Creativity and Imagination

Creativity is an important quality in the spiritual life, and one I think that is quite poorly understood. There is a categorical difference between being artistic and being creative. Making art in whatever medium is the most high profile, and generally considered to to be the most valuable manifestation of creativity. Not everyone has the talent, dexterity, or the patience to be an artist, but still, everyone is creative. In this post I want to explore some of my ideas about creativity, and to show that creativity is a universal human activity, not confined to art making.

Let's start with a definition. What is creativity? Creativity is the ability to look for, find, and realise, new possibilities. I see creativity as a process that has phases and requires different attitudes and skills in each. The process of creativity has these stages: generating, filtering, focussing, moving towards, internalising.

All of our minds are capable of drifting, of being erratic, of jumping around. The infamous monkey mind. I take two contradictory positions on this. Firstly I celebrate my monkey mind because what it is doing is generating possibilities and ideas. Most of us filter out 90% of what our mind generates as non-sense or not needing to be above the threshold of awareness. The artist however pays closer attention to the 'noise' their mind generates because in it lurk all kinds of new possibilities, new combinations of familiar things. The Buddhist position, my second viewpoint, views the monkey mind as a kind of disaster in progress and seeks to calm it down. A calm and controlled mind is free to move in any direction, and we can choose which direction it moves in. So meditation brings in a tension for me. I know that periods of my life which are difficult, chaotic even, are also the times when I can be incredibly productive in my art - which suggests heightened creativity. Too much chaos and the mind becomes incoherent of course, but equally too much calm might mean a reduction in the flow of ideas. However meditation can make me more observant, more able to sustain my gaze which is an important creative skill, but it is an aspect of the second phase of the creative process.

We always have more options than we can choose from. We are always receiving more sensory data than we can possibly process. We are usually flooded with stray thoughts and memories, each of which produces a cascade of association. So we filter what is in our awareness, sometimes through habit, or cultural conditioning, or perhaps because of personal biases, but mostly from necessity. If we were suddenly able to be aware of literally everything that is going on in our bodies and minds we would be swamped and overwhelmed. However we can always do with being a little more aware. Being creative means paying attention to our internal psycho-physical process. Paying attention to what attracts and repels us, what fascinates and what bores. Either extreme may be where the pay-off is. The tension of anticipation of change can make boredom exquisite. People who are more obviously creative are probably more aware of this process and more willing to entertain seemingly silly or ridiculous information arising from his process. They have looser criteria, or can allow the filters to be less restrictive for periods of time. Some people attempt to use drugs for this purpose, but my experience suggests that in such cases people are creative despite the drugs, not because of them.

Once I picked up the exhaust manifold from an old engine lying by the side of the road. As I turned it over I thought - "Snoopy!". It suddenly looked like a beagle sitting with his head hanging. More profoundly William Blake saw the universe in a grain of sand. Objects in our environment can be the grit in our minds to create pearls of creativity. Having seen something interesting in the stream of output from their churning mind, the artist then gives it their full attention. This is where meditation and art really start to work together because samatha (calming) meditations are excellent for aiding this process. Creativity means we can hold an idea in our thoughts and walk around it, explore it, see where it wants to go, follow it a little way into the future in our imagination. I've come to see this as an important aspect of imagination. The ideas just come, just stand out from the flotsam and jetsam of our minds, but to explore them takes imagination.

I think of imagination as my sense of the future. In memory we examine past experience, in imagination we try to predict what a future experience will be like. This is very advantageous on a practical level - it enables us to plan ahead, to try out a new experience a little to see whether we think it is worth expending energy on. When it comes to art, the artist is usually working from a mental design. When Michelangelo was asked by a child what he was doing in his workshop, he replied "there are angels trapped in these blocks of stone, and I'm trying to set them free". Imagination is not the source of creativity, it is a skill that enables us to take advantage of a natural situation. It allows us to mentally develop an idea when it occurs to us, if it gets past the filters. Imagination can be developed through use.

The next thing in the creative process is a response to our mental creation - we have had the new idea, made it stand out from the background noise, explored and navigated it, and now we must move towards it. We have to act on the idea. In art of course this usually means making some kind of object. Or we might bake a cake, plant a bulb in the garden, make a witty comment in the moment, or simply stand for a few minutes to look at a sunset. All of these seem to me to arise out of the creative process as I understand it. This phase often calls for persistence. Thomas Edison is famously quoted as saying that "invention is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration". I'm frequently complemented on my art works. Sometimes people will say "I wish I could paint". I definitely get the sense that they wish to be able to conjure a painting out of nothing. When I have an idea for a painting I generally spend quite a bit of time thinking about it. I might look at art works, or read some books which will inspire me or give me ideas about techniques. Then I will start drawing. This can take some time because I'm not a skilled draughtsman. I struggle with proportion and line. I struggle with shading and colour. It takes a lot of work to get a drawing that will form the basis of a painting. Then I have to transfer the drawing to a canvas or board. The act painting is tedious and takes a long time. I make a lot of mistakes which must be corrected laboriously. It takes many hours, days and weeks to make a painting that I feel happy about. I most certainly do not conjure anything out of thin air.

This is the last phase of the creative process - learning or internalising. Having conceived of and executed a creative act we try to reflect on the experience. Sometimes we can reuse what we've learned, and apply it to other situations and it has a concrete practical value. Other times it's a one off and highly ephemeral. But whatever the utility of what we have learned we allow ourselves to absorb the experience.

The most obvious application of creativity in the spiritual life is the conceiving of, and pursuit of positive change. In the field of ethics for instance we can be creative by allowing for more subtle choices in complex situations - we can allow for more possibilities, explore the potential consequences, move pro-actively towards our best option, and finally to learn about the consequence of our actions. Each phase of the creative process is important and benefits us in it's own way.

The Cult of the Book and Western ideas of Canonicity

American Scholar Gregory Schopen makes the interesting observation that the study of Buddhism contains a curious anomaly. Buddhologists have always had two sources of information about the history of Buddhism: texts and material remains. However despite the existence of epigraphical and archaeological evidence, Buddhologists have set this aside and focuses on texts, taking texts as the sine qua non of the history of Buddhism, and of what Buddhism is. Western Buddhists have conspired with scholars because of a traditional tendency to fundamentalism with regard to texts, we have picked up our Asian teachers' faith that a sutra was always the literal word of the Buddha: thus have I heard.

Anyone educated in the sciences, as I was, will be familiar the refrain that one can only draw conclusions from what one observes. At school one almost always knew what was supposed to happen in a science experiment - but my teachers always insisted that I write up what actually happened and account for any discrepancy between that and what was expected. As the humanities have invaded the sciences - creating the "social sciences" - they could be expected to take on this dictum. However Schopen makes it clear that Buddhologists have not done this. In the rare cases where non-textual information is considered, it is always secondary to texts, and where it conflicts with texts it is set aside as an aberration.

Schopen takes a rather provocative stance in response to this situation - motivated perhaps in part by a desire to stimulate discussion, or perhaps it is frustration? For instance Schopen claims in his book Bones, Stone, and Monks that there is no evidence for a canon of writings before the 5th century. No canon is mentioned in any reliably dated source before this time Although the canon refers to it's own creation at an early date, it has become apparent over the years that the Pali Canon reflects a highly sectarian set of views, and is concerned with establishing the legitimacy of a form of Buddhism which is current in the 5th century in Sri Lanka. Another claim which Schopen makes is that the canonical texts reflect an idealised history, a way of life which no one has ever followed. Where there is material evidence on the lifestyle of monks and nuns it always contradicts the texts. For instance it is axiomatic that the Sangha did not own property, and yet inscriptions on stupas up and down India show that the donors that paid for the monuments were frequently the same monks and nuns who owned no property. Indeed coins are a common find in monastic ruins, and the means for minting coins have been found in at least one! The idea that monks did not own property is contradicted by the evidence of archaeology.

It has been interesting over the years being a member of the FWBO and seeing the vehement criticism of Sangharakshita for having the temerity of teaching things which were not strictly canonical and still calling it Buddhism. For instance Sangharakshita has made creative use of the metaphor of evolution to illustrate his thinking on the spiritual life. This kind of heterodoxy is condemned in some circles as "not Buddhism". Why? Because it is not in a traditional text - although it could be argued that Sangharakshita is simply restating an idea which is explicit in the Pali Canon, in the Upanisa Sutta for instance, but that would be to play the fundamentalists game. Oddly, for an Indian religion, written texts have become the arbiters of orthodoxy - a situation which I would argue runs counter to the long history of religion in that country.

So why is it that Buddhologists and Buddhists have privileged texts? Schopen claims to detect the spirit of Protestantism behind it. During the formation of the Protestant movement one of the defining disputes was over the status of practices. Amongst other things Catholics were accused of idolatry because of the worship given Mary and the Saints. The Protestant response was to turn to biblical fundamentalism in order, not only to distinguish themselves from Catholics, but to justify their heterodoxy by claiming to be more orthodox that the orthodox. Recall the violent repression of heterodoxy which characterised the Catholic Church over the centuries: heretics were not only persecuted they were tortured and horribly executed. If the justification for dissent came from the Bible itself, well perhaps it might prevent a red-hot poker in an uncomfortable place!

The same scenario probably would not have happened in India. The hegemonic religious caste of India has never been hostile to heterodoxy in the same violent way. When the Brahmins felt threatened by a competing faith they adopted what I call the Microsoft Approach: buy-out, rebrand, and market as an innovation. And so Shiva, the ancient cult, was soon adopted as Brahminical and Shaiva priests made honorary Brahmins. If you look at the avatars of Vishnu you will find a number of local cults - gods in the form for instance of a tortoise, a fish, a boar, a dwarf - incorporated. Indeed the 9th incarnation of Vishnu is the Buddha himself, relegated to telling us to be kind to animals. "All is one; God is good".

And so we have the interesting situation at present. Scholars of history have accepted the inevitable and more or less abandoned the project of creating a history out of the sacred texts. Anthropologists have decided they are more interested in what people do, than what they believe; beliefs are interesting in so far as they result in behaviour - a sentiment I believe the Buddha might have endorsed. Of course linguists are OK because they are interested in the language rather than the message. But Buddhists maintain a kind of fundamentalism about Buddhist texts. No point of view is valid unless punctuated by a quote from the Pali Canon (I know I am guilty of this!) Taking the Pali Canon as an example we know that it has been translated at least once (into Pali), that is has been edited rather clumsily at times, and that the current collection is attested only in the 5th century. The canon shows that it's preservers had preoccupations which were not always shared by the contemporaries, and that by the time writing came into being there were multiple competing interpretations of some of the most fundamental doctrines - such as the status of dharmas. It seems clear that the composition of news texts was a constant activity for Buddhists by the time that they began to employ writing in perhaps the 1st century BCE. The newly composed texts often gave considerable space to denouncing their heterodox co-religionists in the most base terms (I believe for instance that hinayana has caste-ist overtones and can be equated with insults such as "nigger" in contemporary vocabulary). And these are the texts to which we Buddhists yoke ourselves, mostly quite uncritically.

Don't get me wrong. I love the Buddhist scriptures, and value them both as spiritual inspiration and as literature. But I believe that what we Buddhists actually do is far more important than what we believe. The scriptures may well contain echoes of the words of the Buddha, but there is no substitute for practice, and the instruction of a more experienced spiritual friend. If, in the end, what works is in contradiction to the texts, then we must follow our insights, as the composers of the later Buddhist texts did. Buddhism is founded on principles, not on texts. Buddhist fundamentalism can never be justified in terms of Buddhist principles.


Further Reading

Harrison, Paul. 1995. Searching for the origins of the Mahayana : what are we looking for? Eastern Buddhist. 28(1), p.48-69.

Schopen, G. 1991. Archaeology and Protestant presumptions in the study of Indian Buddhism. History of Religions. 31(1), p.1-23.

Schopen, G. 1997. Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks : Collected Papers on the Archaeology, Epigraphy, and Texts of Monastic Buddhism in India Honolulu : University of Hawai’i Press.

Schopen, G. 1999. The bones of a Buddha and the business of a monk : conservative monastic values in an early Mahayana polemical tract. Journal of Indian Philosophy. vol. 27, p.279-324.

Wedemeyer, Christain, K. 2001. Tropes, typologies and turnarounds : a brief genealogy of the historiography of tantric Buddhism. History of Religions. 40(3), p.223-259