Sound and mantra

The teaching

As the chanters' craft in the Indian faiths, the cloister and the Sufi circle teaches it.

In the beginning, the word

The chant traditions start from one conviction, each in its own words: that a sacred word, spoken, is a deed and not only a sign. In a hymn of the Rig Veda, Speech herself, Vac, speaks as a goddess who goes with all the gods and bears them up. The Mandukya Upanishad opens by saying that the syllable Om is all this. In Genesis God creates by speaking: “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” John's gospel begins, “In the beginning was the Word,” and the Qur'an teaches that when God decrees a thing, He says to it only, Be, and it is.

These are not one teaching, and each faith holds its own. What they share is the ground of this art: a sacred sound is something done, with breath, voice and attention, and repeating it is a practice and not a performance. It is offered, to a god, to God or to the truth it names, and in each tradition the one who offers it is held to be shaped by what is said.

Breath, voice, word and count

Every chant is made of a few things. The breath carries it: a phrase is sung on one long out-breath, and the short in-breath between phrases sets the pace. The voice gives it a note, most often one reciting note on which most of the words fall, at about the loudness of quiet speech. The word is its matter: a single seed syllable whose force, the Tantric teachers say, lies in the sound itself; a name of God; a short formula of praise or refuge; or a whole verse with its meaning.

The count gives it shape. A mantra is repeated on a string of a hundred and eight beads; the remembrance after the Muslim prayer is counted thirty-three, thirty-three and thirty-four; the Rule of Benedict sets all hundred and fifty psalms in every week. Repetition is the method of the whole art. What is said once is heard; what is said a thousand times, the teachers say, passes from the lips into the mind and at last into the heart.

Last, and first, comes attention. Benedict asks that the mind be in harmony with the voice; Patanjali that the syllable be repeated with dwelling on its meaning; the Sufi masters that the remembrance of the tongue become the remembrance of the heart. A chant said with the mind elsewhere is, by all of them, only half said.

Aloud, in a whisper and in the mind

A chant can be sounded in three ways, and the traditions rank them. It can be spoken or sung aloud; it can be whispered, the lips moving and no one near hearing it; and it can be said in the mind alone. The Indian law books and the manuals of japa set them in that order, the whispered above the spoken and the silent above both. The Sufi orders keep the remembrance aloud in the circle and hidden in the heart, and the Naqshbandis hold to the silent way. The Orthodox teachers of the Jesus Prayer describe the same road as the prayer of the lips, the prayer of the mind and the prayer of the heart.

Most teachers start a beginner aloud. The spoken sound holds the attention, the ear notices when the mind has wandered, and the breath finds its pace of itself; the quieter ways are grown into, not begun with.

The families of sacred sound

The art has several families, and they are not to be confused. There is the recited text, kept word for word: the hymns of the Veda with their raised, low and falling accents; the Qur'an, recited by the rules of tajwid, which govern how each letter is sounded, held and joined; the psalms, sung verse by verse in the monastery. There is the repeated formula: a mantra counted on beads, a phrase of remembrance, the Jesus Prayer, the Kyrie.

There is the name sung together, in the call and response of kirtan, in the hymns of the Sikh gurdwara and in the circle of dhikr. There are the instruments that call to attention and mark the turns of a rite, the temple bell, the bowl and the gong. And there is listening turned inward: to the silence after the syllable and, in the yoga of sound, to the subtle sound heard within. Each family is taught from its own sources on its own page.

The teacher and the guest

Much of this art is not taken from a book. In the Tantric schools and many devotional ones a mantra is given at initiation by a teacher, whispered into the ear and then kept private, and the teaching is that a mantra so received carries the force of all who have repeated it before. A Sufi circle is entered at a teacher's invitation, and the hours of a monastery are the worship of a community. These are described here and not handed out.

Much is also open to anyone. Om is a public sound, to be sounded with respect for those who hold it sacred. The psalms can be read and sung by anyone, and abbeys that welcome visitors to their services ask them to keep the silence of the house. Temples, gurdwaras and kirtan groups welcome guests who sit where others sit, cover the head or leave their shoes as the house asks, and join the response or simply listen. To come as a guest, and to listen before singing, is the first manner of the art.

Posture, pace and the voice

The body's side of the art is plain. The chanter sits or stands upright, the shoulders loose, the jaw unclenched and the throat open, breathes in through the nose, and lets each phrase ride on an unforced out-breath. The loudness is that of quiet speech or a little more, the pace is the chant's own, and nothing is pushed. Dizziness, tingling or a tight chest mean the breath has been driven too hard, and the remedy is to stop and breathe normally. The breath is never held to strain, a voice that tires is rested, and anyone with a heart or lung condition asks a doctor before taking up a breathing practice.

The chant traditions never tied their sound to a number of vibrations. The cantor sets the first note where the voices of that choir sit easily, the accents of Vedic recitation rise and fall from the reciter's own voice, and what the traditions ask of pitch is that it suit the voices and serve the words. The claims made since for special tunings and tones are weighed on their own page.

Silence, where the chant ends

Every tradition here ends its sound in silence, and treats the silence as part of the practice. The Mandukya Upanishad gives the three sounds of Om to waking, dream and deep sleep, and the silence after them to the fourth, which has no letter. The monastery keeps the great silence after Compline until the morning. The Buddhist bell is followed until its sound has wholly gone, and the Naqshbandi remembrance is kept in the heart without any sound at all. The chanter learns to attend to the quiet after a phrase as carefully as to the phrase.

How a student begins

The first practice is listening. The student hears one tradition's chant, at a service or in a recording, with the words in hand, until its pace and its pauses are familiar. Then comes a single sound: sitting upright, a slow breath in through the nose, and one comfortable note hummed for the whole of the out-breath, for three to five minutes, attending to the hum in the lips and chest and to the quiet after it.

Then a short chant from an open tradition, kept for a few weeks: Om sounded three to seven times, each sound fading before the next breath comes; or a psalm read aloud on one note, with a full pause at the middle of each verse; or a simple line sung back and forth with others. The count may be kept on beads. A session is short, ten minutes is plenty, it is never loud, and what the student attends to is the breath, the word and the silence after it.

The branches, and how they stand

The branches follow the families. Mantra teaches the Indian and Tibetan teaching of the repeated word: its parts, its counting, the seed syllables, and the mantras of the Buddhist, Jain and Sikh traditions. The syllable Om teaches the four quarters of the Mandukya Upanishad and the sound within. Chant in the monasteries teaches the hours, the psalm tones and the eight modes. Singing the names teaches kirtan, the bhajan, the hymns of the gurdwara and the Sufi dhikr, each in its own faith.

Bowls and gongs teaches the instruments and how they sound. The claims for a pitch teaches what a pitch is, how tuning works, and where the stories of special tunings and tones come from. What chanting does in the body teaches the breath, the heart's rhythm and the care of the voice. A beginner does well to read the page on the body first, for the breath every chant rides on, and then the one tradition whose chant brought them here.