The Artist As Sadhaka

By John Speirs

The author, whose name rhymes with Shakespeare's, not with church spires, hails from Scotland but has made India his home for more than thirty years past. A disciple of Nataraja Guru, who is himself a disciple of the great Malayali reformer-saint Narayana Guru, Mr. Spiers is the founder-director of Narayana Gurukula at Kaggalipura, south of Bangalore and the founder-editor of the monthly 'Values', published from Kaggalipura and already in its ninth year, through which he untiringly upholds true spiritual values. We are grateful to him for taking time off from his exacting occupations to write this article for The Mountain Path.

The Values that human beings hold dear are all for the sake of the Self. This is the verdict of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (II. iv. I-5) stated in that wonderful dialogue between the Guru Yajnavalkya and his dear wife-disciple Maitreyi. And what applies to marital love also applies to art. All art is for the sake of the Self. The Self being Brahman or the Absolute, there cannot be art for its own sake, unless the 'its' here is equated with the Absolute Self.

What people really mean when they talk of art for art's sake, is that art should not be for the sake of some unworthy end, should not be for some commercial tycoon who wants a picture to sell his cigarettes, nor should it be for a theological establishment who want to instil the fear of hell, nor should it be for encouraging the patriotic egotism of the nation-state. Art is degraded when it abandons the Self and forgets its proper aim. Like all human beings, the artist is seeking Self-knowledge. The only true art is in Self-expression, the endeavour of the Self to understand itself through all media.

Many attempts have been made to image the wonder-mystery of the Absolute (Brahman). We have the image of the Great Mathematician, or the Great Architect of the Universe, the former by the physicist Jean and the latter by the Freemasons. Narayana Guru likened the universe to the work of a Great Artist, a living painting. Putting all these images together we reach the same central Source. The notion is further augmented by the twin chapters in the middle of the Bhagavad Gita, those called Unitive Contemplation as Royal Science and a Crowning Secret (Raja-vidya Raja-guhya Yoga) and Unitive Recognition of Absolute Values (Vibhuti-yoga). One chapter deals with jnana or pure unqualified wisdom, and the other with vijnana or wisdom expressed or applied. And, as the first verse of these chapters states, both must be taken together when we want to be free from whatever is evil or inauspicious.

Sri Ramana Maharshi used the analogy of the movie. If the forgotten white screen is the jnana aspect, and the projected picture the vijnana aspect, the wisdom here is remembering the entire scheme, the total situation, screen, picture, light and the enjoyment, and seeing it all as the production of the Self, in which the Self is screen and film and all. And this can be understood at the cosmological end of Nature, or ontologically or psychologically as the individual's own movie show. In any case all aspects brought together result in the high art called Yoga.

The Self will not brook duality. All is unity for the Self. To see duality, to see one-sidedly, to see the picture and not the screen, to see the screen and ignore the picture, leads to distortions, exaggerations and suffering at one or other pole of the single Self. The sensual or vijnana side can be overemphasised, as also the austere jnana side. On one side the bon viveur, on the other side the ascetic. Both have really lost the way, which is at neither end, nor in the middle, but by apprehending both sides together. This is Yoga and neither Caliban nor Savonarola can be said to have been lovers of art!

For the artist, his own projected world, his private dream, is at once his glory and his danger as a seeker of reality and Self-understanding. He must become more than a dreaming artist. He must become a wide-awake philosopher. The artist is on the same beam as the philosopher, but the philosopher (again in its original meaning) is ahead of him because he is disciplined. This discipline is to discover the supreme Order called 'Beauty' if you like, but not necessarily the same as that beautiful which is counterpart of the ugly. As Plato describes the process in the Theatetus, the Guru's task, in the words of Socrates, is to be a midwife to the art-children born of the artist, and (with what travail to the artist) to destroy the unworthy. What spiritual courage is implied here!

For the artist, as for all wisdom-seekers, there are two paths, one leading to further bondage and cyclic restraint (samsara) and the other to freedom. Kant, in an early work, Beobachtyngen ueber das Gefuel des Schoenen und Erhabenen (translated by John T. Goldthwait, University of California, 1960, as Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime) describes these two paths from the point of view of the artist: "Tall oaks and lonely shadows in a sacred grove are sublime; flower beds, low hedges and trees trimmed in figures are beautiful. Night is sublime, day is beautiful. Temperaments that possess a feeling for the sublime are drawn gradually, by the quiet stillness of a summer evening as the shimmering light of the stars breaks through the brown shadows of night and the lonely moon rises into view, into high feelings of friendship, of disdain for the world, of eternity. The shining day stimulates busy fervour and a feeling of gaiety. The sublime moves, the beautiful charms ... The sublime must always be great; the beautiful can also be small. The sublime must be simple, the beautiful can be adorned and ornamented, a great height is just as sublime as a great depth, except that the latter is accompanied with the sensation of shuddering, the former with one of wonder. Hence the latter can be the terrifying sublime, and the former the noble."

Instances can be multiplied of this broad division of the two paths. The one is the sacred peace of Arunachala and the other the entertainments of the social world of Tiruvannamalai. The sublime heights, and the horizontal though perhaps charming life of the town. On the vertical side the music of the Tamil Alvars and on the horizontal the National Anthem. Or the numinous eternal image of the Yogi of Mohenjodaro's seal, and the statues of public heroes and politicians. Or the Taoist paintings of the classical Tang and Sung periods of China and the paintings of today which glorify the Peking regime. Or the great tragedies of master dramatists like Euripides and Kalidasa and Shakespeare, and the romantic comedies of the cinema.

Sublime art, then, takes us out of the relative world into the eternal, and we finally arrive at the greatest art of all. This is the transformation of the individual from a condition of enslavement to a condition of emancipation. Every artistic device can be used with skill to this end. This is the supreme art of a Buddha, a Jesus, a Sankara, a Maharshi or any of the grand Gurus of humanity anywhere. Their records are there in many languages, of how this is to be done, and they speak with amazing concordance.

But just here trouble arises, for very few artists are by nature philosophers as well. And yet, if they are not to lead themselves astray (not to speak of their admirers), philosophers they must learn to be. Artists have the germ of absolutism in their own character, by nature. That is why they are fit to be knowers of the Absolute. But invariably they are in a state of revolt, wild and uncontrollable, opposed to all authority. For them to reach the terminus of spiritual seeking, they must harness their demon in the service of the quest for enlightenment.

Not all artists are fortunate enough to find a spiritual guide. Euripides was the friend and pupil of Socrates. Tagore reached for the Upanishads. The philosophic or sublime cream of the artists on the whole is very little. Only ten per cent of Wordsworth is of this order, like Tintern Abbey or the Intimations. William Blake, so absolutist a revisionist of Christian thought, got lost in a barbaric mythology of his own. Millions of paintings are preserved in the museums of Europe and USA and the modern turnover is as profuse as in literature. Yet how much of it would stand the test of a Socratic midwife? Most is junk, which misleads.

For this reason, Plato in the Republic was right in cracking down on the danger to mankind of the unphilosophic poet or artist. Art can be delightfully attractive, but of what use if it is not true? Music can stir people to war just as easily as it can raise the spirit to contemplation and invoke the sense of the holy. Uncontrolled, art is a menace to wisdom. However unpalatable to the artistic temperament this may be, the artist must be subordinate to wisdom teaching and to the Guru. Nobody knew this better than Plato himself, literary genius and also a pupil of the 'midwife' Socrates.

But why pick out the artist at all for special treatment? It is because he is one of the three types who by grace of natural temperament, can be led more easily toward Self-realization. Plotinus mentions this in the Enneads (I. iii. I), and places the artist between the born lover and the born philosopher. About the artist, Plotinus says:

"He must be shown that what ravished him was ... not some one shape of beauty but the All-Beauty, the Absolute Beauty; and the truths of philosophy must be implanted in him to lead him to faith in that which, all unknowing, he holds within himself."

The artist and the philosopher are not opposed, as is the case with the man of action and the contemplative. They belong to the same grade. And following Plotinus, we may add to art and philosophy what is called love, adoration or devotion, that principle known in India as bhakti, and defined by Sankara as "seeking after one's own proper nature" or "inquiry into the true principles of one's own Self" (Vivekachudamani 31-32).

Benedetto Croce makes the daring statement that art and language cannot be separated. Creation begins with expression and all expression is linguistic. With the uttering of the Word Sabda, wisdom and the universe itself bursts into being as the Panini doctrine of sphota declares. The Abosolute and the Word are the same. "In the beginning was the Word (Logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God," as the opening verse of the Gospel of St. John puts it.

It follows that philosophic expression, as revealed by a Guru or wisdom teacher, must be the highest art. The world's best known philosophical textbook is also a Gita or song. The Bhagavad Gita itself, in referring to Brahinavidya says so:

"Sung by rishis in many ways, severally and distinctly in (different) metres, and also in the aphoristic words of the Brahma-sutras replete with reasonings and positively determined." (xiii. 4).

Sage after sage, all over the world, from the Ch'an Patriarchs of ancient China to the Sufis of Persia, have ecstatically sung the praises of the Absolute. In India from the days of the anonymous rishis of the Upanishads down through the sages to Sri Ramana Maharshi and Narayana Guru, both of South India, we have glorious contemplative songs about philosophy and the ultimate joy of liberation.

On this grand theme, whose illustration is endless, let us conclude with the song of one of the Persian poet-sages, Jami, from his Tuhfatu'l-Abrar, where he describes the end of the pilgrimage of the artist:

"Beware! say not 'He is All-beautiful,
And we His lovers.' Thou art but the glass,
And He the Face confronting it, which casts
Its image on the mirror. He alone
Is manifest, and thou in truth art hid.
Pure Love, like Beauty, coming but from Him,

Reveals itself in thee. If steadfastly
Thou canst regard, thou wilt at length perceive
He is the mirror also - He alike
The Treasure and the Casket. 'I' and Thou
Have here no place, and are but phantasies
Vain and unreal. Silence! for this tale
Is endless, and no eloquence hath power
To speak of Him. "Tis best for us to love,
And suffer silently, being as naught."