Dharma Sounds
No dia 12 de setembro de 2021 participei do simpósio "Music & Spirituality" organizado pela Western Sydney University. Em dois dias de programação, pesquisadores de dez países apresentaram suas pesquisas recentes sobre a transversalidade da música nas culturas e tradições religiosas nativas.
Fui convidado a ser um dos palestrantes principais com a minhas pesquisas sobre os ritos sonoros nas cerimônias budistas realizadas no Templo Tzong Kwan em São Paulo―aquilo que no jargão acadêmico internacional diz-se "keynote speech", isto é, o discurso principal que define o tom subjacente e resume a mensagem central e mais importante de um evento. Foi uma grande honra tê-lo feito. Na prática significa que a minha pesquisa etnomusicológica na comunidade budista taiwanesa do Templo Tzong Kwan serviu como uma das linhas de pesquisa nesse simpósio.
Visto minhas pesquisas remeterem a quase duas décadas de coleta de material, vivência e trabalho de campo (já apresentada parcialmente aqui neste blog), para este simpósio escolhi o conceito de "paisagem sonora" aplicado ao rito budista, em conjunto com a análise das identidades e papéis religiosos confluídos na formação do grupo de cantores oficiais da cerimônia, tradicionalmente, denominado por grupo da harmonia (悅眾 Yuèzhòng)
Fruto de um trabalho extenso tenho me debruçado sobre os sentidos e significados sociais das cerimônias para a manutenção desse pequena comunidade taiwanesa, em que proponho um modelo de análise para as identidades em trânsito, a partir da leitura, identificação e análise da cerimônia budista enquanto rito sonoro, organizado para espelhar um modo de funcionamento da mente budista, desejável para o exercício espiritual.
Ao invés de propor uma análise dos ritos sonoros (ou da música) budistas sob uma ótica instrumental e complementar aos ritos, aliás, dominante nos trabalhos acadêmico, enxergo a produção sonora da cerimônia como fortemente vinculada ao treinamento mental e espiritual, sob o fundo de uma ordenação perceptiva (tempo e lugar) que operam conjuntamente no sentido de produzir ambiências propícias para difusão do exercício religioso.
De certo modo, os ritos sonoros no budismo indicam a materialização de modos de ser e subjetividades operantes específicos do treinamento mental budista, e por isso, vital à existência coletiva. É dizer que os cânticos, o instrumental percussivo, a ordem sonora da cerimônia estabelecem o espaço ideal para a elaboração de processos identitários e as subsequentes formas de relacionamentos comuns ao ser coletivo, orientado enquanto coletividade espiritual. Trata-se de um tema complexo, intrincado, e que envolve uma série de dinâmicas de envolvimento pessoal, que demanda um olhar abrangente e multidisciplinar do pesquisador. Em última (ou primeira) instância, os ritos sonoros prefiguram e reforçam padrões de existência coletiva pautados na elaboração dos propósitos espirituais aplicados à vida cotidiana.
Sendo um tema por demais amplo, uma investigação se faz fundamental, primeiramente, quanto ao relação dos religiosos e praticantes com a paisagem sonora da comunidade, para detectar os pesos relativos dados ao ambiente sonoro durante as cerimônias, e posteriormente, quanto aos processos identitários operantes dentro da comunidade, e que produzem e possibilitam a existência comum―as estas chamei de "identidades em trânsito."
Segue abaixo o texto original apresentado no simpósio.
Dharma Sounds
The soundscape of the Taiwanese Buddhist diaspora in São Paulo, Brazil. Departamento de Música da Universidade de Brasília.
sub-theme: ‘Traditionalism and ritual’
“Sound, when understood as an environment, is a soundscape: a powerful tool that helps humans relate to their surroundings. They can be consciously designed by an individual or group of individuals or the byproduct of historical, political, and cultural circumstances. They may be musical compositions, ethnographic anthropological field recordings, recordings of a rainforest taken by an ecologist, or imaginings of a sound designer/historian ruminating upon the sounds of the past.” (Marinna Guzy, sound artist research 2017)
Buddhist Soundscape
In my daily observations upon the Taiwanese Buddhist community (which I belong to), the soundscape is an 'oriented-mind product' to create a foster environment conducive to spiritual training. This means that it arises and acquires a perceptual form from the understanding of the collective and atemporal mind.
“Soundscapes define communities—their boundaries, their actors, their geographic intricacies, and industries. They arise through the interactions between external and internal forces within a community. The things that make the soundscape of a place different from any other place in the world are soundmarks." (Guzy, 2017)
Soundmarks
Usually, in Buddhist temples, the soundmarks are produced from bell-ringing along the day, wood plates to announce the daily ceremony, drums of varying size, and singing voices chanting sutras and mantras. At the Tzong Kwan community, these soundmarks respond to the neighbourhood's acoustic environment creating its own sound ecology.
We can imagine these sound markers as endowed with spiritual properties influencing people's behaviour. They establish the aura of each moment within a community—we can say that they have magic influences on us.
Deepening into the soundscape
But, as much as we make ourselves capable of perceiving these distinctive sound features, it is only by entering into the spiritual purposes expressed in the community's daily rites to be aware of their religious meanings. So that our sensibility is shaped by the community's collective perceptions, guided by the Sangha.
As individuals, we can experience the temple's sound surroundings as a special place to be in. But to realize what happens and why its soundscape is constantly restored day by day, we need to train ourselves to actually belong to the community by deepening our perceptive connections.
Silent Chanting
The Buddhist soundscape defines community as a rite-oriented space. This means to shape the collective mind to the ceremonies' performances as featured in the past. So, the constant soundscape restoration by soundmarkers prepares us to engage (our mind) in daily rituals.
However, at the beginning of the ceremonies, monks perform sounds that cannot be heard. It is the silent chanting that rhythmically animates the percussive strikes on bells and drums. So it is the soundscape that actually arises from the silent mind as mind creation.
As a rule, every day before the ceremony, monks silently chant this four-line from the Avatamsaka Sutra《華嚴經》 "If one wishes to understand all about all the Buddhas of the Three Realms, should contemplate the nature of the Dharma Domain. Everything is mind creation." Aside from the concept behind it, it has a biological function that attaches sound to silence.
Salutogenic Sounds
The silent chanting aims to adjust the biological rhythm of both monks and attendees to the spiritual pulse of the ceremony through percussion. The vibration of percussion, performed by an experienced monk, relays calmness reducing heartbeats according to Buddhist beliefs on Dharma sounds' salutogenic properties¹. In fact, the percussion strikes follow the silent pronunciation of those four-line (from Avatamsaka Sutra). Precisely the prosodic rhythmic accents.
In simple terms, this practice reflects a spiritual link between sound and silence (phenomena) as a mental production. And in the context of Chinese Buddhism, both give rise to what is conventionally called the Dharma Sounds—sounds free from mundane intentions. This concept of the mind producing pure, spiritual sounds in the ceremony extends beyond the individual, monk or layman.
The Bodies, Sounds and Space
Among community members, there is a strong belief that chanted scriptures extend beyond the Buddha Hall to help relieve all living beings from suffering—by an imaginative geographical projection. The neighbourhood, city, state, nation, world are visualized by each attendee, while they become sound bodies relaying the good qualities proper to the Dharma.
As both are sacred, the body (transmitting the sounds of the Dharma) and the hall (space providing resonance), it is believed that the strength of its salutogenic aura is propagated beyond the physical limits of reality. Even reaching and benefiting the spiritual worlds, full of lost and suffering souls.
“If he [monk] wishes: ‘May I wield the various kinds of spiritual power: having been one, may I become many; having been many, may I become one; may I appear and vanish. go unhindered through a wall; through a rampart; through a mountain, as if through space; dive in and out of the earth as if it were water; walk on water without sinking as if it were earth; travel through the sky like a bird while seated cross-legged; touch and stroke with my hand the moon and sun, so powerful mighty; exercise mastery with my body even as far as the brahma world’ (...) If he [monk] wishes: ‘With the divine ear element, which is purified and surpasses the human, may I hear both kinds of sound, the divine and the human, those are as far a well as near’—he achieves the capacity of realizing that state by direct knowledge, whenever the necessary conditions obtain.” (Anguttara Nikaya 3:100 §§—10; I 253—56).
It belongs to the Buddhist belief that the mind in harmony with the body reflects on the environment. Thus, a monk whose spiritual training is high, in general, manifests a relationship cultivated in the ceremonial space, in the way of sitting, prostrating, walking and carrying musical instruments, in addition to keeping the hall in good order. Virtuous conduct stems from the spiritual effort of each monk to achieve serenity and thereby make it resonate in the environment, which in turn amplifies the good qualities in other monks during the proper exercise. Thus, the quality of energy put into the environment positively influences the ritual in action.
Centralizing Sound
To achieve this, in the daily ceremonies, the standard practice among monks is that the voices must shape a single sonorous body that reflects the mind as a phenomenon oriented to unfolding spiritual energy through time and space.
So, the mind needs to be aware of external influences without getting pervaded. At the same time, one must converge the reading of texts, different meanings, appropriate emotional content and vocal projection into a balanced but dynamic sonic concentration.
It means that in the preliminary act of preparing himself spiritually and mentally (through silent recitation), each monk and attendant aims to fix his mind on a single point converging on the performance of the ceremony. To summarize, an extraordinary amount of concentrated mental energy (in harmony with body responsive qualities) is placed in the temple hall.
The Harmony Group (悅眾 Yuèzhòng)
To achieve this unique mind and body blend, the Zen master of the Tang Era Bǎizhàng Cónglín 百丈叢林 (720-814) wrote an essentials guide of principles for conveying the rites named after "Pure Rules of Baizhang "《百丈清規》Bǎizhàng qīngguī. This includes establishing a group of official singing voices directly responsible for the correct ceremonies effectiveness, known as "The Harmony Group" (悅眾 Yuèzhòng), which primarily function is to provide sonic references for the community.
Generally speaking, the Harmony Group lends assistance to all the others voices that follow without overlapping them. However, its assignments are far broader than just guiding the singing monks.
It includes the periodic review of Buddhist chants to preserve them from distortions throughout the ceremonial practice, issues concerning speed in reciting the sutras, tuning the tone of the chanting parts, reviewing cadential melodic formulas, prosody adjustments in texts, the rectification of pronunciations caused by corruptions, which result in wrong ways of pronouncing words.
In addition to these technical issues, they are equally responsible to human ones. They are selected to resolve the community's internal conflicts. They are, in fact, the common denominators within the Sangha (monastic community), whether in ceremonies or in daily tasks, where it is necessary to maintain the good relationships between monks concerning the monastic rules.
Thus, they naturally occupy the position of mediators in the resolution of conflicts. It is understood that the members of the harmony vocal group fulfill the fundamental role of structuring and maintaining the Sangha and its complex sphere of relationships.
Succession and Identities (an outline)
An important role, usually attributed to the Harmony Group in a monastic context, is to promote the succession of practitioners within the community—monks teaching others to be monks. In contrast, in transnational communities that present most laypeople in active roles at the ceremonies, such as Tzong Kwan, succession is equal to the reception of new lay attendees.
This means that the community organizes itself to develop standards to co-opt potential candidates to strengthen the community's roots in the non-native territory. In general, future believers will join the community. This leads us to consider the laypeople's roles in official positions as an essential matter.
Transitional Subjects
The unique position that the lay assistants occupy in the rituals, in the service of the Dharma, expresses the need for local religious admissions, participating in the ceremonial performances. At the same time, their roles involve the manifestation of a transitional condition: the lay Dharma assistants, to some extent, are constantly encouraged to manifest the symbolic transference of the highest values of Buddhist culture.
As attendees are circumscribed by the value of their personal contributions, they play the role of transitional subjects, constantly shaping their identities to better receive and adapt the historical symbolic contents of Taiwanese Buddhism. Nevertheless, laypeople lack traditional training, which usually predisposes religious subjectivity to the rite. Hence, they often rely on a secular religious spirit for training themselves in the temple services.
Consequently, their identity processes reveals sometimes contrasting or asymmetrical concerning everyday life outside the religious community. With no formal basis to integrate the identifications made in the community with daily life, their forms of identities present a modulatory character to the constant repositioning of the social referential of their personalities. So to speak, the identity features highlighted in religious behaviour become contingencies in the exercise of relationships outside the temple. Instead of presupposing it as accidental, this transitional condition represents the very practice of acculturation of Buddhism in foreign lands, traditionally in use since Buddha Gautama times.
Cultural adaptation
An observation must be made: chantings and ceremonies do not stress too much on an idealized uniformity. Instead, Buddhist communities open to laypeople are culturally adaptable by definition. Instead, Buddhist communities open to laypeople are culturally adaptable by definition. Usually, they call themselves a community of (local) religious practice, mainly defined by distinctive uses of local language applied in the services.
Yet this process of cultural adaptation is closely related to common language usage; generally, it materialized on the institutional communication and in regulatory forms of the social conduct. Small changes occur concerning the ceremonies. But, they customarily refer to minor practical adjustments regarding the arrangement of ritual spaces, time schedule, and personnel.
At the Tzong Kwan temple, the cultural adaptation process goes further by establishing a Harmony Group formed by monks and laypeople. Compared to the monastic context where the Harmony Group is constituted by monks chosen by the community for their high spiritual level, according to the orthodox guidelines Baizhang, in the Tzong Kwan community, this official group follows other premises.
Basically, by their potential to be taught. Their sharp intellectual and sensitive abilities to Buddhism combined their recognizable proper social manners. The Harmony Group's members fulfill the requirements to make such a transitional state a provisional behaviour model for others.
In the monastic context, the performance of the ceremony involves a daily exercise of observing the precepts that animate it, translated into sound expression, to provide the community with a rite anchored in the rules of conduct. However, in Buddhist communities that includes laypeople in the service of the Dharma, the meaning of the ceremony (perceived by Brazilian attendees) is different from that performed in entirely monastic environments, as it brings into play a dynamic of belongingness by laypeople in the process of spiritual communion with the Sangha. It is to say that the ceremonies officiated by monks and laypeople (assistants) invariably denote a pedagogical aura, most of the time involving constant corrections that ultimately manifest a character of investment in the development of the practicing lay body.
The pedagogical character is typical in transnational communities, where, often, the monastic body tends to be reduced. As a result, it is commonly accepted and stimulated the integration of the lay people to assist in the ceremony under the Sangha's tutelage. The pedagogical environment that involves the rituals also places a way to carry out religious rooting and thus proceed to an actual symbolic transfer of Buddhist spiritual and cultural elements, as said before, often adapted to the uses and customs of local cultures.
From this bias, it is worthy of drawing a substantial difference between monks and laypeople concerning the harmony group, as it appears in the ceremonies of the Tzong Kwan temple in the mixed formation of lay and monastic voices. The group include three female voices (native Taiwanese), one of them being a nun, and three male voices (two Brazilians), one of them a monk (Taiwanese), acting as a crossover of at least four representative roles:
Sangha members, responsible for religious representation.
Lay people well instructed in the process of assimilating Buddhist precepts.
Brazilians lay Dharma assistants as transitional subjects by incorporating substantial elements from the original Buddhist culture, reinforcing the community's transferential (symbolic) religious features.
Taiwanese laypeople, contextualized by their native Buddhist culture, reinforce their belonging to the Taiwanese religious culture.
Except for the monks, the three roles manifested by laypeople sometimes present themselves in a single individual who expresses them alternately. They represent a movable bridge between different cultural contexts, constantly translating and transferring constitutive elements of intercultural relations for spiritual purposes. Doing this, mainly through the ceremony chants, seeking to sensitize and engage people in the spiritual exercise of Buddhism.
By crossing different engaged cultural contexts to Buddhism, the symbolism of integration between Taiwanese monks and Brazilian practitioners stands out from the crossing of different contexts. On the one hand, it confirms a cultural condition of transnationalism of Taiwanese Buddhism in Brazil in symbolic transfer. On the other, it expresses the desire to form a permanent link with Brazilian religiosity.
This results from the unique character of this group. It is characterized by the cultural adaptation of Brazilians in continuous adherence to the behaviours and meanings of the Taiwanese religious lifestyle. Also, by the constant elaboration of forms of identification spiritual, whose functioning is built from notions of belongingness, conversion of cultural values, and different uses of language to materialize the main issues concerning the exercise of daily life based on Buddhist precepts.
Partial conclusion
Instead of viewing Buddhism's sound rites (or music) from an instrumental perspective and complementary to the rituals, I came to see them as sound production strongly linked to mental and spiritual training. So, I realized that the rites established patterns of thinking and feeling significant for the emergence of new forms of religious identities (which I called "transitional subjects"). This approach is quite the distinctive to the usual instrumental and complementary perspective to the rituals (in fact, dominant in academic works).
In summary: the sound rites constitute soundscapes that arise from Buddhist mental training and firmly adhere to identity processes. In this small Buddhist community, there is a characteristic permeability that brings Taiwanese and Brazilians together in unprecedented ways. That is to say, sounds (or music) are not props or something complementary to rituals but the very reason for the existence of this community, musical from the very beginning.
1. The process of sound perception and meaning attribution does not abstain from the perception of the body. In fact, the sense of sound is not abstracted apart. Instead, it is experienced as an organic conjunction of factors that lead to the belief in its materialization.
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