Chanting
February 2021, Bangkok
A long time ago when I first met my teacher and visited him often, he would always ask me if I was meditating regularly. Back then I wasn’t doing it every day, not even every week. I’d be honest with him and say that I did a little bit here and there. He would pause for a bit and say, “You should chant every morning and every evening.” At the time, I would just nod and say ok, completely uninterested in doing that. About a year after having met him I’d do a short stint as a monk, which required memorizing chants just to get ordained. On top of that there would be morning and evening chants every day that I’d have to participate in. Back then I had a lot of problems reconciling my ideas of what I thought Buddhism was and the actual lifestyle. Luckily I craved unique experiences, or was simply drawn toward Buddhism almost despite my shitty attitude. After this initial stint as a monk I fell off with Buddhist practice for a couple of years. The experience of actually being a monk was a shock that I wasn’t prepared for at the time, and at the time I only wanted to use Buddhism in an abstract way, simply for intellectual speculation.
One of the major supports for the resurgence of my Buddhist practice since then has been incorporating a daily chanting habit. My teacher had good advice all those years ago. I just couldn’t see the purpose of chanting at the time. And of course he wasn’t going to explain to me the function of it, because that’s not how Buddhist practice is instructed in general, especially in Asia; the onus is on you to raise yourself up, to put in effort to figure these things out. When I started getting back into a normal meditation routine, I had just gotten back from Nepal where I saw Tibetan monks chanting for long stretches in the morning. I can’t fully explain the effect it had on me because I’m sure there’s some sort of karmic linking, a spark of recognition from the distant past that awakened. What I can say is that I had a strong feeling that this is a good way to spend the morning, and a good way to show, in an objective way, right upon awakening what is most important to you. So when I got back to Thailand, I decided to finally start reciting chants every morning. I would find the audio of Thai forest monks doing the Pali chants, different versions just to make it more interesting, and recite along with the anglicized Pali words until at some point I didn’t need the script anymore. This eventually expanded to incorporating evening chants, and a few other chants after I’d memorized the previous ones.
The justification wasn’t completely clear initially as to why I should be doing this everyday. At first I just knew that it was part of the discipline, and that was good enough for me. Back then I was coming out of a really bad funk and couldn’t feel inspired by anyone for the longest time. I finally came to understand that the monks who live up to the standards of the Vinaya without cutting corners deserved respect, and it just so happened that the teacher I had come into contact with years previous was one of those. I decided to aim for what they aimed at, which eventually came to a conscious intention to become a monk again. The more I chanted on a daily basis, the more I saw the benefits of doing so, and the more I understood how doing this put you in good company and protected you.
First of all, when you chant, you are engaging in Right Speech, one of the factors in the Noble Eightfold Path, which comes with its own accrual of merit. These are words attributed to the Buddha, or words that have sustained the Buddhist Tradition through time. They work as guideposts along the path. The more you recite them, the more they become set in your mind. While chanting them, they also keep you focused, as the form of them is often repetitive in many parts, but also switch up words here and there. If you’re just lazily reciting and not paying attention, you will mess up. Even the best of monks do this on occasion, so it’s good practice with instant feedback on how focused you are at the moment. Of course the chants, for Theravada at least, are all in Pali, so you’d need to find translations to get to their meaning. Chants, to my interpretation, fall under the same rules as mantras. The ancient Vedic culture put a huge emphasis on the power of speech, of speaking only Truth. This is the only way that speech should be used ideally. In our current age, that may be harder to accomplish, but the percentage of Truthful speech to other, more unnecessary, or even harmful or unskillful speech should increase as much as possible. When you spend time chanting, it does just that. There’s a belief in some strains of Hinduism that the Kali Yuga is the era that corresponds with the mouth. It’s easy in this era to misuse your mouth—overindulging in eating, sexual activities, speaking falsehoods, swearing etc. For this reason, more merit is gained through the proper, more Traditional use of the mouth, through chanting Traditional truths. So when you do this, it’s not only doing the right thing, which should be a reward in itself, but also leads to further benefits.
These chants aren’t known by a great majority of people. The only people who know them, for the most part, are people devoted to the holy life, people who have extremely high aims for themselves, people who are devoted, maybe exclusively, to this path. When you memorize these chants, you are connected into this network of people who have this knowledge, you become a part of that living tradition just by having this chant inside you, ready for its expression whenever you see fit. You are a living embodiment of that knowledge, part of the living Buddha body that spans the globe. Even if you’re not the most ardent practitioner, or stray from the path from time to time, you’re still in a part of this noble supraorganism. The more you come into accord with the living Buddhist Tradition the more you receive the benefits of the company you’re keeping. The more connections you can make into this Dhamma by living it, by using your body as a means for its expression on the material plane, by being its instrument, the deeper into this network you become and the more you understand about it. Chanting on a daily basis, while it may seem less important when compared to meditation, is a simple ritual that will make sure you have the right mindset going into meditation, and will ensure that you stay connected with the tradition in more ways than one. It’s a good brace to support your continued development, as it will remind you of the principles you’re looking to continue embodying.
Before every meditation session, I chant, and before and after every chant, I bow three times to the Buddha image I have as a sign of respect for the Buddha as a living embodiment of the Dhamma he taught, and the Sangha he created to transmit that Dhamma through time. In my latest three month stint at the temple, my teacher told me that you’ll never learn anything on this path without first having the proper respect. We’re lucky to have at least some semblance of the original Dhamma of the Buddha, as it’s one of the only teachings still existing that hearkens back to our noble heritage deep in the past. If your aim is to realize it, prove you want it and deserve it through your conduct, character, and practice in an objective way. Simple beliefs without subsequent expression are useless.