I’m new to songwriting still, and desperately want to emulate a feel I got from a deep cut I found in the work of David Darling and Wulu Bunun (an album where a contemporary composer and cellist set out to underscore traditional a cappella chants and songs of an indigenous people. The song is Lugu Lugu Kan-Ibi, and if you listen you’ll quickly find it’s gorgeous, but I’m dying to know if the song has a deep meaning lyrically. If anyone can provide me with the resources with which to come into a translation I’d love that! This is a reach for sure but I figured where else but reddit.
In a sense, what modern physics is to the history of Western thought, Zen is to the development of the Eastern worldview:
the ultimate refinement of more than two thousand years of incisive debate, discussion, and critical development.
Yet the difference between the two could hardly be more marked.
Whereas physics is interested above all in theories, concepts, and formulas, Zen values only the concrete and the simple.
Zen wants facts — not in the Western sense of things that are measurable and numerical (which are, in fact, abstractions!) but as living, immediate, and tangible.
Its approach to understanding is not to theorize because it recognizes that previously accumulated ideas and knowledge —
in other words, memories of all kinds — block the direct perception of reality.
Therefore, Zen adopts an unusual approach. Its buildup involves language — which is unavoidable.
Any method, even if it turns out to be an antimethod, has first to convey some background in order to be effective.
But the way Zen uses language is always to point beyond language, beyond concepts to the concrete.
David Darling, 1996
