The Zen concept of the sacred or what can be called Sacred Reality is radically different from that of other religions. This Zen concept is the end product of a history that began in India and was finalized in China. The closest any other tradition comes to the Zen notion of the sacred is Daoism. Both these traditions share a belief that Sacred Reality can best be defined as the aesthetic continuum.

The term aesthetic continuum means that the world as a whole has an aesthetic quality to it. In other words, that the world is essentially beautiful, and that this beauty has a sacred quality. To define Sacred Reality as the beautiful is not the same as saying Sacred Reality is beautiful. Most major religions acknowledge the beauty of Sacred Reality. Zen violates the norm by doing the reverse. For example, it would be difficult for Western religion to think of the beautiful as Sacred Reality as long as that beauty is something that is essentially worldly. The Western Sacred Reality is a being that transcends the world, which means Sacred Reality can not be too closely identified with the world for this would compromise the transcendence of that Sacred Reality.

What even more radically distinguishes Zen’s definition of Sacred Reality from that of other religions is the characterizing of the Sacred Beautiful as impermanence. In the majority of religions the sacred is a very permanent phenomena, which is part of the reason for it being beautiful. Zen, also, reverses this. In Zen impermanence itself is the source of all the world’s beauty because it is the source of all the world’s creativity. This impermanence is seen positively as the Universal Creative Flux. In more concrete terms Sacred Reality is life and death; and the beauty of both of these. In other words, what makes something part of the aesthetic continuum is the very fact that its existence is impermanent or temporal. This is not only at odds with the Western concept of Sacred Reality and the Beautiful, but of the standard Indian-Buddhist concept of Sacred Reality (Nirvana). For Zen, however, this need for permanence fossilizes what is both beautiful and sacred.

Beauty implies the wish to experience that which is a fuller, more complete, or greater part of the whole. It is a desire to be more worthy than the pitiful little ego with which we usually identify, and this can only be achieved by being a part of what we normally perceive as being other than ourselves. Beauty is the wish to be one with the highest good.

To speak of Sacred Reality as the beautiful or as the highest form of the good is not to naively deny evil in the world. Rather it is to say that evil is the ugliness of our self-centeredness. This is important, because when conceptualizing what is beautiful it is easy to wrongly conceptualize what is ugly. Ugliness is the product of human dual thinking. If the beautiful is to be contrasted with the ugly it must be with the ugliness of the foolish human desire to hold on to things and to crave for permanence. This means that, above all else, ugliness is the fear of the death, which is the ultimate self-centeredness.

Death is one of the most essential factors in making life beautiful because death is the complement to life, and vice versus. To separate them into a conflicting duality is to lose the truly beautiful. Life and death are single inseparable aspects of the universal flux or sacred impermanence. Without impermanence there can be no beauty. The constantly changing shapes, colors, sounds, odors and feelings of things make each experience of them a unique and rare event. It is this uniqueness and rarity that give all things their value or beauty and makes us appreciate the value of every moment of life and to experience the non-dual beauty that is the aesthetic continuum of life.

When we truly experience the beauty of life and death there is a dropping of the alienating pain that is entailed in holding on to self. This loss is not only a part of the realization of the impermanence of self, but the sheer delight in that impermanence; and hence in the sensual beauty of a self-forgetting experience. To have this experience is to be on the threshold of realizing no-self or Buddha-nature. To complete this realization we must not only forget the self, we must remember the beauty of all others.

Our ability to identify with all others is the ultimate act of letting go of self. No matter how close we are to other persons we can never known the beauty of them so totally that they cease to be an other-than-self or otherness. Yet, it is this otherness that makes them sacred or mysterious beautiful. A mysterious otherness is something to which we are attracted, and of which we are fearful at the same time. These very contradictory emotions are universally accepted as an attitude towards the Sacred. We can even say that the more we experience others as a mysterious otherness the greater is the chance of our experiencing them as Sacred Reality. Since the greatest otherness we can experience is towards someone that we perceive as an enemy, it is through this enemy that we may come closest to realizing the sacred beauty in everyone. In other words, it is in the act of seeing our enemies as sacred, and of trying to appreciate them that we can most fully lose or empty ourselves, and experience all humanity as part of the aesthetic continuum or Sacred Reality.

The enemy as part of the aesthetic continuum should, above all, makes us realize that we must not equate the beautiful only with the enjoyable. For example, the fear involved in any relationship with an enemy is not enjoyable, nor for that matter are many other emotions. Yet just as a creative response to fear can bring us closer to our realization of self and others as Sacred Reality, so can such a response to other un-enjoyable emotions such as sadness and grief. These emotions are what inspire in us compassion for the suffering world, and this is just another form of letting go of self and experiencing Sacred Reality.

From a Zen perspective, besides emptying ourselves for the sake of serving others, there are two more major ways of experiencing the beautiful. These are to create art, and thus show our absolute appreciation for the sacred beauty of the world; and to intellectually-scientifically study the marvelous complexity of the world, and in doing so realize how much the world is Sacred Reality.

Knowing the beautiful as the sacred is a serious matter and, therefore, the beautiful must never be confused with the merely pretty. The fact that beauty is not always enjoyable can help us separate it from the merely pretty. Pretty is almost always enjoyable. If you have ever had the experience of viewing the painting Guernica by Pablo Picasso, not only is it not pretty; it is in one sense hideous. In diabolically cubist forms it depicts the dead and dismembered bodies of the men, women and children, as well as the animals, that resulted from the German bombing of a helpless village during the Spanish civil war. If you can get over the initial revulsion upon first seeing the painting, the very horror of it makes you cry for the murdered victims. It is the ability of this work of art to call forth those tears of compassion that make Picasso’s painting, not only beautiful, but also a painting of the face of Sacred Reality.

Picasso’s painting leads us to an important Zen understanding of art. Painting, sculpture, music and dance in and of themselves are not necessarily the beautiful that is the aesthetic continuum. They are only an expression of that continuum if they encourage us to get out of our narrow little egos and to allow us to identify with more than just ourselves; in other words, to feel a unity with all others and/or with the world as a whole. When art does this it is contemplative art, and as such it is a vehicle of Sacred Reality. When it does not, it is merely pretty. Contemplative art is joy because it is our salvation from our alienation from self, others and the world; it means to be truly alive, which is to be a part of a sacred beauty.

It may seem strange that Zen could find sacred beauty in Guernica since most Zen art does not go out of its way to focus on the gruesome, although some Zen artists have done this. One of the reasons for this is that Zen understands that focusing on gruesome by the spiritually naïve may lead to a feel of depressing self-pity more than compassion for others. In the talented hands of a spiritually mature artist such as Picasso, however, the gruesome inspires no such self-pity.

Art, even non-contemplative art, is of spiritual value because it is unnecessary for mere survival. To partake of it, therefore, carries us beyond the self that is primarily interested in survival; and to the degree that art can take us out of ourselves, it has the potential of relating us to others. Art brings us to a higher level of consciousness. It allows us to transcend to another level of existence. Indeed, if the art we are enjoying is the creation of someone other than the self, then no matter how little, it must relate us to the otherness of the artist. Art, of course, is creative and therein allows us to feel like a participant in the creative flux of the universe.

To understand the subtlety of the nature of the art as sacred beauty a comparison can be made between the Egyptian pyramids at Giza and the Indian Taj Mahal in Agra. The pyramids are an estonishing sight and certainly, as one of the ancient wonders of the world, must be admired. However, admiration alone does not make them a good representation of the aesthetic continuum. The reason for this is that their otherwise great beauty has been compromised by the reason for their creation. They were, in fact, created to try to immortalize dead pharaohs, and thus they were created out of a fear of death. This, as mentioned above, is a pitiful failure in understanding that it is mankind’s very mortality that makes human life beautiful and hence sacred. Thus any attempt to deliberately create an object of beauty for prosperity or for the immortalizing of the artist is from the Zen perspective more an ugly act of human hubris then one of sacred creativity. The Taj Mahal, although also a tomb, was built to sanctify the love the emperor Shah Jahan had for his wife, and so it is far more of a sacred beauty than the pyramids can be.

Of course, it must not be forgotten that what may be beautiful in one context may be just pretty or less in another context. An otherwise ordinary teacup used in a tea ceremony, or any other essential element in that ceremony, is beautiful because it is part of the whole ceremony. The function of the ceremony itself is to become absorbed in the making of the tea, and this encourage a beautifully contemplative self-forgetting experience.

Up to now the focus has been on experiencing Sacred Reality in our fellow man or through human creations. Yet, as Zen practitioners to have the total experienced of the sacred or the aesthetic continuum we must have that experience, not just in the form of self, of others, and of man-made art. We must equally realize the beautiful in nature, especially in its awesome quality.

When we hold a kitten in our hands we may experience love, but at the same time we know that we are incapable of creating anything like this, thus we must feel a certain sense of anxious inadequacy. When our attention is captured by the sight of a extraordinarily brilliant sunset, we are not only joyfully taken out of ourselves; but at the same moment we are fearfully aware of how dwarfed we are to it in comparison. When we have gone through a devastating storm, only to have it followed by a glorious rainbow arcing across the sky, we must acknowledge how vulnerable and how insignificant we are compared to this awesome quality of nature. When an earthquake hits, it is natural to be at a loss to find something beautiful about it, yet scientists can tell us that this very movement of the earth ultimately helps to reinvigorate life on this planet. These are the terrifying aspects of the aesthetic continuum of nature as a mysterious otherness. Hence just as the mysterious otherness of our fellow human beings is proof of the sacred or of Sacred Reality, so are all the terrifying aspects of nature.

The equal ability to experience Sacred Reality in nature as well as in human beings is critical. The reason for this is that if we concern ourselves too exclusively with what is human we are in great danger of exaggerating pride in our own power, and/or pity at our own suffering. When we turn our focus away from the exclusively human and towards nature we are compelled to let go of our delusion of being at the center of existence. This delusion is an immense barrier to the Zen understanding of Sacred Reality as the beauty of all existence.

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