Beauty, the classic thing is "What some people think is beautiful, other people might think is ugly". Beauty is very, very subjective, it's based on our conditioning. People growing up in a certain culture, in a certain climate, in a certain race, religion, and so on, may think something is beautiful. Somebody growing up in another climate, culture, and everything may not think it's beautiful at all.
Paintings, in Australia, I think it was The National Art Gallery once paid two million dollars for a painting that had a line drawn down the middle. The reason they paid so much was because of the signature. The guy was super famous. How many people saw beauty in that I'm not sure, but obviously the art director saw a money investment in it. So beauty's a very odd word. We have to look at it as to our own perspective.
Then there's a type of beauty that's different to what we're normally calling beauty and that's a person's inner qualities. This is where Dhamma starts to take on the word beauty in a different way. What are the person's inner qualities? Are they beautiful or not? A person from the outside might be super overweight, they might be full of pimples, they might not comb their hair, they might have terrible clothing and this and that, and we would say "ugly" from a normal standpoint of attraction. And yet the person might be loving, kind, peaceful, and generous, and they're just so pleasant to be around even though they may seem to be "ugly" on the outside. Somebody else, the perfect Hollywood actress, the Hollywood star actor, the centerfold, the playboy, this and that, they may be beautiful on the outside, but do you want to be around them if they're angry, vicious, jealous, super agitated, etc.? You don't really want to be around them because their inside is not beautiful. So when Dhamma thinks of people in particular, "What is beauty?", it is the inner qualities that we have.
So, our feeling in relationships to "What is beauty?" from a Dhamma perspective, the most important thing is beauty in the inner human qualities. That defines something beautiful.
Finding it in objects, this is interesting. I look over at the statue. As much as that is not the most beautiful Buddha statue I've every seen, in my eyes, it's always beautiful. To see that statue as beautiful because of what it represents. Once again we're going deeper than just the outward surface.
Riding the train from Bangkok down to Surat Thani, if you've ever taken the daytime train. It's not that usual, most people go in the night time. But the daytime train, as your going down, especially around Petchaburi, you look to the mountains, you look to the West, there is a monastery, there is another monastery, there is another monastery, they're dotted every few miles along the landscape, and you can always tell them because Buddhist monasteries have traditional buildings that look very similar. Our big building up on top called the "Boat" that's a very traditional Buddhist monastery in Thailand. So they look very similar, they're so tall and usually the reddish color and so on. You can spot them from 20 miles away.
Whenever I go on that train, it was beautiful for me. Whenever I would see those monasteries, I thought it was beautiful. Now, that's because I am a Buddhist. A Christian, a Jew, a Muslim and so on, they're not going to find that same beauty in the object, because the object does not represent to them anything that's of value to them. So when we're thinking of finding beauty in objects, from a Dhamma perspective, it's what the object represents, as to whether we find beauty in it or not.
Then seeking it as an art practice or in poetry, etc. Once again this is very similar to those statues and buildings and all. What does the poetry, what does the art form actually express. We have a beautiful painting up on the "Boat" itself. This huge, giant painting of the Buddha at the time of his enlightenment, sitting next to a river under the Bodhi tree is what it is supposed to represent. To me it's beautiful, once again what it represents. If I don't know the story behind it, then maybe it wouldn't be so beautiful. If I was not a Buddhist, it may not be so beautiful.
There is the ability with any art form, in a sense, that we can take appreciation for the quality of the drawing, or the painting, the sculpture, etc. For me personally, as to normal art, I very much appreciate the beauty that's in Renoir's paintings. I like those dots, I like the way he did things with color and form. It has a personal appeal to me as a person in my artistic talent area. But quite frankly it doesn't have the beauty that most Buddhist paintings have which signify something deeper. So in one level, I can appreciate the artistic talent, on another level, I can appreciate something more deeply. Deeper on the Buddhist level makes me more attractived to its beauty. So these are some ways of looking at beauty in Dhamma terms.