The Sound of One Mind Working

Tibetan ritual music is not a pastiche of gentle good feeling about the Universe. It is an alarm to the system, waking us up to the vibrancy of the world we are placed in and the prevalence of sound as a means to form our home..Whatever one's relation to Buddhism, whether from within or without, the religion appears at once to be admirable. There have been few wars fought in its name; indeed, its teachings seem to aim for a kind of composed peace in the Universe. Though, at times, apparently indifferent to the upheavals of our present world, its visions lie beyond politics. Its aesthetic of calm can prevail behind all that seems to be changing far too often, far too fast..All this composure can be shattered on first hearing the ritual music of the Tibetan monastic traditions. In the Himalaya, it can still be heard in the gompas hidden away in the mountains. Approach the heavy wooden monastery door, tiptoe so as not to disturb the silence, gently push open the portal and pass through a heavy, muffling cloth. Inside, lit by torches burning on either side of a podium, sits the leader of an assembly, deeply engrossed in a religious text. Hear the faint, low rumbling from two rows of monks on either side suddenly surge to an uproar as they pick up their instruments. Huge, thirty-foot metal horns anchor the sound with a groan- as if from the bowels of the Earth, cymbals clang from a crash to a wash, like a wave receding from the shore and preparing to strike, small trumpets made of human bone scream shrilly and large drums beat in rhythmic acceleration, from boom, to bum bum bm bm bm bbbb booom, each instrument with its own rhythm, falling like the leaves of trees that are then blown up into the air as if by sudden gusts of wind, a cacophony of crispness defining the spirit of autumn, the harbinger of winter and the time when snow will drape the valley in a hallowed stillness. At first it is noise, but a din that still understands the rise and the fall, far from the whirring of machines or the honking of traffic. Rather, it is something welling up from the slopes of the mountain, carried down into the winds of the world. The swirls and voices of the spiritual jam session go on long into the night, allowing the sound to overwhelm the players as the candles wear down into darkness..Crazy WisdomOnce you too have heard that sound, you will know that it never leaves you, even when all other sounds are shut out. It is the sound of the body working, sensing the world. The sound of the mountain. The path of pure music, before the song, before the chord, before the beginning, middle or end..The thing is, it's crazy. It´s a roaring din. Western students of Buddhism are sometimes embarrassed by the racket. This is because it does not immediately reflect the peace they seek. Tibetan Buddhism suddenly seems to be not as contained as outsiders would like. It embraces a kind of crazy wisdom, rich with pungent colour and swirling detail, mandalas of demons and terrors, all to take the individual through violent journeys of self-discovery. Yet that very roughness is all to be found inside us, projecting around us the dynamics of a purely inner struggle. Look what happens when you die; you will have to travel through madness. This is what the Tibetan Book of the Dead advises:.Be not afraid of the brilliant radiances of the five colours, know the wisdom to be your own. The natural sound of the truth will reverberate like a thousand thunders. The sound will come with a rolling echo. Fear not. Flee not. Be not terrified. Know these sounds to be the manifestations of your own inner light..It is said that the sounds produced by-Tibetan chants and instruments are the exaggerated counterparts of the sounds your own body would produce if all external sounds were shut out. "This sound", Sonam Chojor Geshe, a lama, told me, "will come to you when it is time. Do not waste time looking for it." Others are less optimistic. The late Gyalwa Karmapa maintained that "only incarnate lamas hear these sounds. They hear them all the time, and see the deities from which they emanate." Sakya Tichen, who has written a book on Tibetan music, was even more restrictive: "Music has nothing to do with man at all. It is for the Gods alone.".So, which is it to be? Will we ever understand the meaning of such distant and foreign sounds, or will we only hear them as shadows of their total purpose? Music remains beyond words and thus might just be better able to express the states of mind that meditation is meant to produce. .Hear the repeating, fading sounds of the cymbals, perishable but never constant. It is perceived but may not be kept. Listen to the deep reverberation of the chant of ancient sutras. Each individual voice produces a chord, a deep bass far beneath the normal human voice, rich with overtones to produce an astounding presence. The text is not so much presented as evoked and camouflaged, penetrating far beyond the words themselves..A Musical Window.Eleven years ago, I went to Nepal to attempt to learn part of this booming, crashing tradition from within. I studied an instrument called the Gyaling, a hand-held conical horn similar to the Indian shehnai, with seven finger holes and played with a double reed. In the midst of all the gigantic, droning horns and crashing cacophony, this oboe-like instrument plays precise, flowing melodies that seem to both begin and end ix the middle. There is some improvisation, but only to the extent of deciding when to change to the next prescribed pattern. Each piece, said my teachers, could last a few minutes or a few hundred years, depending on how far I wished to get into it..Yet they laughed at my interest in the first place. "Why," said Lama Sangye Tenzing, of Serlo Gompa above the village of Junbesi in Solu-Khumbu, "would you come all the way to this country to learn this one, insignificant part of our culture? Can you not see it makes no sense without the whole? I play this piece and can hear the cycles of birth and rebirth and the thirteen phases in the education of a lama. But to you, it is just sound,"."Think of a window," I told him. "I am outside, and looking at your world. I can see only one piece of it. And this is the beginning. As a musician, I know something of music. Through music, I can look in, listen in on your world. Then I can hear the world through what music can reveal of ii. It will be different to what others will read of it, others photograph of it, but it will be another window in.".The gyaling is usually heard in the midst of the crashing and roaring ensemble, so alone that it sounds surprisingly naked and calm. At first, all the pieces sounded alike to me. The differences between them are so subtle as to heighten the attention of the student who is trying to learn to play them. My teachers, usually, could not speak Nepali or English, so they would demonstrate and I would follow. The gyaling is usually played in pairs. One tends to follow the other. The blend must never be exact, to remind us that the musician is always following the music, an art never for humans alone. They would smile and point at my head, imploring me to remember. They would despair at my furtive efforts to write it all down. Music is not for pen or for paper. It must be inside us to mirror the sounds of the naked mind..After a while, I realised that it works. Today, more than a decade later, when all is calm, in those rare moments when I have sought out and found natural silence, in the background inside I hear the warbling melodies of the gyaling, without interruption, as if they would continue for years on end. It is the sound of the mind at work, only audible in places as quiet as the high Tibetan plateau used to be, before it began to be developed like the rest of the world. Those lamas were right. This is the sound of one mind working..Aimless Peacefulness.I have returned to the United States to teach this musk to others, to try to make them understand. It works best when I break from the traditions, when I adapt the rhythms to the world I am now in. I've learned to play the gyaling pieces on my native clarinet, recorded them on digital compact disk, played them all over the world in different contexts..But this has taken the sound away from its home. Is it sad that elements of tradition change, and are not always preserved? Since I embarked on this study years ago, some Tibetan music has crossed the globe to become all the rage. The monks of the Gyuto Tantric College in Bomdilla, Assam and other groups, have toured the "West chanting deep chants and presenting very clearly the grace and gravity of the endangered Tibetan tradition. These concerts are powerful, and have sold out. I suspect that many listeners do not want to understand much more about the sound, except to take it in as another instant spiritual kick. Western composers have not been much more sympathetic; they tend either to appropriate the effect, to try to aim for a deep bass presence of their own or, worse still, to increase their own reputations by mere affiliation. There is, for example, a CD recording of chanting monks with a piece by the American avant-garde composer Philip Glass appended at the end that has nothing at all to do with the Tibetan music..Last year, a benefit concert for Tibet House was held in New York city. The performers: poet Alan Ginsberg, avant-pop star Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, and a Tibetan New-Age flautist whose name, I must admit, I forget. It was an all-star cast, assembled to draw crowds and cash. Numerous film stars and other celebrities populated the audience. The performers had never played together, and they did not share enough common ground to improvise successfully, as jazz musicians might well have done in the same situation. Musically, it was a grave embarrassment, though it is always hard to fault something done for a good cause. Even the sole Tibetan participant, seemed curiously unauthentic. His music was aimlessly peaceful in a New-Age sort of way, rather than penetrating the depths like the tradition he was supposed to represent. The audience, then, got what they wanted to hear and felt what they wanted to feel. That they had seen some famous people and supported an issue without being challenged by a cultural tradition that is meant to shock us into the exactness of our being. Tibetan music, as a part of the Tibetan world, is not a pastiche of gentle good feeling about the Universe. It is an alarm to the system, waking us up to the vibrancy of the world we are placed in and the prevalence of sound as a means to form our home..Way of Pure Sound.You have to look way back before Buddhism to find an eloquence that describes what is meant to be heard. In the Nine Ways of Bon, the early religion of Tibet, we find among them the Way of Pure Sound—not music, not noise, but a way of listening to the inside and outside as one..Water rises from water. There is no.way to avoid it..Wood sprouts from wood. It.never really dies..Add wood to fire and where does.that get you?.You only avoid if you keep to yourself..The way of Pure Sound is the way of change..Without avoiding, it seeks to accept..Taking all into friendship, everything.is its friend..With all as your friend, nothing stands alone..Sky and space, method and wisdom;.losing duality, reaching perfection –.Perform a realm of perfect enjoyment..Music is always said to reach beyond language, so that we may appreciate what we do not understand. Some say that it is the best way to assess distant cultures. But music demands attention. It should be serious, not the background soundtrack to the emotional surge of our lives. Beyond the precision of words, it reveals the precise tones of the soul in the world, Tibetan Buddhist music sets this up religiously as its purpose. No wonder it is hard to listen to. But to live within its world is worth it..David Rothenberg is a writer and musician. His adaptations of Tibetan music are available on his recording nobody could explain it. He is a professor in the humanities department of the New Jersey Institute of Technology.