“We are not really musicians, and we’re not singing songs. We make these sounds to please the holy beings, the Buddhas, using different tones and different instruments.” Those are the words Ven Thupten Donyo, the founder of the Gyuto Vajrayana Center in San Jose, California, uses to describe the immensely powerful sound that is created and captured on Tibetan Chants for World Peace, the new album featuring The Gyuto Monks Tantric Choir out September 23, 2008 on White Swan Records.

While the chanting traditions have been alive for hundreds of years, the idea of an album featuring the amazingly powerful sounds started when the Tibetan chants fell on the ears of Mickey Hart, drummer from the Grateful Dead and world music enthusiast. When Tibetan Buddhism was forced into exile in 1959, the Gyuto monastery in Dharamsala, India. That’s where American professor Huston Smith heard the chanting for the first time. He immediately knew he had to record the amazing sound. He did and brought the sound back to the United States where it eventually got played on the radio in Berkeley, California finding its way to Robert Hunter and then Mickey Hart.

“Nothing had ever touched my ear or affected me like that,” Hart remarks. “In the world of rhythm and noise and the Grateful Dead, this was the opposite; something totally different.” Not only was the sound incredibly moving but the purpose of their singing as well, “They are not chanting for themselves and salvation. They are chanting for every living thing,” says Hart, “for China, Chinese people, Tibetan people, American people, every being.”

Hart seeks to impart the message of caring and peace onto the world using this music. Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman recently published a book titled Why the Dalai Lama Matters that argues the energies of these chants lie at the heart of true social change and are a roadmap to peace across the globe. “Thurman’s new book is why we released this now,” Hart states. “He’s written a template, not just for peace in Tibet and China, but for Palestine and Israel, for anywhere in trouble.” In this spirit, all royalties will go to support Gyuto Tantric Monastic University, while White Swan will make additional donations to Tibet House, a non-profit organization founded by Thurman and dedicated to Tibetan cultural preservation.

“They’re creating a mandala of sound, a perfect universe, a house of many rooms.” When the chants stop, the sounds move from the ear to the soul, as the sand mandalas painstakingly crafted grain by grain, only to be swept away upon completion. “Both live on as spiritual reverberations.”

By: Marc Amigone