THE RED LETTER

Dear Subscriber First Name,

A while back I asked for help thinking through our coming retreat, Beauty and Insight — A Retreat on Perception. All our retreats have a Dharmic backbone, some essential teaching that goes right back to the Buddha, and the backbone of this one is the teaching of the five skandhas. In this teaching, the Buddha shows how experience is made up of just five aspects — form, feeling, perception, mental habits, and consciousness — and that's all there is. Out of those five, like an artist and her materials, a self and a world are created.

There are at least two levels of insight here. The first: if a self and a world are being created moment to moment, then perhaps a more beautiful world can be created too, inner and outer. The second, deeper one: if the skandhas really are all there is, then there's no little numbskull in here running the show — no self to defend or protect, only the five processes doing what they do, and out of that, appearances arising.

The trouble with teachings on no-self is that, misunderstood, they can tip us into nihilism instead of freedom. There are three things we'll lean on to guard against that. First, staying embodied — grounded, in touch with the body — which we'll do through qigong and time in nature. Second, keeping the heart open, through metta practice and building a real sense of community. Third, connecting with the beauty of the world itself. Beauty has a central place on this retreat, as it does on all our retreats — because if a self and a world really are made of these five skandhas, then beauty is something that can be discovered and created out of them too.

Wanting an art focus to our evenings on the retreat I asked you all — the Red Ladder community — for examples of art, music, and film where an artist is clearly working with one particular skandha. The response was amazing. So many avenues to explore. Going through everyone's suggestions, I kept thinking: how has no one told me about this before?

Thank you so much to everyone who contributed. I've compiled the full list below, so you’ll need to sit down with a huge cup of tea! Where the artwork is specific, I've added a link; where the suggestion was more general, I'll leave you to go exploring on your own.

Form

The forms we experience through the senses — 'things' made from the raw materials of sight, sound, touch, and so on.

• Anni Albers, Haiku (1961)  —  a woven textile piece whose rhythmic, minimalist horizontal bands mirror the structure of a haiku

• Barbara Hepworth  —  sculpture through an intuitive sense of sight and touch — form drawn from landscape, the human body, and mythology

• Cai Guo-Qiang  —  intricate explosive paintings made with dynamite; the tension between creation and destruction (also speaks to Volition)

• Evelyn Glennie  —  percussionist, profoundly deaf, who plays barefoot to feel sound through vibration

• Olafur Eliasson  —  installations blending art, science, and natural elements — light, water, temperature (also speaks to Perception)

• Wisława Szymborska, "Nothing Twice"  —  poem

• Dumbo, "Pink Elephants on Parade"  —  sensory overdrive — the mind exaggerating what the senses report

• Terrence Malick, Days of Heaven  —  a film almost entirely made of texture — wind, fire, rough and soft

• Shel Silverstein, The Missing Piece Meets the Big O  —  shapes telling a story — form as narrative

• Giorgio Morandi  —  still life — humble bottles and vessels distilled to essential form

• Antony Gormley  —  body sculptures — the human form as raw material and container

• Henri Matisse  —  colour and cut-paper form, reduced to its essentials

• Fabienne Verdier, Vortex series  —  painting the sound of singing — form arising from sound

Feeling

Traditionally the initial tone of pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral — explored here in a broader sense, including how we work with what arises.

• Tunde Jegede, "Still Moment"  —  a piece whose felt tone shifts depending on the state you bring to it

• Lygia Clark  —  participatory works inviting physical interaction (also touches Form and Perception)

• Tracey Emin  —  grief, loneliness, sadness — the difficult emotional states we all know

• Gillian Ayres  —  joy and passion carried through abstract colour and shape

• Edward Hopper  —  isolation and loneliness in the urban environment; unsettling, voyeuristic

• Wisława Szymborska, "Identification"  —  poem

• Rudolf Kalvach, Clown (1907) & Dayton Brandfield, Clown on a Unicycle (1935–43)  —  the same figure read as either comic or grotesque, depending on the viewer

• Molly Green Music  —  "Hands on My Body" and "She Is Mighty"

• Edvard Munch  —  raw, unguarded emotional states — anxiety, dread, longing

Perception

Traditionally the initial tone of pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral — explored here in a broader sense, including how we work with what arises.

• "It's a Beautiful Day"  —  The Kiffness, Rushawn, Jermaine Edwards

• Partnered dance — salsa  —  how two people create art together in a fully present, improvised way

• James Turrell  —  light and space used to manipulate how the mind perceives reality

• Bridget Riley  —  investigating primary perception through colour, light, and geometry

• M.C. Escher  —  the intersection of mathematics, geometry, and human perception

• Cerith Wyn Evans  —  how we understand text, language, and each other

• Kay Ryan, "The Niagara River" and "Token Loss"  —  poems

• The duck/rabbit illusion  —  a classic image for how perception decides what a thing is

• Louis Armstrong, "What a Wonderful World"  —  words alone conjuring a fully fleshed-out world in the mind

• PJ Harvey  —  Orlam and the album I Inside the Old Year Dying

• Grayson Perry  —  maps of his own subconscious — inner life made into landscape

• René Magritte, The Treachery of Images ("Ceci n'est pas une pipe")  —  the gap between an image and the thing it represents

• Marcel Duchamp, Fountain  —  the urinal — perception and context deciding what counts as art, or as a thing at all

Volition

Our patterns of being, habits, and tendencies — how acting in the present leaves traces that shape what we carry forward.

• Richard Long, A Line Made by Walking  —  a path made simply by walking back and forth — action leaving a trace

• Yoko Ono  —  instruction-based and performance works — small repeated acts as practice

• Andy Warhol  —  the 'machine aesthetic' — a need for sameness and acceptance rooted in childhood (see: The Lonely City, Olivia Laing)

• Yayoi Kusama  —  obsessive, repetitive polka dots and mirrors dissolving the single ego into the collective

• Agnes Martin  —  repetition and pattern as a spiritual devotion to life

• Kay Ryan, "Home to Roost"  —  poem

• Charles Dickens, Great Expectations  —  Miss Havisham, re-living her abandonment daily — a mirror for how we recreate our own patterns

• The Names, Florence Knapp  —  how the naming of a child conditions three different lives in this novel; echoes the Triratna practice of receiving a new name at ordination

Consciousness

How our knowing of anything is always split into subject and object — and how we might soften that division, coming into more intimate relationship with other beings.

• Chiharu Shiota  —  memory and the fragility of our connections to everyday objects

• Sara Ludy  —  the liminal space where the physical and virtual worlds meet

• Surrealism / Automatism  —  as a movement

• Marina Abramović, The Artist Is Present  —  a performance on pure presence between two people

• Andy Goldsworthy  —  intimacy with nature — see the piece where he lets a rock bleed red pigment into a stream, then immerses himself in it; films Rivers and Tides and Leaning into the Wind

• Wisława Szymborska, "Dreams" and "The End and the Beginning"  —  poems

• M.C. Escher, Hand with Reflecting Sphere (1935), Swans (1938), Reptiles (1943)  —  images that blur subject and object, self and other

• "Subliminal sensations — light, images, sounds — when we meditate or sit before sleep… a Bodhisattva stalking us, peering round the edge of our meditation, dreams, awareness."

• Tony Richardson, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner  —  film

• William Kentridge  —  animated drawings — made and unmade before the viewer's eyes, memory made visible

• Ana Mendieta, Silueta series  —  becoming the subject, becoming the land — the body merging with earth

Cross-skandha & general inspiration

Suggestions that resist sitting in just one place.

• Werner Herzog, Fitzcarraldo  —  described by Herzog as "all the skandhas at once"

• Indian ragas  —  different multitone scales for different times of day; ragas as shades of colour

• Stonehenge post-hole theory  —  landscape reshaped by water levels after the last ice age — form, perception, and change over time

• Copernicus satellite ocean-temperature data  —  our relationship to the present moment

• Rhodri Davies, Evan Parker, Hendrix (with Chas Chandler)  —  texture and genius in sound

• Orbital, Samantha Harvey  —  novel

May there be excitement everywhere you look!
Vajradarshini

Hello, I’m Vajradarshini — a British Dharma teacher living in the south of Sweden with my Swedish wife, Dhammasiri. Red Ladder Studio is a place for creative, down-to-earth Dharma practice. From here, we run retreats and workshops, and I also teach internationally, both online and in person. You can also rent The Guesthouse here (named after Rumi’s poem), for your own small retreats and solitaries. I’m glad you’ve found your way here!

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