Wailing

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

In this training, song and dance are reclassified as grief and derangement, and what is left for pleasure is a smile.

Who is being addressed

The audience is monastics, and the frame is in the training of the Noble One — ariyassa vinaye. That phrase is doing real work and it should be translated for a class before anything else: vinaya is the monastic discipline, and the claim is about how these things count inside it.

The same three items appear as the seventh factor of the eight-factored sabbath at AN 3.70, where laypeople take them on for a day and a night. So the discourse is not issuing a general prohibition on music; it is describing a training that laypeople adopt temporarily and monastics keep.

That does not make the passage comfortable, and it should not be presented as though it does. The claim is still that singing is a kind of wailing.

The three redescriptions

Each of the three is not a prohibition but a reclassification, which is more interesting and harder to argue with.

Ruṇṇa, wailing, is the sound of mourning. Calling song a form of it is a claim about what singing is for: a voice raised in strong feeling, which is what grief also produces. The comparison is not that singing is sad but that it belongs to the same category of behavior.

Ummattaka, madness, is said of dancing — the body moving without ordinary restraint, which is also what derangement looks like from outside.

And too much laughter, showing the teeth, is childish, komāraka. Not wicked: childish. The word is developmental rather than moral, and it is the mildest of the three.

Read together the three are an exercise in seeing familiar behavior stripped of its social meaning. That is a recognizable ascetic move and it is the same one AN 3.93 makes in the other direction, when it strips ascetic hardship of its religious meaning.

Meeting the objection

The objection is real: a tradition that classifies music as wailing sounds joyless, and a class that has been enjoying the collection’s humanity will feel the change of temperature. Three things are worth saying.

First, the instruction ends positively. When you’re appropriately pleased, it’s enough to simply smile. Pleasure is not denied and its expression is not forbidden; it is given a form. The last word of the discourse is a smile.

Second, the scope is the training, not the world. Nothing here says that laypeople should not sing or that music is bad. AN 3.79 has the good householder living at home, generous and well spoken of; nobody tells them to stop singing.

Third — and this is the part that should not be smoothed over — the Buddhist traditions did not keep this consistently. East Asian Buddhism developed 梵唄, liturgical chant, into a major art; Tibetan practice uses instruments; Theravāda chanting is melodic. Whether that is a relaxation of this instruction, a distinction between entertainment and liturgy, or a straightforward departure is a question with real positions on both sides, and a teacher should present it as one rather than resolving it in either direction.

Using it

Give it early to a class that is finding this collection unexpectedly congenial, precisely because it is not. A reader who only meets the humane discourses will get a false picture of the training, and this one costs four lines.

The usable observation is the reclassification itself, which works outside the monastic context. Stripped of its social framing, what is any familiar behavior actually doing? The discourse applies that question to singing, dancing, and laughter; a class can apply it to anything, and will not always get an answer they like.

Key terms