Chanting: Moved By Love

Some time ago, my husband, who doesn’t practice Zen, asked me why we chanted. I began to regurgitate some Zen teaching on the matter, mimicking Zen Master Seung Sahn’s words and left it at that, but my answer wasn’t satisfactory to me or to him, and so I began to dive more deeply into this practice handed down to us from our Korean teachers.

I’ve always accepted chanting as a part of our practice, but in my early practice, chanting seemed secondary to sitting meditation. The sangha chanted, and because they chanted, I chanted. I had favorite chants, of course, and some that were hard for me to sit through initially, but I didn’t give the matter any thought. It wasn’t until later that I began to appreciate that this vocalization gave a different kind of focus for meditation practice. Zen Master Seung Sahn said that we can chant any syllables, and if we believe in them strongly enough, the chanting will be efficacious for our practice, so it isn’t just the words we use, but the chanting, the sounds themselves, the vibrations and the perception of those vibrations that make all the difference.

Zen Master Seung Sahn had clear teaching about chanting meditation. He said that perceiving our voice is the same as perceiving our true nature. He taught that the perceiving itself is our true nature. Each one of us is not separate from the sound, and thus we are not separate from the universe. Further, chanting can keep us centered, and if we perceive the sound of our voice and the voices around us, then we can keep a mind that is clear and compassionate and open. He spoke of our chanting together and perceiving this one voice as the sound of world peace. As we are not separate from the universe, neither are we separate from one another, and chanting is an action that solidifies that oneness. When we perceive the voices of the world and chant together with the world, then that is already peace.

Dae Soen Sa Nim’s teaching points to this wonderful sense of unity we can feel in our experience of the sounds we create together. I personally feel this most keenly when chanting the opening lines of the Heart Sutra in English, when the words are slow enough that our voices have time to find just the right tone to merge with the tone of everyone else. The term for this feeling of unity is kama muta, Sanskrit for “moved by love.” Kama muta is the feeling we get when we have a sudden feeling of oneness or union with others. Kama muta happens when our voices blend and the sense of separateness dissipates.

There was a recent video on Facebook of two groups brought together by Koolulam, an organization that seeks to bring Israelis together for mass singing events. In this video, three thousand Muslims and Jews, none of whom knew each other, were taught the song “One Day” by Matisyahu. In one hour, they were taught the song and the harmonization. It was then recorded and uploaded to YouTube. The results were stunning. Singing together, there was no heartbreak or dissension. There was just the beauty of the music they were making together. There was only the sound of the voices harmonizing together. And as they sang, they began to move to the rhythm of the music, many hands lifted up, and you could see the joy in their faces. The comments on Facebook were full of heart healing and compassion. When the COVID pandemic caused a lockdown in Italy, videos emerged of Italian neighbors coming out onto their balconies and singing together. There was this sense of “We are all in this together.” How is it that music can be so powerful in bringing us together?

Singing and chanting together was recognized from the very beginnings of ancient spiritual practices as a way of creating community and bringing the mysterious into our present experience. Nearly every religious tradition utilizes singing or chanting in their rites of passage and rituals of worship. Vedic chants from the Hindu tradition are nearly four thousand years old, making it likely that the Buddha also chanted or was familiar with chanting. And the Buddha’s teachings were passed down in an oral tradition—probably through the use of chanting. Throughout the Lotus Sutra or the Avatamsaka Sutra, we find the speaker changing from prose to a verse, or gatha. I suspect that these verse forms were used to memorize and chant the sutras, thus passing the teaching from one person to another, one generation to another. We continue that oral tradition every practice when we chant the Heart Sutra.

Although the beginnings of vocalization practice were perhaps intuited by our spiritual forebears, science underscores the reasons why it’s been so important in our rituals and forms. Chanting together stimulates the release of oxytocin—a neuropeptide that is sometimes characterized as the “love hormone” and is associated with empathy, trust, and relationship building. The sound of our voices blending brings forth that sense of community, of unity. While we are chanting in unison, we are also in time together—in sync with one another. In the book How God Changes Your Brain (Random House, 2009), Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman write about how this synchronicity in moving, chanting, or singing is shown in psychological research to bring forth our innate compassion and empathy for one another. Chanting together in unison creates world peace because we are, in essence, co-creating a milieu in which compassion, generosity, and empathy for others becomes a reality.

Chanting also helps us with our sitting meditation. If you’ve ever just sat down on your cushion without some chanting prior to it, you can tell the difference. I could sense that in my own practice, and so always included one or two chants before my sitting practice at home. At a retreat a few years ago, one of my teachers said that he believed chanting helped us settle into our sitting meditation. The word settle caught my attention. Settling in this context connotes “coming to rest” or “sinking into.” It was interesting to learn that chanting increases serotonin levels, which stabilizes our mood—lessening anxiety and bringing calmness to our heart and mind. Sarah Keating writes in “The World’s Most Accessible Stress Reliever” (BBC, May 2020) that cortisol levels also decrease with chanting, letting our muscles relax and slowing our heart rate. The deep, diaphragmatic breathing often required of chanting increases vagal nerve tone, which slows the beating of our heart and lowers our blood pressure. Because of these physiological changes, chanting helps us come to rest in our sitting meditation practice with more focus and concentration. Newberg and Waldman also point out that even doing a quiet mantra has been shown to activate areas of the brain that decrease anxiety and increase our connection to others.

None of this will help, though, without some effort. Many of us have had the experience of chanting on autopilot while our brains have taken us in all different directions and then suddenly we’re at the end of the chant. Or sometimes we end up repeating verses or skipping verses—and suddenly everyone in the sangha is confused! Zen Master So Sahn in the Mirror of Zen cautions us against chanting in a pro forma manner: “Merely chanting with the lips is nothing more than recitation of the Buddha’s name. Chanting with a one-pointed mind is true chanting. Just mouthing the words without mindfulness, absorbed in habitual thinking, will do no real good for your practice.” As with all meditation practice, we must bring our attention back over and over again to the chant, the sound of our voice and the sounds of the voices around us. Zen Master Dae Bong said, “If there is any kind of thinking, any kind of feeling, or any kind of thing going on, take that energy and put it into the sound. Then there is no thinking at all, only the sound.”

Chanting is a wonderful practice both in together action and when practicing alone. The energy of strong together action in chanting upholds us, bonds us, and soothes the heat of our passions and thinking mind. The solitary chants or mantras at dawn bring centeredness to the day. The sound of chanting carries into the room and out into the world, touching lives with the compassion of Kwan Seum Bosal or the blessings of the Great Dharani.