ABSTRACT
The chapter, which is ostensibly centred around David Bowie, explores the artist and musician's relationship with Buddhism, which date back to the 1960s. In this regard, the chapter constitutes the first in-depth attempt to trace the tenuous but no less substantive threads of Bowie's ‘Buddhist bumblings’, as he once described them. However, beyond biographical and mythological forays into Bowie's spiritual and philosophical leanings, the chapter's overarching objective is to examine links between strands of Buddhist theory and practice and the nurturing and sustaining of creativity (or of creative selfhood). In the first section, we explore the ways in which Bowie is frequently held up as an exemplar of ‘postmodern selfhood’, a characterisation rooted in his oft-cited status as a shapeshifter or changeling. We then turn more directly to Bowie's interest in Tibetan Buddhism, from its first, rather naïve and orientalist renderings in the mid-1960s, through to his relationship with Tibetan lama Chime Rinpoche (and the more overstated and mythologised links with Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche), to Bowie's later comments and reflections on the role that Buddhist teachings have played in his life: ‘I have always followed some of the tenets of Buddhism’, he told an interviewer in 2005, ‘especially the one about change’. In the last section, we shift the discussion more prominently towards questions of creativity and the incubation of self/non-self, concluding with some tentative thoughts on the interplay between Buddhism, creativity and the productive harnessing of dwellspace.
