Why buddhist chants

I pray for blessings and protection. The chant should be repeated times in order to be blessed by deities who will shower them with abundance. This chant is perfect when going for a job interview or making a proposal. May all my works and wishes get complete. I don't know what to do. So do at once whatever is good for me.

For those who want to enhance wisdom and improve skills, chanting "Om a ra pa ca na dhih" will increase skills in all types of learning. The more emphasis and times the chant is recited, the more likely it is to succeed.

Vajrapani represents the energy of an enlightened mind, which is why it is said that chanting"Om vajrapani hum" will cut through delusion and make the chanter free from hatred. He is often pictured dancing wildly within flames as a representation of transformation. The chant helps gain access to excessive energy and even the chant sounds energetic. The phrase translates to:. There are several mantras that can be used to bring health, strength and peace.

McKim, Some behavioral studies have found that religious prayer or chanting helps followers to cope with bereavement or other negative events in life McIntosh, ; Wortmann and Park, One recent EEG study among Christians and Muslims shows increased alpha waves during prayers, indicating a state of relaxation and mental concentration Doufesh et al.

Other studies using conventional subjective measures have found that mantra recitation repetition of a specific sound may have a healing effect on late-stage cancer patients, as measured by the psychological questionnaires and physical examinations Khalsa et al. Technologically, current advances in neuroscience have enabled us to examine brain responses to negative contexts with high temporal resolution.

Previous event-related potential ERP study has found that negative emotion processing occurs at different locations along several time courses. The time courses can largely be distinguished by attention allocation in the early stage and cognitive evaluation at the later stages Huang and Luo, In this study, negative visual stimuli were used to test the influence of religious chanting on early- and late-stage neural information processing.

It has been argued that evolution has made us more susceptible to negative events and, hence, increased our chance of survival. This phenomenon is referred to as negativity bias, which can widely influence cognitive and psychological characteristics including attention, learning, memory, moral judgment, and contagion Rozin and Royzman, On the other hand, strong negative bias and negative proliferation could make the individuals more vulnerable to depression Rude et al.

Negativity bias occurs in different brain processing stages, including attention at the earlier stage and evaluation and reaction readiness at the later stages Huang and Luo, For example, when compared to pleasantly valenced pictures, viewing of unpleasantly valenced pictures engages more focal attentional processes Smith et al. While discerning the neural processing of negativity bias, P1 and N1 of ERP components are found to relate to early sensory and perceptual processing in the extrastriate visual cortex, and these components are sensitive to the graphic physical features in negative stimuli.

Furthermore, the N1 component elicited by highly arousing negative pictures is robust and resistant to habituation as compared to other categories of pictures Carretie et al. Negative pictures also elicit greater LPP than neutral pictures and positive pictures with equal arousal levels Ito et al. In addition, negative events also affect the autonomic nervous system ANS which controls the fight-or-flight response Schmidt and Thews, The ANS can influence cognition and emotion, and vice versa.

Physiological changes such as heart rate and galvanic skin response GSR , among others, correlate with internal emotional responses Libby et al. For example, the response of disgust becomes more intense at the systolic stage of heart beat, which highlights a close coupling of emotional processes and visceral activities Gray et al.

Moreover, emotions and religious beliefs are closely related, with emotion playing a substantial role in cultural settings and in a variety of religious contexts Corrigan, Previous studies have demonstrated that the effect of emotion and negative events may be modulated by participating in behavior therapy and practice of mindfulness Fassbinder et al. Evidence shows that background music can also modulate the brain response to negative events to some degree Waldie et al.

While an untrained layperson experiences these unavoidable feelings, he or she may further develop negative emotions such as distress, despair, worry, etc. However, a well-trained practitioner would not react to these negative events with additional suffering; it is as if they would only be hit by a first arrow, but avoided the suffering of the second one Sik, Base on this Buddhist understanding of two arrows of suffering, we theorize that during the processing of negative information, religious practice such as chanting would not affect the early neural processing of N1 early stage attentional processing but only affect the late-stage processing of LPP later stage attentional processing which appears to be elicited specifically by the presence of emotional information Anderson and Stanford, In this study, ERP was used to investigate whether religious chanting could affect negative information processing.

We also hypothesized that chanting may affect concurrent physiological changes given the apparent interaction between emotional stimulus processing and ANS functioning Critchley and Garfinkel, They were all Buddhist, but from different Buddhist sects. The average chanting experience of the participants was 2. Participants with neurological, psychiatric, or other mental disorders were excluded from the study.

Based on our pilot data, a block design was chosen since emotional response could be resilient to time; thus, a previous image-induced emotion would inevitably affect the subsequent image-induced emotion, unless the interstimulus interval was set long enough, e. Thus, we used a block design which could induce a specific emotion in a relatively short time Stewart et al. The sequence of the six conditions was randomized for each participant.

Thus, a single session lasted for a duration of 60 s. This pattern was the same for all three chanting conditions. See Figure 1. Each condition was repeated six times and the sequence was pseudorandomized across participants. In another condition, participants were asked to chant the name of Santa Claus instead SAN condition. Santa Claus is a locally well-known figure with whom all participants have been familiar since childhood. We purposely chose such a name because chanting Santa Claus would not elicit negative emotions; rather, we anticipated that participants would either have neutral or slightly positive emotions though adults do not believe Santa Claus to be a real person or a deity.

This was designed in an effort to monitor the consistency of pronunciation between conditions. It is to be noted that the participants chanted silently in their minds to avoid muscle movements, which would increase the ERP noise.

We also had a no-chanting but passively view condition PAS , where the participants remained silent without any form of chanting while they passively viewed the pictures. This was set as another control condition, simply differentiating neutral vs.

Different participants had different combinations of picture conditions and chanting conditions to counterbalance the sequence effect.

Pictures were all selected from the IAPS. Neutral pictures were those images with neutral facial expressions or everyday objects that would not induce any specific emotion; while negative pictures were gun-aiming and mutilation images 2 that would provoke fear and stress.

The participants did not rate separately for these images in each of the three chanting conditions, although they did mention slightly feeling easier to confront the negative pictures in the AMI condition. During the experiment, the participants did not make any overt behavioral responses to the pictures, as it may have overlapped with the emotion-related ERP component.

Simple behavioral response time usually falls into a similar time course as emotional processing. A post-test recognition task was used to ensure that participants had been attending to the images. During the picture viewing session, each picture was shown for 1.

Ten pictures of the same condition neutral or negative were presented in each block 20 s per block. After the first two blocks 40 s , the third block in that session was a s rest period to counter any potential residual effects of chanting or picture viewing see Figure 1 for details. Participants were instructed to look at the pictures carefully and a memory test was administered after the experiment.

Before the task, each participant performed a brief practice session in order to familiarize them with each condition. None of the participants misunderstood the experiment nor fell asleep during the experiment. It showed an average score of 8. The participants were seated in a dim and quiet room and the experiment was presented using E-prime software Psychology Software Tools, Inc. The sampling rate of the electroencephalography data EEG was Hz.

Three ECG electrodes were placed on the left foot, and on the left and right sides of the waist. Two GSR electrodes were placed on the palm side of the left forefinger and ring finger.

The skin was cleaned by alcohol before placement of the electrodes. The GSR value was based on subjective zero, i. In the preprocessing stage, the data were resampled at Hz, filtered by a finite impulse response filter with a passband of 0. Then, the noisy segments e. Bad channels were reconstructed with spherical interpolation Carfora, Consequently, independent component analysis was used to remove the components of eye movement, blinking, and other possible noises.

The data were then reconstructed with the retained components. To obtain the ERP data, the preprocessed EEG data were first filtered by a Hz low-pass filter and then segmented into epochs according to the events and conditions defined by the experiment.

EEG epochs with too many bad channels were discarded directly; and epochs with few bad channels would have those channels replaced by spherical interpolation. The data were re-referenced with the average signal of the left and right mastoids. The amplitudes of N1 and LPP were obtained from the second 20 s of a trial. If the model was significant, post hoc analysis Bonferroni correction was used to determine the significant differences between two conditions separately.

Event-related potentials source analysis Grech et al. The coordinate system of the EGI sensor positions was linked to the coordinate system of a standard structural MRI image MNI coordinates by landmark-based co-registration. Then, forward computation was performed to calculate the effect of each of the dipoles on the cortical mesh imposed on the EEG sensors.

Since the matrix S was unknown, the third step was the inverse reconstruction. Among the many different algorithms for inverse reconstruction, we used the Greedy Search-based multiple sparse priors algorithm because it was more reliable than other methods Friston et al. The difference between conditions was determined using general linear modeling by SPM. The average scores were obtained for each condition. If the model was significant, post hoc analysis Bonferroni correction was used to determine the significant differences between the two conditions separately.

The experimental results showed that the chanting conditions had different effects on the early N1 and late LPP processing of negative pictures.

The N1 component was not significantly affected by the chanting conditions, while the LPP component was affected by the AMI condition see Figures 2 — 4.

It showed that negative pictures vs. See Figures 2 and 3. Two-dimensional maps of the N1 component in the six conditions. It indicates that the negative pictures elicited higher negativity around the central regions in all three conditions. Two-dimensional maps of the late positive potential component LPP in the six conditions for each picture type.

Compared to viewing neutral pictures, negative pictures elicited a higher positive amplitude of LPP in the PAS and SAN conditions, mainly in the centroparietal regions. However, the LPP to negative pictures in the AMI condition had significantly lower amplitude similar to the LPP to neutral pictures compared to those in the other two conditions.

See Figures 2 and 4. To better demonstrate the different effect of chanting conditions, two regions of interest ROI were selected in the central regions for the N1 and LPP components.

To select ROI, the epochs of all three conditions was averaged to calculate those channels where the neutral and negative pictures overall had a significant difference in the specific time window e. Figure 5 shows the differences between the ERPs for negative pictures and neutral pictures Neg-Neu, i. It indicates that negative pictures similarly elicited larger N1 components than neutral pictures did in all three conditions. Region of interest ROI analysis on difference of neutral vs.

The left three columns are for N1 and the right three columns are for LPP. The error bar is standard deviation. The difference of N1 amplitudes between negative picture and neutral picture Neg-Neu in the three conditions is similar. Further post hoc pairwise comparisons Bonferroni correction were made between conditions.

Please also refer to our previous method Gao et al. The comparison results are shown in Figure 6. It demonstrates that AMI might reduce related brain activity in the parietal lobe, which is involved in late-stage processing on negative pictures.

T -value of the t -test for the source of the LPP under the three conditions. The results showed that when compared to neutral pictures, negative pictures elicited more parietal activities in the PAS and SAN conditions. Essentially, chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo is the most complete Buddhist practice, enabling all people today to awaken to their Buddha nature, the true aspect of their life. By expressing the essence of the Lotus Sutra as Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, Nichiren was able to establish a way for all people to achieve enlightenment, or absolute happiness.

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