Bowie and the Buddha

I’m working on a pitch to a potential special guest to come on my interview show to discuss Bowie and Buddhism. The idea is to focus more on Buddhism than Bowie per se, to get a better sense of the basis of some of Bowie’s lyrical references, but on a bigger level, some of the ideas that influenced the way Bowie presented himself. This post is a preview in a sense.

Bowie, reportedly, always had an interest in Buddhism and even contemplated becoming a monk. While he did not choose that path, some of his very early songs made direct reference to Buddhist concepts. Examples include two songs from 1967, the overt “Karma Man” and the slightly less obvious “Silly Boy Blue,” the latter of which likely mixes Buddhist, Hindu and some kind of late 60s western hippie-dippy amalgamation of concepts in lines such as:

Yak butter statues that melt in the sun
Cannot dissolve all the work you’ve not done
A chela likes to feel
That his overself pays the bill

Bowie would quickly adapt a more subtle approach in his songwriting but continued to make Buddhist references in songs such as “After All” (1970), which mentions the Buddhist concept of impermanence and “rebirth,” and “Quicksand” (1971), which makes reference to “the next bardo,’ a line that confused me for years until I learned that the word means a transitional state between two phases of existence and comes out of Tibetan Buddhism.

What happened next is more interesting. Although I suspect that Bowie included additional, overt Buddhist references in some of his later songs that I haven’t recognized as such, he moved away from using the language and rather practiced some of the ideas– specifically, the ideas that nothing is permanent, nothing is real, and the idea of reincarnation. Think about Bowie’s process of reinvention as a cycle of birth, temporary, illusory existence, death and rebirth. He didn’t just sing about impermanence, he lived it. I mentioned in a post earlier this week that his repeated assurance that his newest incarnation is the “real Bowie” must have been an in-joke, not the least reason being that “David Bowie” was a fictitious name. This seems to align with the Buddhist idea that the whole concept of self is illusory. Bowie’s often-noted theme of exploring identity may have actually been his exploration of non-identity. I have also written before about the repeated appearance of the word “nothing” in Bowie’s lyrics. I’m not the first to note this, but the word is so common that it seems to me that for Bowie, “nothing” might mean something. If so, Bowie is using the word with an awareness of the Buddhist concept of emptiness. Everything is nothing, or at least everything is emptiness (which, OK, is not the exact same thing), though ’emptiness” doesn’t work as well as “nothing” as a lyric. Bowie also continued to the end to remind us that everything ch-ch-changes. This gets back to the idea of impermanence. Even “The Wedding,” one of Bowie’s few, genuine love songs, written for his own marriage to Iman, includes the line, “she’s not mine for eternity.” No endless love for Bowie, because nothing is eternal. Actually, the idea of permanence is stultifying for Bowie. The lives of “The Supermen” (1970) are endless but tragic. Major Tom, who retreats to the stasis of space, ends up as a junkie, strung out in Heaven’s High.

Even as Bowie’s lyrics became more self-referential and reflective, he hints that time and space are themselves illusory. He has a lot going on in “Slip Away” (2002), which is at least partially a commentary on nostalgia:

“Oogie knew there’s never ever time
Some of us will always stay behind
Down in space it’s always 1982”

Oogie was a puppet– another fictional character. In this respect, Oogie knew nothing because Oogie was not real. But this non-being also, paradoxically knew that there is no time. The lyric is a typical Bowie double meaning– “there’s never ever time” sounds, on the surface, to mean that there isn’t enough time for some purpose. But to my limited understanding of the Buddhist view, the line can also be interpreted literally– there never really is time, because time itself is a fiction. Those of us stuck in the past are in the same stasis– space– as Major Tom. I think, also, 1982 had a particular meaning to Bowie in the sense that it was the year before Let’s Dance, the last year between his transition from the edgy, dangerous Bowie of Scary Monsters and the 1970s and family-friendly pop icon Bowie of the 80s. 1982 was essentially a bardo. On some level, I think the song is a lament about the folly of regret, an emotion, which to Buddhists equates to suffering. Few of Bowie’s more than 400 songs even mention emotions. “Nothing” is far more common even than “love,” let alone anger or pride or any other emotion in Bowie’s songs.

Anyway, all this and more seems informed by an understanding of Buddhism beyond that of my own. So be on the lookout for a future interview on the subject. Otherwise, I’ll tell you all about it… well, you get the idea…