When I travel, I make it a point to visit a significant place of worship in whichever significant city I’ll be in. Whether it’s a church, a mosque, a shrine, or a temple, I find it centering to be in a place where quietness tends to reign. On special occasions, I quietly sit in on services, waiting to hear my favorite part of the “mass”: when people come together to sing. It’s this hypnotic moment that still fills me with awe. I thought of these feelings, when I was thinking about what to capture in my latest Digging Deep mix for LYL Radio. Every time I kept returning to the idea of how music can immediately put you in a similar headspace.
Centering on the idea of “satori,” the Zen concept of sudden enlightenment, I pulled from my collection songs and tracks that embodied the sense I was going for. I landed on pieces from Zen’s homeland that drew inspiration from the Buddhist practice of meditative sutra singing. These were songs that don’t separate themselves from their inspiration–they place it firmly at their core.
I kept thinking of something. I thought of how, in Buddhist theology, Siddhartha Gautama sat under the Bodhi tree for 49 days, meditating in search of awakening, a path toward ending suffering by breaking the cycle of rebirth. A wandering ascetic, his previous acts of distancing from the world–both physically and emotionally–had left him intimately connected to the pain he sought to transcend. It wasn’t until he found light in stillness that something powerful stirred in him, and he caught his first glimpse of Nirvana. When he awoke, the Buddha’s first sermons (the Mahāyāna sūtras) would eventually be carried on in the Japanese oral tradition by Sōtō Zen’s founder, Dōgen Zenji, as ritual chanting or songs one could sing to oneself or others to induce inner peace, drawing listeners closer to a state where satori could be experienced.
As I kept piecing together the mix, I lost myself in the music, forgetting that I could–or probably should–move on to the next track. I lost track of time, feeling stillness settle in, time becoming fleeting. I thought: Yes, you can feel this experience span from bedroom to dance floor, from temple to a shaded tree. It’s something I felt familiar, present elsewhere–a tale as old as time. I thought: this is it. I thought: I should share this.
The 49th Day (四十九日)
Tracklist:
Toshimi Mikami (三上敏視): 十六夜の月 Izayoi No Tsuki
Something Wonderful (中山ケイ): What U Want?
Kensuke Shiina (椎名謙介): Beyond The Java Sea
Spiritual XTC Boys & DJ Lama: 天照大神と弁財天 (Amaterasu & Benzaiten)
F.A.B.: Uminari (海鳴り)
Uttara-Kuru: Cocoro (こころ)