Word, Chant, and Song

Spiritual Transformation in Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Sikhism

Harold Coward

• Editorial: SUNY Press
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781438475776
• Categoría: Literatur
• Categoría: Asiatische Literaturkritik

In academic religious studies and musicology, little attention has been given to chanted word, hymns, and songs, yet these are often the key spiritual practices for lay devotees. To address this gap in knowledge, Harold Coward presents a thematic study of sacred sound as it functions in word, chant, and song for devotees in the Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, and Sikh traditions. Each chapter begins with a brief introduction of a particular tradition's word/scripture, followed by case studies showcasing the diversity of understanding and the range of chant and song in devotee practice, and concludes with a brief illustration of new trends in music and chant within the tradition. Written in a style that will appeal to both scholars and lay readers, technical terms are clearly explained and case studies explicitly include devotees' personal experiences of songs and chants in public and private religious ritual.

CHAPTER 1

Hinduism

Mantra Chanting and Singing in Spiritual Transformation

India is … the land of mantra. To know and love Indian religious life means coming to terms with mantric utterances.

—Harvey Alper, Understanding Mantras

This chapter will examine how it is that Vedic words used in mantra chants and singing function as forces for spiritual transformation in the Hindu tradition. While mantra chanting was given careful analysis in Alper’s Understanding Mantras (1989), the singing of kirtan and bhajans plays a powerful role in the practice of modern-day devotees. This chapter will examine the philosophy of word and practice underlying the formation of Hindu chant and singing and cite selected examples of important genres of chant and devotional music as powerful forms of spiritual transformation in Hinduism.

Spiritual Transformation via Mantra Practice

Just as Westerners are often put off by the strange shapes encountered in Hindu images, they also sometimes find the scripture, prayers, rituals, and chants that are constantly chanted to be a mystery. Indeed, for me as a Protestant boy deeply influenced by the Christian sense of sola scriptura, it was the Hindu sensitivity to the power of the spoken, chanted, or sung word to transform consciousness that first drew me to the study of Indian religious life. Technically referred to by the Sanskrit term mantra, this Indian ability to hear the divine sound, in the spoken words of the Veda (scripture) in ritual, in the chanting of Om, and the singing of hymns in the sounds of birds and nature—all of this is a continuing fascination for scholarly study.

In Indian cities one often feels engulfed in a sea of sound—trucks, cars, and motor scooters honk incessantly and one is surrounded by the crush of people. One soon longs for quiet and finds it by rising early and venturing out into the awakening day. Imagine yourself stepping into a small side street of Varanasi. The soft morning light is brightening to the East. All is quiet, and yet you begin to realize that around you the streets are full of activity. Forms of devout worshipers pass silently on their way to offer morning prayers and bathe in the Ganges. The merchants and traveling vendors with their distinctive cries of “Mangos,” “Knives sharpened,” or “Ice cream” have not yet appeared. But the morning quiet is broken by sounds of a different kind. From a second-floor window comes the sound of a morning prayer being chanted. As our ears become attuned to this chant, we hear it rising from houses all around us as we wind our way through the narrow streets. The golden globe of the sun is just cresting the horizon as we reach the ghats or steps leading down from the street level to the flowing water of the Ganges. The murmur of prayers being said around us steadily increases. A quietly chanted prayer is mixed with splashing of water from a man standing waist deep in the river. Sadhus, holy men, naked except for saffron loincloths, chant Sanskrit verses of the Veda, keeping count of their repetitions with prayer beads. Laypeople join in with their own chants—all seem to be different and yet somehow blend together. A harmonious hymn of sound is raised to welcome the auspicious moment of the rising of the sun—the dawning of a new day.

As the sun ascends from the horizon and its first rays are felt warm upon one’s skin, the chanted prayers increase in their intensity. To the Indian the light and warmth of the sun is a manifestation of the divine, but so is the sound of the morning chant that rises heavenward as an invocation of the new day. Speaking the Vedic chants and seeing the sunrise are both important experiences of the divine in India. Indeed, we can say that Indians specialize in seeing the divine in nature, in images of gods and goddesses, and in hearing the divine in the sounds of daily life, from the morning prayer to the call of the crow, the screech of the ox cart axle or, in modern times, the incessant blaring of horns. In India, all sound is perceived as being divine in origin, since it all arises from the one sacred source. Some sounds, however, are more powerful in evoking the divine within and around oneself than are others. Sound intrinsically bears the power of the sacred in India. In the Hindu hierarchy of scripture, it is the sruti, the heard text, which is preserved in oral tradition, that is the highest manifestation of the creative word. Om is the supreme example, since it is the divine seed sound from which all other sounds are said to arise. Om is, therefore, taken as the root mantra or sacred sound for the whole universe of sound.

The rising sun also signals the start of activity in the major temples of Varanasi dedicated to the gods and goddesses of Hinduism. Within the imposing Vishvanath Temple, dedicated to Shiva, the priests begin to chant and dedicate offerings. Devotees crowd into the temple to have a view of the image of Shiva, a sight that is held to bring blessing, and to watch the colorful ceremony. Throughout the day, devotees stream to thousands of temples located all over Varanasi to worship their favorite gods and goddesses. The variety of images from which they can choose reflects the richness through which the divine has revealed itself in the Hindu tradition: Vishnu, the heavenly king who descends to the world from time to time in various incarnations (avataras) to maintain cosmic stability; Shiva, the ascetic god who dwells in yogic meditation in the Himalayas generating energy that can be released into the world to refresh its vigor; Krishna, the manifestation of the divine as lover; Hanuman, the monkey god, who embodies strength, courage, and loyalty; Ganesha, the elephant-headed god who removes all obstacles for his followers; Durga, the warrior goddess who periodically defeats the forces of evil in order to protect the world; and Kali, the black mother goddess who dwells in cremation grounds and takes you to herself at death.

Dawn is a busy time at the cremation grounds on the banks of the Ganges River. Family funeral processions carry their stretcher-borne corpses down the steps to the spot where several funeral pyres are always burning. Pious Hindus believe that death near the Ganges or Varanasi results in moksa, liberation, from the endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth—the ultimate spiritual goal of most Hindus. Varanasi is also the home of many religious orders, including a large number of ascetics or world renouncers. These holy men or women may be seen spending their day in meditation on the steps leading to the Ganges or at the cremation grounds. Their only possessions are a staff and water pot. The males may be naked with long matted hair and bodies smeared with ash from the cremation grounds. The women may have shaved heads to show lack of concern for bodily appearance. All around them Hindu laypeople are busily going about their daily tasks as merchants, businesspeople, tradespeople, artists, students, and professors from Banaras Hindu University, all busy with everyday family life. In their midst, the ascetics look as if they are from another world, yet they are all part of the rich variety of lifestyles that Hindus may take on—one large extended family, as it were—full of diversity, including many languages, cultures, and religious traditions, yet with an underlying sense of unity.

Hindus living in North America cannot visit the Ganges at dawn, but many have a small pot of Ganges water on their home altar to help with morning prayers. Many of the same images (Vishnu, Shiva, Durga, Krishna, Ganesha, and Kali) will be present on the home altar, which is often located in an upstairs bedroom dedicated as the worship room. There the family may gather or pray individually, using the same chanted prayers or mantras and the same repetitions of Om that are said in India. Hindu temples have been built in many American cities, providing places for family and the whole community to gather on ceremonial occasions. Cremation takes place in funeral homes rather than on the banks of the Ganges. So, in many ways, the sacred practice of Hindus in Varanasi goes on in modified form in the West.

Just as the day begins with mantra chanting, so it also ends with an evening chant. At night, in India, the tropical birds join in with their “donc donc, donc donc.” From the seashore comes the rhythmic roar of the waves. Not only is each day enclosed in sacred sound but so also is the whole of life. Indeed, it has been said, “From the mother’s womb to the funeral pyre, a Hindu literally lives and dies in mantra” (Alper 1989a, 296). This saying appears to express a truth that has dominated India for the past thousand years. For generations of post-Vedic Indians mantra is not primarily a Vedic text but rather the symbolic source of sacred sound that overflows textual boundaries until it encloses all of life—not only the speaking of humans but also of animals, particularly of birds. Mantra is also heard in the voices of fire, thunder, and rain.

Diana Eck has shown that India is filled with visual experiences of the divine—images in homes, temples, or roadside shrines—that a central act of worship “is to stand in the presence of the deity and to behold the image with one’s own eyes, to see and be seen by the deity” (Eck 1998, 3). That is now also happening in Hindu diaspora communities all over North America where temples have been built and images installed. But India is also permeated by sonic experiences of the divine. Drums, bells, gongs, cymbals, conches, flutes, and a wide variety of vocalizations are often heard, sometimes simultaneously, invoking and evoking the divine within temple, home, or sacred space. As suggested earlier, the first impression to the outsider may be one of chaos and cacophony, an ensemble of “noise” with no apparent rhyme or reason. But, if we empathize with the presuppositions of the Indian culture and religious traditions, we come to realize that there is an underlying religious foundation for the experience of sound in general and for the saying of specific mantras (words or sounds) in particular. Indeed, we could parallel Diana Eck’s statement about the visual experience of the divine by saying that in Hinduism the central act of worship is hearing the mantra or sacred sound with one’s own ears and chanting the mantra with one’s voice (Coward and Goa 2004).

Hearing and saying the mantra is an act of worship and “tunes” one to the basic sound or vibration of the universe. By a continual hearing and chanting, one purifies and transforms one’s life until it vibrates in harmony with the divine, which is itself pure sound. Indeed, we find Hindu religion filled with many different versions of “sonic theology.” For Hindu India, then, the act of worship involves both seeing and being seen by the divine image (darshan) and also hearing and speaking the divine sound (mantra). Both are present and central to the worship of most lay people in India. For some more advanced worshipers, the sound may totally displace the image so that the concentration is on the sound alone. In this chapter, our focus will be on mantra, the hearing, chanting, and singing aspect of experiencing the divine by Hindu devotees.

It has been said that there is no parallel to the concept of darshan, of seeing and being seen by the divine in the Western religions (Bharati 1970, 102). As Diana Eck puts it, when the gaze of the huge eyes of the image of Lord Krishna meets those of the worshiper standing on tiptoe in the crowd, there is a special exchange of vision that is itself a form of “touching,” of intimate knowing. Such an exchange of vision is darshan and is fundamental to Hindu worship. So also, the practice of hearing and speaking the mantra is an act in which the consciousness of the individual may experience a tuning into the divine sound of the cosmos. This is what Agehananda Bharati means when he says, “Mantra is not meaningful in any descriptive or even persuasive sense, but within the mystical universe of discourse” (Bharati 1970a, 102). Mantra chanting is verified not by what it describes or cognitively reveals but by the complex vibration or feeling tone it creates in the practicing person.

The Indian Worldview

From the Hindu perspective two presuppositions, karma and samsara, are basic to Indian thought and the spiritual function of mantra. Karma is a word that is fairly common in the West but often little understood. There are many definitions of karma in the Indian tradition, some making karma appear quite deterministic. One of the clearest descriptions, however, is found in the Yoga-System of Patanjali (Woods 1966). This concept is widely influential and makes room for free will. It runs as follows. Every time you do an action or think a thought a memory trace or karmic seed is laid down in the storehouse of your unconscious waiting for conditions to arise conducive to its sprouting fourth as an impulse, instinct, or predisposition to do the same action or think the same thought again (for a detailed analysis of the Yoga Sutra passages, see Coward 1983, 49–60). How does all of this apply to mantras? Speaking a mantra lays down a karmic memory trace in the unconscious. Chanting a mantra over and over reinforces that karmic trace (samskara) until a deep root or habit pattern (vasana) is established. Correctly chanting a mantra, such as Om or a Vedic verse, reinforces good karma and removes negative karmas or impulses by preventing their blossoming or maturing so that they wither away, leaving no trace behind. The more powerful the mantra the more good karma will be reinforced and negative karma will be removed from one’s storehouse consciousness. In this way mantra chanting or singing can be seen to be a powerful tool for purifying and transforming consciousness.

Karma works together with the other basic presupposition of Hindu thought, namely, samsara or rebirth. Accordingly, your unconscious storehouse contains not only all the karmic traces from actions and thoughts done in this life but also in the life before this and so on, backward infinitely, since in Indian thought there is no absolute beginning. From this perspective, your unconscious is like a huge granary full of karmic seeds or memory traces that are constantly sprouting up, as conducive situations arise, impelling you toward good or evil actions or thoughts. No wonder we constantly feel ourselves being pulled and pushed by our karmic desires. But the possibility of free choice always allows us to take control over these impulses, and mantra chanting or singing gives us a powerful psychological tool to use in directing this process.

In Hinduism, the thing that causes one to be reborn is the karma within one’s own consciousness. The chanting or singing of mantras is one of the most powerful practices for the purging of karmas, and when the last karma is removed, moksa is realized. Although conceptualized differently by different Hindu schools, moksa may generally be thought of as the removal of karmas that make us appear to be separate from Brahman (the divine). When the last veiling or obstructing karma is removed, the fact that one is, and has always been, nothing but Brahman is revealed. That is moksa—the direct realization of one’s own oneness with the divine.

The concept of mantra as powerful sacred sound is associated with one of India’s ancient scriptures, the Rgveda (Findly 1989, 15). India also shares with the rest of the world a fascination with what Rudolf Otto has called numinous sounds (Otto 1958, 4–7), sounds that go beyond the rational and the ethical to evoke direct, face-to-face contact with the holy. Otto conceived of the numinous with a typically Western emphasis on the experience of the distance, the separation, between human beings and God. For Hindus in the Rgvedic context the cosmos is peopled by gods sometimes thought of in personal ways. For example, prayers or mantras are spoken to gods such as Varuna to maintain relationships with them so that they will act for the devotee. However, the Rgveda also saw mantras as the means by which the power of truth and order that is at the very center of the Vedic universe could be evoked. That truth, however, is not thought of as a personal God, like Yahweh or Allah, but as the impersonal rta or divine order of reality. In his classic article “The Indian Mantra,” Gonda points out that mantras are not thought of as products of discursive thought, human wisdom, or poetic fantasy “but as flash-lights of the eternal truth, seen by those eminent men who have come into supersensuous contact with the Unseen” (Gonda 1963, 247). Sri Aurobindo puts it even more vividly: “The language of the Veda is itself a sruti, a rhythm not composed by the intellect but heard, a divine Word that came vibrating out of the Infinite to the inner audience of the man who had previously made himself fit for the impersonal knowledge” (Aurobindo 1971, 7). The Vedic seers supersensuously “heard” these divine mantras not as personal but as divinely rooted words and spoke them in the Hindu scripture or Veda as an aid to those less spiritually advanced. By concentrating one’s mind upon such a mantra, the devotee invokes the power and truth inherent in the seers’ divine intuition and so purifies his or her consciousness. It is this understanding that is behind the long-standing Indian practice of repeated chanting of mantras as a means for removing karmic ignorance or impurity from one’s personality. The more difficulties to be overcome, the more repetitions are needed. The deeper one’s separation from the Divine, the more one must invoke the mantra. Contrary to what our modern minds quickly tend to assume, the Hindu chanting a mantra in morning and evening worship is not simply engaging in an empty superstition. From the Hindu perspective, such chanted words have power to confirm and increase truth and order (rta) within one’s character and in the wider universe. Chanting a Vedic mantra has a spiritually therapeutic effect upon the devotee and a cosmic significance as well. Hindus maintain that the holiness of the mantra or divine word is intrinsic, that one participates in it not by discursive understanding but by hearing, reciting, and singing it (Coburn 447).

The Hindu View of Language and Mantra in the Mimamsa, Grammarian, Patanjali’s Yoga, Theistic, and Tantric Schools

The powerful function of words as mantras depends not only on Patanjali’s psychological analysis of karma (as previously outlined) but also on the Hindu view of language as Daivi Vak or Divine Word. For the Hindu, the spoken scripture of the tradition is the Divine Word (Murti 1983, 361). The “sensitive soul” ...

Índice

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Hinduism: Mantra Chanting and Singing in Spiritual Transformation
• 2. Buddhism: Word, Chant, and Song in Spiritual Practice
• 3. Word, Chant, and Song on the Islamic Spiritual Path
• 4. Sikh Spiritual Practice: Word, Chant, and Song
• Conclusion
• References
• Index
• Back Cover