Stop Thinking; Chant—and Listen

Part of all relationships is the unspoken. It sits right there under the ribs. Then what can you say that’s real at a time when you have to say something?

One answer is: you stop thinking and chant. With Luang Por, there were probably all kinds of things that each individual would have liked to say, but the ‘impersonal’ communality of monastic life doesn’t accommodate – at least among the large numbers of the extended community. Instead you close, or open, all that with chanting. And that’s how we took leave of Luang Por: chanting, offering blessings and asking for forgiveness.

When you chant, especially as part of a group, you have to listen - to the timbre and tonality of your own voice and to that of others. And in that timbre is where the emotions are sensed. Chanting carries the resonances of about all that can be expressed on an emotional level; and you hear in it what your kamma brings up.

Chanting has an impeccable tradition. All the original Buddhist teachings were formulated and transmitted orally… The pragmatism of that is that when a group learns to recite a teaching, the transmission is less likely to err than if it was written down (copyist’s errors, fires, termites). But it’s also the case that the chanted voice comes from and touches a different place in us than the visual word.

With the written and read, you can pore over the words, take them as separate units one at a time and mull over their meaning. It excludes the speaker; it is non-relational. Then we subsequently employ the faculty that has read and ‘understood’ the meaning to guide us in a life that is holistic and relational.

What often occurs then is an attachment to views, or fundamentalism, or at least an awkward handle on life. It’s not that the words aren’t true, but the organ that receives and uses them is the organ of abstraction for which things stand still as discrete entities. And living experience isn’t that way.

On the other hand, for the system that speaks, chants and listens, meaning is resonant, shifting, and nuanced. What is said rides on a wave that is not separate from the speaker, the listener and the context in which it happened. Then even simple words go straight to the central nervous system and cause a shift. Ajahn Chah taught like that.

And this of course is also the essence of Zen teachings – enigmatic on paper, right on the mark in the flesh.

This reflection by Ajahn Sucitto is from the blog post, “Stop Thinking and Chant (and listen, of course.)”