Rilke, Zen Master: On Awakening to Beauty. Part 1. About a Broken Nose

All things perish, but beauty endures! A mind established in beauty needs no more salvation!

Beauty Breathes Where It Wants To

We can recall another famous statement about beauty, although it sounds like an echo of Dostoyevsky’s aphorism. We are talking about the words of Nicholas Roerich, who said,

Awareness of beauty will save the world.

Disagreeing with the Russian classic, the author of the Living Ethics doctrine was convinced:

It is wrong to say: ́Beauty will save the world́.

As we can see, in Roerich’s understanding it is not beauty in itself, which is unchanging and eternal, that saves, but the awareness of it. In essence, the philosopher-theosophist subjected beauty to consciousnes. He also truly believed that it was possible to create beauty:

Man inexorably approaches the knowledge of truth and ascends to light through art, which creates beauty.

The patient reader who has read the dialogues carefully will easily come to the conclusion that Roerich’s ideas about the nature of beauty are profoundly… wrong! How can one be aware of, let alone create, beauty which, as Rilke succinctly and accurately put it, has

no image, no meaning, no trace of a name?[1 - «nichts Dargestelltes, nichts Gemeintes, keine Spur von einem Namen»]

To be ́awaré or to ́creaté beauty, doesn’t that simply mean to be bound by ́beautý, by its form, its attributes, its visibility? And therefore,

the artist who is guided by this knowledge does not need to think about beauty; he knows as little as the others what it is made of,[2 - «Der Künstler, den diese Erkenntnis lenkt, hat nicht an die Schönheit zu denken; er weiß ebensowenig wie die Anderen, worin sie besteht»]

the poet continues, formulating the fundamental aesthetic principle that the artist should follow:

No one has ever created beauty.[3 - «Niemand hat je Schönheit gemacht.»]

This paradoxical principle of the non-man-made essence of beauty is what the Master of Chan would have called ́non-thought́ about beauty. For true beauty rises to the impersonal, where there is no ego. On this point Master Tho Idi gave his explanation:

If you allow images, meanings, names for beauty there is a danger that you will begin to create an illusion. The causeless is not consciously graspable. It cannot be created. Beauty breathes where it wants to.

Two Masters of Zen

Is Beauty Not Prelest?

Beauty is often confused with prelest[4 - Prelest (a word of Russian origin, known as flattery, charm, seduction, deception) is an Orthodox Christian term that, according to the Holy Fathers of the Orthodox Church, refers to a false spiritual state, a spiritual illness, a spiritual delusion.], which is ego-generated and a substitute for beauty. Therefore, spiritually immature minds are often ́enlightened́ by the idea that beauty is something man-made, and that it can be improved and even appropriated if one makes enough effort and learns its principles. Only the truly awakened know how irresistible and pernicious the spiritual prelest can be, and how skilled it is in the art of deception. In the soul-saving tradition of the Orthodox Church there are many examples of how even holy silent ascetics imbue beauty with false attributes peculiar to delirium (netvarnal ́radiancé, angelic ́illuminationś and other high mountain ́lightś), which they regard as ́garments of their deificatioń. Alas, the souls of such ascetics revel in ́glorý and clothe themselves in the ́splendour of the highest beautieś, often forgetting that