REPRESENTATION AND MEANING

Buddhist theory or practice tells us that at the root of things, forms are empty.  That is to say, as one proceeds toward enlightenment, we work to separate the meaning, or content, from form.  Two words commonly used in this tradition to describe meaning are narrative and story.  (Wright.  pp 142-152)

As an example of narrative, picture a colonial house on a tree lined street.   We might say to ourselves, what a great place to have a wonderful candle lit dinner with a fire in the fireplace.  The association of the quality of the dinner you can have in the house is what is deemed the narrative.

Another word that Buddhists use is story.  As another example, a representational drawing, or a photograph for that matter, of the interior of Hagia Sophia, enables us to assemble a narrative story around the image.  We might apply the words dark and gloomy to the image.  Or we might narrate about how dramatic shafts of sunlight that are raking the space from the clerestory windows over which the dome floats is as if it is the light of God.

The story or narrative are what the Buddhists term meaning.  And the Buddhist goal is to remove that meaning, that literary fabrication from the form, from the object.  Buddhists would tell us that true understanding will be possible only after the narrative, or story,  has been removed from form.  One of the central goals of meditation is to quiet the narrative;  the goal is to quiet the incessant chatter inside your brain.  They would tell us that our narrative of a colonial home or the story of Godlike raking shafts of light in a basilica are fabrications.

And I submit that narration is analogus to representation.  That is to say, just as a story about a form prevents us from knowing the truth, representation prevents us from knowing the truth of the form.

Can we consider the act of transparent drawing as a return to the understanding of the form as a pure object?  Is it going too far to say that Transparent Drawing allows the contemplation of the empty form; the form without meaning;  the true form?  And in this contemplation of the pure form, devoid of false meaning, our drawing is closer to the truth?

For we just might as easily say that the colonial home representation is repressive, as it recalls a dominant patriarch.  Or raking shafts of light in a worship space might trigger memories of religious usursupation.

Yet transparency gives us the tool with which to separate narrative from form.  Transparency allows us to quiet the narrative so as to examine the form carefully.  Our newfound ability to separate form from story allows us to separate truth from fabrication.

I would not have been able to make the association between representation and narration without reading Robert Wright’s, Why Buddhism is True.  I was able to map Transparent Drawing onto their thoughts in the chapter titled Encounters with the Formless.   This is a great book that everyone should read.  And I remain struck with the Buddhist suppression of words as a path to truth, which is a practice that is thousands of years old.

1.  Wright, Robert. Why Buddhism is True. Simon and Schuster. New York. 2017.