Modal Harmony, Dissonance, and the Threshold Between: Tibetan Ritual Music as a Locus for Understanding Difference in Tibetan Buddhist and Euro-American Logics

By Nicholas Nauman

Note: Because it is concerned primarily with the encounter of cultures rather than what Tibetan Buddhism may or may not be on its own, this paper presupposes a familiarity with many Tibetan Buddhist concepts and vocabulary.  Where the involutions of language get most sticky, explanatory footnotes are attached.

Different ears perk for different reasons.  When our small sound vessels twitch, they wriggle the vast involutions of their bearer’s involvement in a world known solely through the senses.  Not being the first to encounter sonic perception, a hearer bears the influence of innumerable preceding representations thereof; culture drives the particular perk.  To wit: I’m a young American, fancying myself a musician, subjecting my ears most regularly to the chugging pomp of American jazz and rock ‘n’ roll.  My university one sunny weekend invites a group of Tibetan lamas to make their ordinary sounds.  The vociferous honks and crashes known as puja barely register as music, their sonic contours relegated in American representative norms to the category of “noise.”  I delve into an inquiry of the stuff and stuffing of Tibetan Budhhist puja, traveling to the Himalayas to examine as best he could the tradition’s internal philosophical and musical contours, and, most recently, to New York, to try to understand how my fellow Americans have reinterpreted the mores and music of the far-away mountains. 

The sounds of Tibetan puja defy most of the “Western”[1] music tradition’s aesthetic standards with visceral evidence: discernibly regular rhythm, melody, and structure never quite lock into a thoroughly “Western” sensibility.  There is no reason for much parity, anyhow.  Geographically, and, consequently, culturally isolated from most of Europe’s colonial reaches until the last couple of centuries, all things Tibetan really only permeated the American[2] imagination after China displaced much of the Tibetan population in the 1950s.[3]

The U.S. of A. is different from the Himalayan mountains.  People here do not know yaks.  People here do not look like Tibetans.  Until the last century or so, people here were not Buddhist.

Here’s where things get trickier and trickier.  To bandy about the words “Buddhist” or “Buddhism” is to get sticky in a web of historically muddled linguistic designations.  There are near-countless discrepancies between the near-countless worldwide practices and discourses somehow involving Buddha, not all of which necessarily cohere with the colonial, Christian conception of systems and “religion” that invented the term “Buddhism” in the nineteenth century.  European interaction with the many Asian modes of behavior involving representations of Buddha required the articulation of categories with limited parameters, defined by observers unfamiliar with the self-contained modes of the foreign practitioners.  Postmodern studiers of religion persistently grapple with this problem of the disparity between insider and outsider definitions of meaning.  When I describe my perception of puja as a cacophonous blast, I represent the practice in the mode of an outsider.  How would a Tibetan describe it?  And, more difficultly, how can I access a Tibetan description with the confidence that translation will not totally alter the Tibetan meaning?

These questions confront further complication in light of the culturally mishmashed juncture from which my scholarly inquiry embarks.  “Buddhism” has been a subject of American imagination and re-imagination for a couple hundred years now, making the particulars of Tibetan traditions subject to a densely muddied variety of translation and appropriation.  The American re-imagining of Tibet has fashioned its traditions as alternately barbaric, sublime, magical, wishy-washy, or a solution to the ills of Judeo-Christian religions.  So decontextualized, Tibetan Buddhism has, in popular American discourse, become lauded for unstudied claims to perfection or indistinguishable from other Buddhist traditions.  The practical elements of the tradition have become so divorced from the context of their development that the F.B.I. can use recordings of Tibetan monks as intimidation tactics.[4]

Even within the muddled state of Buddhism in America, many folks have committed to identifying as Buddhist.  That identity means as many different things as there are people who hold it.  Some people attempt to distill from the various traditions an “essential Buddhism” or try to innovate a “Western Buddhism.”  Those that have troubled to distinguish the diverse traditions from one another often recognize unique cultural specifications as integral to the practice itself.  Prominent English scholar/practitioner Stephen Batchelor says that the notion of a Western Buddhism “presupposes West/ East… a standard dualism and one that reflects, in fact, a kind of imperial, colonial basis.” [5] Considering that many Buddhist texts suggest the fallacy of dualistic conception, communities calling themselves Buddhist might want to avoid the West/East construction. 

Amid the many incarnations of “Buddhism” in the U.S., adherence to a single tradition remains complexly challenging.  Any practicing Tibetan Buddhist familiar with the Himalayan versions of the tradition will find immediately that at least one extremely visible presence is largely missing: monasteries.  Indo-Tibetan Buddhist cultural development has included for nearly two millennia the prominent social institution of what we in the West call monasteries, large centers of training in various manners of social comportment, philosophy, and practices like meditation, prayer, and the performance of puja. Most Buddhist monastic traditions adhere to the points of the vinaya code[6] that suggest staunch prohibitive regulations against music.  Tibetan monastics interpret the rule to their own ends.  According to Rakra Tethong, “Vinaya texts put restrictions on music, and don’t allow monks to play folk songs.”[7]  Tibetan puja consists of organized sound, but the music is not for mere frivolity or entertainment; it serves specific Buddhist purposes.[8]

The lamas at these monasteries[9] spend their years studying texts and rituals toward a designated end. Their rigor is said not to be for the mere expansion of knowledge, but is directed at what Georges Dreyfus calls the goal of “closure, the final vantage point from which the members of a community can interpret the world and find meaning in it.”[10]  For the Tibetan Buddhist, closure is the liberation of all beings from samsara via enlightenment.  Samsara, cyclic existence, perpetuates over countless lifetimes, through all the six realms of existence. Tibetan Buddhism stems from the Mahayana tradition, the authors of which maintain that enlightenment occurs when an individual realizes the fundamental emptiness of all phenomena; that is, one must cultivate a penetrating insight into the reality that nothing exists independently of the perception of it.  Understanding of ideas like impermanence and non-dualism ideally lead to an understanding of emptiness. Lati Rinbochay refers to one who has realized emptiness as a “direct perceiver,” a being perceiving phenomena free from concepts.[11] 

The Buddhist project, then, is to determine the means of liberating and cultivating direct perception for all beings.  The tantric tradition out of which modern Tibetan Buddhism developed holds that the capacity for enlightenment is innate[12] in all beings, and that one can cultivate that capacity through practical means.  The literature of tantra suggests that its surrounding tradition arose in insubordinate response to the rigidity of pre- tantric Buddhist regulations, one of which, presumably, was the vinaya code.  Saraha’s Treasury of Songs, an early (post seventh- century CE) text associated with tantra, contains the verse, “Eat and drink, indulge the senses… By things like this you’ll gain the world beyond.”[13]   While institutional Tibetan Buddhism in its present state has many regulations of its own, the tantric embrace of the senses as a method toward closure has, at least in terms of the ear sense, been somewhat retained.  A thirteenth- century Tibetan scholar, Sa skya Pandita, illustrated at length the benefits music could have for the Buddhist in his Treatise on Music, Explained According to the Sutras.  With the purported word of the Buddha (the sutras) as his reference, Pandita asserted: “However deprived of beauty, inferior in intellect,/ And, moreover, of unfortunate birth and lacking in wealth,/ If skilled in manipulating the parts of music, /In the midst of a crowd, you will shine like an ornament.”[14]

The entire puja ensemble is comprised, depending on the monastery, of some combination of the following instruments: the rgya-gling (double reed horn), the dung (long horn), the rol mo (hand cymbals), the rnga (hanging or hand drum), and the don rta dbyangs (vocal chanting).[15] Buddhist philosophical strongholds like impermanence and no-self as instructive channels to emptiness must find affirmation in the practice of puja, and they do. The rgya—gling, with its piercing melodies, appeals to peaceful deities; the low dung blasts capture the attention of the wrathful deities; the rol mo and the rgna, crashing into chaos, emphasize impermanence; and the various chants explicitly voice texts proclaiming dedication to the liberation of all beings, as well as suggesting the interconnected relationships between perceiver, perceived, and the beings involved, in their shifting cadences and emphasis on “contours” rather than fixed melodies.  The entire ensemble works as a unit, each player following the progress of the others, without fixed meter, tempo, or number of repetitions of a cycle.[16]

The sound of puja provides its hearers, both seen and unseen, with extraordinarily meritorious karma.  The more a hearer is exposed to the sounds of puja, the better capacity the hearer has for approaching enlightenment, in this or subsequent lifetimes.[17] 

The Tibetan description of the mechanics behind this liberating music involves, first, the follwing logic: in order for sound to affect a being, the being must perceive the sound.  Lama Khempo, a lama in Sikkim, asserts that if sound is perceived, sound must have form- it must exist.  He goes on to claim that everything with form must be composed of more discrete parts, which we can call particles.[18]  Jeffrey Hopkins adds that “although sounds are entities constructed from particles, they are not … visible forms.”[19]    Most forms have components we can see; most things, if we can touch, taste, or smell them, we can see, too.   We cannot see sound, but it can affect things we can see.  A loud noise can visibly vibrate an object near it.   In the case of the sounds of Tibetan puja, the sound particles have Buddhist effects.  They can vibrate the innate bodhicitta (roughly translated as “enlightened mind”) of any sentient being who hears them.  At least for the duration of the sound, bodhicitta is “awakened” in hearers.[20]

Of course, there is the caveat that nothing exists beyond the perception of it anyhow; the fundamental conception of emptiness, vital to Tibetan Buddhist closure, seems to negate the capacity for something illusory, like sound, to have “real” effects on a perceiver. All things Buddhist can be understood on what many Tibetan Buddhists call relative and ultimate levels.[21]  The relative level is that on which beings operate most frequently, the conventional reality of conceptual perception.  Folks perceive things as existing and behave accordingly. This is the level of samsaric existence.[22] 

It is the level on which activities such as art-making and storytelling operate.  The cultural accoutrements of Tibet, from the language to the pantheon of deities to the to the music, are entwined in the history of that place and the people who have defined it.

On the ultimate level, the sounds do not really even exist.  They have no inherent
capacity for liberation, or special relationships with beings in other realms.  Those other
realms do not exist either, and neither do the deities to whom the puja is dedicated.  But
the crucial stipulation remains: they still have as much inherent existence as you or me. It
is important to note that the relative level for Tibetan Buddhists includes such things as
deities, unseen realms of existence, and the cycle of rebirth that some non- Tibetan
cultures might not include in conventional reality.  The motivations for and conceptions
of Tibetan Buddhist music are culturally endogenous, and an understanding of them must
assume their own relative framework.

Puja and other Buddhist practices apparently operating on the relative level are methods that use relative means to achieve ultimate ends.  They work as intentional manipulations of perception.  The sounds of puja work for Buddhist means because those engaged in their production understand them to do so.  Mundane matters do not negate that on both relative and ultimate levels, the eventual realization of emptiness- whether by insight into impermanence, non- dualism, or the accumulation of merit- is ideally valuable to Tibetan Buddhists because through it they reach closure.  By assigning the sounds of puja the capacity to facilitate such realization, in terms of merit or emptiness, the sounds become deliberately Buddhist.

Such historical precedents and continuing practices are all fine and good in their home context of the Himalayan monastery, but on the much flatter soil of the U.S., there are very few Tibetan monasteries, and the music of Tibetan puja is inevitably assigned different meaning. The word music itself warrants scrutiny. Euro-American culture often defines music as an art, an aesthetic expression of the culture’s highest values.[23] As such, Tibetan puja most certainly qualifies as music: the ceremony serves to affirm and further the Buddhist project of enlightenment for all beings.

But the Buddhist project is not the American project.  A review of influential literature and popular conceptions of music and the artist’s endeavor reveals vocabulary not of no-self and emptiness, but often “self-expression.” [24]  Robert Pryor, a prominent scholar of Buddhism in America, discusses the conflicted “romantic ideal” of the Euro-American artist’s tradition: that the artist is a free agent, in opposition to pedestrian social norms, but constantly vying with peers and self for widespread recognition of individual genius.  Not divisible from such an ideal is the intense commercialism propagated within Europe and America, and the persistent emphasis on individual ascendancy and the competitive spirit of market capitalism.[25]  Perhaps these trends can be traced to the late development of the codified “self” itself, which was authoritatively articulated in the European legacy much later than in the Upanishadic literature to which early Buddhism has been called a subversive response.[26]

Regardless of the sinuous tendrils of intellectual history informing Euro-American representations of music, their trends are observable.  Whether it’s the “solo” in jazz or rock ‘n’ roll,[27] pop star excess, or the grandly assertive opuses of classical composers, the vocabulary of “self-expression” and “ego” runs rampant.  People make recordings for a posterity possibly aspiring toward permanence. Composer Iannis Xenakis pays homage to the importance of creative individuality when suggesting that “originality” is the “foundation of art,”[28] and influential critic-composer Claude Debussy asserts that music “must never be shut in and become an academic art.”[29] These claims ring far from the vocabulary of “no-self,” “emptiness,” and the intensely collegiate monastic puja.[30]

The vocabulary of the “self” demands inspection, too, for while Americans use the terms “no-self,” “selflessness,” and “ego” and “egoless” when representing Buddhism, these translations are tinted with their linguistic situations.  That is, as Harvey Aronson puts it, “the Sanskrit word atman (most often translated as “self” or “ego” or “I”) and the English words self, ego, and I mean vastly different things in different contexts.” [31] As with the word “Buddhism,” the words Americans employ to convey concepts and descriptions developed independently of English (philological connections within the Indo-European language family notwithstanding) can only be assumed to represent the original words.  Further complicating the matter, those original words were employed as representations themselves, of concepts and the deconstruction thereof.  Language is a project of symbols, creating representations that suggest but never are their referents.  Buddhist language is a facet of relative reality, pointing at but never offering ultimate reality.  Buddhist language in translation is a further representation, requiring interpretive moves on the part of translators that necessarily tweak meaning as a concept moves across cultures. 

When Americans use the terms “self” and “ego,” we bring to the Buddhist language the cultural circumstances of the English language’s history.  Lama Sherab Dorje, a North American lama, says of a translated Tibetan text, “’self’ here means bodhicitta.”[32] “Ego” already comes to English in translation from a German aping antiquity, and “ego in [Freud’s] technical sense refers to a hypothetical structure of psychological functions and entails no ontological claims as to their essential nature.”[33] When we make “ego” stand for “atman,” we bring into contact two subtly disparate philosophical sensibilities; we redefine “ego” to hint at describing an ontology, or read it without the portentous ontological assertions of atman.

Ter Ellingson, the most widely published American on the subject of Tibetan puja, describes the problem of understanding distinct philosophical modes as such: “in the comparison of separate modes, the best result will be an approximate degree of precision that slightly distorts, but in its main outlines adequately represents, the separate modes.”[34]  He creates a comparative model in which the Euro-American mode is designated “Algebraic Logic,” which “utilizes sequential techniques of quantification and negation,” whereas Indo-Tibetan “Geometric Logic” “demonstrates configurational relationships of similarity and congruence.”[35] Through algebraic means of quantitative positing and refuting, the Euro-American mode prohibits certain leaps of empirical observation like multiple realms of existence and the cycle of rebirth.  The Indo-Tibetan mode of qualitative equivalence, establishing relationships in a non-linear fashion, is indivisible from a cosmology and underlying philosophy of interconnection and emptiness. Those things correspondent to the Euro-American institution of Art, like tangka paintings, mandalas, and puja, are relative manifestations of the geometric mode.

Donald Lopez, in regard to about a tangka painting, asserts that “far from being the high symbolist art that is always pointing to something else, away from itself, always standing for something else, a Tibetan image is not… a representation of the deity at all, but is the deity itself.”[36]  Such is a typical move in the geometric mode, similar to the claims that rgya-ling sounds appease certain deities or that puja sound particles vibrate bodhicitta.  Such is the definitive relationship between the relative reality a culture describes and the logic it employs.  As typical a move, in the algebraic mode, would be to call the painting or sounds symbol, or the geometric equation of deities and paintings “metaphor.” This logic, part and parcel of all Euro-American culture, shapes any attempt on the part of an American to access the Tibetan mode.  My own study, as well as any cross-cultural study of Tibetan practice, has been influenced by geometric logic, but mandated by the algebraic mode of the academic milieu in which it presents itself.[37]

Tibetan puja, in its place of origin, has been inseparable from its nurturing way of life and social structure. Every aspect of a Buddhist’s life is ideally (as represented in text and ritual) aimed at a Buddhist closure; all views, actions, and practices should be united toward enlightenment.  While relative concerns often take precedence over ultimate, Buddhist modes are pervasively integrated into everyday happenstance.  No small facilitator of that integration is, in the Himalayas, the presence of monastic institutions.  Communities of laypeople support monasteries symbolically and financially, and part of that support involves the attendance or even commission of puja.  

In stark relief, most American folks involved in Buddhism might shirk the notion of a “monastic order,” entrenched as that category is in the Christian traditions to which Buddhism has oft seemed the foil.[38] Without historical precedent for the integration of the relative operative elements of Tibetan culture into social proceedings, including the presence of monasteries, associated ritual elements have little room to thrive among communities of American Tibetan Buddhists.  In the U.S., the cultural items of religion, music, and social order have traditionally been conceived of as separate.  To introduce a system in which representational modes of thinking and behavior might not even fit into the categories of religion, music, and social order, as Americans know them, is going to engender change.

Many accounts of Euro-American encounters with Tibetan puja describe the music in terms of primal majesty, mysteriousness, and ineffability.  Little attempt is often made at understanding Tibetan modes on their own terms.  Even a self-proclaimed “dedicated student” like Bruce Newman recounts, “During our retreat… we spent approximately one quarter of our time in pujas.  Some of us liked them; many like me were overwhelmed, bored, or alienated.”[39] He also says, referring to such negative reactions, “with time, it’s perhaps best to leave the more Western interpretations behind and try to understand the ritual on its own terms.”[40]  But he still makes claims such as, “Just as a melody is a succession of notes, a puja is a succession of symbols.  Strung together, they become a story.”[41]  Unfortunately, Newman disregards the problems of using such an interpretable, “Western” term as symbol.  What can he mean by that final statement, especially in light of what Lopez argued about representation in Tibetan art?       

The somewhat jumbled mix of interpretations and reactions to Tibetan cultural items is common.  Puja, nonetheless, because of its near restriction to monasticism, and since there are so few Tibetan monasteries in the U.S., bears the fortune of at least formal preservation.  That is, the sounds performed in Tibetan monasteries in the U.S.A. resembles quite closely the sounds reverberating in the Himalayas, because their transmission occurs between ordained lama and dedicated student.

At Karma Triyana Dharmachakra, a monastery in upstate New York, at least three small pujas are performed daily.  The cast of instruments is usually small; not many trained lamas regularly reside there.  Tom Schmidt, an American jazz and experimental musician, has become an executive director of affairs at KTD, as well as a frequent member of puja ensembles.  He trains people on the instruments before retreats, and I was lucky enough to have a lesson and conversation from him.     

Already differences were apparent between this American Tibetan music lesson and one in the Himalayas: neither teacher nor student was a lama.  Tom says that he learned puja music gradually, and it was a long time before he was “empowered” to teach others.  Still, he recognizes the nascent stage of the cultural translation and establishment of American Tibetan Buddhist norms.  He does not necessarily know the esoteric mechanisms of the sounds of puja; he would not describe “sound particles” or be able to represent the music’s various associated deities and realms.  That does not concern him- many lamas would not be able to do that either.  What interests Tom is the intention behind his playing.   

Significantly, Tom extends that intention- now represented as Tibetan Buddhist, toward the liberation of all beings- to the motivation behind creating any music, not just puja.  He sees the problems of the seemingly oppositional Tibetan and American modes as mere obstacles, “word play” that can be dissolved through dedication to the path to enlightenment.  Whether puja sounds or jazz sounds come out of right motivation, it does not matter in light of a realization of emptiness, in which the sounds do not ultimately exist.[42] 

Tom Schmidt’s perspective sheds light on the developing possibilities of what Robert Pryor describes as “the threshold,” where Tibetan and American modes interact.[43] It is here that new categories are defined, and people come to the ultimate, the Dharma, through unforeseen means.  While it has been estimated that the vast majority of American Buddhists see a “spiritual fulfillment” as the primary aim in “being Buddhist” (whatever myriad things that means), that category may or may not have anything to do with traditionally defined Buddhist closure.[44] But the more the relative reality of Tibet and Tibetan cultural items are transplanted, the more American representations of ultimate reality resemble Tibetan ones in their conceptual modes.  That does not mean an American’s understanding of relative reality must match a Tibetan’s- an American will not necessarily speak of other realms and deities- but the Tibetan relative reality must at least be acknowledged as validly coherent for an American to access Tibetan “geometry.”

Franklin Kiermyer is another American awash in the threshold.  A jazz drummer who discovered some fame in the late Nineties, with write-ups in Downbeat magazine and Rolling Stone, he says he was attracted to “spiritual” music from an early age.  He set out to hone his own “self-expression” to the point of renowned virtuosity. As he mastered his instrument, a deep-seated dissatisfaction with his relationship to his life did not dissipate.  He became more and more committed to Tibetan Buddhism as a vehicle for dealing with dissatisfaction, and even recorded some music with the puja performers of Rumtek monastery in Sikkim.  At first he wanted to call that record “The Dharma,” but a high lama admonished: “If it was going to be the Dharma, it would have to be a combination of Marpa and Mozart,” hinting that a manifestation of ultimate reality is not that reality itself.  Eventually, Franklin began to let go of music as the sole means for exploring what his “self” was and was not.  He says, “Self expression brought me to the point of realizing that what I was expressing was more important than the expression.”  Per recommendation of his Tibetan teacher, Franklin redirected his attention from music to meditation and study.  Now, entrenched in the Tibetan Buddhist system of representation, Franklin makes statements like, “We tend to think [music] is coming from somewhere- but it’s not.”  He sounds like a Tibetan Buddhist- he has adapted his American mode in terms of the Tibetan.[45]

Even as American and Tibetan modes interact toward positive representations of Tibetan Buddhism’s ultimate reality, the relative realities remain distinct, and meld in all manner of confusing ways.  At many practice centers across the U.S., pujas do not take place for lack of trained lamas, and in their stead practitioners play recordings.  Even the sister institution to the Sikkimese monastery at which I learned about puja most often has recordings.  The “record,” in name and form, is that Western testament to attempted permanence.  To commit sounds belaboring impermanence and emptiness to record is a bizarre phenomenon, but a popular one.[46]  At Tibet House in New York City, it is said that the most popular recordings of puja, among Americans and Tibetans, are those with Euro-American embellishments like synthesized strings and keyboards.[47]  Tibetan Buddhism in diaspora cannot immediately sustain its myriad cultural items, and, just as with more esoterically described modes and philosophies, rituals are preserved in far remove from their original contexts, and so are changed.  Beyond recordings, traveling puja-performing monks, like those who visited Wesleyan University in 2004, have become popular attractions for Americans somehow interested in Tibetan Buddhism.  But how many ears perk with an inkling of those loud sounds’ context?

The context of mountains and monasteries, other realms and omnipresent deities, and the “geometric” mode toward Tibetan Buddhist closure, is rarely translated along with the increasingly popular Tibetan Buddhism in America.  Sometimes the vibrantly alien-seeming relative reality of Tibetan culture is conflated with the ultimate reality or “spiritual fulfillment” practitioners claim to want to access.  Other times, folks seek the “essence” of Buddhism and want to do away with the relative claptrap.  The significance of puja for understanding the current threshold of Buddhism and culture is its firmly nestled place between the relative and ultimate.  As Stephen Batchelor says, “The Dharma finds its form not because there’s some essential dharma that dresses up in Tibetan robes or Japanese robes… You peel away the culture, there’s actually nothing there.”[48] Music can be one thread to grasp as we try to unravel some of the whole cultural mishmash- but the further we unravel, if we unravel in a Buddhist way, the less we’ll be left with.

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