Chris Preist
Thanks so much for inviting me. Before we start chanting, I would like to share some of my thoughts about approaches to chanting – for want of a better word, my ‘philosophy’ of chant.
The first thing I’d like to speak about is practice vs rehearsal/performance. In the West we tend to see singing as a performance: you rehearse before you perform. You rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. You improve and refine what you do, to get better; to get really good. And then finally you perform. You are performing for other people, displaying it to other people. I feel some of that comes across in the Western approach to chanting, which I don’t think is the traditional approach to chanting. Chanting for me is a practice, not a rehearsal and performance. Rehearsal/performance is about displaying one’s excellence to others, going out, rather than inwards. An act of sharing through the personal self, the ego. At its finest, this is a good, even great, thing to do – but not in the end what spiritual practice is about.
So if chanting is a practice, not a performance, what does this mean? Practice has different aspects, and one that is important to me as a practitioner of yoga is its meditational aspects. To use the yoga terms, Dharana and Dhyāna. Dharana – something that you make an effort to engage and connect your mind with, and Dhyāna – the connection persists and becomes continuous, your mind is held by the act of chanting. Being wholeheartedly present on the act of chanting. This is true of any meditation. In the same way, when you’re practising Asana, sometimes your mind is trying to get it right but in the end you’re aspiring to be present on what you’re doing. Wholeheartedly present.
So this is one important aspect: trying to cultivate a sense of connection with the chant as opposed to a sense of trying to get it right. A second aspect – and again this goes back to rehearsal/performance versus practice – is that the energy of chanting is a more contained interior energy rather than western singing. Singing is about projecting out and reaching the audience, connecting with the audience. Whereas in chanting it’s about containing and holding the energy. This is in a similar way to Prānāyāma: When we practice Prānāyāma, then ideally the energy is contained and held in the body, not spreading out and dissipating. It’s the same with chanting – containing the energy of the chant; feeling the resonance inside the body. That resonance might project outwards, but it’s important that the energy is contained.
In the moment I heard of Desikachar’s death a few years ago, there were two images of him that came to my mind which captured how he taught. In both, he was seated on a chair. In the first, he was the cheeky imp with a mischievous smile, playfully and skilfully engaging with his audience of students. His light-heartedness belying the seriousness and depth of the teaching he skilfully transmitted.
The second image was of him chanting. He would sit with his eyes closed or gazing downwards, spine upright, hands on knees, chin slightly tucked in – and chant with a clear, resonant, contained voice. Even though it was in front of a group, there was a sense of contained energy and a real feeling of practice rather than performance. It was ‘for’ us, but not as an audience – it was practice shared with us. A sense of contained resonant energy would spread through the room, but no sense of a performer trying to project. So those are the images that have most stayed with me.
So it’s cultivating that sense of resonant containment. This means it’s not always important to chant loudly. When you chant in a group it’s very much a collective experience. In the Zen tradition when you chant in a group, you chant in such a way that you hear all those around you supporting you and combining with you. This is something that we can do too.
So it’s a practice rather than performance. For me it’s primarily a meditational practice; being present to the act of chanting. Dharana and Dhyāna. In the case of chanting, the most important aspect of dharana that you’re connecting to is the hearing. This is true if you’re in a learning situation: hearing what the teacher is doing. But even more importantly hearing yourself. It’s not about performing the chant, it’s about the chant emerging through you and you experiencing and hearing that chant. That act of hearing, that act of being present to the hearing is what will, for want of a better word, ‘improve’ the quality of the chant. This might be getting it more technically right, or it might be more about changing the quality in more subtle ways.
The act of hearing is something that one places one’s attention to, but without desperately trying; it’s not about hearing to try to get it right. Rather, it’s about hearing and noticing and being present and aware. There is a beauty in exactness of chant, as anyone who’s studied it for a long time knows. There is a beauty in its exactness in the same way as in an asana posture there is a beauty in the exactness, the precision, of posture. But in the end it’s actually that one’s mind is held by that with which one is engaged that is more important. One can allow the exactness to emerge by placing one’s attention on the hearing and the doing and noticing, but not desperately trying to get it right. You notice differences, you notice things, and adjust both unconsciously and consciously in response to that noticing.
It’s good to improve, but that’s not in the end what’s most important. What’s most important is that one is wholeheartedly present and engaged with the chant; listening, hearing and that hearing might result in ‘improvements’. The improvements, the more exactness, emerge as a consequence of dhyana rather than as an end which is striven for.
I would say as a consequence of this, I have a slightly different attitude to the rules of chanting than some other people. For me, it isn’t that knowing the rules allows you to chant correctly. Rather, chanting correctly allows you to understand the rules. They put into words what you’ve already experienced, what you have learnt from really hearing the chanting of your teacher, and really hearing your own chanting. If you try to apply a rule consciously when you’re chanting, it’s like the old story about the dancing centipede who could no longer dance when asked which foot moved first; as soon as you think about what you are doing, you are lost. Rather than applying the rules as you chant, you can use them later to understand what you are doing. For example, I noticed a small difference between what I was chanting and what Karen, who led us yesterday, was chanting. Afterwards, I thought about the Sanskrit chant rules with regard to rhythm, and realised that Karen’s way was correct; I had an old habit with regard to the rhythm which wasn’t quite right, and can now correct that. It’s not me trying to apply the rules in the moment, but rather using them to augment the act of really hearing.
Because chanting is an act of meditation, of Dhyāna, then it acts as a mirror on the mind. When one is solidly engaged in meditation, there will be things that come up whenever we meditate. When we were doing the gratitude meditation at the start of this session, if you’re like me your mind won’t be dwelling in a profound state of gratitude throughout. Your mind will be wandering off doing all kinds of things; that’s just how the mind is. That’s the nature of the human mind and we shouldn’t give ourselves a hard time about it. Don’t believe some enlightened master who claims that their mind doesn’t do that.
As a result of that, chanting reflects the mind in different ways; it reflects the act of distraction and the way in which distraction manifests. Part of meditation is to confront the games that one’s ego plays. Everyone has an ego, and everyone’s ego plays games. Different people play different games with their egos, but we all play games with our egos. So chanting will reflect back your personal ego games to you for you to see; you might be frustrated you make a mistake, or notice wanting to get it right. Or, “I’m better than that person, they got it wrong”. You know, all those sort of things. It will reflect back these things to us, and so we can just notice that. We can say, “OK that’s part of my character. It’s maybe not the nicest part of my character but it’s part of me.” Things like this are part of everyone so don’t feel bad about it. But by noticing how our kleśa arise, by being conscious of these things without analysing, it naturally means they have less power over us. That’s really what meditation is about; so when your ego throws up stuff in chanting notice it, let it go and carry on chanting.
There’s also the more divine cosmic spiritual aspect of meditation. Through chanting one lets go. There’s an act of noticing the ego and then once more letting go into the moment. Let go of the ego into the moment; let go of the ego to the chant. Just simply chant. Just come back; come back; come back. Again. Again. Again. This noticing, letting go and coming back, over time, is what has profound mental and spiritual healing properties. So that’s why I chant.
I also have a slightly different approach to the meaning of chants. I don’t talk about the meaning as much as some people. I think this is partly because in the days when I was chanting with Desikachar and the teachers at the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram, there was a lot less emphasis and discussion of meaning, at least in the chanting sessions. The texts would be studied at different times. For example, Desikachar sent me to study the Taittirīya Upaniṣad with one of the teachers from the Sanskrit College – Krishnamurti Shastri, I think his name was. The study was a very traditional form. The first time, I got my chant sheets out to look at the Sanskrit words while we were studying. The teacher said, “No, no ,you can’t do that here, you can do it with Desikachar, but not here.” He thought I wanted to chant with him.
So the way that I like to engage with the meaning is through bhāvana – a felt connection. That is what we were doing earlier with the Opening Chants. They are all about gratitude – gratitude to our teachers, to the lineage before them, and to the divine for giving us the opportunity to practice in this life. And so we sat in silence for a short time with a sense, a bhavana, of gratitude after chanting them. This, for me, is more important than understanding the exact words which are chanted. I tend to offer bhavana which link with the meaning of the chant. I also tend to use more short meditations within chant sessions, using these bhavana. Again, this is to emphasise chanting as practice, as opposed to learning.
In addition to gratitude, there are other bhāvana which connect with the meaning of the chants we typically use. There is honouring, offering and surrendering to different forms of the divine. Different chants engage with different expressions of divine energy. And in return, there is a sense of receiving. Offering, surrendering and receiving. Receiving some of the characteristics of the divine energy one engages with. This is a bhavana that often works with chants. There is also a feeling of connection, of manifesting something through the chant, the practice. This is something I would say that comes, that one doesn’t look for but just happens when one is chanting. There’s a sense of divine energy flowing through the practice. I’m a bit of a scientific rationalist so I find it slightly uncomfortable using terms like this, but it’s the best way of putting into words my experience.
There’s a sense of something coming from beyond, through one, and being expressed in the world; something being made concrete in the world through the practice. The last bhavana I would like to consider is one that appears more in the Upanishads than the Vedas – the bhavana of engaging with the nature of the Self in its different aspects.
So my personal approach is to engage with the meanings of the chants through bhāvana in meditation, rather than thinking, talking and discussing it at the time of chanting.
Thank you very much for listening. Now, let’s chant together.