commentaries on “Original Face.” The first is a discussion of two newcomer Zen students’ reaction to the koan. The second provides some deep historical context that isn’t immediately apparent. “The story is told in a terse form that leaves out the events that led to confrontation between the two leading characters,” they write. “That is doubtless because Chan monks in those days were already completely familiar with the events leading up to that fateful encounter.”
I grew up in a conservative evangelical church, and Zen’s skepticism about religious authority is one reason I remain engaged with the practice. This koan is one of many examples of Zen’s subversion of established religious hierarchies. The monk in this story is pursuing Huineng, the freshly minted Sixth Patriarch, out of envy. Huineng was a layperson - “an illiterate woodcutter” – who worked in the monastery’s kitchen. As in many similar stories, he turns out to have a deeper understanding of the dharma than the learned monks that surround him. Huineng is secretly appointed to succeed the Fifth Patriarch, who bestows him with the ceremonial robe and bowl of the koan’s title.
The outgoing Patriarch “warned Huineng that he should flee that same night, since many senior monks would be jealous and assume Huineng had stolen the robe and bowl.” The koan is the story of one envious monk’s encounter with Huineng. Dig deeper at at the SF Zen blog’s course on koans.
A similar story serves as the plot to Raining in the Mountain, the 1979 martial arts epic written and directed by King Hu. I’m new to Hu’s work, and grateful to the Criterion Channel for introducing me to “the wuxia specialist’s infusion of Buddhist principles into martial-arts cinema.” The short videos that accompany ID Music’s “Original Face” series are heavily manipulated edits from the film.
Koans can be confounding, but perhaps never so much as our counterintuitive mix of yin and yang frequencies. We'll hear a selection of "multi-instrumental music combining devotional folk, international/cosmic jazz, new age, and roots & dub" from ML Wah, black metal that ranges from "pretty sure it's not sketchy" to "anti-sketchy," and a raga emanating from the Canadian prairie.
Our practice begins and ends with excerpts from Whisper Fold Brush: sounds created for an ASMR performance piece by the artist Sofie Birch. Your host reads from "The Sixth Patriarch's Robe and Bowl" version of the Original Face koan as found in the Entangling Vines collection.
📹 Montane Precipitation / Apologies to King Hu (#CosmicChambo Slow Inversion Edit)
🔊 Sofie Birch x ML Wah
✍️ "The Sixth Patriarch's Robe and Bowl"
20210903 setlist
artist - track
Sofie Birch - Whisper Fold Brush (excerpt)
ML Wah - Head Home (instrumental)
Haunter - Thus My Undertaking, to Reject Stagnation, and to Liberate Fervency
Wolves in The Throne Room - Primal Chasm (Gift of Fire)
Enslaved - As Fire Swept Clean The Earth
Mare Cognitum - Antaresian
Holy Drone Travelers - I am You, I am Me (सोहम /Sohum) - Part I
White Magic - All the World Wept
Carlos Niño & Friends - Cloud Prayer
Sofie Birch - Whisper Fold Brush (excerpt)
Dharma: Original Face aka The Sixth Patriarch's Robe and Bowl aka Eno's Good and Evil
Find more from many of these artists on the Inter-Dimensional Music library on Bandcamp.