Abstract
If listening to a Mozart sonata is like watching afternoon light graze a river’s swollen wave, then listening to John Cage’s composition 4’33” is like opening your eyes underwater. Simple and complete, the composition was first performed in a formal concert hall in 1952, where it shocked, perplexed and dazzled audiences. This work is like no other traditional classical music composition; it is a score which prescribes four minutes and 33 seconds of silence. In this paper, I embark on a cross-cultural analysis of 4’33”, using the seminal avant-garde work to clarify a subtle distinction between core tenets of the Madhyamaka and Yogācāra schools of Buddhism. Specifically, I argue that the performance of 4’33” expresses the two truths doctrine of the Madhyamaka school, and is an example of the emptiness of subject-object duality in Yogācāra thought.
Introduction
Buddhism is about solving an existential problem: dukkha. The drive to extinguish the persistent flame of worldly suffering forms the soteriological center around which all Buddhist schools of thought revolve. By recognizing the primordial illusion which causes all forms of grasping, we can begin the process of retraining experience to eventually see the true nature of reality. In accordance with both Madhyamaka and Yogācāra thought, the ultimate nature of reality is empty.
Madhyamaka and Yogācāra share this central belief but differ in their views of emptiness in relation to phenomena. The wise Mādhyamika will realize that all phenomena are empty of intrinsic nature; whereas, the wise Yogācārin will realize that all phenomena are empty of subject-object duality. The distinction between each school’s view of the ontology of phenomena is based in their differing views of dependent origination. To the Mādhyamika concerned with the true nature of reality, all parts of the conventional world are ultimately empty due to their interdependence. By privileging the “ontology of everyday life,” Mādhyamikas approach emptiness from the objective side, placing the onus on the subject’s perceptual processes to bring the external world into existence (Garfield, p. 34). By means of conceptual processes, the subject attributes properties to an ultimately empty reality. This point is highlighted by the example of water: we humans perceive water as a life-giving liquid, Buddhist deities perceive water as ambrosia, and pretas perceive water as pus and blood. The Madhyamaka view is that there are no inherent properties of water, but through the interaction between experiencing subject and experienced object, the water is perceived to have inherent properties. In reality, everything, including water, is empty of intrinsic nature; our belief that the imputed concepts and characteristics of the external world reflect how they really are is fundamentally deceptive. In fact, there is no one way to see the world because phenomena depend for existence on our subjective sensory and conceptual processes, which in turn depend on the social, biological, and mental structures of conventional reality. The centrality of interdependence in the Madhyamaka view of emptiness underscores its ontological foundation in conventional reality. Phenomenologically, the Madhyamaka experience of emptiness is the experience of interdependence, and so of the conventional world as conventional.
An ontological reading of Yogācāra entails that the emptiness of phenomena be understood by privileging the mind. Objects of the external world have no inherent existence and merely appear as such due to the subject’s complex cognitive and perceptual mechanisms. Subjects construct both the imagined properties of phenomena and the belief that phenomena truly exist as they are imagined in the mind. Thus, the apparent existence of all phenomena depends on the subject’s conceptual imputations. These mental activities prove extremely far-reaching, conditioning all levels of consciousness, and consequently forming the basis for the privileged ontological status of the mind as a “substantially real subjective substrate of those representations [of the external world].” While Madhyamaka valorizes the existence of objects of conventional reality due to their being dependently originated, an idealist reading of Yogācāra necessitates denying the existence of conventional phenomena, instead arguing that the mind is the cause of their appearing to consciousness as existent.
While the ontological analysis of phenomena produces a discrepancy between Madyhamaka’s conventionalist view of existent phenomena and Yogācāra’s idealistic view of nonexistent, purely constructed objects of experience, a phenomenological reading of Yogācāra will resolve the apparent conflict regarding interdependence by proving that emptiness arises in virtue of the nondual relation between phenomena and subjectivity. The search for the true nature of reality is purely metaphysical, but the examination of subjectivity in relation to these metaphysical entities and how they come to arise in consciousness is the domain of phenomenology. By thematizing phenomena, the need to distinguish the external world from an ontologically privileged mind falls away. The manifold objects of experience and the modes through which we come to be aware of them become the arena of exploration, not the transcendental reality which hangs behind all of experience. This thematization results only in a distinguishing of “the subjective from the objective aspects of a cognitive act, enabling an anatomy of experience, but not an investigation of reality” (Garfield, p. 91)
By approaching emptiness from the subjective side, Yogācāra manages to grant the existence of phenomena while maintaining the view of emptiness as that of subject-object duality. In fact, our subjective experience of phenomena is empty of dualistic projections. Objects of experience are just as unreliable as our experiences of them because subjectivity is constructed just as objects of experience are. Just as we confuse constructed experiences of external objects with the natures we impute to them, we also confuse our inner states with imagined natures, objectifying ourselves just as we do the external world. Reality is nondually related, but dualistically experienced. In the realm of phenomena, I am a subject of experience, but the self I experience and the objects of my experience are nondually related. Hence, phenomenology and ontology rely on each other to understand the fundamental nature.
We can’t simultaneously adopt the idealistic Yogācāra view and believe there is no external world, but because we presuppose our being in the world, it’s impossible to disbelieve in the existence of an external world, which leads to the conclusion that all of our experience must be inherently dualistic. In fact, Mipham accepts dependently originated conventional existents, albeit unanalyzed, as appearing to perception. These ever arising objects provide useful functions and are understood to be pure appearance in virtue of their designation as “conventional.” The appearance of a double moon (i.e. a cognitive phenomenon) is distinct from the appearing double moon. Cognitive phenomena exist in one way, but appear differently. Because the moon’s appearance exists conventionally, it’s necessarily deceptive; we’re only aware of the moon’s appearance as it appears to our subjective experience, not as an appearance of the double moon as it truly is. The double moon’s appearance is just consciousness appearing to itself.
Our awareness of appearances is still filtered through cognitive processes, rendering our access to consciousness susceptible to illusion. Vasubandhu’s phenomenological reading of Yogācāra underscores its consequent failure to deliver a metaphysical explanation of the true nature of reality, of which Mādhyamikas claim there is none. Objects of conventional reality aren’t completely denigrated in the Yogācāra view, but they only arise in experience as they appear to us. Since these apparent objects are conventional and don’t exist as they appear, they are conventionally non-existent. If we are fundamentally subject to primal confusion, then any kind of reasoning about our experience of reality can’t be taken to be true. All we have, then, is the world of apparent existents. The human enterprise therefore becomes an attempt to improve our understanding of the world, not to reach the purest understanding of what hangs behind it.
This paper has three main goals: to clarify Madhyamaka’s conception of emptiness, to clarify Yogācāra’s conception of emptiness, and to argue that by applying its own analysis of emptiness on the structure of subjective experience itself, the Yogācārin view makes possible a broader scope of spiritual development. Analyzing John Cage’s composition 4’33” through these thematic lenses will help me to achieve my goals.
Cage background
John Cage was an American composer known for his experiments with invented instruments and unorthodox compositional structure. With the aim of exiting the boundaries of conventional Western music, Cage looked to Zen Buddhism for a new conceptual framework that would ultimately allow him to reframe the concepts of traditional performance and purposeful sound. The early 1940s marked a crystallization of Cage’s compositional philosophy that would inform all of his subsequent work and deeply influence 21st century aesthetics and compositional practice. Cage’s view was that all actions that constitute the production of music must be viewed as parts of one natural whole. Furthermore, all sonic phenomena must be regarded as potential music, not just those that the composer chooses, turning the authoritarianism of Western classical music on its head.
This revolutionary, expansive view comes to life in the 1952 performance of Cage’s composition, 4’33”, a piece in three movements of durations 33s, 2m40s, and 1m20s respectively, whose score consisted solely of the instruction, “Tacet,” Latin for “it is silent,” indicating that the musician is not to play. In Cage’s words, the piece consists of the “absence of intended sounds.” Pianist David Tudor performed the piece for the first time in 1952 at the Maverick Concert Hall near Woodstock, NY. He walked onstage in the usual pristine garb, bowed to the audience, carefully smoothed his coattails as he sat before the piano, took out a stopwatch, and proceeded to open and close the keyboard lid at each specified time interval.
Ambient sounds––the rush of wind against the exterior walls, the thrum of raindrops on the roof, the grumblings of audience members on their way out of the theater––permeated the air in the concert hall. Thus, these “accidental sounds” became part of the composition and the performance itself. Cage viewed it as “an act of framing, of enclosing environmental and unintended sounds in a moment of attention in order to open the mind to the fact that all sounds are music,” blurring the “conventional boundaries between art and life” (Gann).
As with any challenge to a longstanding institution, the work proved extremely polarizing. Some reactions to a 2004 performance of the piece submitted by BBC listeners: “This is clearly a gimmick, when he ‘wrote’ this piece he was testing who was stupid enough to fall for it,” “I’ve never heard of such a stupid thing in my life! God rest his soul, but this ‘composition’ by Cage smacks of arrogance and self importance…” Cage explained that the audience’s resistance to the performance was actually a misunderstanding of their own perceptions: “What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds” (Gann).
Madhyamaka analysis: Two truths and emptiness
The two truths doctrine outlines the relation between the conventional and ultimate, which consequently illuminates the possibility of nondualistic expression. The explication of the two truths in the Heart of Wisdom Sūtra grounds the paradox of the ultimate nature of reality. Because everything is dependently originated, and that which is dependently originated is empty, all phenomena and metaphysical entities––including emptiness and dependent origination––are conventionally real, bearing their designations only in dependence on everything else. Everything is empty, and, what’s more, emptiness is also empty. Because it too is dependent on the phenomena of which it is empty, emptiness is empty of intrinsic nature and can thus only exist conventionally, not as a transcendental entity free from illusion, but simply as the fact that all phenomena are dependently originated and conventionally real.
In the ninth chapter of the Discourse of Vimalakīrti, the two truths doctrine comes to life in an interaction between two bodhisattvas trying to understand how to express the inexpressible. First, the lay bodhisattva Vimalakīrti asks a congregation of wise bodhisattvas to explain ultimate reality. Some reply that the distinction between the ultimate and conventional is illusory and that understanding this illusion is the way to understand ultimate reality. Then Mañjuśrī, a celestial bodhisattva of perfect wisdom, states that these responses fail because they’ve been trying to express the ultimate truth of nonduality by using language––an inherently dualistic mode. Instead, he posits that ultimate reality can only be understood once one transcends linguistic expression, becoming able “to express nothing, to say nothing, to explain nothing, to announce nothing, to indicate nothing, and to designate nothing.” Vimalakīrti responds with silence.
In the context of this sūtra, Vimalakīrti’s silence is understood to express the ultimately inexpressible, but we only understand it as such because his silence is framed as a kind of articulate response. Put another way: “Matter is not void because of voidness; voidness is not elsewhere from matter. Matter itself is voidness. Voidness itself is matter.” Where “matter” represents the conventional world of relations and “voidness” the ultimate truth of nonduality, this insight reflects Vimalakīrti’s recognition that only in relation to conventional modes of expression can the inexpressibility of the ultimate be understood.
The performance isn’t evidently didactic, but from a Buddhist view, 4’33” is a teaching of emptiness. By taking advantage of the mainstream understanding that musical performance should produce a certain kind of intentional sound, Cage uses the concert hall as the context of conventional reality in which his composition of four minutes and 33 seconds of silence can be understood as a form of articulate expression. Just as Vimalakīrti’s silence was understood as an expression of the inexpressible only in the context of a room of bodhisattvas hypothesizing about something beyond concepts and language, so 4’33” is only understood as an ultimately silent composition when its performance is expected to consist of intentional sound. In other words, silence (i.e. absence, ultimate reality, nonduality) only makes sense in relation to sound (i.e. presence, conventional reality, dualistic relations).
Further analysis will reveal that Cage’s act of containing sound within a prescribed period of intentional silence demonstrates that the ordinary understanding of silence as the absence of sound is fundamentally misguided. In fact, we can never actually experience silence as a positive determination; we only understand it nominally as experienced in moments where our attention is turned to the spaces between sounds. We assign meaning to the silence interspersed in sound when we place our attention on its presence in the interstitial space between the two, “rendering that very silence, or background, a kind of speech, and hence a new foreground” (Garfield, p. 256).
However, even when articulate, silence is still a form of discursive expression because of its understanding only being possible in relation to sound. Silence proves just as paradoxical as ultimate reality, continuing to probe us with the question of how an entity independent of all forms of consciousness can be understood and seemingly expressed through conventional modes. Nevertheless, we recognize the persistent paradox of ultimate reality and return “with an understanding of our predicament, just as awakening brings us back into the world, back, but with insight replacing confusion” (260).
Cage shows us that recognizing 4’33” as ultimately silent, empty of sound, doesn’t change the relation between intentional sound and musical performance, but offers the opportunity for us to reflect on the social and cultural inputs that condition our understanding of what counts as music and what merits its formal performance. The realization of emptiness doesn’t preclude the conventions of conceptual imputation and discursive thought; instead, realizing emptiness enables a wiser engagement with those conventional tools not as deliverers of reality, but tuning forks for consciousness, ontological landmarks that can help us stay rooted in reality.
Yogācāra analysis: Emptiness of subject-object duality
Emptiness according to Yogācāra doctrine is predicated upon trisvabhāva, the theory that all objects of experience have three causally related modes of existence (imagined, dependent, and consummate) which correspond to three different senses of emptiness (characteristics, production, and the ultimate) that coalesce to represent the emptiness of subject-object duality or externality of objects to mental processes. Primal confusion is believing that objects of experience appear to us as they are in reality, which results in the bifurcation of experience into a passively experiencing subject and independently existent objects.
Human beings are not “detectors” of the world, but active participants in relation to and constantly relating to all objects of experience. While shared imagination among human beings is helpful for talking about phenomena, there is a distinction between imagining independent characteristics and believing that they’re actually instantiated in objects. Upon contemplation, a nondual understanding that doesn’t thematize reality in terms of subject and object can be cultivated. Eventually, the properties of phenomena appearing in experience are realized to be constructed by the mind, ultimately producing objects which erroneously seem to exist independently. Experience can then be recognized as “a complex, opaque, causally determined construction of objects” (Garfield, p. 74).
Imagined nature (parikalpita) represents the naïve consciousness of objects as independently and externally existent, delivered to consciousness by infallible perceptual processes. The imagined nature of language, for example, is its ability to represent reality in virtue of the belief that its meaning is inherent and true. To realize that phenomena actually possess none of the properties we attribute to them is to realize their emptiness with respect to characteristics. In fact, perception of external objects arises due to our sensory faculties’ delivering them to consciousness in a series of neurobiological processes. Percepts only appear to consciousness as our own conceptual imputations.
Dependent nature (paratantra) is the consciousness of phenomena as dependent on cognitive and perceptual processes. Our cognitive and perceptual processes construct the objects of experience that appear to us in consciousness. The experience of phenomena as possessing imagined nature arises due to this active construction; thus, all percepts depend on the perceiver’s cognitive constructions. The dependent nature of language is that its function depends on common semantic structures which are in causal relation to determinate conditions of linguistic behavior and their effects on human behavior. Emptiness with respect to production is realized when phenomena are emptied of their dependence on our neurophysiological processes.
Consummate nature (pariniṣpanna) is that phenomena depend on our cognitive and perceptual constructions (i.e. have a dependent nature) and that we imagine them to exist independently, passively received, not constructed (i.e. have an imagined nature). When we realize that phenomena have no imagined nature, we recognize their dependent nature. Hence, that phenomena are empty of imagined nature is their consummate nature. The consummate nature of language is the absence of the imagined in the dependent. Realizing emptiness with respect to the ultimate is that no phenomena have the characteristics we attribute to them. Language doesn’t require syntax, representation, truth values, or shared understanding. In fact, language is empty of all of the things on which we imagine it to depend.
A grammatical analysis of the three natures further elucidates the relations between them. Pariniṣpanna and parikalpita are past participles, but paratantra is only a semantic designation. Dependent nature (paratantra) is purely nominal, representing the causal relation between experience and mental constructions. When we construct objects of experience, we imagine that they truly possess the characteristics we attribute to them. Upon seeing that our experience of the object depends on our predisposed cognitive constructions, we realize that because objects of experience exist as dependent but appear as imagined, they don’t exist as we imagine them. This is the realization of consummate nature, which is the ultimate goal of spiritual practice.
In verses 27-30 of Vasubandhu’s treatise Trisvabhāvanirdeśa, Vasubandhu’s magic show simile provides a framework for understanding the three natures and how they structure our experience of the world and ourselves. At a roadside magic show, a magician utters a mantra that causes the audience members to perceive a pile of sticks as an elephant. The object of experience (i.e. elephant) has three distinct modes of existence corresponding to the three different perspectives of the magic trick (i.e. magician, naïve villagers, and wise beings). If we grant that the elephant is an existent phenomenon available to experience, we’ll see that subject-object duality is nonexistent and caused to appear by mental constructions, just as the elephant was by the magician’s mantra.
An ontological analysis of the simile reflects the idealistic mind-only reading of Yogācāra and ultimately denies the existence of the apparent elephant as a pure mental construction. In verses 27-28, Vasubandhu argues that perception of external objects is like the naïve villagers’ perception of the conjured elephant as truly existent. The elephant’s imagined nature is a pure projection, representing the imagined characteristics we superimpose onto objects of experience as a result of cognitive and perceptual processes.
We can either incorrectly perceive the pile of sticks as an existent elephant, or we can correctly perceive them as a pile of sticks. In both cases, these percepts depend on our cognitive processes for their existence as objects of experience. In both cases, the experience––even when illusory––of these objects depend on how they’re constructed in the mind. By correcting the belief that the conjured elephant exists as an independent entity external to the mind, the wise beings in the audience see through the trick and understand that the object of their experience is truly just a pile of sticks.
The consummate nature of the elephant is that there is no existent elephant, just the absence of imagined nature in dependence on the mind. “[Since] our introspective experience depends on the mind, it is empty of those qualities we superimpose and of a dualistic relation to my subjectivity” (Garfield, p. 188). Thus, the true nature of the sticks is that they are not an existent elephant. They are purely constructions of the mind arising from a series of perceptual and physiological processes constituting our subjective sense faculties.
A phenomenological reading of Vasubandhu’s simile examines how subjectivity is structured to project duality on reality and experience. In verse 27, the elephant is nonexistent, conjured by the magician’s trick which represents the foundation consciousness which does all of the construction. In verse 28, the elephant represents the imagined nature, which has the same unreality as the conjured, nonexistent elephant. In verse 30, the elephant is duality itself where duality is its imagined nature.
In verses 28-29, Vasubandhu highlights the confusion of subjective experience with reality that occurs in everyday life. Caused by unconscious cognitive constructions, this confusion about our subjectivity causes the superimposition of subject-object duality onto reality, resulting in our mistaking the world we dually construct in the mind with the world we encounter. There is no elephant in reality; that it’s an object dually related to a subject is its imagined nature. This duality arises due to cognitive processes which lead us to confuse objects of experience with the “unreal structure of subject standing over and against object” (Garfield, p. 192). In distinguishing the act of construction from its content, Vasubandhu reveals to us the structure of subjective experience which inevitably leads to dualistic projections.
The dependent nature of objects of experience is represented by the pile of sticks arising in consciousness due to the magician’s mantra. Understanding that the apparently real pile of sticks is empty with respect to causation reveals that experience doesn’t deliver reality as it appears. Just as the pile of sticks produces the illusory appearance of a nonexistent reality, so does the experiencing subject. In distinguishing the act of experience from the content of experience, subjective experience is shown to be empty of dependent nature, without a distinct experiencer. So the subject is independent of her experience just like the pile of sticks. This is the consummate nature of subjective experience.
The performance of 4’33” can be thought of as a modern-day roadside magic show. Cage teaches us about the naturelessness of the experienced performance as well as that of the experiencing subjects. We assume that some members of the audience choose to ponder the performance as an act of commentary while some simply react to it as a gross waste of time and money. The wise being is analogous to the reflectively engaged audience members, the naïve villagers are analogous to the annoyed audience members, and the magician is analogous to the audience’s minds. The elephant is like the performance of 4’33”. This analysis will reveal that Cage’s work represents a profound insight into the nature of performance and the act of performing.
Like the wise beings at Vasubandhu’s magic show, the thoughtful audience members develop a more nuanced understanding of 4’33”. By understanding that the qualia of performance depends on the audience’s interpretation. They know that there is no universal way in which any performance exists and have bought tickets to the concert in hopes of taking away something of their own from the performance. Their reflection enables them to see the dependent nature of the performance, recognizing the performer’s conjuring trick but knowing that it’s only a trick.
On the other hand, the audience members who’ve attended the performance in hopes of hearing some first-rate classical music are like the naïve villagers who believe that the magician’s trick is real. They imagine musical performance has inherent sonic qualities and believe that the performer has an obligation to produce the quality of sound to which they attribute classical music performance. Mired in the imagined nature of performed sound, they operate under the assumption that each of their experiences of the external world are reflective of a singular mode in which it exists.
The minds of both the responsive and reactive audience members are like the magician in the magic show. The magician’s mantra causes their minds to perceive the pile of sticks as an existent elephant. Cage’s audience enacts a similar mantra by constructing the experience of the performance both as a prescribed duration of silence and as a comment on the intentionality of sounds conventionally attributed to musical performance. Their minds recognize that the experience of the performance is empty of both its dualistic imagined nature.
I argue that the subjective experience of 4’33” is like the conjured elephant. We could believe naïvely that our subjective experience of an apparently objective performance truly exists in this experiencer-experienced dyad. This would be to mistakenly apprehend the performance, our subject, and the dual structure of experience. Fundamentally, the performance or conjured elephant is a complex perceptual and cognitive response constructed in response to two stimuli: subjectivity and the dual structure of experience. Firstly, we construct our subjective experience in response to unseen predispositions conditioned by a variety of interwoven social inputs and internalized personal narratives. The Yogācārin would designate this construction as the result of a ripening of seeds in the fundamental consciousness. Secondly, the dual structure of experience results from a primordial projection of ourselves as immediately self-aware subjects constantly interfacing with distinct others.
The experience of 4’33” involves both of these constructions in that it encompasses not only the content of experience, but the act as well. Our experience is both that of the conjured elephant and of our experience of the elephant. Paradoxically, both the act of subjective experience and its content are just a pile of sticks on the side of the road, nondually related but dually experienced. Thus, a truly awakened understanding of 4’33” requires that we become the magician––aware of the act and of the appearance it produces.
The complexity of subjective experience is inescapable. While we inhabit a world lacking distinct boundaries between subject/object, internal/external, we nevertheless enact the magician’s conjuring trick on reality and our experience of reality. We superimpose a dualistic relation between our neurophysiological constructions and the external world onto a higher order experience of ourselves as the seemingly unifying subject “I” hanging behind all of experience. Because this reflexive apprehension is mediated by unseen, fallible processes, introspection is still subject to this dualistic superimposition. In other words, we deceive ourselves about our own subjectivity. However, I must presuppose this superimposition, even if I know that I’m the one enacting it, because without it I could never understand anything about the character of my subjectivity, including the fact of it being a construction.
In reality, I am the pile of sticks, simultaneously experiencing ourselves “as a pure subject, believing that it is not one, and an embodied being knowing itself to be nothing but a pure subject” (Garfield, p. 204). Because subjective experience presupposes the existence of an experiencing subject, any enlightened awareness we claim to have about the dualism we constantly project onto reality also applies to the very awareness of that act of projection. The entirety of subjective experience is hence illusory all the way down.
Danger arises when I begin to relate to this illusory projection as if it were my subjectivity. Forgetting that there is some unseen force creating subjectivity creates the risk of believing that my phenomenal subjective experiences reflect some intrinsic truth about my subjectivity. For example, when we hear a sound before turning our attention to the fact of our hearing it, we’re merely prereflectively conscious of our phenomenal experience. We allow ourselves to be affected by our implicit experience “without thematizing the sound or [our] affectedness by it.” In reality, all phenomena are present even if we don’t notice them; our noticing is nothing but a construction of phenomenal subjective experience only capable of delivering fictive dualistic forms of consciousness.
The carelessness illuminated in this example inevitably leads to affective states caused by belief in fictions that delude us about how we are in relation to the world and ourselves, consequently blocking us from realizing any ounce of truth about reality. It’s absolutely essential that when we reflect on anything we believe ourselves to have encountered, including our self-awareness as subjects and the phenomena which we experience, we remember that we’re only analyzing at best a reconstruction, mediated by unfathomable cognitive and psychic processes.
Conclusion
Using the elements of John Cage’s 4’33”, I have explicated the Madhyamaka and Yogācāra interpretations of emptiness. I have clarified the distinction between each school’s approach to the ontology and phenomenology of emptiness. I have shown that a phenomenological reading of Yogācāra emphasizes the importance of realizing the emptiness of subject-object duality in order to better understand ourselves and recognize that all subjective experiences are ultimately fictions.
As subjects, we can either be tossed from affective state to affective state by thoughts which appear to be out of our control, or become agents of these constructions and transform the attitudes which don’t serve us. It is true that 4’33” is a philosophically complex work containing profound insight into the nature of reality and conventional expression, but I believe its ability to transform how we relate to the world of phenomena immediately around and within us warrants its consideration as a modern-day Buddhist teaching illuminating the manifold wisdom we can gain from the conventional world.
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