The Wisdom of The Monk by the Sea
The Monk by the Sea (1808-1810) by Caspar David Friedrich
April 20, 2025
As a lifelong art lover, I’ve happened upon numerous works that have evoked meditative states in as many museums: Mark Rothko’s dreamy rectangles, surrealist masterpieces by René Magritte and Salvador Dalí, and the spectacle of Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrors. While language can offer us glimpses into states of deep contemplation, images can instantly summon the naked presence, calm spaciousness, and radiant buoyancy that mark these timeless experiences.
One such artwork, Caspar David Friedrich’s “The Monk by the Sea” (1808-1810), struck me the moment I encountered it at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2025. Before I could explain it, I stood as close as I could to photograph the Romantic minimalist masterwork. What is it about this painting? I wondered, moved by a fascination I couldn't describe. The answer to the riddle lay just beyond reach, yet hidden in plain sight.
The Soul of Nature, the exhibit it was part of, featured dozens of paintings, drawings, and sketches by the German Romantic landscape artist who produced a corpus of naturalist wonders from the late 18th century to the early 19th century. While other canvases beckoned further scrutiny for compelling moments, “The Monk by the Sea” touched me so profoundly that I returned to view it three more times.
And then I realized why.
Each viewing recalled the contemplative traditions I’ve practiced over the years: the expansiveness of Transcendental Meditation, the calm of mindfulness (shamatha-vipashyana), and the clarity of Dzogchen (Great Perfection). The scene conjured the emptiness containing the windswept volcanoes, flowering deserts, and hypnotic oceans I’ve stood before, the emptiness making the power of air, fire, earth, and water possible on my nature treks throughout the years.
Three horizontal bands of land, sea, and sky anchor the composition, the atmosphere dominating with light, color, and movement that invoke a strong sense of limitless openness. A lone monk contemplates the scene, bottom left center, dwarfed by undulating clouds that reflect twilight before sunrise or after sunset. He seems to yearn for a deeper understanding of the spectacle surrounding him, like a dialogue between the purity of his spirit and the dominion of nature that nurtures and destroys.
The muted hues and heavy atmosphere evoke the thoughts, feelings, and perceptions that distract you when you invert your attention to gaze directly at the mind in mindfulness. This avalanche of activity often intimidates—and frustrates—novice meditators who attempt to stop their thoughts to clear their minds, a common misconception among my students.
While more advanced ascetics might claim such a feat to be possible, stopping the mind from producing thoughts is beyond reach for most of us.
The mindfulness method teaches you to notice such “movements” of the mind without engaging them. Rather than trying to rid consciousness of this never-ending barrage of activity (which creates more thinking), you return your attention to the breath or other objects of focus. Through repetition, you train yourself to arouse equanimity in any situation, particularly those that incite defiled emotions like rage, jealousy, or suspicion. Through disciplined effort, you learn to respond rather than react to challenges.
The seemingly limitless horizon where sea and sky merge hints at the boundless expanse of your awareness. You observe the thoughts, emotions, and sensations that arise from and vanish into the great emptiness of consciousness when you meditate, like cresting waves that collapse into the ocean or mists that form and evaporate. The mind is as vast as the limitless universe it can imagine, I read somewhere once. You can experience this inward expansive easily when guided by a qualified teacher.
This all-pervading awareness reigns as supremely as the atmospheric spaciousness in this artwork, an inner expanse that mirrors the cosmic infinitude you perceive as being “out there.” This cognizance illuminates every aspect of your life, like the twilight glow that makes the earth, sea, and sky visible in this scene. This radiating consciousness makes your thoughts and emotions perceptible to you, whether you’re aware of its presence or not. It objectifies every sight, sound, scent, taste, and feeling that permeates your existence through the ordinary senses. It’s the light that brings reality to life.
Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche used the analogy of a movie theater to explain how consciousness functions in his famous teachings. The movie screen represents emptiness or the fundamental ground of your being, capable of displaying any image cast upon it like a mirror. The film reel symbolizes the flow of thoughts, emotions, and perceptions that can be projected onto this field of emptiness, the ever-changing contents of consciousness that string together in a succession of snapshots and impressions.
The movie projector mirrors your ego or conceptual mind, which transforms these static celluloid images into a fluidly continuous stream on the screen, the illusion of a fixed reality. The light passing through the film (and lens) from the projector’s bulb represents your awareness or consciousness, the fundamental luminescence that allows the images (your experiences) to appear on the screen. Scenes cannot come to life without the luminescence cast from this “lamp”—no awareness, no reality.
The lone monk at the edge of the world recalls the “observing self” in dualistic meditation traditions like mindfulness. You, like him, stand apart from the forms arising and vanishing in the atmosphere of your sky-mind, which you witness without judgment in mindfulness. His stillness echoes the point of view from which you observe the ever-shifting nature of inner and outer “reality”. With time and practice, you settle into the profound stillness of mind and body known as samadhi or meditative equipoise, a timeless state of being revered for the joy, peace, and bliss it inspires.
The indistinct line between sea and sky evokes the merging of “me/subject” and “world/object” as you transition into nondual (non)meditation discipline. This blurring of the ego's hard lines produces feelings of unity and interconnectedness, much like the space permeating everything in “The Monk by the Sea”. Watcher and watched fuse into the non-dual experience of “watching” in your natural state of primordial awareness, or rigpa in Tibetan, which a qualified teacher points out to you.
(You can visualize this transition as a movie camera pulling back from the beach scene until the monk blurs into the immensity of space and form, as subject and object fuse into the non-duality of naked experience.)
In non-meditation practices, such as Dzogchen (Great Perfection) and Mahamudra (Great Seal), we let everything come and go in the mind without a fixed object of focus. We allow everything to remain unchanged. Unburdened of the ceaseless tyranny of distracting thoughts, our minds become clearer and lighter as we rest in awareness, like the twilight passing through the break in the clouds in Friedrich’s composition. (My Zen colleagues approach the shikantaza (just sitting) non-meditation method similarly.)
While attaining these degrees of insight and recognition takes time, you begin by accepting whatever arises in the mind rather than trying to control it, since you can’t. Like the monk in this masterwork, you take everything in while remaining firmly in place through wakeful mindfulness. By “being” rather than “doing”, you surrender to the pristine, timeless awareness that makes your life possible—a radiant bliss.
As in life, the undefined horizon in “The Monk by the Sea” speaks to the inherent mystery of the future. Just like the solitary witness who stands before an ever-changing world in this jewel of art history, you can accept the certainty of uncertainty in life, the impermanence of your precious human birth. You release your grip on the need to know and control everything, allowing yourself to “bend in the wind like bamboo” as needed.
The fruition of these practices becomes clearer with time: We give our fullest attention to real-time experience, the present moment, rather than getting swept away by the time-traveling ego mind that causes most of our suffering. Like the sole protagonist in this haunting masterwork, we stop to take in the fullest breadth of each moment with alert awareness, with each fleeting in-breath and out-breath.
We awaken to the spectacle.