Gil
Asakawa
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 photo by Bob Winsett, Mandala Magazine |
The 49-year-old Tibetan-born composer is taking the time to reflect on the journey that has brought him to this place and time. And, he's eager to share a preview of an upcoming solo album, "Universal Love," which features his flute and long-horn, playing along with environmental recordings he made of nature and the chanting of the Dalai Lama and hundreds of high lamas and monks in India.
His musical travels have followed his spiritual path through life. "My lifespan has been from tragic to all kinds of spiritual adventures to musical adventures," he says, chuckling. "I could have been herding yaks and sheep, you know."
It's true. He grew up in a nomadic tribe of Tibetan warriors, but his parents were told to escape their country. "A hermit came by and stayed with my family for a few days, and he predicted that times would be bad."
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Nawang Khechog's Achievements: ALBUMS:
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"In a Distant Place," with R. Carlos Nakai, William Eaton
and Will Clipman, which was nominated for a Grammy music award
in 2000
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"The Dance of Innocents," with pianist Peter Kater
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"Winds of Devotion," with Native American flute player R.
Carlos Nakai
TOURS: MOVIES: |
His parents had faith in the hermit's ominous warning, and the family pulled up stakes and began a trek to a new home in India, in time to escape China's ruthless 1959 massacre of thousands of Tibetans. "Only my family escaped as a whole family," Khechog says. By the time his family settled in a refugee camp in northeast Assam, two of Khechog's younger sisters and his grandmother had died. "I was the only one who was not sick," he says. He was six years old at the time.
He found his spiritual calling early, when he was exposed to all the different Tibetan lineages in his family's settlement. His mother was from the Kagyu lineage his father the Nyingma lineage, but he describes his upbringing as "non-sectarian."
He was enchanted in particular by the stories his mother told him about the Tibetan Saint Milarepa, who spontaneously created songs and poems throughout his life, and when he was 13, he decided to be a monk.
A few years after embarking on his spiritual path, Khechog decided to be a hermit at Dharamsala, above the Kangra Valley in northern India where the Dalai Lama made his home-in-exile and the Tibetan Government-in-Exile is based.
Khechog had joined the Tibetan guerilla army but found himself immersed instead in the teachings of peace. He decided that becoming a hermit instead of a soldier ultimately served all sentient beings.
So for four years, he lived in isolation in the mountains and focused only on spiritual understanding and practice. His only visitor was his hermit teacher. Before becoming a hermit, he had his first audience with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. "Later on, he gave me permission to come see him anytime when I had a question about my spiritual path. That was the highest point in my life," he says with emotion rising. "There have been times when I've had audiences with His Holiness Dalai Lama when I've seen him in really, really faded monk's robes; I've seen his patches. He truly lives as a simple Buddhist monk."
Khechog says the Dalai Lama is "the one spiritual leader alive today who has a vast and deep understanding of Buddhist traditions as well as other traditions, and tries to put them all into practice every day. As a Buddhist monk, I think, how can I help humanity, and it is in the true practice of compassion and love."
But Khechog ended up hospitalized after four years as a hermit. "I support whomever wants to be a hermit, but they should not go to the extreme of not taking care of their physical well-being," he says. "You are bound in the human condition - I am just a human being. That was my mistake. I did not take care of myself, and I became sick."
After his recovery, he decided to "live more in the world. Whether I live in the mountains or the world, still the law of karma follows me," he notes. "It doesn't matter, I still have a suffering nature, and I must seek my way out of suffering. There are still suffering sentient beings out there, and I must still cultivate compassion and love."
And when he entered the world outside of India, he discovered the perfect avenue for cultivating compassion and love: music.
Khechog began playing the flute as a teenager, but didn't think it would lead him as far as it has. He learned it as part of the regimen of every Tibetan child in exile, to preserve his culture's arts. He found he liked the instrument but wasn't planning on a musical career.
The turn down his musical path came when Khechog was living in Australia with his first wife, working odd jobs including as a railroad station attendant, and teaching meditation and relaxation at a community college. When an Australian band he admired and met invited him onstage to play the flute with them, audiences cheered him. "To my surprise, it has snowballed from there," he says.
 Nawang Khechog listening to a master copy of his latest album in his Boulder apartment. (photo by Gil Asakawa) |
He credits his
spiritual roots for the soothing, melodic quality of his music: "I'm
inspired by Tibetan spiritual tradition, not folk or classical or
opera traditions, and I'm taking that spirituality into new environments,
new fields," he says. But, he adds, "It's spiritual music but not
religious music."
From the beginning, he composed his own music. "I like playing how I feel rather than to play someone else's song," he explains. His curiosity for music led him to master a variety of instruments including flutes, horns and panpipes from around the world, as well as drums and percussion instruments. He even invented his own instrument, hybrid of a Tibetan long-horn with the note-changing versatility of a trombone, which uses plumbing parts attached to a modified long-horn. He also has learned the art of Tuvan throat singing, an ancient vocal style developed in Mongolia that allows him to create up to four tones simultaneously from a low growl to a high-pitched whine. He was taught the style by several Tuvan singers, and he finds it is similar to the low Tibetan chanting style.
Khechog's talent has led him to collaborate with a variety of world-class musicians, from the Japanese new age musician Kitaro to Native American flute player R. Carlos Nakai, avant-garde artists Laurie Anderson and Philip Glass, and even rock musicians such as R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe and Phish's Trey Anastasio.
All these instruments, musical styles and collaborations color his compositions, which range from peaceful, haunting sounds of the flute floating through a melody with its distinctive Tibetan/Indian flutter of notes, to a wall of sound built atop a foundation of world music percussion, rising upwards on columns of thundering longhorn overlayed with flutes, Australian didgeridoo and other ancient instruments from Africa, Japan and Native American culture. Whether the music is calm or intense, the total effect is hypnotically organic, and breathtakingly beautiful.
When he collaborates, whether it's with R. Carlos Nakai's flute or Ustad Sultan Khan, the master of the classical Indian stringed instrument sarangi, Khechog says he plays from the heart. "We play how we feel - we merge into each other and express our feelings," he says.
He attributes his success to karma. "These things keep happening - I've been very lucky that in a short time I've been able to do so much in the musical world, to meet so many musicians and to collaborate with them," he says sincerely. "As a Buddhist, I would say I've had good karma."
His work has also taken him to Hollywood. "'Seven Years in Tibet' is as accurate as it can get, for Hollywood…. Really," he says. Most of the movie, including portions on which Khechog served as an assistant director, were filmed in Argentina, which Khechog swears is just like Tibet, with Bolivians playing the part of Tibetans. His one speaking role in the movie is as a Tibetan worker helping Pitt's character build a movie theater for the young Dalai Lama, who protests because digging the foundation for the building is killing worms. "I like that, that my part was one that was showing compassion," he says.
 Khechog's collection of flutes and wind instruments from around the world. (photo by Gil Asakawa) |
Success has allowed Khechog the freedom to travel and see the world - in April, he will perform at a Tibetan Freedom Concert in Japan. It has also allowed him to share his message of compassion and support for the Tibetan cause to a much wider audience than as a monk, or a teacher.
He educates audiences to the plight of the Tibetan people not only at performances but also his workshops. He has developed a day-long workshop for youth and adults called "Kindness Revolution: To Create a Culture of Kindness" in which he offers a culturally diverse, non-sectarian series of exercises, chanting and dancing to ignite a sense of compassion within attendees. He says he's trying to follow the same footsteps as His Holiness Dalai Lama, " but in my own way. It's not religious, it's to try and get in touch with the basic human value of kindness."
But his career - and his spirituality is centered on his music. His 11 years as a monk brings a glow to his face as he explains why he's deeply committed to music as an expression of his Buddhism.
"I feel music really is one of the highest inspirations for wisdom - of shunyatha, or emptiness," he says, making sure his philosophy is understood before moving on. "When you listen to a sound, a few moments before there was not that sound at all. But because of all the factors, the sound starts to rise and comes into being then ceases to be. Therefore, sound gives a very good example of how everything does not exist independently; everything exists dependently.
"That's why in Tibetan Buddhism, sound is a symbol for wisdom. Sound is not nothing, sound is something. It comes out of something. There is a something that exists, but also a nothing that exists independently, inherently."
Learn more about Nawang, listen to cound clips and order his albums online at http://nawangkhechog.com.
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