A Buddhist Path of Poetic Atmospheres
Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey
The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions.
In The Therīgāthā—The Poems by Early Buddhist Nuns, a woman known only as Sumangala’s Mother reaches the moment of highest awakening, and it brings to her a memory of the sound of bamboo being split. This made me wonder: What is the sound of bamboo when it’s being split? What is it to me, who has never heard it? Is the sound wet, like water leaving or arriving? Does it carry the snap of something breaking or the sigh of something letting go? Sumangala’s Mother suggests it can make you disappear. In that case, upon whom does the memory act: upon the one who still exists or upon the one who existed earlier?
After decades of studying Buddhism academically and on a cushion, these questions opened my present investigative fascination—the possibility of a path to awakening that winds through poetic atmospheres.
Although difficult to pinpoint or describe, this path could be cultivated through Buddhist meditation training—even if this path of poetic atmospheres does not belong to the mainstream methods and pedagogies offered in Buddhist centers and monasteries, and its discipline is almost impossible to comprehend. This path is not realized by means of industrious labor on a meditation cushion or by mastering ethical perfection, but by surrendering to spontaneous words that come to the mind or sudden glimpses from the sensual world.
The path of poetic atmospheres mirrors processes described in works of mainstream Buddhist pedagogy, such as Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, which I analyzed in Embodied Nature and Health: How to Attune to the Open-source Intelligence (Routledge, 2022). The sutta states that each micro-moment of life consists of attention touching an object, and its pedagogy suggests exposing this attention to ever more subtle realities that are better described by words like “atmosphere” than “object.”
There is a common phase in the Buddhist process of awakening, whether induced by poetry or by discipline-based effort, that I call a “surprising pleasure.” It is sweet and overwhelming. It offers experiences unknown to those who do not meditate, experiences which, when described, sound contradictory in our languages, such as “the thrill of tranquility.” The surprise wears many faces: it is sudden, comes from no direction, and is neither expected nor planned as the result of any special labor.
Typically, the surprise is considered to result from detachment from sensual pleasures, but it may be provoked by sensual experience itself. Various meditative experiences I had over three years of meditating in Buddhist monasteries, mainly in Asia, led me to distinguish between the impulse that provokes the surprising pleasure and the pleasure itself. The pleasure indeed bears the taste of independence from sensual stimulation; it just does not need it. After the surprising pleasure matures, it is autonomous. Still, it was provoked by a sensual impulse.
That pleasure, which may be felt as an atmosphere spreading beyond the skin frontier of our body, throws us outside the ruts of expected experience. It can transport us to worlds known from Buddhist cosmology; it can bring a clarity never before encountered; it can serve as a foundation that deepens meditation to the point of liberating us from ourselves. It can be simply described as awe.
According to mainstream Theravada Buddhist tradition, that surprising pleasure can also be treated analytically as consisting of two specific experiences that arise only at a certain level of advancement: pīti and sukha, joy and ease. They are eudaimonic pleasures; they do not come as results of hedonic satisfaction. They are distinctive, and their first experience always takes us by surprise. They have their causes. Namely, vitakka and vicāra, meaning directing attention and sustaining it: two mental factors that, when developed, ignite Buddhist meditation and, when activated, signal the departure from the world of fantasizing on the meditation cushion.
When the Nun Patacara (also mentioned in the collection of poems above) washed her feet one day, she decided to make “the water useful in another way by concentrating on its movement from the higher ground down.” This experience of gravity’s elegant work shook her. It was an act of the auto-pedagogy of freedom based on poetic attention applied not to a single concept or sensation but to an atmosphere—perhaps the best pedagogy ever created, surpassed only by the pedagogy of non-pedagogy that unfolds when awakening is reached.
Becoming immersed alternatively in the technical description of meditation and the poetry of awakening, I realized that the duration of a poetic literary piece offers a wonderful platform for the sustaining vicāra to endure. The magnetic dramaturgy of poetic words holds attention in one place, even as it feeds attention with a series of shifting images rather than a single fixed one. This realization marks, for me, the beginning of the research to come.