The word chant derives from the same French word meaning ‘to sing’. When you realise this, then these practices, known as devotional, you see are universal. It’s what in India is referred to as bhakti, which means also means devotion. It could also be interpreted as ’emotional worship’, i.e. offering the emotions to a deity (or idea of awakening). Think of devoted religious people singing in a religious place, maybe dancing. There is supposed to be an accompanying mental process, they are supposed to be feeling joy and gratitude and hold in mind the deity or messiah or idea or whatever they are devoting themselves to. So they are ‘shining their light’. They’re not supposed to be singing and dancing while planning a shopping list for the evenings meal. Their light, the contents of their mind, is supposed to be filled entirely with the thought of their deity, to understand whatever reality (field) it represents.
Then they stop and go home. But they come back next week and do it, or the next day. It’s an ongoing practice. Like when you lose your keys, and ‘shine your light’ recalling mental pictures of where it might be with the wish held to remember, then let go, and you might ‘shine your light’ like this a few times, before the answer rises in the mind. An ultimate awakening might be a loftier goal, or there could be more soil obscuring the seed, than an ultimate awakening.
The Pure Land school of Buddhism makes use of chanting and Nembutsu (the latter of which we will come to) their central practice. This school of Buddhism is sometimes derided by other practitioners, particularly Westerners as it is not a well known school outside of Asia and the practices are misunderstood. Like any religion, there are lay practitioners who are totally devoted, and other lay practitioners for whom their associated spirituality is more of an identity than a practice. There’s a saying in the Pure Land school, that one only needs to say the name of the Buddha of Pure Land seven times to be enlightened, i.e. to be reborn in his Pure Land after death, where spiritual progress is easy and you are assured Nirvanah. The joke is that Pure Land practitioners don’t have to meditate, so it’s an easy path. It reminds me of the joke about Christianity, ‘There’s a long way between the stirrup and the ground’. To explain that (as I know you love all your jokes explained), as long as you repent for any sin before death, all is forgiven and you can go to heaven. So, you can do what you want all of your life, be bad and unethical and never do any spiritual practice, and if you fall off your horse, there’s time to feel sorry about it all!
Of course, most devout, practicing Christians might tell you it doesn’t work like that, in the same way a Pure Land practitioner devoted to awakening will tell you that the chanting is actually a devotional practice. The practice is to chant the name of the Buddha, but remember the first refuge, the name of the Buddha is actually YOUR name, it is a symbol of your ability to be awake, and chanting it is the wish to do so. Chanting for a period of time is holding that intention over that period of time, shining your light, or even ‘shining your wish’. It doesn’t have to be the name of a deity. I mentioned the Tibetan mantra ‘Hail to the jewel in the lotus’, it can be a direct reference to the wish.
The Pure Land method isn’t only about chanting to hold the wish though, this is only half of it. The other half is Nembutsu, which means to ‘recollect’ the Buddha. What that means in practice, is to hold an image of the Buddha in the mind, to visualise it. The intent and purpose is exactly the same. It is an expression of your wish, what you are asking to arise. Now, if you lost your keys, you might have a wish held with the picture of the keys and it’s only a small thing, hopefully you get your answer straight away and can get back in your car. It might be a daily practice for years to fully awaken! As with the name of the Buddha, you can think of it as a deity ‘out there’, a symbol of ‘other-power’, or really ‘your future self’, a symbol of the innate you, with no self, a primordial Buddha.
The practice can be physical, i.e. performed with the eyes open actually looking at a statue of the Buddha, or closed, imagining a picture of the Buddha, or both — eyes open but imagining at the same time, so there is a simultaneous practice in two worlds. Verbal chanting is also performed, and this also becomes ‘manasika’ meaning a mental chant, not repetition only of the inner voice, but using the spiritual sensation of chanting.
So, say you are kneeling before a picture of the Buddha verbally chanting, and in your mind you are also aware, imagining the mental body of yourself, permeating you in another realm looking at a corresponding Buddha picture in the next world. The inner you is mirroring the outer you and your spiritual ears hear you inner chant and the physical ears hear you outer chant and when you stop physically chanting, the inner you can still be heard and continuing to chant in the next world you are also inhabiting.
While chanting, the practitioner may also be moving beads through the fingers, and perhaps imagining the chant existing within the body, and it spins and is felt with each repetition. So now, one’s light is shining and the wish is occupying the senses of sight and hearing and movement and hopefully energy as the concentration begins to cause joy. Of course, time is an illusion, and so in a way one is already awake at this time, like misplaced keys. If you hold the wish of wanting to find them, nothing is lost, the future you has them and THE FUTURE YOU IS YOU.
I want to bring up a school of Buddhism named after it’s founder: Nichiren, not technically a Pure Land school but clearly heavily influenced by it. The main practice is chanting and visual practice with the wish to awaken in this lifetime. There are two very interesting aspects about this school of Buddhism. One is that Nichiren priorotized one particular sutra of Buddhism, called the lotus sutra. Now I’m not particularly into that individual sutra, but his idea to base the chanting practice around it. The sutra explains the nature of reality and all the different realms that exist. Nichiren made a gohozon around this, basically he drew a picture based on all the different realms and realities as described in the sutra, this is in the Asian style drawn using Japanese writing. The image represents the teaching of the lotus sutra, which is about reality and thus the gohozon represents awakening. The practice of Nichiren is to chant the name of the sutra (in Japanese) Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō while looking at the gohozon, and obviously having an intention/wish for the wisdom of the sutra to be fully realised. I think that is quite something. You don’t necessarily have to spend time reading or understanding the full teaching of the sutra and all it’s chapters, you hold the wish for it to be realised while occupying the visual field with a representation of the same wish, and essentially rely on other-power to call for it’s realisation.
The other interesting thing about Nichiren was that he taught that as one’s mind becomes aligned with the dharma (things as they are, reality, as opposed to our deluded way of thinking (of ourselves as individuals)) then the environment around one becomes harmonious, and affluent. There is an acknowledgement the outside reality, and one’s circumstances, are shining out from the inner field. I’ll stress, this isn’t a main focus of the practice, which is awakening, but the teaching is that it will also cause harmony and ease in material circumstances.
This school of Buddhism has sprouted various world wide branches, and although materialism is never the main teaching, it’s always awakening, there is this material slant, and some practitioners chant for specific material change. So the shining the light practice isn’t just to awaken but can be for a specific outcome, like getting a better job, being richer, passing an exam. There is a material wish held with the chanting.
Nichiren taught the concept of ‘attaining enlightenment in one’s current form’ (sokushin jōbutsu). He believed that the Buddha’s Pure Land is to be found in this present world (shaba soku jakkōdo) Nichiren’s disciple Nichikan explained that material prosperity is one of the three types of benefits that come from chanting — the others being spiritual enlightenment and social harmony. However, as I stated, Nichiren himself did not promise wealth or good fortune as a direct result of chanting. He emphasized that chanting should be done with the intention of transforming one’s life and environment, not for material gain alone.
One way to look at it, is that we are always chanting and we are always doing Nembutsu. What I mean is, the imagination is, in normal circumstances, active and creating various scenarios and situations and daydreams and the inner-voice is usually talking — and what are these situation and inner-conversations about? You, in a nutshell. Yes, all the inner-mental processes involve other people… in relation to yourself. In the imagination, there is a mini-you that is being constantly recreated in different situations, and you are constantly defining yourself, I am this or that, hungry, lonely, wealthy, a shop worker or taxi driver. The mind is constantly creating images of self and defining self, and this creates the observed, physical world and circumstances around you.
So perhaps someone gets into New Age things, the law of attraction and magick and they change all their negative self-images (beliefs about self) and inner-talk from poverty to abundance and they watch their lives materially transform. With the Buddhist practice of Nembutsu and chanting you are holding a single self-concept with intent over a long period of time, to become an enlightened (awake) being (a Buddha), and over time, this steady-holding of the wish will manifest an answer.
As Nichiren suggested, as the mind spends long periods doing this, then the environment around one, the life you are manifesting, will become calmer and also more abundant and lucky, as insane as it sounds, but it’s actually logical if you think about it. With long periods of chanting (disciplining inner-talk) and Nembutsu (disciplining self-concept) then there is also a general awareness, a mindfulness, that is established. All the time ‘off the cushion’ i.e. away from formal practice, then the awareness is carried over, negative or poverty-based or angry or resentful self-images and concepts are held less. As they would say in New Age circles, one’s ‘vibration’ changes, or the energy making up one’s field, your Pure Land, becomes purer and closer to the awakened state. On a moment-to-moment basis, the Nembutsu image becomes a replacement thought, replacing the self-concepts you are leaving behind.
With traditional Nembutsu, you are holding a specific intention, a single wish, to awaken, and surrendering all thought into that. Comparing this to a manifestation practice based on materialism, a New Age practitioner or whatever flavour, imagining financial abundance, career success, health, relationships, the images of self in various abundant situation and positive affirmations replace chanting, the gohozon (to look at while chanting) is replaced by a vision board, i.e. physical pictures of desired goals to look at and a feeling of wanting or lack is replaced by gratitude — and so it works in a similar way in disciplining the mind to create the future.
The problem with manifesting like this from a Buddhist perspective is the grasping. The mental pictures in the mind (of abundance) are incongruent with sense perception (you visualise the riches and success before they manifest) and this will lead to grasping. The emotion (gratitude and satiation) are dependent on sense perception, seeing and ‘having’ something ‘out there’ in the world, and as soon as that is the case, then it is subject to impermanence and will cause pain. As the Buddha explains in the Dharmapada, all grasping ends in tears, even in heaven.
The answer is, IT’S ALL ON THE INSIDE, what we are actually ‘holding’ (not grasping) is a state. It’s not something we can grasp or hold, it’s something we become and we are. Everything that manifests INSIDE of us (and so later on the ‘outside’ also) comes from a ‘state’, so what is that? If you’re in an angry ‘state’, what is it? It’s a little like dark matter, in that you can’t easily know it directly but more from it’s effect, what radiates from it, for example angry, resentful fantasies, mental pictures, inner talk – and if it’s held habitually in consciousness, then various painful circumstances will also manifest to the senses.
If, in the middle of an angry state, you became very mindful, stopped the mental pictures and inner-talk and looked for the ‘state’, then the closest you get to it is a vague, subtle sensation in the body, or at least that’s how it is for me, but again, that can’t be the ‘state’, the sensation (which is actually unlabeled emotion) is, again, an effect of a state, not a state itself.
But there is clearly an interplay between state and the ‘Pure Land’, the ‘astral light’ or the contents of your imagination and consciousness (all the same thing). The invisible state flows into the light and creates itself as pictures and talk. But this flows both ways. You can choose to change angry, aggressive mental pictures to abundance or peace or sexual desire or a Nembutsu image or whatever, and hold that until the state changes. If you only hold the contrary for a moment, then the state flips right back, but if you consciously reign the imagination with the contrary and hold an opposite state for a minute or so, then you are ‘existing’ in a new state. It’s like two mirrors facing each other and reflecting each others images into infinity.
Ultimately, WILL creates all. Within your mind, you can see and image or create any self talk, and this shines out and creates the world you perceive. When you don’t choose to create the contents of your mind, then they are being constantly created anyway, but based on what you created with WILL in the past. What you created with WILL in the past becomes unconscious direction, as ‘the light’ somehow carries a momentum, moment-to-moment, life-to-life. If you practice Nembutsu for awakening for half an hour and manage some degree of happiness and concentration, then it doesn’t stop the instant you do, it carries on away from the cushion for a while, like pushing a boat out into a river. Yes, it will get caught up in the current soon enough, but your ‘push’ can actually BE THE CURRENT.
Will can be seen as intent. So, often held intends are like the flow of water creating the flow of a stream. Awakening Nembutsu will, over time, replace much of the self-concepts and unobserved intents that were creating poverty or bad luck or, what Nichiren would call, ‘disharmony’ in life. So is it necessary to try and create specific manifestation intentions like in New Age practices, such as material goals like a car or nicer home, or a better job, a set amount of money? It’s somehow distinctly unbuddhist to create a picture of dollar bills and gold bars with a caption of 10,000,000 usd and chant in front of it. And of course, when the chanting stops and you are not looking at the image it is not there to be physically perceived, it’s incongruent.
What about if it was for someone else? What if you knew someone going through financial hardship and you wanted to create wealth for them, would you do that if you could? If you put their picture on a shrine with pictures of abundance and chanted to bless them and wish them well, then is there anything wrong with that, because what you are really talking about is a metta (loving kindness) meditation.
So with the first example, is the problem that the goals are personal and selfish. This is a problem in a way. The main issue is that the overarching intention needs to be awakening. To manifest gold bars and 10,000,000 usd is going to complicate life and generally take one away from concentration, mindfulness and discipline — which is what you need to be happy and awake. Yes, 10,000,000 usd will cause some kind of happiness but based on things that the senses perceive, and so subject to impermanence, and remember that consciousness is a momentum, and you can’t take this with you into another life when you leave here, you take with you the intention of the states you have habitually created over the course of your lifetime.
But it IS necessary to use will to create the things you need in life. If you wake up hungry, there needs to be the desire for the egg and toast and bacon, the mental picture and the WILL to get up and make it. You need to create wealth and a home, and meaningful connections to share your gifts. We are all already doing this, for better or worse, as I explained. The way to incorporate this fact, of needing right livelihood, into Nembutsu practice is to have clear goals and intentions. Then we hold the intention to create certain circumstances, situations and advantages, and they are aligned to community and giving and awakening. On one level, a ‘lower’ level, the goals are very specific, and they all link into an overarching state. There’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting 10,000,000 usd, it depends what it’s for!
The issue with having specific images and goals like this is the grasping for form, when what we really want is a state. IT’S ALL INSIDE. When you are concentrated on chanting, you have the state and that is it, that is the end of it. There is nothing about wanting into the future because you are the state. Now if that state is long-held with a specific intention, it will actually manifest into life because that is how life is created, but it is an irrelevance to your awakening self as the state itself is free, it’s not reactive or triggered or dependent on sense objects.
Nembutsu can create material abundance by it’s dedication. Traditionally, you will feel joy and chant and ‘dedicate’ it to your awakening, so a dedication is a statement of intent, it is to be clear why you are doing this, why you are creating this state of joy, and you are reinforcing it with an image of awakening to look at, the same image occupies your consciousness and you chant a name symbolising the same dedication. Not all dedication is directed for your personal awakening. A popular practice is to dedicate a period of meditation practice for the benefit of all beings, which ironically still leads to awakening because you are lessening the concept of self.
An abundance practice is to have a set of specific goals, where you will live, your abode, the good health of your body and the health of people you love, world peace and an unpolluted environment, to be successful in a certain career which will enrich others, a piano to enjoy music (nothing wrong with that), a holiday once a year to keep your mind happy (nothing wrong with that either), an amount of money to be comfortable and a plan that the momentum of that money be abundant.
If these intentions are all somehow geared to community or awakening in some way, then there is no conflict with dharmic practice. Take the piano. You could come up with some BS about how you want to enrich others’ lives with music and all this, but if you just want to play it, enjoy the aesthetic and leave it to your kids when you die, is there anything inherently bad about that, and if the happiness it creates is lived as a mindful state and the perception of the object is on the inside, then it hurts no one and never stands in the way of your awakening, as you ‘have’ it before you ‘have’ it. You can create the state before you have it and maintain it after it has gone. The magick is to live your chosen state beyond form, under will.
With manifestation practices, there are many visualisations (of individual goals) and with Nembutsu, there is one image (of awakening). In manifestation, there are many affirmations (of individual goals) and in chanting there is one (the intention to awake). An abundance practice is to be clear on your goals and needs in life, that they are not incongruent with awakening, and to link the intentions to the Nembutsu image and chant. I’ll give a very simple explanation of how this can work. Say the traditional image to imagine or look at (recollection) is a Buddha, a picture of the Buddha, then a shrine can be constructed with symbolic representations of individual goals, and the intent of creating it will attract the desired circumstances into life. Of course, this is only one half of the practice, the other half is living mindfully and not creating any contrary pictures or inner-talk (negativity) during the rest of your conscious waking day. The traditional manifestation practice of collecting pictures of goals (vision board) can be adapted to include the same Buddha picture.
Of course, the Buddha picture can be any symbol of awakening to you. It could be another spiritual leader instead, or a symbol, such as the lotus flower, which traditionally represents Nirvanah in Buddhist teaching. A very good choice is the enso, which is essentially a circle, but the image is usually in the Zen painting style, which represents the totality of existence. I like it because it’s such a simple, non-attached image if you know what I mean. It doesn’t inspire the ‘my god is better than your’ BS, but it can also be easier to work with. For example, if this is the central image on the shrine representing awakening, then when a mantra is chanted, while looking at the enso, you can visualise it in the inner, and also FEEL it spinning, physically, in your heart, one spin for each full chant, which links three worlds of physical, empiricle and imagination.
When you have a set of unchanging goals, you can add another manifestation practice to Nembutsu. Namely writing down the goals. Usually the instruction here is to write out a statement of gratitude that you have already obtained your goals. For example, ‘I give thanks for the beautiful piano which graces my living room and the joy that I obtain from it every day.’ The statement is essentially a letter written to ‘the universe’ (source or whatever) in gratitude for having created and manifested the life you want. This would generally be quite long, so it isn’t a daily practice, but linked to moon cycles (so roughly every fourteen days) is usually comfortable.
A simplified version of this (I’ll include the FULL FORM LATER). Write a letter to the universe, in gratitude, for all your wishes having come true, state in detail what they are as though you have them. It can help to include things you actually have in the world and things that, at this point, are only percieved on the inner (your intentions). Then simply count the number of lines in the letter. So say the whole letter is 23 lines. Then reduce the number by adding the digits. 2+3=5.
If you did this on the new moon, then for the next 14 days before the full moon, before each chanting session, you trace, and feel, an enso five times with a finger over your chest, each time your finger goes around you feel a corresponding enso around your heart area moving in unison with your finger, and this momentum continues as you begin the chanting.
When the full moon comes, you rewrite the letter. Because you’re not copying it, even though the goals are essentially the same, the number of lines will be different, and so you change the number from five to whatever it is now (or the same if that is how it calculated).
A slightly more complex variation of this practice is counting each letter O in the letter, and reducing the resulting digits in the same way e.g. 2+7=9. You can ritualise this and burn the letter to ‘send’ it if that means something to you. But what you are doing here is linking the intentions to the image, although it’s primary meaning is still awakening, overarching the goals.
So the practice is to add underlying intentions into the symbol of awakening. Another way this can be helpful is to create an image of healing where needed. For example, I had a bad childhood and I notice it still creates a lot of disturbance during meditation, and life, sometimes. I made a symbol, which is actually an emblem from the crest of the old school badge they used to make me wear, which is also on my hometown’s crest (I live abroad now). I made an image of this and overlaid an enso image as a symbol of healing, and of course, it is the intent. This is my aligning this intent into the image of awakening, but it (the healing image I created) is also, going forward, a replacement thought.
Part of the way abundance practices work is to cease negative creations of will. When these negative pictures and painful memories arise spontaneously in my mind, in meditation or just going about life, then the healing image, with the symbol of awakening overlaid, can be held steady in the mind, replacing whatever state the previous was emanating from, with joy.
I have these images in a folder and set up a gallery app on my tablet, that it repeats them, showing each for three seconds, and in the background I have a mindfulness bell ringing every minute. So the images of my goals are repeating with images of awakening. I look visually while I am chanting, and I am also mirroring the pictures with my inner vision, i.e. as I physically see the pictures, I also create the picture on my mental screen.
There’s kind of a threshold where this practice becomes, not addictive, but life itself. Conscious Nembutsu becomes the default consciousness of your life. Once you nail the skill of disciplining the contents of mind, it’s the first orientation upon awakening, and you can create and sustain independent states of joy whenever you choose. For example, every meal can be a celebratory one sustaining the joy while eating. Waiting in line and someone pushes in, you’ll learn to notice the change in your state and the negativity radiating from it, and catch it very quickly, and replace it with Nembutsu, a sustained image for just a minute resets the stream towards abundance and out of the darkness, and this is where abundance and awakening are born. You become the practice.