COURSE: Asian Languages and Cultures 951: Buddhism and Film
MEDIUM: Video, Film
DESCRIPTION:
A film inspired by the “ten appearances” said to manifest to the Buddhist skygazer performing the six visionary yogas of Kālacakra: smoke, mirage, lights in the clear sky, a butter lamp, blazing, the moon, the sun, vajras, the supreme form, and a seminal nucleus (thig-le), as detailed and explicated in Christopher Hatchell’s Naked Seeing: The Great Perfection, the Wheel of Time, and Visionary Buddhism in Renaissance Tibet (2014). The work is intended to act both as a representation of and a tool for visionary meditative practice and insight.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT:
A meditative journey comes to visual life in Viewing Emptiness. Inspired by the “ten appearances” said to manifest to the Buddhist skygazer performing the six yogas of Kālacakra, director Kyle Dougherty takes us through a succession of images that serve to both represent and inspire the experiential insights of contemplative practice. The “ten appearances” are detailed in surviving records of an eleventh-century Tibetan tantric method known as “sky-gazing,” wherein the practitioner would fix their gaze on a clear, open expanse of sky for extended periods of time, causing specific images to successively arise: smoke, mirage, lights in the clear sky, a butter lamp, blazing, the moon, the sun, vajras, the supreme form, and a seminal nucleus (thig-le). These images would culminate in a vision of Buddhism’s central conception of Reality – emptiness, in the form of a luminous goddess known as Mahāmudrā, or the “Great Seal,” – not as an abstract formulation, but as a literal object beheld by the eyes. This esoteric method of attaining realization was argued by adherents to be superior to both philosophic reasoning and other forms of meditation, enabling one to get beyond the inherent limits of linguistic and mental conceptualization to a tangible visual perception of ultimate reality. Following in the creative and experimental tradition of Tibetan yogis developing new methods for expediently achieving insight and enlightenment using whatever resources may be at hand, Dougherty intends the film to act not only as a representation of a visual meditative experience but also as a tool for visionary practice, heralding a new esoteric yoga we may dub “contemplative screen-gazing.”