On Saturday September 15, 2007 I
attended the First Interreligious Art & Music Festival at
Berkeley Buddhist Monastery in Berkeley, California.
Berkeley Buddhist Monastery
(http://www.berkeleymonastery.org)
is an urban Buddhist temple with roots in the Chinese Mahayana
tradition.
The festival brought together
musicians and artists from several different religious traditions.
It incorporated ritual from several faith traditions, and I feel it
created its own form of ritual.
The sights and sounds were rich with
ritual and religious meaning and symbolism. It was interesting to
see and hear so many different forms of religious expression being
represented in art and music.
The first group to perform was Ya
Elah. It is a group of four women musicians that got together at a
Jewish meditation center. They combined Jewish music with Hari
Krsna, it was a little scary, but very energetic. It sounded like
the Krsna chanters that invade UC Berkeley from time to time, but
their voices were a lot better.
The other songs that they sung were
quite beautiful, but in Sanskrit or other languages that I didn't
quite understand that well. I think they were the most interesting
in regards to the merging of many cultures and faiths, but they
weren't my favorite. Their website is
http://www.yaelah.com.
There were many different kinds of
people represented in the audience as well. There were Buddhist nuns in the audience from two different traditions, and they
wore different colored robes. There were also Buddhist monks,
wearing different colors as well.
There is a lot of visual
representation in the Chinese Mahayana, it is actually a lot like
Tibetan Buddhism in that regard. Images of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas
are used in contemplation and as teaching tools. The stained glass
windows that surround the sactuary are extremely interesting as well
as beautiful.
Amitabha Buddha is the central
Buddhist figure in much of the Chinese Buddhist world. And he is
also seen everywhere at Berkeley Monastery. The tall standing Buddha
on the altar is him, and there is a large stained glass image of him
behind the atar in the central window.