Buddhist Music And Its Different Forms

Buddhist Music has spread throughout the world in various forms. With so many different schools of Buddhism it isn’t easy to label exactly what Buddhist music is.

To some people it is the Tibetan chanting or singing bowls. To others it is more ambient sounds for Zen meditation. This type of music is also often used in ceremonies and rituals to signify a procession or establish a trance like state.

Koyasan Shingon Buddhsim

Shingon Buddhism specifically recognizes ways of reaching enlightenment not only through seated meditation such as “Ajikan”, but also through many other various forms of music as well. Horagai (“conch shell”) players are often associated with shugendo (“mountain ascetics”), which is closely related to Shingon and Shinto. However, it is shomyo (Buddhist Chant, similar to hymns) that are said to be where the roots of most Japanese music today lie. Shomyo is specific to the Mikkyo schools of the Shingon and Tendai sects. Also, during Shingon rituals such as the famous Goma (Homa) fire ceremony a taiko drum is used repitiously with the chantings of mantras and usually the Heart Sutra. Here is a picture of Matsumura Jisho, head priest at Taimadera Temple, Nakanobo, and myself (which you can't really see) doing the taiko drum and chanting:

The shakuhachi, the Japanese bamboo flute, has been used in association with esoteric Buddhism as well as Zen Buddhism for quite some time. Due to a weakening voice in his older years, the Tendai priest Jikaku Taishi Ennin (794-864) is said to have practiced and taught with the shakuhachi, as well as performed the chant “Inzei no Amida-Kyo” on the shakuhachi. Shomyo’s focus on different tones produced is supposed to bring the singer into harmony with nature and himself. The Japanese music scholar Koizumi Fumio (1984) laid out in detail the relationship of Japanese music with shomyo, in particular gagaku and biwa.

Shimura “Zenpo” Satoshi, a shakuhachi performer, scholar, and professor at Osaka Arts University, says that the old Myoan-ji temple of the Myoan Shimpo ryu contains a repertoire of over 60 pieces. He says that many of these pieces have a strong relationship with the shomyo and the Mikkyo influenced gagaku music (Personal Correspondence, 2009).

Buddhist music has incorporated many different types of instruments each serving a different purpose. Each culture that that school has grown in has developed its own style and form of incorporating music into the communication of spirituality.

I recommend the following deep meditation system which also incorporates music into its methods of synchronizing brainwaves.