Last summer, I gave a lecture on Zen Buddhism and John Cage at the library of Chuang Yen Monastery in Carmel, NY. I wanted to tell the story of Cage’s encounter with Zen in a way that was useful for understanding his musical work. Preparing for this, I needed to refresh my memory and to fill in some gaps in my knowledge: about Zen in general, Zen in America, the work of D. T. Suzuki, and Cage’s specific statements about Zen. As I did this work, I kept bumping up against negative thoughts: criticisms of Cage’s attitude towards Buddhism. I’ve come to realize that these judgments and feelings arose because of my own personal history and relationship to Buddhism, and that I need to write about that history.

It all started when I encountered Cage’s book Silence in my sophomore year at college; I would have been twenty years old at the time. I remember enjoying the writing, the ideas, the way he turned things on their head. There was a sense of freedom in the “why not?” challenge that Cage presented. I found the scores engaging and interesting: puzzles to be solved, games to be played.

I spent the next several years immersing myself in Cage’s world. I remember reading about the Dadaists and loving the same kind of challenge to the status quo that they had raised. Art was about changing your mind, dismantling your assumptions and habits. This approach was liberating; it also just made such good sense to me.

I read D. T. Suzuki on Zen Buddhism at this point as well. I remember quite well reading his work while eating in the campus dining hall. This would have been my first introduction to Buddhism, and I didn’t really understand it at all. It seemed to me that Suzuki spoke in riddles; there was the impression that he possessed esoteric knowledge that I just wasn’t in on. But I loved the stories and the subversiveness of what he described.

My reading on Buddhism at this time was very Cage-centric. I made my way through Suzuki and other Zen texts by looking for statements that aligned with what Cage had written. I navigated them by spotting the blazes marking the trail that Cage had followed. Cage led me to Suzuki, and then he shaped my reading of Suzuki.

At this point, in my 20s, I had a taste for Zen from reading these things, and an enthusiasm for Cage’s path of experimental music, a path that I was following in my piano performance and music-historical research and writing. In retrospect, I cannot say that I had much of an idea at all of what Buddhism was as a spiritual practice. I didn’t know anything about any other schools of Buddhism; I didn’t know anything about Buddhist practice, Zen or otherwise; I didn’t know anything about any common Buddhist teachings, such as the noble truths or the eightfold path or the triple gem. After all that reading, I still had not read the Heart Sutra, a foundational Zen text.

When I was in my 30s, researching my book on Cage, I went through a somewhat careful reading of the texts that formed his philosophical views: Aldous Huxley, Meister Eckhart, Sri Ramakrishna, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Suzuki. Once again I was reading texts with the framework of Cage’s music in the back of my mind. When I wrote about these things in my book, I stuck with the terms and concepts that Cage himself used (e.g., “unimpeded and interpenetrating”), and I showed how they related to his compositional methods, following Cage’s own analogies. I didn’t talk about a spiritual quest at all.

This is where things stayed for some time. Then, when I was in my early 40s and completely independently from my musical interests, I began my meditation practice. I studied and practiced in the Theravada Buddhist tradition of Thailand and Burma, as disseminated and adapted in the west by teachers such as Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, and Sharon Salzberg. Going on a longer meditation retreat for the first time at Insight Meditation Society, I found that being mindful of sounds arising and passing away was a natural way for me to practice. But while my experience with Cage’s work helped my vipassana meditation practice, my meditation teachers provided a bigger, more meaningful context for this. By the time I was 50, I became more immersed in the Buddhist background of this practice. I became familiar with concepts and language from the Pali scriptures (even if often filtered through a modern western presentation).

In my Buddhist practice (meditation, working with teachers, and sutta study) I had gained some experience of what Buddhists call the three characteristics: impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, non-self. I better understood attachment as the source of suffering. I found myself embracing the forms of my Buddhist teachers: meditation, chanting, bowing, etc. I developed faith (saddhā, confidence) in the teachings, in the Triple Gem (Buddha, Dhamma, Sangha). It was all becoming an important part of my life.

At this point, when I looked again at Cage’s life and work, I found myself more attuned to his spiritual quest. In his pivotal 1948 lecture “A composer’s confessions,” I could see that he was seeking something larger than himself. He wanted a purpose for being a composer that was aligned with this. He realized that ego and an enlarged sense of self were what got in the way, and I connected this with ideas of non-self, emptiness, and silence. I could see how he would experience his first forays into chance as a liberating encounter with this emptiness, this silence. For the first time, I was mapping what Cage was saying against my own spiritual experience.

That said, I also found myself less connected to what Cage himself said about Buddhism and Zen. Having practiced within a Buddhist lineage and having deepened that experience, it was quite clear to me that Cage had not done what I had. When I read Cage on Zen, I saw someone with knowledge of ideas and texts, but no experiential knowledge of an actual tradition. He was like me when I was in my 20s: an enthusiastic reader and student in an academic class on Zen. And I knew that experiencing the traditional forms actually matters for getting an embodied understanding of the teachings.

Now in my 60s and preparing a lecture on Zen and Cage, I became quite aware of what I didn’t know about Zen. I knew that Zen had its own lineage and forms of practice. Based on my experience of the Thai/Burmese-Western Theravada lineage, I knew that just reading about it isn’t at all the same thing as doing the work of practice. Although I had some experience with my own lineage that I’m sure overlaps with Zen, I really had only anecdotal knowledge of Zen practice, and so couldn’t really speak to what Zen means. Cage had even less practical experience with any Buddhist tradition, so his knowledge of Zen would be even more limited. How seriously could I take what he said?

Cage’s hands-off relationship with Zen was typical of many Westerners in the 1950s, and was even encouraged by writers such as Suzuki and Alan Watts. Watts was quite clear that he saw meditation—zazen—as unnecessary for understanding the depths of Zen. In his book The Way of Zen (1957), the most he will say about zazen is that, while its use is “exaggerated in the Far East”, a certain amount of it might be helpful “for the jittery minds and agitated bodies of Europeans and Americans.” (p. 112) Instead, he follows Suzuki’s line in pointing to the essence of Zen as a universal spiritual understanding, independent of any forms of practice.

In doing my research, though, I found dissenting voices that mirrored my own misgivings. Robert Sharf, in his article “Whose Zen?: Zen Nationalism revisited” (1995), criticizes Suzuki’s depiction of Zen as “some sort of nonsectarian spiritual gnosis” because it severs Zen from traditional Buddhist concerns. “This free-floating Zen could be used to lend spiritual legitimacy to a host of contemporary social, philosophical, and political movements, from dadaism to Kyoto philosophy, from new-age hedonism to fascism.” (pp. 43–44) 

I read Philip Kapleau’s The three pillars of Zen (1966) to get the view of an American from this period who actually embraced Zen as a practice. He, too, found Watts’ cavalier attitude towards Zen practice problematic. While he noted that the theoretical approach to Zen dominant in the West might be “stimulating … for the academic-minded and intellectually curious,” he stated flatly that “the heart of Zen discipline is zazen. Remove the heart and a mere corpse remains.” (p. 84)

I found myself nodding in agreement with Kapleau’s indignation. There was something in his complaint that was close to my increasing discomfort with Cage’s attitude towards Zen. The cavalier way that Cage dismissed “sitting cross-legged,” the way that he translated equanimity (one of the Buddhist brahmaviharas or “divine abodes”) into a simple matter of just learning to enjoy things you initially disliked, the air of authority that he projected when speaking of Buddhism: all of this began to grate on me and I found judgments arising about it all.

I was—and remain—conflicted. I am still deeply indebted to Cage and his work, still devoted to understanding his music and communicating that to others, but I am also increasingly uncomfortable with his use of Zen to justify what he was doing. My response critically in my lecture last summer and in recent writings has been to minimize the importance of Zen as a foundation of Cage’s work. I think that it is very easy to overestimate Cage’s understanding of Zen, and I do not agree with those who would portray him as a Buddhist artist.

Instead, I am focusing more on the importance of the style of Zen than on its substance. In a recent post about Cage and Suzuki, I noted that, for the purposes of understanding Cage’s journey, the details of Suzuki’s actual lectures are not as important as what Cage took away from them. Taken more broadly, I would expand this principle when writing about Cage: it doesn’t matter so much what Zen actually is, it matters what Cage thought he was getting from Zen—or perhaps more accurately, what Cage said he was getting from Zen.

In a way, it is an inversion of the classic Zen image of the finger pointing at the moon and the danger associated with it. In Zen, the finger pointing at the moon is a metaphor for the way the teachings point at the truth; the danger is to mistake the finger for the moon. With Cage, it’s the opposite danger. Because it’s his finger pointing to the moon of Zen, I propose that we focus on his finger, not the moon. Why is he pointing? What does he want us to pay attention to?

For me, Cage’s story isn’t that he encountered Zen and then learned from it how to make his art. What actually happened is that, through experimentation, he discovered his way to a music made of only sounds, and he did this largely before he attended Suzuki’s classes and became fascinated with Zen (although Blyth’s portrayal of the haiku poets helped move things along). His compositional path was already set when he stepped into that Columbia classroom. He listened to Suzuki in much the same way that I did initially: searching for ideas, language, frameworks that he could relate to what he already knew about experimental music. I see Cage as using Zen, in large part, to justify what he was doing in music.

This version of the story makes historical sense to me. It also helps me to reconcile my personal Buddhist path with Cage’s rather shallow use of Buddhism. Cage was a bit of what I would call a serial enthusiast: over the course of his life, he became highly engaged with one thinker after another. Zen Buddhism was just one of many such enthusiasms over the years. Carolyn Brown described Cage’s eclecticism well in her memoir Chance and circumstance (2007). Of his many influences, she remembered: 

John took in their ideas like a hummingbird flitting at high speed from flower to flower sipping precious nectar on the wing. In his own unique and perhaps intellectually outrageous fashion, he made their ideas his own, now blunderingly, now brilliantly synthesizing—but always with an ingenuous freshness and spontaneity. (p. 38)

Zen really only blossomed in Cage’s writings for a few years in the 1950s and early 1960s. The whole episode has the air of an enthusiastic undergraduate being inspired by a captivating course they just took. I remember what that felt like—how, at the time, you can’t seem to talk about anything else. This is exactly how Carolyn Brown remembered him holding forth during the long drives while on tour with Merce Cunningham: “back seat Zen-philosophy seminars à la Cage.” (p. 498)

Cage’s involvement with Buddhism never went any deeper than that first flush of enthusiasm. For me, it was only after I had stopped thinking about it for years that I could be introduced to the Buddhist path in a wholly different context and in such a way that it took root in my life. I still view John Cage as a great and inspiring artist, but I can no longer take his supposed Buddhism very seriously. He was really a product of early twentieth century western attitudes towards Asian spirituality, an approach that seems dated and very limited to me today.