#15 - the aesthetics of Enlightenment
#15 - the aesthetics of Enlightenment
And lessons from Frank Yang, the 'Infinite Bruh'
I’m Hima Batavia. A writer, artist, co-creator, and community organizer based in T’karonto and the great infinite. You can learn more about me, my social location, and this newsletter here.
The visual language of Enlightenment is pretty limited, despite its essential pursuit of infinity waking up to its infinity. In our mind and our google searches, Enlightenment is any one of an old, frail man with beads and a beard draped in tattered cloth that mercifully conceals genitalia who is likely walking to a mountain peak with an ancient stick, a queer and smooth-skinned bodhisattva who has renounced all worldly desires hanging out in silence under a voluptuous Bo-Tree for seemingly years with a virgin lotus flower in their lap or a stencil of a human filled in with cosmic patterns set against an intricate kaleidoscopic backdrop of repetitive cyan and purple shapes capped with a feathering effect to denote the merging of the self with all of consciousness.
As someone raised in the Jain tradition, the first two aesthetics align with almost all texts, handouts, spiritual teachers, and gurus that I have come across. You either gave it all up for the woods or you simply were not serious enough. Or worse, too karmically bound. If you’ve experimented with psychedelics or long-sit meditation, the third aesthetic is not a huge leap from the actual experience. Each visual communicates a solo and solemn journey, a soft and radiating joy with complete devotion being a prerequisite.
The distortion with the Enlightenment aesthetic is that it communicates a static state or the point of transcendence, and very rarely illustrates the phases of the journey which while crossing all emotional, mental, and physical thresholds known to your perceived self to merge and hold all states known in the universe, it can be you know, difficult sometimes. At least perceptively. The heightened awareness and feelings, whether it’s love, compassion, fear, breakthrough your skin, outgrowing the physical limits of the body, literally and figuratively expanding your consciousness. Or at least that is what I have experienced so far.
This formulaic visual repertoire is why Frank Yang, the first person to record attaining Enlightenment on YouTube last September, interrupts everything you might perceive to be the spiritual path towards nirvana. Eight years ago, Yang was best known on the Internet for combining his gregarious personality with bro-y bodybuilding and bulking up tips coming straight from a grungy gym in Taipei. Now, after attaining nirvana - the process of reality realizing itself - he is known as ‘Infinite Bruh.’
Since my friend Ian Doty introduced me to Yang, I’ve watched his video, titled ‘FULL ENLIGHTENMENT HAPPENING LIVE (1st Time In Human History) 開悟之路’ three times. Over 15 minutes, Yang shares his entire journey, documented using low-fi vlogs taken on his mobile phone, from his first sit in 2013 to the ‘big bang’ attained through dedicated practice in September 2020. He tracks two metrics throughout - 1) hours of practice and 2) % level of awakening - an approach aligned with Yang’s bro-y goal-oriented personality and largely uses a Buddhist framework to track his journey, aptly noting to ‘think of it as a video game.’ There are points where Yang is in hysterics experiencing the ‘dark soul,’ and other times where he does not leave bed for two weeks after passing a Kundalini threshold. Throughout, he uses different meditation techniques and shares bite-size realizations around the nature of reality. By the end, his eyes are popping out of his head, all-seeing.
The first time I watched the video, I could not process what I was seeing and hearing; the aesthetic was too much of a departure from all previous visual references. My face squinched and my mind, skeptical, wondered if it was performance art. When Ian asked me what I thought about it, I replied with confusion. In the second viewing, I listened, took mental notes, and integrated the possibility that Enlightenment is truly open and available to anyone and all of us if we so desire in this cycle of birth and death.
Quotes by Frank Yang
If infinity does not include paradox and contradictions, it’s not infinity is it?
When I look at this cup, its completely holographic, I can penetrate it on and on along with all the other objects in the room and sensations…sounds, thoughts, bodies, emotions, whatever. It’s like this luminous boundless hologram, 360 degrees, and its just percieving itself in unity, simultaneously without any delay.
There was never an ego to kill. There was never a meditator. There is no process to dissolve anything. There was never anyone in here.
The third time I watched it, I laughed. Like the kind of laugh that is so deep the noise never makes it to your mouth. Perhaps it is the internal sound of witnessing divinity. The soundless sound emerged as I realized that I was living, aware and awake, in the moment in the infinite universe where Enlightenment is broadcasted live on the Internet, and I got to watch it.
Perhaps what is most endearing about Yang is his quirky and unconventional approach to a process that all eastern religions and rituals are institutionalized around, though it is likely that some may see him as disrespectful to ancient and ancestral wisdom. He throws away all pretense - the monastery is now the gym and Yang’s bedroom, the robe is now a white tank top, the sermons are self-documentary vlogs using a fish-eye lens, and the scriptures are memes - adapting the path to Enlightenment to his way in the world. He is emblematic that how we exist and participate in the external world is no match for the depths and unraveling possible in our internal worlds. That there is no single or right way to awaken to ourselves except to awaken to ourselves.
Though Yang’s particular approach is the first I’ve come across, with the explosion of spiritual content on TikTok and Instagram as our global consciousness rises in symphony with the lifting of the veil of white supremacy, I suspect he won’t be the last. It’s difficult to comprehend how Yang managed to document such an intimate and vulnerable experience, and if the camera gaze legitimizes or delegitimizes his first-person account. There are many points in his journey that are exposed for critique against spiritual and religious traditions and rituals, but ultimately you either decide to take his word for it or not.
Is Yang making the spiritual path more accessible? The way spirituality has been co-opted and shaped in the west, it can feel like awakening is only for the rich, privileged, and those who do yoga and care about moon cycles. For those who have the time for practice and can pay $30 for a meditation class, who can find communities of practice that acknowledge systemic oppression, the politics of marginalized identities, and the way the two intersect to shape our realities and relationships with spirituality, the financial resources for guides, healers, and books, and the mental space to pursue inner emptiness. The path to Enlightenment is an inner calling that eventually supersedes structural barriers, but the colonial and capitalist project is designed to make it as challenging as possible to pursue the path of Enlightenment - by creating labour demands for survival that prevent mental and physical time and space, that center Christian and ‘secular’ ideology in the way cities and physical spaces are prioritized and built, and by co-opting and commercializing spirituality as a brand of whiteness that discourages participation by racialized communities. Any barrier to awakening is a rejection of collective liberation. Rejection of collective liberation allows separation to persist. This is absolutely shifting as Black and Brown communities, healers and spiritual teachers begin to take up space on existing and independent digital platforms, fueled by the racial uprising in 2020, but it is questionable whether this shift is structural versus cosmetic.
It’s not clear what Yang’s privileges are and how they may or may not contribute to his path to Enlightenment. He certainly has time to dedicate himself fully, the most scarce resource in a capitalist society, and does not acknowledge these privileges. However, through his process and post-Big Bang, he uses new forms of media, storytelling, accessible language, and an unpolished aesthetic that demystifies the path to awakening from his social location in Taipei, which one can argue will contribute to dismantling structural barriers by changing the narrative.
The challenge with negotiating the tension between the individual and collective liberation is the limited amount of discourse available on the intersection of spirituality and politics. As Reverand Angel Kyodo Williams says, most Buddhist Sanghas in the west that are predominantly white have completely ignored systemic oppression and political realities, asserting that it does not belong in the space. Her book Radical Dharma is one of few bringing together spiritual practice with justice into an evolved understanding of Buddhist practice.
White folks’ particular reluctance to acknowledge impact as a collective while continuing to benefit from the construct of the collective leaves a wound intact without a dressing. The air needed to breathe through forgiveness is smothered. Healing is suspended for all. Truth is necessary for reconciliation. Will we express the promise of and commitment to liberation for all beings, or will we instead continue a hyper-individualized salvation model—the myth of meritocracy—that is the foundation of this country’s untruth?”
My personal access to spiritual teachings and practice has always been a source of discomfort and a mental barrier to fully surrendering to my path. In Jainism, my privilege would be attributed to my karma, but that explanation has never fully digested because it negates the intention and impact of structural barriers on our shared reality, which I simply do not buy.
Yang gives me permission to own my awakening as the single most important pursuit, priority, and practice in my lifetime. Maybe that’s felt grandiose or presumptuous to say. Maybe I didn’t see myself in the aesthetic of Enlightenment or questioned my seriousness and willingness to participate in the rituals and renunciation required by the Jain tradition, which was ingrained in me from a young age. Yang reminds me, assures me, that we can shape our own way if we are committed, devoted. ‘It’s our human right
I am here for my Enlightenment, Nirvana, Moksha, and I am here for yours too.
Much love this week -
Hima
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