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Musical Instruments in Nirgrantha
: Canonical Literature*
M. A. Dhaky
St. Augustine was very firm with those who professed an instinctive enjoyment of music, saying that this places them on a
level similar to birds - Andrew Martindale The early Nirgrantha attitude towards music somewhat parallels the early Christian as reflected in St. Augustine's exhortation (c. late 6th early 7th cent. A.D.); both religions advocated, and resolutely enforced, severity of discipline for friars and nuns. For the Nirgrantha Church, asceticism in its extreme, almost in absolutist form, was not only a desirable virtue; it also was, and still is, an invariate precondition to salvation.
As with the Buddhist church, the disciplinary rules as first framed in the Nirgrantha Order 'were fewer and simple. As time wore on, these progressively became exhaustive, elaborate, and complex. Very largely as a result of the burgeoning material culture, the "danger points" in terms of laxities in monastic discipline multiplied and grew in intensity. To this continually renewed and phenomenally augmenting challenge, spasmodic adjustments including some minor concessions) but also additional, fresh, and sterner clauses were introduced, together with enlargement in the scope of the existing injunctions. The extended code of strictures, which now also included atonements, was expected to act as a safeguard and an expediency against lapses and transgression of the monk's fundamental and inviolable vows taken at the time of ordination.
The monastic conduct rules forbid what was considered then, as now, the 'good things' leading to material happiness in life. But, in the very process of negation, the disciplinary texts reveal what, in times contemporaneous to their
*
Earlier published in The Indian Theosophist (Thakur (Dr.) Jaideva Singh Felicitation Number), Official Journal of The Indian Section, The Theosophical Society, Vol. 82, Nos. 10 & 11, Varanasi 1985.
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