Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World

by Stephen Batchelor

And the term that I currently use is “the everyday sublime.” “Everyday,” because I feel the sublime is not reducible to magnificent sunsets and vast views of the Himalayas. If you look carefully and mindfully at the tiniest detail of what’s going on, that is just as awe inspiring as the stars in the night sky. When you look at a leaf or a blade of grass—very Sŏn, I suppose—that’s the sublime. The sublime has to be here and now.

There is no reason why a Buddhist should not profoundly value works of art that are not intentionally Buddhist. For if a work of any tradition heightens awareness of the three marks of existence (impermanence, suffering, not-self), it will serve the fundamental tasks of Buddhism: to fully know anguish, to let go of self-centered craving, to realize cessation, and to cultivate the path.

As soon as you make the perceptual shift to seeing the object as a condition of light, what you observe becomes as tentative, shimmering, and luminous as light itself.

Same thing with drawing. To draw something "true to life" you have to stop thinking about the object as an object, and instead think of it as a series of interrelated shadows and shapes. The concept of "coffee mug" gets in the way of the reality of the mug's curvature, texture, proportions, and color.

The photographer becomes absorbed by the restless contrasts of line, color, shading, and what is in and out of focus to the point where the object as a recognizable “thing” disappears.

This is my favorite kind of photography to do

Each of the 81 discarded bits of paper, plastic, or cloth I came across appeared at first sight to be self-evidently “white.” But when rearranged into a mosaic of 1,296 noncontiguous squares, it became evident that none of them were in fact the same “white” at all. There was no such thing as “white,” only infinite shades of whiteness.

In picking it up and gluing it on card, I arrest its decay and save it from further damage. Once preserved, each salvaged object bears witness to the history of its frictive and entropic relationship with the world.

This reminds me of Catcher in the Rye

There I rummage through shoe boxes filled with discarded photographs and postcards,

I have some of these photos from this exact kind of sale in Paris