The Dhamma as Sonic Praxis

"Securing protection and generating punya are primary concerns of Buddhist laypeople; mindfulness of and transmission of the Buddha's teachings are primary concerns of Buddhist clergy; paritta incantation is a meeting point of these objectives." [53]

"To many Theravada laypeople, paritta chant is an apotropaic practice, performed in order to bring protection from danger, relief from crisis, and spiritual blessings. Paritta rituals are believed to secure a blessing or protection for worldly pursuits, such as the beginning of a business venture, a house-warming, or a marriage." [51]

"More elaborate rituals in Sri Lanka involve sounding bells and gongs, and extending string from the hands of the chanting monks to those of the laypeople. At the conclusion of some paritta rituals in both Thailand and Sri Lanka, monks give practitioners short lengths of string (in Sri Lanka, this is the same string as used in the ritual itself, cut into shorter lengths) to wear around their wrists as amulets of protection ..." [51]

"... the structure reflects aspects of Burmese speech-tones -- particularly the distinctive falling tones -- in order clearly to articulate the text ..." [50]

"... monks and laypeople practice a mindfulness of the padas of parittas as whole expressive units. Both the textual meter and the various musical renderings of paritta chant clearly articulate the syntactic units of the pada and the gatha, but tend to resist subdivisions of the pada. The pada is the unit of one breath exhalation; it is rendered as a continuous, uninterrupted stretch of sound, preceded and followed by short rests. In my musical analyses of Burmese chant I find no pattern to the rhythm of the chant rendering the padas that could be described as regularly musically metrical in any sense ..." [49-50]

"Numerous commentaries emerged to clarify matters of phonology and accentuation in Vedic recitation. Exceptionally elaborate traditions emerged around incantation of the Samaveda ... in which ancient commentaries specified features of pronunciation, accentuation, melodic-timbral inflection, and rhythm: all of which were painstakingly memorized. Such was not the case for Buddhism, perhaps because in Buddhist chant phonological sounds are considered a means to an end rather than an end in themselves." [48]


The Dhamma as Sonic Praxis
Paul D. Greene