Ayya Patācārā was a Buddhist nun at Santi Forest Monastery in New South Wales, Australia for many years. She was ordained by Bhante Sujato, abbot of the monastery at that time. She disrobed in 2014.
Ayya Patācārā was exceptionally gifted and crafted beautiful sculptures and carvings around the monastery. Her masterpiece is this 3 meter high Buddha statue in Gandhari style in a sandstone cave known as “The Big Cave”. This cave was excavated under the leadership of Bhante Sujato on the monastery’s land. It took Ayya Patācārā 2 years to complete it.
She also had a beautiful voice as you can hear on this recording from 2013.
I thought this chanting was very beautiful! Out of curiosity, and to try to improve my knowledge of such chants, I figured out for myself what these chants were (some I recognized but not others) and tracked down some Pali words and translations for them. Luckily, almost all were to be found in the online version of Bhante Gunaratana’s Bhavana Vandana. The pages in that come in pairs (Pali on the left and corresponding English translation on the right). Anyway, I’ll cut and paste my list here in case it might be of use to someone else:
0:00-1:37 Three Refuges
p. 42/43
1:37–3:36 Homage to the Triple Gem
1st verse on each of pages 50/51, 52/53 and 54/55
14:15-15:37 Khanda Paritta/The Protection of Loving-Friendliness
p. 176/177 partial version; the Gunaratana book’s version doesn’t contain some of the initial and final verses that are chanted. However, full versions can be found here: Paritta Chanting - For Protection and Practice
(from the 3rd verse onwards) and also here: Khandha Paritta | A Chanting Guide
15:37-17:56 Maha Jayamangala Gatha/Great Verses of Joyous Victory
from the last verse on p. 98/99 onwards
Cool, I wasn’t aware of that! It was fun figuring out what all the chants were but the Tilorien Chanting Book may have made the process a bit easier!
P.S. The links to the Tilorien chanting book seem to be broken in the webpage you link to!
Just checked again in different browsers (Firefox, Edge, Opera) but there’s still the same issue. Perhaps it’s some specific weirdness on the part of my internet connection, but maybe it’s some kind of local Tilorien permissions thing? Maybe someone else could try out the chanting book links? The later links on the page work fine for me, but also don’t point to stuff locally hosted in Tilorien I think.
They just informed me the Tilorien site will be down for 24 hours but I have uploaded the files in a different location and changed the links so you should be able to download these now.
Maybe someone else could try out the chanting book links? The later links on the page work fine for me, but also don’t point to stuff locally hosted in Tilorien I think.