Just Listen
I’ve posted earlier about reading the Satipatthana Sutta out loud and having an experience that was closer to a visceral feeling of the words than a conceptual understanding of them. (full post here.) It was the English translation I was reading, of course, so I did understand what I was reading. But the repetition and the archaic style made it closer to music than text.
I had a similar-but-different experience of “knowing” the words — but in Pali this time — when I listened to an extraordinarily beautiful recording of the entire sutta, chanted by a Sri Lankan monk, Ven. Omalpe Sobitha Thero.
I offer it to you here, for your pleasure, and for whatever understanding comes with the experience:
To listen, start by clicking here. Then scroll down almost to the bottom of the page. Look for the Maha Satipatthana Sutta. Because the recording quality is so high, the file is quite large, so it is broken into four parts. Part 1 is an introduction in English (under 2 minutes). The chanting begins at part 2 (about 20 minutes) and ends with Part 4 (about an hour total).
It’s more than gorgeous.
Just listen.