Last month saw two giants pass away. One was a Vietnamese Buddhist Monk, who earned the nickname the “father of mindfulness.” A man whose insistence on living in peace led him to be exiled from his home country for 40 years; to be disdained by southern Vietnamese military leaders, northern Vietnamese communists, and the American government; and to be embraced by leaders like the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and Trappist Monk Thomas Merton.
The other was a rocker who shared his name with America’s seventh favorite dish.
I write of course about Thich Nhat Hanh and Meat Loaf.
Meat Loaf and Thich Nhat Hanh.
One was a rock star whose greatest song was about a guy who wanted to get laid so badly that he swore “on his mother’s grave” that he’d love his girl until the end of time. The other was a monk who dedicated his life to peace and to the worldwide spread of “engaged Buddhism,” a form of Buddhism dedicated to addressing injustice around the world.
Prior to their deaths, had their names ever appeared together in a single sentence? Or even a paragraph, essay, or book?
Let’s try. Let’s explore ways in which they or their ideas are in harmony with one another, ways in which they have some common ground.
Let’s start simple to bridge this seeming chasm:
- Thich Nhat Hanh was vegan. Meat Loaf, ironically, was vegetarian for a dozen years, refraining from all meats, including presumably his namesake meat.
- Both sold millions of copies of their work. Thich Nhat Hanh sold over 5 million copies of his 130 publications. Rock ‘n’ roll is a worthy competitor, however. Meat Loaf’s 14x platinum album Bat Out of Hell, alone, sold over 43 million copies.
Those are, however, relatively superficial similarities. After all, had they not each been phenomenally successful in their pursuits, we’d have no idea who they even were and I never would have even contemplated this essay.
While noodling on Meat and Thich Nhat Hanh, I raised the topic of their lives with the leader of my local Zen practice, Peter. In his 70s and raised on rock and roll, Peter noted that there may be conflicts inherent between rock and roll and Buddhism; that their underlying philosophies and lifestyles are just too different.
I countered that rock and roll is very much about living in the moment—”we gotta make the most of our one night together,” Meat Loaf sings in “Bat out of Hell.” Similarly, Buddhism and mindfulness tell us that there is nothing but the current moment. “There is only one moment for you to be alive, and that is the present moment,” wrote Thich Nhat Hanh. “Go back to the present moment and live this moment deeply, and you’ll be free.”
But, explained Peter, rock and roll is about taking that moment to excess. In that same song, Meat Loaf sings “I never see the sudden curve ’til it’s way too late” and the song’s lead character crashes his motorcycle into a pit on the side of the road and dies. He lived the moment to its extreme, and it killed him. Thich Nhat Hanh, in contrast, leans into the present moment whether it is simply a moment of eating breakfast or cutting carrots.
So much of rock is about escaping the present moment. Those who know me well, know that I am a fan—disciple even—of Bruce Springsteen and of course the Boss’s definitive song is exactly about escape–”Tramps like us, baby we were born to run!” “Bat Out of Hell” is remarkably similar:
Like a bat out of hell, I’ll be gone when the morning comes.
When the night is over, like a bat out of hell
I’ll be gone, gone, gone.
Buddhism and mindfulness are about not escaping. They are about accepting the present moment in all its ugliness or beauty. Only from that acceptance, a Buddhist like Thich Nhat Hanh would argue, can one make change in the world as he himself sought to do throughout his life. If one is always escaping the present moment, one never faces reality.
Still, there is something about rock. A great live rock show is in a category of its own on the “List of In-the-Moment Experiences.” Harken back to your best ever concert. For me, at the greatest concerts I’ve attended, my whole body filled with the beating of the drums, my mind carved by the squealing of the guitar, my lungs screaming with the lyrics of my favorite songs. Had someone told me there were a million dollars to be had if I just walked away, I would have answered, “No thank you. I am here, now, doing this.” That’s the definition of present-mindedness.
Words ultimately fail even the most devout Buddhists in their effort to describe enlightenment. In his introduction to The Dhammapada, a sacred Buddhist text, scholar Eknath Easwaran explains that the Buddha himself “steadfastly refuses to limit with words what we will find” when we glimpse our true nature.
The experience of our true nature, of enlightenment, is the experience and nothing else. The experience cannot be described by words, but can only be vaguely pointed to by them.
Here—maybe—is where music helps. Sound comes to us very early. In the womb, we begin to hear noises outside of our mother’s body, making hearing foundational to our experience of life. (For those who are hearing impaired, other senses come to play this significant role.)
And where the written word fails us, perhaps the experience of listening to music does not. Different rockers—Steppenwolf—sang the following:
Close your eyes girl
Look inside girl
Let the sound
Take you away
A Buddhist like Thich Nhat Hanh might change just the last word in those lyrics–replace “away” to “deeper,” and by so doing transform rock’s penchant for escaping with Buddhism’s penchant for looking deep into our minds and the current moment. (He’d likely also change “girl” to acknowledge this experience is open to all humanity, but we’ll leave it for now.)
Close your eyes girl
Look inside girl
Let the sound
Take you deeper.
Are we getting closer to bridging the chasm? A message we take from Thich Nhat Hanh is that the present moment is the only place we ever can be and that in this present moment we can find some transcendence.
A message from Meat Loaf—or really from our now 70 year love affair with rock and roll—is that while words lack the power to truly describe transcendence, music itself gets us closer. It takes us there not through the message of the music (which is encased in words) but through the music itself. Through our “cannot-be-named” experience of that music.
All we ever have is the present moment. So many of those moments can seem dull. We have to get work done, cook our food, drive the kids to and fro, wash dishes.
But, some of those moments are one hundred percent full of life. You’ve had them and there’s a chance you’ve had one at the greatest rock concert you ever attended—an instance when you were so lost in the present moment of music that you found and experienced your true self.
Those transcendent rock concert moments are available all day, every day. This doesn’t mean you should be air-guitaring, belting out lyrics, or diving into mosh pits while at work, dropping the kids at school, or cleaning up after dinner.
But, the aliveness you felt at that concert is always available to you.
As Thich Nhat Hanh writes:
We can see making breakfast as mundane work or as a privilege—it just depends on our way of looking. When we cook, when we clean, when we walk, each movement can be made with mindfulness, concentration, and insight.
And while Meat Loaf and just about every other rock star will tell you that your liberation is a fast car or a fast motorcycle headed straight out of town, Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us that, no, “Insight is our liberation.”
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Previously Published on Cairn and Sky and is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Shutterstock