If I might be so bold as to try to pull together a few wandering threads here... I live in a country that's only 95% Buddhist (and only 1% Xtian, praise Jesus), and they drink, steal, lie, fornicate and do whatever that other precept forbids. The essence of it has nothing to do with religion (Buddhism is essentially atheistic) in the Western sense, but it's pure Buk: The world is what it is, not what we might wish it to be, and happiness comes from understanding that. Don't try. The composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (who died December, 2007, RIP) was influenced by trips to Sri Lanka in the 70's, and began writing music in which the players are instructed not to try, to begin playing only when their mind was clear of musical ideas, and as soon as they found themselves consciously playing, to stop. A little hippy-dippy, but he was onto something (I think). I attended a few of these concerts long ago, and the results were often surprising. Buk's writing was like that. He just lived, and usually the poetry came bubbling up, and he wrote it down. If not, who cared? It almost never seems the result of conscious will, the exceptions being, in my opinion, his writing for money (Notes of a Dirty Old Man, Barfly). A better musical corollary would be Charles Ives, who realized that creating for money was just another kind of prostitution, so he cofounded a life insurance company and became a millionaire, writing four symphonies and 1,000 other works on the weekends, at night, and on the commuter train to New York. When he won a Pulitzer for a String Quartet, he didn't show up to accept it, saying "Prizes are for little biys. I'm grown up now." So if I were giving advice to a young composer wantging to know how to be successful, I'd said "Don't try", because the act of trying will muck it up. Or as Zappa said, "Get a real estate license." By the way, several Indian friends have told me that "All Buddhists are Hindus." Whatever.
