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The Musical Woodblock:
There is sometimes a need to communicate with everyone in a community and for this purpose the monks at Saint Anne’s rhythmically beat a hollowed-out block of wood with a stick. The first sound we heard early in the morning was this rhythmic tattoo beaten on the woodblock. It was really quite a nice “wake-up call”—far better to rouse sometimes cranky old men from sleep, I think, than the military bugle or the civilian alarm clock.
On Holy Mountain, where there are no other sounds of civilization, the woodblock can be heard a long way off. When it is necessary to call monks in from their sketes (house-like residences for just a few men) scattered over the mountainside nearby, the block sounds from Saint Anne’s alerts them.
I think a similar device is used for a similar purpose in some of the monasteries in Japan.
Tomasito, 2009
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