Chanting the Medicine Buddha Sutra: A Musical Transcription and English Translation of the Medicine Buddha Service of the Liberation Rite of Water and Land at Fo Guang Shan Monastery

A book review is presented for Reed Criddle, ed., Chanting the Medicine Buddha Sutra: A Musical Transcription and English Translation of the Medicine Buddha Service of the Liberation Rite of Water and Land at Fo Guang Shan Monastery. Recent Researches in the Oral Traditions of Music 13. Philip V. Bohlman, general editor. Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 2020. 77 pages

Excavating Feminist Phenomenology: Lived-Experiences and Wellbeing of Indigenous Students at Western University

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission underscores the need to incorporate narrative accounts of Indigenous students’ experiences as part of wide-scale de-colonizing efforts. This dissertation asks; how do Indigenous students experience their identities at Western University? What is at stake for phenomenology, feminist methods, and Indigenous theory, in the post Truth and Reconciliation era? There is a gap between theories centering on reflective cognition in philosophy and the embodiment of land, prevalent across Indigenous cultures. However, phenomenology can provide a method to facilitate dialogues with discourses outside Eurocentric domains that empathize with marginalized communities’ struggles, through an understanding of location-based knowledge. I will explore how Indigenous learners’ experiences inform concepts in phenomenology, Haudenosaunee, Cree, and Anishinaabe thinking, before they become marked literary categories. I undertake a ‘two-eyed seeing’ approach, from Eurocentric and Indigenous perspectives, to connect non-hierarchal epistemologies across nation-specific expressions. In chapter two, I discuss relational, land-based methods, through Dolleen Manning’s Anishinaabe ‘mnidoo’ concept, Merleau-Pontian phenomenology, and feminist epistemologies, in terms of dialogues with Indigenous students and Elders. In our discussions, I explore concepts about community, home, health, and belonging, in relation to lived theories of embodiment, places, and beings, within an interpretive circle. Chapter three discusses the impacts of language, reflexivity, emotion, oppression, environmental repossession, and experience, within feminist research methods and Indigenous paradigms, through anthropology’s ontological turn. Chapter four discusses how experiences influence Indigenous artists, in their efforts to create work that is emergent from, and reflexive of culture and identity. Chapter five surveys concepts that include, citizenship, human rights, and freedom, through Indigenous scholars’ episodes of wellbeing and theories about emergent governance. I conclude, by offering Indigenous students’ reflections about education, ally-ship, and reconciliation. Indigenous subjectivities are unique, not homogenously categorized. This project’s interviews bring forth information missing from research involving community-based wellness services, without statistical representation in government and university strategic plan reports. Hearing individuals articulate desires to instigate healing in their communities is a powerful gesture and offers teachable moments, for the listener. I hope that when interviewees speak their gifts and insights, in our interactions, it inspires continued activist incentives that foster community-wide changes

Buddhism as Performing Art: Visualizing Music in the Tibetan Sacred Ritual Music Liturgies

The eleventh-century Tibetan female ascetic, Machik Labdrön (1055-1153), developed a Vajrayāna (Tantric) Buddhist meditation method called Chöd (Tib. gCod, Eng. “to cut”) and associated ritual practices as a means of eliminating “self-grasping,” which is defined as the mistaken instinct of regarding one’s “self” and all phenomena as intrinsically, or independently, existent. Her musical-meditation method became renowned across Central Asia during her lifetime, and Chödritual practices and liturgies have been transmitted from teacher to disciple in unbroken lineages until today. The ritual is now well known globally, with Tibetan Lamas, nuns, and empowered exponents teaching widely, across a transnational Diaspora, to Tibetan Buddhists engaging in the practice. The Chöd meditation practice requires operationalizing the heightened emotions roused from the experience of fear in order to elicit the seemingly self-existent “I,” and “cut” (gCod) the instinctual grasping to the “self.” The ritual that effects this transformation is liturgically based upon song-poetry drawn from the Tibetan mgur tradition, which is itself drawn from the Indian dohā tradition of meditative poetry. The ritualized meditation experience is inhabited musically by several mgur-styled song-poem melodies that are performed in accordance with a liturgy over an underlying and potentially trance-inducing, rhythmic theme. In this paper, I show what I have found to be correspondences between the “internal” performance of meditative visualizations and the “external” performance of the liturgical song-poetry and musical gestures within the Chöd rituals. Indeed, the musical parameters themselves carry meanings that not only enhance or reinforce the effect of the liturgical song-poetry but also directly assist in the meditative journey and spiritual catharsis of the Chöd practitioner. When a melody has been composed to symbolically represent a visualized scene in a subritual section of this religious rite, it illustrates an instance of what I call, “sonic iconography”—at once, a melody serves to embody a meditative complement to the sung text, enliven the psychophysical drama, and provide an atmosphere, or mood, akin to an Indian rasa. According to the Tibetan oral tradition, the melody composed by Machik Labdrön for the subritual section at the height of the dramaturgical narrative of one Chöd liturgy is designed to conjure an image depicting the “sound of vultures’ wings as they arrive at a sky burial.” By exploring the purposeful use of melody--as an aid in meditative visualization--at this climactic moment in a Chöd ritual, it provides a unique window into the interwoven aspects of music and religion in this important Himalayan tradition

The Role of Personality In Moving Encounters with Sacred Art

In Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions, the material world is understood to contain access points to the transcendent. An icon may move the awestruck believer to emotional engagement and reflection on moral and religious themes. Personality dispositions potentiating the experience of being moved in religious aesthetic contexts have not been thoroughly studied. The present article describes the development and testing of a cross-sectional study into potential belief and personality-related predictors of being moved by sacred art in a lab environment evocative of a holy site. Ninety (90) Christians in Canada and Greece completed personality measures and viewed and rated thematically matched Latin and Byzantine icons. Findings suggest impacts of attachment, imaginativeness, and traditional vs. mystical dispositions in resonance with sacred art, and point to a secure, mystically oriented perceiver. Those who tended towards structured religious lives also presented with a personality profile favouring logical problem-solving. The paradigm applied the social psychological tradition of an evocative lab situation and use of psychometric tests to pressing questions in aesthetics and transpersonal psychology. This study offers a replicable methodology, inviting further empirical inquiry into the experiential texture of being moved and predictive relationships among individual differences at play in moving encounters

Reader responses to literary depictions of rape

This study explored reader responses to different literary depictions of rape. Four literary excerpts were used and divided as aesthetic versus nonaesthetic (style) and allusive versus explicit (detail). The general question was how readers would react to literary fragments depicting rape and whether the level of aesthetics and the level of explicitness influenced readers' thoughts and feelings. An open-ended question asked readers to report how the style had influenced their thoughts and feelings, whereas 7-point scales addressed the following variables: experienced distance, perceptions of realism and of beauty, emotional versus intellectual reaction, empathy, tension, and arousal. In a 2 (detail: explicit vs. allusive) × 2 (style: aesthetic vs. nonaesthetic) within-participant design (N = 34), gender functioned as a between-participants variable. Results indicate that the personal tendency to feel engaged with fiction overrides effects of aesthetics and explicitness. Principal-components factor analysis suggests that readers who are easily engaged with the characters feel unsettled when reading rape scenes they find brutal and intellectualize to handle these feelings. These “high empathizers” are not likely to be detached or to appreciate the fragment negatively: once absorbed, they will try to take something positive even from an unsettling experience

Examining the Role of Aesthetic Experiences in Self-Realization and Self-Transcendence: A Thematic Analysis

Numerous scholars, philosophers, and experts in aesthetics have underscored the profound significance of a life enriched by the presence of beauty. Consequently, the appreciation of aesthetic experiences is considered pivotal for achieving self-discovery and self-transcendence (Howell et al. 2017). Despite theoretical prominence, limited qualitative research has been conducted on this topic. To address this gap in research, this study’s objective emphasized two questions guiding the inquiry; What is the role of aesthetic encounters in aiding self-realization or individuation? and, how do these experiences foster self-transcendence? A thematic analysis was performed on the online interviews conducted (N=25), and their results revealed seven themes pertaining to self-realization: a) Losing Yourself to Find Yourself; b) Relatability and Self-Reflection in Art; c) Identity as a Collection of Skills; d) Art as a Medium for Self-Expression and Acknowledgment; e) Aesthetic Genres and Taste as Identity; f) Belonging and Social Identity through Art; and g) Personal Interests and Choices in Artistic Consumption. Furthermore, seven themes for the second research question of self-transcendence were also discovered: a) Mother Nature’s Beauty; b) Intense, Passionate, and Overwhelming Experiences of Heightened Consciousness; c) Sacred Symbolism, Archetypal Imagery, and the Collective Unconscious; d) Collective Effervescence, Social Connection, and Shared Meaning; e) The ‘Profound’ Found in the Mundane; f) Feelings of Spiritual Elevation and Wellbeing; and g) Self-Referential Meaning-Making through Art. These findings evidenced the transformative potential of aesthetic experiences, shedding light on the facets of personal growth and meaning that individuals derive from such encounters

On Multifractal Structure in Non-Representational Art

Multifractal analysis techniques are applied to patterns in several abstract expressionist artworks, paintined by various artists. The analysis is carried out on two distinct types of structures: the physical patterns formed by a specific color (``blobs''), as well as patterns formed by the luminance gradient between adjacent colors (``edges''). It is found that the analysis method applied to ``blobs'' cannot distinguish between artists of the same movement, yielding a multifractal spectrum of dimensions between about 1.5-1.8. The method can distinguish between different types of images, however, as demonstrated by studying a radically different type of art. The data suggests that the ``edge'' method can distinguish between artists in the same movement, and is proposed to represent a toy model of visual discrimination. A ``fractal reconstruction'' analysis technique is also applied to the images, in order to determine whether or not a specific signature can be extracted which might serve as a type of fingerprint for the movement. However, these results are vague and no direct conclusions may be drawn.Comment: 53 pp LaTeX, 10 figures (ps/eps

Films, Affective Computing and Aesthetic Experience: Identifying Emotional and Aesthetic Highlights from Multimodal Signals in a Social Setting.

Over the last years, affective computing has been strengthening its ties with the humanities, exploring and building understanding of people’s responses to specific artistic multimedia stimuli. “Aesthetic experience” is acknowledged to be the subjective part of some artistic exposure, namely, the inner affective state of a person exposed to some artistic object. In this work, we describe ongoing research activities for studying the aesthetic experience of people when exposed to movie artistic stimuli. To do so, this work is focused on the definition of emotional and aesthetic highlights in movies and studies the people responses to them using physiological and behavioral signals, in a social setting. In order to examine the suitability of multimodal signals for detecting highlights, we initially evaluate a supervised highlight detection system. Further, in order to provide an insight on the reactions of people, in a social setting, during emotional and aesthetic highlights, we study two unsupervised systems. Those systems are able to (a) measure the distance among the captured signals of multiple people using the dynamic time warping algorithm and (b) create a reaction profile for a group of people that would be indicative of whether that group reacts or not at a given time. The results indicate that the proposed systems are suitable for detecting highlights in movies and capturing some form of social interactions across different movie genres. Moreover, similar social interactions during exposure to emotional and some types of aesthetic highlights, such as those corresponding to technical or lightening choices of the director, can be observed. The utilization of electrodermal activity measurements yields in better performances than those achieved when using acceleration measurements, whereas fusion of the modalities does not appear to be beneficial for the majority of the cases