Someone on the Bodhisattva Path stays within the world, and by letting go the habit of loving or hating sounds, cultivates stillness right within the movement of the busy marketplace. When we sing the praises of the Triple Jewel, and glorify the Bodhisattvas and Dharma Protectors, we plant blessing and create merit. In this country we can use music to praise the Triple Jewel and the Bodhisattvas; we use it to teach principle, to gather in and harmonize the conscious awareness of an audience, to accompany sutra text, to restate sutra text in verse. In the end as in the beginning, music is magic. Whether one can use it or not depends on your samadhi.
I recalled how I had let go my guitar 25 years earlier, in an attempt to practice what I thought was a religious austerity. I had been a folk singer from high school through graduate school. I made my living with my guitar at one point in Michigan. Having made up my mind to leave the home life and become a monastic, I assumed that I would have to give up my Guild D-40 guitar, a prized possession, and to my dour Protestant way of thinking an attachment. From what I understood about Buddhism, if I liked something, it surely had to go.
When I entered the monastery for my trial run just before leaving home I put an advertisement in the San Francisco Chronicle, and listed my guitar at an absurdly low price. The phone rang within thirty minutes of my posting the ad. The man’s voice said, _Guild guitar? $300.00? Don’t sell it, I’m coming over._ He arrived with his girlfriend in less than fifteen minutes and while I was opening the case, the phone rang again.
_Shi Fu?_
It was Master Hua, calling from his quarters on the third floor of Gold Mountain Monastery.
_What are you doing?_
_Selling my guitar, Shi Fu.
_Why are you doing that?_
_I’m going to leave home, remember?_
Master Hua (In English) _Stooopid!_
_Shi Fu?_
_Who says you have to sell your guitar? Can you learn to play the guitar so that your mind doesn’t move, so that the guitar doesn’t play you? You know for a Bhikshu to play guitar in this country could be a very useful expedient means in speaking Dharma. This is America, not China._
_But Shi Fu, I want to leave home. The guitar is a big attachment. I need to break all my attachments, so that I can leave home._
_Stooopid!_ he said, and he hung up the phone. I sold the guitar to the man and regretted it immediately. For the next twenty-five years I immersed myself in the Chinese Buddhist musical tradition and came to love the purity and power of its spirit, even if I will never completely master its idiom. I feel entrusted to carry on a tradition, but the tradition must move and evolve to stay true to the spirit of the Buddha’s expedient wisdom.
Twenty-five years later, I watched James Baraz use his guitar as a tool for teaching Dharma and for generating harmony. James Baraz leads the Spirit Rock East Bay Vippasana group every Thursday evening at the Berkeley Buddhist Monastery. One night James was celebrating his 50th birthday and the group was in fine spirits, a bit on the rowdy side. James reached for his battered old Gibson guitar and strummed a Crosby, Stills and Nash anthem. On the spot the group gave James their full attention and sang along with the chorus, _Teach your parents well... just look at them and sigh, and know they love you._
(Graham Nash)
I realized that in this country, as Master Hua had pointed out, the guitar had a profound power to focus our awareness of the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. I subsequently picked up guitar-playing once again, to explore writing Buddhist songs for students and children.
At the same time the first generations of Buddhist disciples in the West have a responsibility to preserve the heritage of traditional Buddhist liturgical music (梵貝）. The sounds of drums and bells, the wooden fish have carried cultural identity and have sparked faith and devotion in the hearts of countless Buddhist devotees over thousands of years. Even though each new culture and continent that Buddhism meets has its own indigenous musical styles and preferences, it is a sacred duty of conscientious disciples to keep alive the pure heritage as long as possible. Successful innovation of musical development depends on whether or not the new melodies and rhythms are grounded solidly on the roots of tradition.
In my initiative to create a hybrid Buddhist music, in North America I have begun introducing songs about Guan Yin Bodhisattva during my Dharma talks. I visited Hong Kong at the invitation of the Guang Hua Cultural and News Center and the topic was Guan Yin Bodhisattva. I decided to enhance my slide presentation and Dharma talk with Jennifer Berezan’s lovely ode to Guan Yin, _She Carries Me._ It has a sing-a-long chorus, gentle lyrics with a genuinely compassionate feel. What made that an interesting decision was the fact that Chinese Buddhist audiences by and large are perplexed by monks playing guitars. There are definitely cultural differences in this regard. Guitars came to Asia not with gentle acoustic folk music but with raucous outlaw rock 『n roll. The lone cowboy picking a tune under the stars isn’t part of the Asian view of the guitar. In their eyes the guitar is bound up with drums, amplifiers, heavy metal, long hair and revolution. So when the senior monk at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas picks up his guitar, eyebrows are raised.
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