A Meditation on Crafting a Beautiful Human Something Beautiful for the World

Flute making and human making are similar arts, both driven by the muse, both dancing and revealing the music that we are. Allow these ideas to percolate into your bones. I've speculated sometimes on how the first flute might have come about. You know, I have this fantasy of if you go into a bamboo grove and you'll hear the winds blowing and the bamboo clacks. And I had an imagination of someone sitting in a grove, just feeling their interconnectedness with the earth, with the plant realm, with the insect realm, with the birds and the trees and so forth. The wind was blowing across this open, a bit like, you know, blowing across the top of a bottle and a bit of a moaning sound might come out. My name is Tarjan Hang and where we are here is in a small patch of regenerating bush in Ongatete, in the Bay of Plenty, Aotearoa, New Zealand. I'm an evolving collaboration of atoms and molecules and cells and ecological realities. I also happen to have been able to spend the last 50 years of my life exploring and integrating Buddhist philosophy and teaching with evolutionary science and various different disciplines of art. Something Beautiful for the World was a book that arose out of a collaboration of teaching that Calvin and I did over the course of eight years. And it linked the crafting of a fine bamboo flute, in this case a shakuhachi flute, and comparing that with the work of crafting a fine, well-integrated, well-balanced, fully engaged human being. Kelvin Faulkner, who's a dear friend, superb craftsman, both in pottery and flute making and many other disciplines. My name is Kelvin Faulkner. I am blind from a condition known as retinal dyspigmentosa. I enjoy playing the Japanese shakuhachi flute, and I particularly enjoy making them. A shakuhachi flute is made of bamboo, and the bamboo grows in a grove. And we look at the grove, some beautiful, magnificent cathedral-like bamboo grove. But if you scratch around a bit, you begin to realize that under the surface of the earth, there are roots, right, which are crisscrossing everywhere. And in actual fact, what looks like a forest of bamboo is actually one organism. To craft a bamboo flute, you can't just leave it in the grove. I mean, there's a whole lot of making a bamboo flute that we have nothing to do with. It takes billions of years of evolution to bring it up to that point. The story of life on earth is the story of this bamboo. Each stick of bamboo is unique. It's different. It's not like making a plastic flute, and you just stamp out the exact same flute all the time. The same with a human being. We've grown out of a ****-a-papa of ancestry. And if you take a baby, a human baby, and just kind of leave them in their bassinet or in their cradle or what have you, and just leave them alone for five or six years, come back later, you know, when they can talk and they can do something. Actually, you won't develop a fine, well-integrated, fully functioning human being. Same with the comb. If you just lay the cut bamboo on the table and wait, it won't turn into a flute. In order for it to craft a fine flute or craft a fine human being, requires that we actively, intentionally participate in the crafting. And our participation requires us to approach it in a very experimental, open-ended way, because we don't know exactly how this one's going to turn out. It's kind of recognized that in meditation, first of all, you need to find a good posture, and then you have a sense of aspiration. What are you going to do here? And then you've got the work. But actually, the same applies to making a fine flute. But instead of thinking of posture as just a physical thing, we could think of it as a kind of an attitude, a posture, a way of being. We begin with a posture of openness, a posture of attentiveness. We begin our discipline with this kind of posture. It may be that we're doing it sitting this way or that way, right? That's just part of it. But the interior posture, right? Curiosity, willingness to explore, interest in the subject. Then we have our aspiration, and then we begin to actually settle into the work. The first thing we need to do is to open up the septums, right, between the sections of the bamboo. What we're doing is we're using files and sometimes different drill bits and different kinds of tools to open up the flute. And then what we do is we put a sharp edge on the top of the flute. It's the blow edge. I've actually gone off a bit, so I'm trying to correct it. At that point, without going any further, I begin to blow the flute. Hear certain qualities of sound and harmonics and so on. Once we've got the basic flute structure there, we bring the blow edge, right, to the point where it's sufficiently good enough to move on. Well, I think we could probably proceed with the holes. And in the human being, we could say these holes could correspond in a way to the five senses. So imagine for a moment that these aren't two different things. There's a flute we're crafting and there's a human we're crafting. They're both instruments for musing and contemplating and engaging sensitively with the evolving universe. Imagine for a moment you are a human flute. And one of the holes that you've put in allows light. We call them eyes, right? The light comes into your being. It kind of stimulates your retinal cells and sends cascades shimmering back into your brain and through the visual cortex, leading to tensings and loosings in your muscles, in your hormonal flow, in your emotion, in your memory, all these things. In a sense, your experience of singing is the kind of visual music that comes when photons blow through the flute of your organism. And then you open another hole and that hole is, you might say, the sound, ears, right? So you're really hearing. And when different waves of compression and so on in the atmosphere kind of wash up on the drum head of your eardrum and cause shimmering shifts and cascades of functioning in your organism and you say, oh, I'm hearing the bird or I'm hearing someone speak. We could think of that experience of hearing as the music that takes place when the universe blows through your flute in a certain way. And your nose, we're picking up, right? Olfactory experience is blowing through our nose and so on. There's a sense of smelling the earth and the way we shift and change our feelings, change our memories, change our whole experience of life is being sung into being through the olfactory hole. And then we've got tactile, right? Tactile sensation. One of them is like all kinds of touches in a similar way. And taste, all kinds of tastes in a similar way. And although technically we talk about the flute as having five holes, the original bore that went from one end to the other is the sixth hole. The sixth hole is what we call the mind door. This is the kind of the doorway through which memory and thoughts and expectations and hopes and fears flows through. So now we've got a kind of a basically functioning shakuhachi flute and a basically functioning human flute. I mean, we've got a kind of an openness. We've got a certain amount of discernment. We've got the blow edge. We've got the five holes. We've got our five senses. We've got a mind that can think. The further crafting of this unfolds as we learn to play it. I mean, what I'm saying is we don't sort of perfectly finish the crafting and then you get on with the playing. You need to play and craft at the same time, right? This is something that's extraordinarily important. It's a process of playful experimentation. The playfulness is that, you know, that's the willingness to try things out and to kind of, there are no mistakes in this. There's no mistakes in the flute. There's no mistakes in the human. I'm pretty happy with that. I'm going to do lots of little polishing now. And then what you find, you might find, oh, I need to make a little adjustment. A little bit more attentiveness, a little bit less tension, a little bit more openness, a little bit more patience, a little bit more acceptance, a bit more generosity. And after a while you begin to see that this is, this wholeness of your being functioning well is the greatest, most wonderful offering that you can offer to others. And so, you know, we've crafted a beautiful instrument. We've learned to play it and we offer the music of our playing to others. This is the musician. And as a human flute, you know, whether we're working in crafts or raising a family or working in business and so on to kind of open this up, right? It's like, what do I have that I can offer to the world? One way of looking at the flute is it amplifies the inherent music of the musician. And, you know, when we look at a human being, we say, well, what is music? Music is rhythm and notes and pauses and silences and repetitions, right, of this kind of thing. And we are made of biorhythms. We have a heart is beating, our breath is moving, right? Our cells are clicking, our arteries and veins are swooshing. There is a kind of a music in each one of us. The human being who is living a life with lots of kind of agitation and anger and frustration and so on manifests a certain type of music. This is really why we did this work, because we saw that it was more of a metaphor. Yes, we worked with making a flute and working in this way, but it can be applied to everything. You know, what we're talking about here is like fundamental to being very alive and engaged and responsive participant in the ecosphere, participating in crafting ourselves into the finest, most responsive, most fully potential instrument to offer to the world.