On chanting a sutra through electronic sound

The Heart Sutra was made to be recited. It isn't a text you read; it's one you voice.

So putting music to it is nothing new. What's new is which music you put to it.

Show details

Item	Detail
Artist	Kanho Yakushiji
Show	First Korean concert, 'Circle of Harmony'
Subtitle	Heart Sutra Music 10th anniversary world tour
Date	October 30, 7 p.m.
Venue	YES24 Wonderlock Hall, Seoul
Running time	About 100 minutes
Presenter	Jazz Bridge Company

Someone who is both a monk and a musician

Kanho Yakushiji is a monk at a temple in Imabari, Japan. He also makes music.

The two occupations overlap. Chanting is a voiced act, with rhythm and pitch. Their purposes differ, though: chanting is practice, music is work.

When one person does both, that boundary blurs. Singing the Heart Sutra on a stage doesn't settle into practice or performance. Perhaps not settling it is the method.

Ten years, as a span

This show is the tenth-anniversary world tour of 'Heart Sutra Music'. Ten years of the same work.

Setting music to a sutra could have been a single attempt — try it like an experiment and move on.

Filling ten years means it wasn't an experiment. It became not one song but a method.

Choosing electronic music

Yakushiji renders the Heart Sutra in electronic music — not with wooden bells or traditional instruments.

There's a calculation in that. Traditional instruments connect back to the sound you'd hear in a temple, which returns you to the familiar. Electronic sound has no such link. It has nothing to do with scripture, so attaching it makes the text unfamiliar.

Making it unfamiliar may be the point. To make people hear a text again once it has become too familiar to notice, changing the sound is the fastest route.

A hundred minutes

The show runs about 100 minutes including an interval.

The Heart Sutra is short — a little over 260 characters in Chinese, a few minutes read aloud.

Filling 100 minutes with a text that short means repetition. And repetition is the original method of chanting: the practice isn't reading it once but continuing to read it.

Electronic music is also built on repetition. Two things with the same structure have met.

Tonight, try it like this

Read the Heart Sutra aloud once. You don't need the meaning — just feel the length and rhythm of the sound.

Then listen to Yakushiji's music and find where that sound sits inside it.

Last, consider the hundred minutes. The only way to make a short text long is repetition — and repetition was always how this text was handled.

Put sound to a text made for reciting: is that a new piece, or a return to the original method?