[Buddha-l] Re: Filtered Buddhism

[Richard Hayes]

On Fri, 2007-07-06 at 18:11 -0600, Michael LaTorra wrote:

> I myself prefer to know what I am saying. Evidently, this preference places me
> in the minority.  Does anyone else here feel the same way?

Hi Mike,

Yes, I feel the same way. I have a pretty strong preference for
meaningful vocalization. On the other hand, I love listening to North
American Indian ceremonial chanting, a great deal of which consists of
non-lexical vocables, that is, recognizable phonetic sequences to which
no meaning is attached. I also love both to hear and to do scat singing.
Sometimes, when confronted in a Buddhist context with a bunch of
syllables that are meaningless to me, I just think of them as
non-lexical vocables, like "hey nonny nonny" or "tra la la" or "oop
shooby dooby bebop a rebop". Playing the trick of imagining myself to be
a Cree cantor or a jazz singer helps me overcome the resistance to
vocalizing what I find meaningless.

This brings me to chanting in Pali. When I had a meditation group, we
used to chant the refuges and precepts in Pali, and then recite the
precepts in English translation. Chanting in Pali always connects me
strongly with the tradition I most love, perhaps because I am aware that
every day for the past two thousand years or so countless thousands of
people have been reciting those very words. No other liturgical act
speaks more deeply to my particular condition. Still, it sometimes
bothered me that we were chanting in Pali in unison, because it felt
somewhat unbalanced. I have studied Pali and understand the grammar and
have a pretty decent vocabulary, but most of the people in the
meditation group couldn't really follow the Pali very well and thus were
doing what I used to do when I chanted Chinese texts in a laughable
approximation of the Korean pronunciation of Chinese characters. The
very fact that it bothered me that people around me were chanting what
they couldn't understand gave me something valuable to work with.
Clearly there is an inconsistency involved in loving to chant
Sino-Korean while imagining myself to be a Hopi sacred clown and being
bothered by the fact that people areound me are chanting what they can't
understand. Grappling with this contradiction in my own thinking proved
(or at least seemed to prove) valuable to me.

Richard