Cool Stuff! no. 4 (Southeastern and Far Eastern Asia)

It’s time for our final round of Cool Stuff! This last round should begin with inquiries about cultures found in Southeast and Far East Asia. We’ve mostly looked at (and listened to) the music of Indonesia and China, but if you’d like to extend your exploration into other parts of Asia (excluding India and neighbors, which we’ve already covered), please feel free. Cool Stuff! 4 blogs are due by 11:59 on Wednesday, January 29.

As you’ve all no doubt figured out by now, I find the various traditional religions of the Asian continent to be really interesting. And I loved the World Religion course I took with Dr. Fohr. We didn’t cover much of the music of those religions in the course, though, so I started to look into how music was used in conjunction with Hinduism and Buddhism. We talked briefly in class about the bhajan, a kind of religious hymn in Hinduism,  but we didn’t really talk much about music and Buddhism. I don’t want to go too deep into it, in case any of you would like to explore that area on your own, but I will say that I’ve found that musical sounds are often used in various types of Buddhism as tools of meditation, which is very different from the way they’re used in many other religions. This is one of my favorite videos on the subject. It takes place in California, rather than in Asia, but the nun speaking to us is Vietnamese, and certainly Buddhism has its home on the Asian continent. You might want to bookmark this one—it might come in handy as you find stressful times during the Spring Term...