Abstract
In Japan, explicitly religious content is not commonly found in popular music. Against this mainstream tendency, since approximately 2008, ecclesiastic and non-ecclesiastic actors alike have made musical arrangements of the Heart Sutra. What do these musical arrangements help us to understand about the formation of Buddhist religiosity in contemporary Japan? In order to answer these questions, I analyze the circulation of these musical arrangements on online media platforms. I pursue the claim that they exhibit significant resonances with traditional Japanese Buddhist practices and concepts, while also developing novel sensibilities, behaviors, and understandings of Buddhist religiosity that are articulated by global trends in secularism, popular music, and ‘spirituality’. I suggest that they show institutionally marginal but publicly significant transformations in affective relationships with Buddhist religious content in Japan through the mediation of musical sound, which I interpret as indicative of an emerging “structure of feeling”. Overall, this essay demonstrates how articulating the rite of sutra recitation with modern music technologies, including samplers, electric guitars, and Vocaloid software, can generate novel, sonorous ways to experience and propagate Buddhism.
Highlights
Mediating Buddhist ReligiosityThe Heart Sutra is one of the most widely known and recited Mahayana Buddhist texts
What happens to the religious functions of the sutra when it is turned into technologically mediated music? In order to answer this question, I discuss how musical arrangements of the Heart Sutra mediate idiosyncratic sonic performances of Buddhist religiosity to a globally networked audience, and generate novel forms of attuning to Buddhism through the process of circulation
I discussed how it transforms the sacred rite of performing the Heart Sutra by turning it into technologically mediated musical objects, which I interpreted using Rambelli’s analytic of the “prayer machine.”
Summary
The Heart Sutra is one of the most widely known and recited Mahayana Buddhist texts. It arrived in Japan as early as 732 CE (Tanahashi 2014, p. 40). While practices of musical arrangements of Buddhist texts are marginal and have not yet settled into institutional norms, their widespread circulation on media such as the internet seem to have induced transformations in how Buddhist cosmological and ontological systems may become knowable through the practices of audition, given the technologically mediated sensoria of musical modernity Towards these investigative ends, this essay discusses how the musical mediation of the Heart Sutra generates novel forms of attuning to Buddhism, or just engaging with Buddhist content, through a hermeneutic study of the online circulation of these musical arrangements of the Heart Sutra, attending to media discourses, and drawing on ethnographic fieldwork experiences and interviews with Japanese Buddhist music-making ecclesiastics.. This essay extends these analyses of Japanese Buddhism and popular culture by emphasizing the sense of sound and hearing
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
