Tibet, Sri Lanka, and Nepal, Buddhist music comprises a variety of monastic and non-monastic musical genres, including those performed by lay Bud dhist groups (including pilgrimage groups) and professional musicians (see, eg, Wong 2001, Ellingson 1996, and Greene 2003). In mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, by contrast, monastic liturgical chants and modern commercial versions of them are more prominent, as has been reflected in scholarly writing (eg, Chen 1999, 2001, 2002; Lin 1988; Gao 1999; Tian 1993; Yuan 2003). In these areas the concept of Buddhist" music" per se has come to increasingly substitute for the concept of chant, creating new sorts of debates and issues in Buddhist culture. This paper seeks to present a more comprehensive picture of contem porary Chinese Buddhist music through exploring some of the relationships between its major types. Here I focus in particular on three mainstream genres: monastic liturgical chant, modern devotional song, and commercial popular Buddhist music. These genres are not necessarily tied to specific geographical sites. For example, especially since the Ming dynasty (1368 1644), despite the great cultural diversity in various Chinese-speaking areas, almost all monasteries have practiced monastic liturgies which are more or less the same in terms of the literary structure and ritual content. However, the melodic attributes of many rituals have been subject to local variations (except for the daily services). Similarly, in China, under the tremendous forces of modernization, a repertory of modern devotional songs was first created within the monastic order? the sangha? in the early twentieth century. Since 1949, when the government of the Kuomintang Party (KMT)

? 2005 by the Society for Ethnomusicology