Encyclopedia of Buddhism Volume One A -L Robert E. Buswell

C HANTING AND L ITURGY
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JOHN JORGENSEN
CHANTING AND LITURGY
Chanting and RITUAL are the liturgical means of transforming
doctrinal and moral ideals into experience.
The types, uses, and meanings of chants and rituals are
vast, ranging from those performed by individuals as
everyday custom, to elaborate temple ceremonies for
large groups. There are appropriate rituals for serious
ascetics seeking enlightenment, as well as for casual believers
seeking worldly benefits such as health, wealth,
and a good spouse. Defined by scriptures and sectarian
traditions, chanting and ritual are carried out as
prescribed actions, but they are also the means by
which practitioners express their own concerns. The
repeated performances of certain chants and rituals are
part of the everyday fabric of Buddhist cultures, and
give members their religious identities.
Repetition also invites people to lose or forget the
doctrinal meanings of chants and rituals. Chanting
produces liturgical rhythms valued for their audible or
musical effects rather than their textual messages. Since
chants consist of words, they have linguistic meaning,
but chanting often produces sounds that cannot be
recognized as a regular spoken language. The HEART
SU TRA (Prajñaparamitahrdaya-su tra), for example, is
popular in East Asia as a Chinese text about emptiness,
a fundamental MAHAYANA teaching, but when it is
chanted in Japan, each Chinese character is given a
Japanese pronunciation without any change in the
Chinese grammatical word order of the text. The audible
result is neither Japanese nor Chinese, but a ritual
language unto itself. Many Japanese laypersons
who have memorized the Heart Su tra as a chant do not
know what it means, but they are untroubled by the
question of meaning since the value of the chant lies
in its phonetics rather than its philosophy. This is the
case for other Chinese Buddhist texts chanted with
Japanese pronunciations.
Chanting in this sense supersedes reading. Chanting
only the first Chinese character on each page of
an entire scripture is believed to be equal to reading
every character. Understood as a consummation
rather than a subversion of reading, chanting first
characters is based on the idea that single words or
phrases can evoke the virtue and power that all of the
words combined are trying to explain. Reading for
meaning is a useful step for grasping the truth of a
text, but it is a means, not the final objective. All Buddhist
traditions emphasize the supreme value of
experiencing the truth of a text, and chanting aims
at that objective. Chanting the Heart Su tra without
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