There are beauties and beauties… and there are categories. Dance is beautiful, but there is something beyond it: an absolute unmoving state of consciousness… no dance. Music is beautiful but you should not forget silence. There is much more than music, because music is after all sound, and there is silence too. You fall in love, you feel it, you become it. Listening to the music of the winds as they pass through the pine trees, what can you understand? Or listening to the sound of running water, what can you understand? Or looking at a beautiful sunset and all the colors spread over the horizon, what can you understand? What do you understand? But something happens which is far more precious than understanding. If you are a dancer, then dancing is your religion.’ This is your religion - not Mohammedanism, not Hinduism, not Christianity. All that is beautiful in the world, all that is valuable in the world has always been discovered by the buddhas. Music is a device it was invented by the buddhas. Music helps you from the outside to fall in tune with the inner. In fact, nothing is more alive than silence. It is not dead, it is very much alive, it is tremendously alive. Then you start, for the first time, hearing silence. When you are utterly silent, not a single thought passes your mind, there is not even a ripple of any feeling in your heart.
Meditation is the art of hearing the soundless sound, the art of hearing the music of silence - what the Zen people call the sound of one hand clapping. Music is a way towards meditation and the most beautiful way. Real music takes you to the world of the beyond - what Buddha calls the farther shore, even beyond the beyond. Real music helps you to transcend your biology, your physiology, your psychology. Much modern music is not music it simply makes you sexually excited. One has to become more of the ears and less of the eyes.
Without meditation, music is simply noise - harmonious, but noise.
And without music, meditation lacks something without music, meditation is a little dull, unalive.