Tibetan Buddhist Chants

Namgyal Monastery is the personal monastery of the Dalai Lama, established in Dharamsala, India following the Tibetan diaspora. Its monks maintain the chant traditions of Tibetan Buddhist practice — recordings made for devotional purposes, distributed to practitioners and available to anyone willing to seek them.

The chants themselves — deep bass voices, ritual percussion, liturgical instruments — function as an acoustic technology for focusing attention and cultivating states of mind. They are not music in the Western sense; they are practice. That the One Curious World archive treats them with the same attention as Slayer and The Residents is its own statement about what music is for.

Opening 2026 on January 3rd with Tibetan Buddhist chants is a considered curatorial choice: the least commercial, the least Western, the most temporally patient music in the collection. It sets a context for everything that follows.