Skillful Means: Good gateway drugs and the founding Buddhists on whether DJ's are musicians

Summary: Many subscribers didn't get the animation I created as last week's article: Here it is. I'm a practicing jazz musician--practicing because I'm nowhere near as good as I want to be. I didn't start out interested in jazz and getting good, I was interested in rock and getting girls. Rock didn't necessarily take a lot of practice. During my teens I was satisfied playing the same simple riffs over and over through my flatteringly loud bass equipment. My father, a classical oboist and pianist called my electric bass a toy. Earlier he had me play bassoon which had eight keys for the right thumb alone and required making your own reeds with a micrometer-very fussy. He was right. Comparatively speaking, the bass was a toy. Musical equipment just gets easier and easier. Now you don't even have to know any simple riffs to sound like a virtuoso. With electronic keyboards you can rest a finger on any key and a whole band pumps out a steady glorious sound. DJ's claim to be musicians. In the old days people who said, "Yeah, I play music; I play the record player," were kidding. Compared to an electric bass, these new instruments are toys.* Musicians debate what easy access to easier instruments will do to musicianship. We hope these easy instruments won't set a new low standard for musical achievement. We hope instead they'll be like gateway drugs. That's what the flatteringly loud bass equipment did for me. It affirmed me early on, whispering, "You're a pro, you're really doing this," in my ear while I closed my eyes, kicked back my head and wailed away for hours on those same simple riffs. But like a gateway drug it eventually lead me to the harder stuff like bebop and altered dominant scales. Of course for some, the flattering new equipment doesn't have the gateway effect. They're easily impressed by their prowess. They get complacent and don't bother to learn anything more sophisticated, not that there's any reason they should have to. After all, life is short. We should all be so lucky as to experience the pinnacles of human achievement, even if only by simulation. Fake musical instruments, virtual reality games, movies, fiction, even pornography--are we going to begrudge the talentless a chance to pretend to have talent, the timid a vicarious experience of fictional heroism, the homely a chance to experience sex with attractive people? Mahayana Buddhism emerged in India around four hundred years after Buddha lived. The word Mahayana means "great vehicle" in several senses, but the key sense comes from the allegory that justified the pivotal Mahayana update on Buddhas' teachings: A father's house is burning down and his two children are in it. He wants them to run out of the house but they don't see why they should. He entices them out with the promise of little toy wagons, a different one for each child. Excited, the children rush out to their father and the presents but when they arrive their father admits that he didn't have the two little wagons really. He has something better instead, one large wagon, a great vehicle that would carry them both. The traditional interpretation is that the little wagons the father promised were the earlier schools of Buddhist thought to be replaced by Mahayana Buddhism, the great vehicle that would carry all people. Though these earlier schools couldn't take you to nirvana they are to be appreciated for motivating people to take the first step toward Buddhism. They did not deliver as promised but they demonstrated the earlier teacher's "skillful means," which from what I've read sounds like a euphemism for the seductive skill of leading people toward virtue, in effect, selling good gateway drugs, drugs that will eventually lead people into addictions to truly worthy commitments. As with the easier musical instruments that led me eventually to dig deeper into music, the fabled