Research On Musical Culture In Contemporary Huayan Temple Buddhist Ceremonies And Its Inheritance

This paper is a case study of musical culture in contemporary Huayan Temple Buddhist ceremonies. It is an empirical study with the music of Buddhist temples that is typical in showing inheritance of fine traditional Chinese culture as the research object and with the related theories about ethnomusicology and ethnic pedagogy and the "system theories about the inheritance of Chinese religious music" as the guiding ideas.The paper features research and demonstration of Huayan Tone that represents the core of musical culture in contemporary Huayan Temple Buddhist ceremonies. Huayan Tone is a verbal concept that is used by monks in Chongqing Huayan Temple to summarize the Buddhist Tone features of this temple. Instead of a specific definition for this concept, there are scholars’doubts over it. To unveil the myth about this concept and understand the music style and feature of the Tone in this temple, this paper researches in detail the form, style and origin of the Tone in its major ceremonies through field survey, thus working out new ideas and conclusions about Huayan Tone: in a narrow sense, Huayan Tone forms the basic structure of the Tone in this temple:it is a melody mode cored upon the tunes of la do re mi, focusing on re, and ended with la. The tunes and tune groups extended from the previous melody mode are characterized by the simple singing style, the minor interval preference, the tone-row conjunction development, and the elegant, sacred and solemn aesthetic style. This can, to certain extent, be understood as the style of Huayan Tone in a broad sense. Such a style came into being because Buddhist music from south of the Yangtze River is melted with local musical elements after it is introduced into Chongqing. It is therefore reasonable and tenable for monks to put forward this concept.The paper, in general, involves the following five aspects:Chapter One gives an overview to the environment for survival of musical culture in Huayan Temple Buddhist ceremonies. It categorizes all ceremonies into three types of cultivation, salvation and celebration according to their functions, and explains them respectively in detail.Chapter Two describes and records the procedures for contemporary Huayan Temple Buddhist ceremonies in the musicological perspective. It focuses on detailed demonstration of the logical structure, music application and ceremony-music relationship of the ceremony procedures.Chapter Three targets all the eighteen musical compositions in chanting and fire spitting ceremonies for analysis of musical form. On the basis of simplifying and restoring the theories, this chapter finally approaches the "nucleus tune", the basic structure that constitutes the tone in its entirety, by applying the "nucleus tone" theories to peel off and eliminate step by step the complex and rhythm-variable melody factors in melody structures at different levels according to the principles of clustering by sameness and similarity, thus revealing the intrinsic features of Huayan Tone.Chapter Four, for the purpose of understanding the status and level of Huayan Tone in the music style system of Chinese Buddhist temples as a whole, carries out on the one hand statistical analysis of the typical melody segments that influence the style of Huayan Tone, and on the other hand conducts cross-region comparison of typical musical compositions, therefore finding out that the music style of Huayan Tone is a local variation of the music style of Shifang Tone. Such a music style is a recreation resulted from adaptation of Buddhist music from south of the Yangtze River to local music and culture upon its introduction into Chongqing.Chapter Fiver explores the pedagogic significance of the music culture inheritance system for Huayan Temple Buddhist ceremonies, and reveals preliminarily how educational functions are shown in cultural inheritance. The music culture in Huayan Temple Buddhist ceremonies show tenacious vitality in traditional Chinese music culture, which is a "living fossil" still active in traditional temple music. Systematic analysis of educational principle for ceremony inheritance factors and mechanisms is to demonstrate the interaction and relationship among the factors that constitute the ceremony inheritance in the perspective of school education, which is of great significance in exploring why verbal folk music can remain vital in face of impact from modern culture. The function of education in ceremony inheritance, in the meantime, is embodied by the cultivation of Buddhists’ religious feelings, the spreading of Buddhist music culture and the role of adjusting the mentality of the practitioners.The paper achieves innovation in the following three aspects:First, the research of the paper is a comprehensive answer to the pending question about the style of Huayan Tone, which is not only conducive to understanding the features of the tone in this temple, but also plays a positive role in recommending how to treat and research the verbal concepts of Buddhist music.Second, the first-hand research materials obtained in nearly 4 years’ field survey are original, and it is a rescue work on recording and summarizing Huayan Temple Buddhist music that is in danger of loss of inheritance.Third, it is an attempt to apply "system theories about the inheritance of Chinese religious music" to the case of researching the inheritance of music culture in Huayan Temple Buddhist ceremonies for the first time. It further explores reasons for formation of music style in contemporary Huayan Temple Buddhist ceremonies, and tries to avoid the problem in unsystematic research of Buddhist music inheritance by predecessors.Limited by the author’s research ability, the paper has a defect in failing to demonstrate the style of the melody system of Shifang Tone, and it is a real regret.