Young Burmese Nuns Chanting Their Lessons
In 2005 I was a part of a recording project in Burma. The goal of the trip was to document older monks, nuns, and lay people describing their meditation experiences. We called this The Wisdom Preservation Project. The vast majority of those recordings were in Burmese and have yet to be translated. Happily, we were able to record many jewels of wisdom for posterity before the these elder practitioners passed on (some of them have already).
Throughout this trip we stayed in monasteries and retreat centers and so I had the good fortune to record some young nuns as they were studying their lessons. Chanting is used as a memorization technique. Part of the training of Theravadan monks and nuns includes not dancing, singing, or making/listening to music or any kind of entertainment show. So, while they don’t think of this chanting as music, there is voice and rhythm. Though this is a more traditional Buddhist context than Dhamma Gita, they are both young people are using sound and Dhamma together. Here are the nuns and their chanting:
One-sided Coin
May 7, 2010 by max · Leave a Comment
So our new album of young Buddhists’ music – Dhamma Gita – is out and totally rocking. Sharon Salzberg just tweeted about us, and we were linked on the blog of PBS series The Buddha where Hanuman wrote a nice piece…. anyway….
There’s one track on Dhamma Gita – Faith by Michaela Lucas (featuring Sogyal Rinpoche teaching) – where Rinpoche is talking about all the delusional perceptions of Samsara (the cycle of death and rebirth) – which, if you think about it means like everything we see and experience here while alive. Everything? Delusion? Holy crap.
So driving into work this morning listening to this part of Faith I recalled a version of this, from what I think was the Zen teachings of Bodhidharma, somewhere in the vast stacks of the internet: “You can’t find the Buddha with the mind, there’s no use looking – the mind only finds more mind.” You simply can’t find what is real with what is delusion. How could you? It’s impossible!
All at once it occurred to me, finally, what that Borges story El Disco (The Disk, not The Disco) meant. Read it 10 years ago perhaps. All of a sudden – Sogyal, Bodhidharma, El Disco! Delusion!
PS – found that page and while my direct quote may have been more or less apocryphal, there was this attributed to Bodhidharma: ‘A Buddha doesn’t observe precepts. A Buddha doesn’t do good or evil. A Buddha isn’t energetic or lazy. A Buddha is someone who does nothing, someone who can’t even focus his mind on a Buddha. A Buddha isn’t a Buddha. Don’t think about Buddhas. If you don’t see what I’m talking about, you’ll never know your own mind.’
Let’s all hang in there. Happy Friday!
