Birthing Buddhas

By Robert A. F. Thurman

What is art? It springs from the discovery that freedom, bliss, and love are the deepest realities of the triuniversal world.1 The self-transcending wisdom that discovers such realities is said to be the “Mother of All Victorious Buddhas” (sarvajinamat ̄a). She is associated with the fertile triangle of absolute emptiness, signlessness, and wishlessness, which grants freedom from all suffering and is the loving source of all liberated beings and things.

When a being attains such wisdom, she or he discovers that life is art, since there are no more compulsions to be or not to be. One is free to remain in peaceful aloofness, afloat in the sea of bliss; but there is also no insensitivity, no ignoring the suffering of other beings from whom one feels no separation. So then, naturally, one feels like investing that freedom in helping others find their own deeper reality of their own deepest nature of freedom-bliss. But each of them has a particular wall of defense, a particular configuration of the solid-seeming, apparently undeniable sense of separateness, alienation, and aloneness, stirring discontent and insecurity, fear and loathing, appetite and aversion.

The true artist, explorer of reality, discoverer of its heart with her or his heart, letting go of all superficial holding on, floats lightly free while maintaining sensitivity in all directions, like the thousand-armed, 1,033-eyed, divine Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara; sustains with ease such a cognitively dissonant double-exposure awareness, seeing everything as made of bliss while not overlooking beings so made yet ignorantly persisting in experiencing themselves as trapped in suffering. Such artists’ wisdom keeps them free, balanced in bliss, while their compassion keeps them attuned to others’ suffering. That attunement tirelessly drives their careful reaching out to open hearts, relieve pain, and heal sickness—whatever it takes to evoke the others’ underlying health of subatomic bliss.

Such an awareness, intuitively if not always conceptually present in the heart of the artist’s process, ensures that any movement, any manifestation, any aggregation is sheer art, natural art- fulness. Wisdom-bliss emanates as love and compassion in endlessly various artful creations—works of art—that engage others and open for them, on either conscious or subliminal levels or both at once, the doors of liberation from their suffering. In fact, what we call beauty is itself the perception of such a doorway of release, however subtle or magnificent. In some cases it stirs experience of a breakthrough awareness of a suffering they didn’t know they were entrapped in. At other times it opens their imagination to the astounding possibility of actually being free from suffering. There are many aesthetic tastes, from tragic poignancy to comic hilarity, to awe, to disgust, to sympathy, to adoration, every single one capable of some degree of self-transcending ecstatic release. Finding each of these in the artist’s own heart shapes the specific creative manifestation that opens the heart of anyone then reached in precisely just this or that way. The power of each experience comes from the depth of the artistic heart and is gently modulated by skilled attunement to the capacity and sensitivity of the recipient.

Arlene Shechet’s buddhas and blue mandalas probe toward and draw from the DNA origins of such doors to liberation, just the way the loving buddha mind articulates forms as doorways to freedom. She elaborates seemingly individuated bodies—bodies fully or partially formed—inviting the viewer to nurture, or applaud, or embrace, depending on how that person needs to encounter their own free potential.

The expression “buddha-nature” comes from Sanskrit tath ̄a-gata-garbha. Tath ̄a means “thus,” or “such,” which indicates a chosen thing as a doorway to something else. One indicates some- thing as “such,” meaning it is “like” itself while also being some- thing beyond itself. Everything is just “such as itself,” meaning it is not only itself, but also more. It is an instance of the absolute in the relative, the transcendent in the immanent, by being essentially free of itself. Gata means “gone”—the Chinese translated it as “come” ( ̄agata)—in the sense of having fully understood the transcendent “suchness” of things by realizing one’s oneness with it; by melting into it, experiencing that one is not anything other than it; losing oneself in it and being reborn free within it, thus losing even one’s being lost, so to speak. Therefore the realized one is “gone” into suchness and “comes” in suchness (not “from” it as it is everything there and here), and so on. Finally, garbha means both “womb,” a nurturing membrane that lovingly and selflessly and self-sacrificingly grants life, and also “fetus,” the embryonic being that is nurtured and loved and given embodiment within the membrane. So it’s not merely a “nature,” it’s really a buddha-essence, a buddha-soul, a buddha-being essentially beyond progression in time yet also evolving to being fulfilled in time, the potential embodiment of perfect bliss embraced by the wisdom of freedom as a loving, bliss-bestowing, nurturing membrane. This buddha essence is life itself redeemed by realistic bliss from the suffering of alienation, emerging into form from the “Buddha-Mother,” the wise and loving awareness that constitutes the void clear light plenum of micro and macro life forms gently embraced in its minutely careful attention of blissful calm.

Arlene’s art makes me think of the manifestations of the Bodhisattva Sadaprarudita (“Ever-Weeping”) in the 8,000 Line Transcendent Wisdom Sutra who weeps and laughs with relief and joy at seeing buddhas in every atom, and in every trans-galactic pattern and in all stages of formation and deformation: in every dimension and in between them all! Sometimes they appeared and sometimes they disappeared, and all his tears and self-transcend- ing acts flowed forth spontaneously from his merging with that blissful reality of total goodness and safety and abundant generous all-powerful yet unobtrusive loving nurture. For me, all of Arlene’s creations intuitively evoke and celebrate that deep reality, the non- duality of transcending beauty and mere existence, embraced by nonexistence. As she once explained to me, in the making of her buddhas, process is important: she only has a limited amount of time, while the plaster is hardening, to make the shape and lay in the colored skins of paint. So she has to be aware: of time and the materials and herself and the object, as the plaster sets. The buddhas she ends up with hold the time of their making; they capture her process and transmit a sense of form melting into formlessness and formlessness emerging as form. They give a hint of the liberating view of impermanence, not as something to fear but as something that is, in its essence, a buddha. She came up with this process after making a decision to bring more awareness into her studio life. Though she did not set out to make buddhas, they came like a gift she didn’t know she was looking for.

As seer and artist, Arlene delves down, dives down, melts down into reality, opening mind and heart while peeling away layer after layer of inner and outer surface unrealities until boundless freedom is given out and gone into, beyond grasping and so revealed as intimately close. Then beyond that beyond, her process elaborates new layers of bliss-in-form playfully emerging as gestures of love, artist’s freedom releasing inexhaustible inspiration forming itself into buddhas in all stages of gestation. Thus energized in joy, Arlene mindfully shares her natural flow, spontaneously yet with fully artful care, creating a variety of communicating manifestations that respond precisely to different viewers’ receptivities.

The transcendent wisdom mantra is:

OM ̇ GA TEY GA TEY PA RA ̄ GA TEY PA RA SAM ̇ GA TEY BO DHI SVA HA ̄!

Mantras do not impart meaning in the ordinary way of a discursive sentence, catering to the conceptual mind alone. Each word and sound has meaning, but they also evoke and celebrate a particular reality. To riff for a moment on this Heart Sutra mantra:

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“OM (Be with me, buddhabodyspeechmind!), gone (I give my heart), gone

(it’s given away), super-gone (totally merged me, my gift, and its recip- ients), super-altogether-gone (back here meditatively balancing step by step the gone-beyond and here-in-love-together-with-you-all), awakened (in bliss-freedom-indivisible-present all-petal-white-lotus full bloom), all hail! (I salute the inconceivable all-goodness-truth-beauty of reality as it has ever been, will ever be, IS!)

Of course it’s ultimately all beyond words, yet words kindly catapult us beyond themselves. While the Art of Arlene is itself beyond these meditations, looking at her creations inspires me in this way. Arlene’s buddhas are totally natural. They evolve as life-sustaining. Her buddhas, and the generative mandala patterns she perceives and manifests, really do now strike me as revelatory of the voidness-compassion-womb (shunyat ̄a-karun. ̄a-garbham. ) that is, in N ̄ag ̄arjuna’s famous phrase, reality.