Guest
The Gyuto Monks Tantric Choir - Tibetan Chants for World Peace (album) 01 Mandala Offering 02 Praising Chakrasamvara 03 Blessing the Offerings 04 Great Sacred Music Shimmering above a tone so low it seems to boom from the earth itself, the overtone chants of Gyuto monks create what ethnomusicologist Dr. Fredric Lieberman terms “a musical halo.” This otherworldly sound, based on one of the lowest fundamental pitches of any of the world’s throat-singing traditions, is a sacred offering to the Tibetan Buddhist deities and enlightened beings, and, in the case of the chants featured on the new release, is rarely performed outside of the 600-year-old Tibetan monastery now located in Dharamsala, India. This sonic offering, while transforming the performers’ mind and body with its demanding technique, serves a broader purpose. “They are not chanting for themselves and salvation. They are chanting for every living thing,” says Mickey Hart, “for China, Chinese people, Tibetan people, American people, every being.” This, Lieberman explains, is the essence of Tibetan Buddhism, the call for the enlightenment and salvation of all beings. This essence has been distilled in the Gyuto monks’ unique chants over hundreds of years. Monks cannot perform the chants aloud until they have sufficient initiations and empowerments, a learning process of many years. The style evolved to keep the sacred words restricted to initiates who can handle their power, says Ven. Donyo. “If you were to sing just my name, ‘Thupten Donyo,’ using this form, it would take ten minutes!” Gyuto was founded by Jetsun Kunga Dondrub, whose teacher learned directly from Lama Tsongkhapa, the founder of the Dalai Lama’s lineage, the Gelugpa. A precocious student of logic and tantric practices, Jetsun Kunga Dondrub soon began wandering through Eastern Tibet, sharing his wisdom. “On the way to another monastery, he met 31 monks on the road,” Donyo recounts. “He asked, ‘Where are you gentlemen going?’ They replied, ‘We’re going to join the Gyuto Monastery.’ But Dondrub knew that such a monastery didn’t exist. So he replied, ‘I’m going, too.’” The 32 monks established the Gyuto monastery in 1474. Dondrub began to write the texts that form the basis of Gyuto’s instruction today, and the founding monk became well-respected in Tibet. Once, facing a serious flood and lacking any tactics for diverting the rising waters, government officials called for a lama to perform a miracle. When they sent for Dondrub, the waters receded. As a show of gratitude, he was rewarded with the Ramoche Temple for his monastery in Lhasa, Tibet. Fast forward five centuries to the 1960s, when scholar of world religions and MIT professor Huston Smith woke up one morning in his room at a Tibetan monastery. When Tibet’s Buddhism was forced into exile in 1959, the monks re-established their monastery and university—which is the equivalent of a post-doctoral institution—in Dharamsala, India. “Huston woke up at four in the morning hearing a hundred monks in the courtyard chanting” says Hart. “At one point the group stopped chanting, and the sound was carried on by a single monk, whose voice contained all the notes that the choir had been singing. He dropped to his knees and knew why he was there. He had to record it.” Hart’s deep connection to the Gyuto monks’ chants led him decades later to bring them to the Bay Area for a sold-out performance, and eventually to get fourteen monks into the studio. While working together, Hart introduced the monks to American culture, from Jimi Hendrix and Carlos Santana to Star Wars, from basketball to skateboarding. Open minded and easy going, the monks responded favorably to Hart’s suggestion during their fourth recording in 2001 that they try multi-tracking their voices to recreate the sound of a large chorus of chanting monks as usually heard at Gyuto. “I have always dreamed of Huston’s magical moment, when he first heard them chant as it was meant to be, using the walls as a reflector of sound,” Hart explains. “Remember: these are quiet voices. The only way to achieve that massive sound is with a hundred or more chanters.” While seemingly innovative, this approach revealed an intimate side of chants never before heard, as the monks explained to Hart. “The monks thought multi-tracking was the right approach because it replicated the sound of the full choir,” Hart muses. “Perhaps they hear it internally as it sounds on the recording.” When the monks chant, Hart notes, “They’re creating a mandala of sound, a perfect universe, a house of many rooms.“ When the chants stop, the sounds move from the ear to the soul, as the sand mandalas painstakingly crafted grain by grain, only to be swept away upon completion. “Both live on as spiritual reverberations,” Hart concludes. - - - May All Sentient Beings Be Liberated
