- Vocal sound-resonation
- Control of breath
- One-pointed concentration required to produce the sounds of the
mantraor verse being chanted.
Acute attention to locating the precise point of articulation of a sound
(for instance, guttural, in the throat, or labial, at the lips), along with at-
tunement to the correct use of breath to produce the sound, counters
fragmentation of consciousness and helps one to develop the one-
pointedness of mind prescribed by Yoga.
The somatic and aesthetic dimensions of Sanskrit exemplify the sot-
eriological role of the body in the experience of sacred sound. We ordi-
narily think of language as a cognitive phenomenon, and regard the phys-
ical articulation of speech as incidental to the communication of
meaning. Certainly language exists to convey meaning, but the meanings
in Sanskrit’s awesome body of literature are carried by currents of sound
with amazing beauty, and the power to modify states of consciousness.
Mental concentration on Sanskrit verses, and the resonation of their
sound with one’s own body as its instrument, can be an experience of the
highest order of enjoyment, a therapeutic that utilizes human physicality
in a sublime way.
Healing in Identification of Self with Cosmos
Harold Coward explores how the spoken word can “evoke the Divine
word of which it is an earthly resonance.”
A direct correspondence is seen as existing between the physical vibra-
tions of the noumenal chant and the noumenal vibrations of the tran-
scendent. The more the physical vibrations of the uttered chant are re-
peated, the more Transcendent power is evoked in experience until one’s
consciousness is purified and transformed.^88An instance of religiously transformative chant is Tibetan overtone
chanting. Individual monks chant not single notes, but multiple-note
chords. Coward writes that chanting “enables the monks to feel the evo-
cation of the interdependence of the universe—a meaning that can be
said symbolically in the chanted sounds and gestures, but not said expli-
citly.”^89 Tibetan Buddhist overtone chant expresses that things are more
than they seem: the higher overtone frequencies are held to stand in the
same relation to the extremely low fundamental tone as spiritual reality
stands to the world we think we inhabit.^90
164 religious therapeutics