I sure wish I could answer that. I've given my life to Indian mysticism of the Sant tradition and have tried and failed to find a satisfactory way to express those ideals through photography. Maybe it's because photography is so bound to physical reality, and spirituality, at least as I see it, begins where physical reality ends. Painting, poetry, and music are far more capable of that experience, IMO. Still, the reality found within is something entirely different.
There are photographers like Thomas Merton and Minor White who have sought to express the transcendent through their work. And there are many Taoist and Zen approaches, such as Miksang.
I think what I've finally come round to is what Miksang says. It's not the photographs that matter; it's the mindset, the practice of awareness, that makes photography a spiritual discipline. That's about as close as I'm able to get. Probably not a good answer because Moriyama surely has that, too.
I do admire you for developing the discipline to follow a life philosophy consistently. Mysticism and mystic traditions throw another difficult-to-pin-down variable into what is already a difficult target (art). I suspect it's something of a Norman Vincent Peale "even if you miss you'll land among the stars" sort of process. We create work that is infused with the struggle to express something. What people see in that (and what we may eventually come to see in that) may be something different than we came into it with, but it will be something.
I've long enjoyed Miksang and tried to emulate it. It is, as you say, something the photographer practices, and not necessarily something inherent in the work - since we take photos of physical things, there is always a way to look at Miksang photographs as representations of the physical - it almost takes the same practice
looking at the photos as it does making them. I think that when I look at Moriyama's work, sometimes I'm struck by the power of the composition or content, but, many times, I'm trying to imagine what his mindset was and how to view the image the same way as he does.
Different traditions have used art to express spiritual concepts in different ways, of course. In the west, some of the most beautiful art is certainly Catholic in origin, showing spirituality by means of scenes from biblical stories, or imaginings of spiritual concepts like heaven or hell - leading perhaps to our overly concretized traditions in the west such as hell being a realm presided over by demons and filled with suffering
bodies, rather than a spiritual state. But, I think, viewed in their proper framework, they can be very powerful. I like how the Orthodox church has defined the characteristics of their iconography, which I think is actually not more cerebral than Catholic tradition, but seems that way, because it's consistent, and because the viewer is told how to view it (for example, the lack of perspective symbolizing the absence of time in heaven, figures are larger relative to how important they are, the light is flat, with the only added light coming from the halos around saints and others, symbolizing faith and love inside them, etc.). I think in many traditions, and many mediums, art is locked in the physical while trying to express something immaterial.
