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An Article by Andy Spragg, Re-Vitalise

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder…..and so is

suffering.
I’ve always found the phrase “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” a fascinating phrase. And
as a Buddhist even more so.

I remember, on retreat, I had a brief flash of insight when I heard a bird singing in the forest.
The birdsong was, I felt, beautiful and for me seemed to deepen the silence of the wood. I
asked why the bird was singing. The answer came almost immediately. That bird was singing
because of suffering. It was singing because of its own cravings and desires. The desire for
food, which all creatures have, and the desire to procreate, which again, all creatures have.
Including us. So at a very base level, it was singing because of suffering. Suffering induced by
these very simple desires.

This may seem like a very obvious and straightforward conclusion. However, that day in the
forest I felt that answer very intimately and suddenly the whole beauty of the forest was filled
with suffering. Suffering was all around me and I now understood that very basic message
given by the Buddha and given in the first two noble truths. That in life there is always
suffering and that suffering is due to our own cravings and desires.

Back in the retreat, I discussed this with the retreat leader. Feeling quite content with my
understanding I had to start rethinking when he said, “yes, but what makes you think the
birdsong is beautiful?” At the time I must confess to feeling a little deflated by this (in itself, not
particularly mindful of me) but it has led me to further meditations and thinking and therefore
to this article.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Actually, I think my understanding has now deepened a
little. I think that suffering is necessary for us to appreciate beauty. What is beauty? I feel
now, in my meditations that actually beauty is a mental formation born out of our deep
appreciation of suffering. The Buddhist view is that Buddha-hood is within us all. I think this
may be a direct example of this. Beauty and our view of something as beautiful is a direct
result of our appreciation of the suffering in our lives.

When we see something as beautiful, we see it (or hear it or taste it or feel it or smell it!) on
many levels. Initially there will be the simple appreciation of the direct colour, texture, taste,
smell etc. Then something deeper happens. Beauty touches our ‘soul’.

In order to try to illustrate this, I have picked a subject which, for me, invokes beauty. A
sunset. I love sunsets! I’ve picked this deliberately as it is particularly difficult to see the
suffering in a sunset! I have meditated on this for some time and really, this article talks
through these meditations.

In order to set out my conclusions I need to outline the steps I have gone through in my
meditations. I had a suspicion that the different levels of the appreciation of beauty line up
with the Buddhist view of the pañca khandha or the five aggregates. The more I meditate on
this, the more I feel the interconnection of all things and therefore the intimate nature and
connection we have with the suffering in our experience, and everything else’s experience
living on this earth and therefore the deep sense of beauty we sometimes feel. The pañca
khandha takes us through the 5 base things that make up our appreciation of the world
around us. Form, feelings, perception, formation and consciousness. I have approached the
sunset from the perspective of the five aggregates.

First and foremost form. A sunset just is. It is essential a complex form of dependents arising.
The time of day, the position of the earth in relation to the sun, the texture of the atmosphere,
the clouds in the sky, whether over water or land, any pollution or other particles in the sky,
the texture of the land (cityscape, fields, mountains etc). When I observe the sunset and
meditate I first try to see the sunset as it is. A mix of colours and there positions relating to
each other. The perspective, the position I am sitting etc. It is extremely difficult to do this
because what arises next happens in an instant. We naturally travel through the 5 aggregates
in “a twelfth of a finger-snap” and jump straight to beauty. Concentrated mindfulness is
required to get anywhere close to understanding this. But if I can just break this down, and
observe what happens next, then I can start to appreciate something. The tricky thing is that
beautiful sunsets don’t happen all that often in rainy Bedfordshire so the opportunity to
practice meditation on a sunset directly is rare. However, in my meditations I have
experienced that our minds do have the ability to recall the ‘form’ of something, i.e. an image,
separately to the other 4 aggregates. Fascinating that, I think. It is almost that when we
remember something, we rebuild our experience in real-time by running through the five
aggregates again. This is both fascinating and encouraging. If my mind works in this way then
I can break apart my perceptions, thoughts, consciousness within my meditations at any time
and start to understand some of those deeply carved ruts in my mind, and maybe start to
smooth them out.
So, back to the sunset. I meditate on feelings. A feeling in Buddhism is a very base-level
mental formulation. Not, as we understand in the west as an emotion. It is simply the labeling
of liking, dis-liking or a feeling of neutrality. With gentle meditation on the sunset I can feel my
mind latch on to aspects of the image. The deepest red in the image and label ‘liking’. I think
that with a complex form like a sunset, we don’t just go through the whole five aggregates in
one go for the whole image. I find that I jump around and notice elements of the image. The
colour of the foreground, the scale, the clouds in the sky and I feel myself noticing and
labeling. Liking, disliking etc. Neutrality is the most interesting I think and just as important.
Elements of the image go unnoticed until you break down the aggregates like this. Then I
notice the things I don’t usually notice because they are neutral to me. Maybe I noticed them
before, but subconsciously. But now, the image becomes even more alive and complete. I
also think that I maybe noticing feelings with one aspect of the sunset when I have already
moved on to perception for another aspect. But to be honest, this is beyond me for the
moment.
But certainly perception arises next. I label. Simply that. Red, pink, tree, green, smog, distant,
near. I feel my minds craving and desire to label, to name, to describe. Perception can be
both fascinating and frustrating. I remember once as a child traveling with my parents in a car
through a town. As we traveled through the town I noticed how my mind leapt on all the signs.
Straight away I heard the signs shouting in my mind and, rather oddly, I found myself getting
frustrated that I couldn’t shut my mind up. All these signs shouting at me. With the sunset,
when I meditate on it, the labeling deepens. This has the effect of slowing down the five
aggregates. The more I examine the image and meditate on perception, the slower the
process seems to go. I guess the devil is in the detail!

But we haven’t got to suffering yet. The suffering, I think, comes next. The next aggregate is
Formation (saṃskāra). Meaning either 'that which has been put together' or 'that which puts
together'. This step in the process is absolutely fascinating. I feel my mind almost sorting
through its store. Finding the links to these perceptions. And interestingly, although a lot of
this is done almost subconsciously, I find that my mind strives to start overlaying things. If I’m
honest, I find my mind deliberately trying to add in the beauty. It is craving something and it
goes searching for it. And for me, it finds experiences associated with the sunset. All the
times I have sat and looked at a sunset, I have done so because I have had the time and the
opportunity to do exactly that and something has been going on in my life which gives me that
time and opportunity. I think this is it. This is why I see the beauty. Because, the feelings (and
sometimes they are physical sensations of calmness, rapture, bliss) come up, I crave them
and I find beauty in the sunset because of them. It is difficul to see this as suffering. But in a
way I find my mind striving to hold on to the sunset. To not want to let it go on its natural way.
Although not huge, this is the suffering in the beauty of the sunset. This is also the fith
aggregate. Consciousness. This consciousness, I feel is much, much bigger than I am. It is
me, but it is also the sunset and also the hill I am sitting on.

A sunset is very much an impermanent thing. It lasts for a short period of time and no two
appear the same. Every sunset is different, unique and alive for a short period of time. I think
that many things that have this particular nature of being impermanent, fleeting, unique, we
find beautiful. A flower which withers and dies. A mountain scene which looks like no other
and differs with the seasons and even the time of say. The sound of birdsong in a wood.
These all have this nature about them. We can’t grab hold and keep them forever. Yes, we
can take a picture, but then we are not actually sat there, forming a part of the landscape with
the sunset all around us. Breathing the very air from which the sunset is dependent on. So we
are a part of the sunset itself. We are in it. We are experiencing dependents-arising at a very
personal level with these beautiful things and it is our store-consciousness, our mental
formations that complete the sunset. Without us being there, the sunset wouldn’t exist. There
would be air, there would be the texture of the earth, there would be land or water, there
would be pollution or other particles, there would be clouds and of course there would be the
sun. But the other 4 aggregates would be missing and therefore no sunset and no beauty.
This is why the sunset is beautiful. Because we are in it. We are part of it. No photograph,
video or even IMAX 3D cinema will ever capture that. Because we can breathe the sunset.

Finally I turn to myself. I look at an image of myself in the mirror. Not a lot to look at. I am
short-ish, I have rather a lop-sided smile and my one ear is a little higher than the other. I see
my character represented by my image in the mirror and those mental formations help me to
perceive my character, the result of all those years of conditioned behavior. An initial glance
tells me that I’m far from beautiful.

But then, maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on myself. Unless, I’m actually there, that sunset
doesn’t exist. Beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder. And the body, and the mind, and in
the conditioned consciousness that is a result of my dependents arising.