Real Buddhas Don’t Laugh

         Real Buddhas Don’t Laugh
Introduction
Our investigation of humour in ancient India will start on a negative note. The
following excerpt from Buddhist scriptures gives us the ofŽcial view on
laughter and humour of an important religious establishment:
… At that time, (a) group of six monks, laughing a great laugh, went
amidst the houses … (to which the Buddha said) …“Not with loud
laughter will I go amidst the houses’, is a training to be observed. One
should not go amidst the houses with loud laughter. Whoever out of
disrespect, laughing a great laugh, goes amidst the houses, there is an
offence of wrongdoing, (but) there is no offence if it is unintentional, if
he is not thinking, if he does not know, if he is ill, if he only smiles when
the matter is one for laughing, if there are accidents, if he is mad, if he
is the Žrst wrong-doer.’ (Horner, 1983, p. 123).

This regulation comes from the Vinaya,1 the code of conduct for Buddhist
monks and nuns, and is one of over 220 rules for monastic behaviour. For a
Buddhist monk in ancient India, to laugh out load was an offence, a matter
requiring confession and expiation in front of the entire assembly of fellow
monastics. Ancient Buddhism was opposed to humour and laughter, as we can
see when the concept is brought up again in the Anguttara Nikaya:
This is reckoned as childishness in the discipline of the (Noble Ones),
namely immoderate laughter that displays the teeth… Enough for you,
98 Michel Clasquin
if you are pleased righteously, to smile just to show your pleasure.
(Woodward, 1979, p. 239)
In various places in Buddhist scriptures, not only in the Vinaya, but also in
the Bhrahmajalasutta, the Buddhist monk is forbidden to attend concerts
and theatrical shows. And again, in the extra-canonical Buddhacarita, the
Buddha-to-be asks ‘How can anyone laugh who knows of old age, disease and
death?’ (Siegel, 1987, pp. 209, 4). Later Buddhist scholastics took their cue from
these pronouncements, and from the dramatic classiŽcation system of the
fourth-century CE Indian scholar Bharata, to develop a scheme of six kinds of
laughter, or, perhaps, we should rather say of amusement, ranging from ‘sita,
a faint, almost imperceptible smile manifest in the subtleties of facial expression
and countenance alone’2 all the way to ‘atihasita, the most boisterous,
uproarious laughter attended by movements of the entire body’ (Hyers, 1974,
p. 34), see also Gilhus, 1991, p. 267). Of these, a Buddha would be expected to
indulge only in the Žrst, and this is in fact the kind of faintly amused,
closed-lips smile on can see on many Indian sculptures and paintings of the
Buddha and his most advanced disciples. For a monk of lesser attainment,
perhaps the second category, hasita — a slightly bigger smile that barely
exposed the teeth — might be acceptable, but it was certainly something to
steer away from. Loud, boisterous laughter, and anything humorous that might
cause it, was for the worldling, the unenlightened, the fool.
Let us now move forward some Žfteen hundred years. Buddhism, after
having been a powerful force in India for centuries, is on the verge of collapse
there, partly through re-absorption into a renascent Hinduism, and partly
because the Muslim invasions of its North Indian strongholds increasingly
make its position untenable. But by now, Buddhism has spread far beyond
India, and one of its most inuential (if not numerically dominant) forms in
China is Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism. Here we Žnd a very different attitude towards
humour and laughter. The slim, aristocratic Žgure of the Buddha with its
barely perceptible smile has been replaced in Buddhist art by the broad grin of
Pu-Tai (Jap: Hotei), still familiar today as the jolly, fat ‘laughing Buddha’ of
curio shops around the world.
Historically he is identiŽed with a wandering priest named … Cho
Tai-shi (d 916) who carried a large linen sack (hence the name Pu-Tai)
with whatever possessions he had, and who was popularly believed to
be an incognito appearance of Maitreya Buddha. (Hyers, 1974, p. 46)
Another favourite motif in Zen Buddhist art is that of the ‘three laughing
monks’. It relates to a traditional tale of a monk who had taken a vow never
to cross the bridge connecting his island hermitage to the mainland. He was
visited by two fellow monastics, and on seeing them off, they were so absorbed
in conversation that the island monk had walked across the bridge before he
was aware of his own actions. All three of them then collapsed into a helpless
Žt of laughter. The challenge for the artist is to portray the exact moment when
the realisation that a vow has been broken dawns on the three actors and,
instead of guilt and self-recrimination, they end up in a backslapping, ‘holdAttitudes
towards Humour and Laughter in Ancient India and China 99
me-or-I’ll fall-down’ session of uncontrollable mirth: atihasita, precisely the
kind of laughter deprecated by early Buddhism. The monk, so the story goes,
returned to his hermitage and never broke his vow again. But neither did he
brood on the one time he had broken it (see Hyers, 1974, pp. 48–49, see also
Žgure 1).
Indeed, humour in Zen Buddhism has been changed from something to be
avoided if at all possible to a teaching device in its own right. Time and again
we read of Zen monks and their masters laughing uproariously, of revered
teachers clowning around, playing the fool, joking even about things ordinarily
held sacred by other Buddhists, not excluding the Buddha himself. Again and
again we read about a Zen master who ‘clapped his hands and gave a loud
roar of laughter’ (Hyers, 1974, p. 33). Here Zen monks ‘battle’ with each other,
trying to outdo each other in series of puns, witticisms and non-sequiturs.
Consider the following duel of words between Chao-chou and his disciple
Wen-yuan, in which each tried to outdo the other in identifying with the lowest
thing they could imagine:
‘I am an ass.’
‘I am the ass’s buttocks.’
‘I am the ass’s faeces.’
‘I am a worm in the faeces.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I’m on my summer vacation!’ (Hyers, 1974, p. 145)
It is recorded that Wen-yuan ‘won’ that encounter. Even more bizarre and
humorous behaviours can be found among these ancient monastic humorists.
Teng Yin-Feng (eighth century), for example, when he had decided his time
had come to die, had his disciples search the scriptures and monastic records
to Žnd a position in which no Zen master had ever died. He found out that no
100 Michel Clasquin
master had ever died upside-down, so when his time came, he did a handstand
and expired in that position. His awed disciples found themselves unable to
take his body, still in an inverted position, to the crematorium, and there he
stayed until his sister, a nun, came upon him and exclaimed,
When you were alive you took no notice of laws and customs, and even
now that you are dead you are making a nuisance of yourself!
and poked the body with her Žnger until it fell down (Hyers, 1974, p. 43). In
Zen, though, such behaviour was not merely odd: it was an expression of the
essential freedom from constraints the master had attained through years of
disciplined meditation. The antinomian moments were recorded, the long
hours of contemplation that made them possible were not. Through the
discipline, a master could use non-discipline to expose the absurdity of the
human situation, and thus encourage the student to further discipline and
eventual attainment. Humour had become a teaching device in its own right.
What happened? How did the appreciation of humour in Buddhism change
so radically from its early days to its later Chinese development? What does it
tell us about the position and development of humour in ancient Asian
civilisations? Indeed, what does it tell us about the nature of humour itself?
China did, of course, have its own history of humour, and this may have
played a role in shaping Zen’s attitude to laughter. There is a wry humour
discernible in the sayings of the Taoist masters (Lee, 1993). Artists, in China, as
in so many other environments, were especially noted for their unorthodox
lifestyles and many of them acted in ways that closely resemble the archetype
of the Holy Fool as it can be found in other societies (Hyers, 1974, pp. 50–54).
But for all that it took from Taoism and Chinese culture generally, Zen always
remained Buddhist at heart. Why, then, this decisive break with the earlier
Buddhist tradition as far as humour is concerned?
To answer these questions, we need to look, Žrst of all, at humour in ancient
India and what little of it has come down to us, and then enquire into the
essence of humour itself. Much of what I will say below will concentrate on
Buddhism, not only because that is my primary area of expertise, but also
because Buddhism served as the only pan-Asian philosophical structure until
the early twentieth century, as virtually the only link between the Indian and
Chinese worlds. But at a deeper level, much of what I shall explain below could
as easily be said of Hinduism and especially Taoism, and this is a thread to
which we shall return at the end of this essay. For Asian religious and
philosophical thought is inherently humorous, if we dig deep enough into it.
Humour in Ancient India
There is a consistent perception even among scholars that humour hardly
existed in ancient India. There are a number of reasons for this: Žrstly, much
of early Indian humour was scatological and erotic in nature, even to the
point of being openly pornographic. In the romanised versions and the
western-language translations still being reprinted today, most of which were
produced by Victorian and Edwardian scholars, these passages are either
Attitudes towards Humour and Laughter in Ancient India and China 101
omitted entirely or given only in a heavily latinised form. This extends even to
the names of characters in ancient Indian plays, some of which, if translated
literally and presented at certain university campuses today, might give rise to
sexual harassment charges (see Siegel, 1987, p. 68 for some examples). As Elwin
Žrst pointed out in 1944, this bowdlerisation process has affected the study of
Indian folklore as much as that of sacred texts (Narayan, 1993, p. 184).
For example, in the Nalinika Jataka (one of the many traditional Indian tales
purporting to be about the previous lives of the Buddha), a naive ascetic seeing
a naked woman for the Žrst time wonders what happened to her penis. She
explains that it had been torn off by a bear and invites him to inspect the
wound and ‘kiss it and make it better’ (Siegel, 1987, p. 82). In the standard
English translation of this Jataka from the Pali Text Society, this passage is
simply glossed over and we are told in a footnote that Nalinika ‘practises on
the simplicity of the ascetic youth with much the same guile as Venus employs
to win Adonis’ (Francis, 1981, p. 102; this edition was Žrst published in 1895).
An unacceptable humorous passage is exchanged for a classical reference, and
the humour is lost. The Kacchapa Jataka is even more openly pornographic,
describing a monkey masturbating in the ear of a meditating brahmin, and
gives us the unusual event of the Buddha, albeit in a previous life, cracking a
mild joke (Siegel, 1987, pp. 278–79).
The second reason why the humour in ancient Indian texts is often
overlooked is that there is almost a concerted effort among believers and
scholars, especially, it seems, in Hinduism, to theologise the relevant passages
until nothing funny remains. This has been particularly true of those passages
that might otherwise have been cut because of their raunchiness, but that are
too central to the story to be deleted. For example, in a passage in Jayadeva’s
Gitagovinda, Krishna and his lover Radha are found to be wearing each other’s
clothes, to the merriment of Radha’s companions
Dressing in darkness after lovemaking, each of the lovers put on the
other’s clothes by mistake. In later Vaishnava devotional literature,
Radha and Krishna intentionally dress in each other’s clothes and the
comic incident is transformed into a symbol of the ultimate unity of
Radha and Krishna. A joke became a doxology. (Siegel, 1987, p. 31)4
Similarly, Siegel describes how he attended a shadow puppet performance
in Delhi featuring the exploits of the god Hanuman and how the audience
roared with laughter at the well known tales, but a Hanuman devotee told him
that ‘Hanuman is a god who seems to be a monkey to the ignorant [but] he is
in no way humorous’ (Siegel, 1987, pp. 282–85).
A similar tendency can be found among Indian literary theorists. Jan
Gonda, for example, in his monumental History of Indian Literature, consistently
denies any comic intent among the authors of the Samhita and Brahmana
sections of the Vedas (Gonda, 1975, pp. 168, 200, 226, 246–47). In this case, it is
not theological concerns that usurp the place of humour, but technical linguistic
and literary matters. Still, the message is the same: Indian literature is
serious, not humorous. According to some sources, even the Indian govern102
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ment has been involved in this effort to ‘clean up’ the Indian tradition from any
vestige of humour (Siegel, 1987, p. 320).
Thirdly, we must consider the vagaries of time and history. In the hot,
humid climate of most of India, without chemically treated paper, a manuscript
might have had a life span of little more than Žfty years before it needed to be
rewritten (Tieken and Schokker, 1991, p. 20). With few people being literate,
only the most important texts would survive, and for ‘important’ we can read
‘serious’.
Finally, some humour, though certainly not all, is speciŽc to a certain time,
place or culture. In contemporary South Africa, jokes about government leaders
in the apartheid era are already fading into obscurity. Already, editions of
Shakespearean comedies destined to be used by schoolchildren have extensive
footnotes explaining the humour that had people rolling in the aisles in
Shakespeare’s days; and a joke explained is a joke not laughed at. Accordingly,
some humorous passages in ancient Indian texts may simply escape western
readers, and possibly even contemporary Indians, simply because they were
too topical at the time to survive as humour, even if they did survive as texts.
Despite these tendencies to dehumorise Indian texts, a new appreciation of
Indian humour has come into being since the publication of Lee Siegel’s
ground-breaking work Laughing Matters (Siegel, 1987. See especially the Bibliographic
Essay on pp. 465–70 for further literature on the subject). I shall not
attempt to duplicate the entire contents of his fascinating blend of Sanskrit
scholarship and personal observation here, only to reiterate some of his main
points.
In a sense, Siegel argues, all Indian literature is comic. The western idea of
literature as bifurcated between tragedy and comedy does not apply, for the
dramatic basis of tragedy, of hubris leading to nemesis, never developed in
India. In Indian literature, there is always a happy ending for the main
protagonists, even if it needs to be postponed by a reincarnation or two:
In Western terms there is no tragedy in India. There are no plays which
begin in joy and culminate in sorrowful defeat, no stories of glory in
grief and disaster, no conclusions to arouse pity and fear, and no
catharsis of those emotions. Rather, there are heroic or romantic melodramas
in which one particular aesthetic mood dominates and in which
others may play a part … The comic sentiment is not understood in
India as a dichotomous principle in relation to a tragic one; it is rather
a mood which arises out of an opposition to, or parody of, any of the
aesthetic avours. (Siegel, 1987, p. 8)5
Nevertheless, there are moments in the Indian literature that are more
overtly humorous than others. These can, as in other languages, be based on
language itself. In written Sanskrit, there is no space between two words if the
Žrst ends on a consonant and the second begins with a vowel (though these are
sometimes added in modern editions). A skilful writer can render entire lines
without any sign of spacing or punctuation. This has created the possibility,
especially in poetry, of creating sentences that can be divided up in different
ways, leading to at least one serious, highbrow interpretation and at least one
Attitudes towards Humour and Laughter in Ancient India and China 103
comic version. Even if the comic interpretation itself is not particularly funny,
the humour lies in the juxtaposition between the two, something that would be
immediately obvious to the ancient Indian reader or listener, but less so to us
when we read the passage in (the ofŽcial) translation. In effect, it is a highly
sophisticated version of the ‘knock-knock, who’s there?’ joke, or, to put it
another way, a vastly extended pun. Although this process does not work
nearly as well in English, Siegel has managed to create the following example:
ThechaplainwasbeatiŽcandearthysextonitestallsinsexcommunicationsaintsoveryearnestimateyouratonementogodasoft
womanslaughtersent
which can be read either as:
The chaplain was beatiŽc and earthy
‘Sexton! I test all sins!’
‘Excommunication?’
‘Saints over-yearn!’
‘Estimate your atonement …’
‘O God!’
‘… as of two manslaughters!’
End.
or, with a different division of words, as:
The chap, lain, was beat.
‘If I can, dear.’
‘Thy sex tonite stalls. In sex, communications ain’t so very earnest’
‘I (Aye) mate, you rat on men!’
To God a soft woman’s laughter send. (Siegel, 1987, p. 383)
A actual example of this technique in Indian poetry gives us two possible
understandings of a single poem, known as Rasikaranjana, which emerge in
translation as:
Version 1:
One should strive at once
to be devoted to the Absolute Self.
Damn the man who worships Shiva only occasionally,
only in distress.
Version 2:
One should try to get another man’s wife
to do what he wants to do.
Damn the man who overcomes desire with pain,
who settles for one wife,
who conquers himself. (Rasikaranjana, in Siegel, 1987, p. 382)
Other Indian poems do not rely on the ambiguity of language for their
effect, but on the situation which they present: the seventh-century CE erotic
104 Michel Clasquin
poet Amaru presents us with the following interview, freely translated by
Siegel:
‘Why is your face all covered with sweat?’
‘The heat of the sun posed quite a threat.’
‘But your eyes are wet; why are they red?’
‘The words of your lover Žlled me with dread’
‘But your hair is dishevelled; why such a mess?’
‘The wind was blowing; no need for distress.’
‘Your make-up is gone, rubbed all away.’
‘Yes, rubbed by the shawl I was wearing today.’
‘But your breathing is heavy; why are you tired?’
‘From working so hard, doing what you desired.’
‘Very clever, my friend, you’ve made not a slip,
So tell me what rhymes with the bite on your lip?’
(Siegel, 1987, pp. 14–15)
Even in Indian scriptures themselves, there are humorous passages. In the
Shiva Purana, for instance, we Žnd a description of the arrival of the gods at
Shiva’s betrothal rite. As each god appears, the one more splendidly attired
than the one before, Mena, the prospective mother-in-law, enquires whether
this one is Shiva. Finally the groom shows up, in his customary guise of the
tutelary deity of ascetics: wearing a loincloth of elephant skin and a garland of
human skulls, his hair matted and his body smeared with ashes, and trailing
a retinue of ghouls and demons. Mena promptly faints. As Siegel puts it, this
is ‘the comic farce that occurs when the Hell’s Angel shows up at the home in
Southampton to meet the mother of his debutante bride’ (Siegel, 1987, p. 394)
And then, of course, there are comic plays. In contemporary western
thought on humour, comic drama is often seen as both the archetype and the
pinnacle of humour. Time and again, western philosophers of humour in need
of an example point to a comic play, in some cases to plays that have since long
been forgotten. I would question the presuppositions underlying this belief, but
since we are discussing Indian humour in English here, a language in which
much even of the vocabulary of humour is derived from stage comedy,6 we do
need to look more closely at Indian comic drama, to see how ancient Indian
humour was structured, and even more, how ancient Indian audiences laughed
at many of the same things we laugh at today.
Traditional Indian theories of drama, which can be traced to around the Žrst
or second century BCE, distinguish among about ten different types of play,
but examples of only about four types have survived, and of these, only two
are humorous in nature. Firstly, there is the prahasana, which has a ‘pure’ form
that portrays only ascetics and mendicants, and a ‘miscellaneous’ form with a
wider cast of characters. Secondly, there is the bhana, a solo performance that
takes the audience on a vicarious voyage through the demi-monde (Tieken and
Schokker, 1991, pp. 7–10).
The plays that have come down to us force us to stretch the deŽnition of
‘antiquity’ somewhat, having been written in the latter part of what we would
normally consider that period, the Žfth to seventh centuries CE. They do,
Attitudes towards Humour and Laughter in Ancient India and China 105
however, point to a much older tradition, especially when we take account of
the fact that Bharata produced his dramatic classiŽcation system some centuries
earlier. There may well have been an earlier indigenous village tradition
of slapstick farces and knockabout comedies, now lost to us. The plays that we
do have are almost exclusively associated with royal courts and court-associated
ranks of society.
It is possible that there was a certain amount of Greek inuence in the
formation of Sanskrit drama, though the evidence is slim. The backdrop to the
stage is a large cloth called a yavanika, which is derived from the word yavana,
meaning Ionian, that is, Greek (Tieken and Schokker, 1991, p. 17). There is,
however, no trace of a chorus in any of these plays. Besides the backdrop, there
is no evidence that props or masks were used, and female roles were generally
played by women.
I do not intend to try and recreate Siegel’s 450 page work on the subject
(much, though not all, of which is concerned with comic drama), but would
rather concentrate on three farces from late Indian antiquity, which are conveniently
available in a single volume in Dutch translation (Tieken and
Schokker, 1991). Taken together, these three show the broad scope of ancient
Indian comic drama.
Indian Comic Drama: The Saint and the Harlot
The Bhagavad-ajjuka of Bodhayana, like so many Sanskrit comic plays, starts
with a prologue that consists of a dialogue between the director of the play and
a vidusaka (a stereotypical comic Žgure, equivalent to the court jester in
medieval western society), explaining the rationale behind the performance.
Both end up acting two of the main parts, respectively that of an ascetic or yogi
and his reluctant disciple, in this example of a ‘miscellaneous’ prahasana.
The Saint and the Harlot (see Tieken and Schokker, 1991, pp. 25–60), as we
may translate the title of the play, is what would today be called a situation
comedy (or sit-com). The humour of the play lies primarily in the confusion
caused by the characters behaving in unexpected ways — the courtesan’s soul
is removed from her body because the messenger from the realm of Death has
confused her with another woman of the same name. The saint then takes
possession of the harlot’s body with the intention of teaching his student a
lesson about the undesirability of sensual pleasures, but while he is so engaged,
Death’s messenger returns with the woman’s soul and seeing her body occupied,
deposits the soul in the saint’s body. Thus, we have a saint speaking like
a harlot and a harlot expounding grammar and philosophy in the most learned
Sanskrit terms,7 causing consternation not only for the student, but among a
few other associated characters who have by now entered the scene. In the end,
of course, both souls are returned to the appropriate bodies and all ends well
enough.
The comic devices in this play are not unusual: the swapping of identities,
if not of souls, even the exchange of sexual roles, is a common literary device
from antiquity, through the comedies of Shakespeare, to today’s television
comedies. It seems that, apart from temporarily topical matters, what makes
106 Michel Clasquin
people laugh has not, after all, changed much over all these centuries. ‘Jokes,
passed on for pleasure in social intercourse, travel around the world like
venereal disease’ (Siegel, 1987, p. 255), and we cannot say with any certainty
who Žrst thought of such a device, who Žrst realised that it would raise a
laugh.
Nothing is known about Bodhayana, the author of the play. The earliest
mention of the Bhagavad-ajjuka is on a seventh-century CE inscription, which
leads one to believe that the play might date to the early part of that century.
Indian Comic Drama: The Merry Pranks of a Drunkard
If the Bhagavad-ajjuka is a situation comedy, then the Mattavilasa, or The Merry
Pranks of a Drunkard a ‘pure’ prahasana ostensibly written by the early seventhcentury
CE South Indian king Mahendravikrama-varman, is what we might
today call a comedy of manners (see Tieken and Schokker, 1991, pp. 61–93 and
Siegel, 1987, pp. 217–23. An English translation by LD Barnett is available in the
Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies V, 1928–1930, pp. 697–717). There is little
that is humorous in the plot itself; instead, the humour lies in the Žnely
detailed nuances of speech and behaviour of the Žve ascetics who make up the
cast. In various ways, all of them ridicule the world-renouncing and ascetic
ideals of Indian philosophy. There is, for instance, a Buddhist monk, who lives
by rules of conduct that might seem harsh to us, but which in the context of
the times were quite moderate, even allowing robes and monasteries, while
other yogis were expected to go naked or dress in rags, and to sleep out in the
open — the Buddhists were a kind of ascetic gentry by comparison. This monk
is caught in the following monologue:
How is it possible that the Buddha, otherwise so compassionate, who
allows us monks to enjoy palaces, luxurious beds and soft robes … that
this same Buddha made no similar arrangements regarding wine and
women! …It must have been that those elders, the Shtavira monks,
those lazy old fogies, just to spite us younger monks, out of envy,
purged all the precepts in favour of women and wine from the Buddhist
scriptures. I wish I knew where I could Žnd those missing passages! I
shall perform a service to the brotherhood by making known to the
world the complete teachings of the Buddha! (Tieken and Schokker,
1991, p. 79, the English paraphrase here mainly following the partial
translation in Siegel, 1987, p. 217)
Again, the play starts with a prologue, this time between the director and
an actress, playing his wife, discussing between themselves the committee that
commissioned the play, the king who wrote it, and indulging in some general
bickering that gives the impression that what we are about to see is a play
within a play. Then the main characters arrive.
The plot, as far as it goes, is simple. The lead character is a kapalin, an ascetic
member of a Hindu sect of which we know little, but which may well have
been an early form of Tantric Hinduism: the kapalin openly partakes of meat
and alcohol, has a female student, as she is euphemistically introduced, and
Attitudes towards Humour and Laughter in Ancient India and China 107
uses a human skull for a begging bowl. Indeed, it is when this begging bowl
goes missing that the plot begins in earnest. In a drunken rage, the kapalin and
his acolyte accuse the Buddhist monk of having stolen the skull. The monk at
Žrst refuses to show his own begging bowl, which is hidden underneath his
robe, but even when it is revealed to be quite unlike a skull, the kapalin accuses
him of having magically transformed its appearance. The situation is resolved
only by the intercession of yet another ascetic, from the pasupata sect, and a
fool. In the end, it turns out that a dog had run off with the skull. The object
is retrieved and all return to their normal lives.
As I have indicated, this is a very different kind of comedy from The
Saint and the Harlot. Instead of playing up the comedic implications of the
situation, it is the satire with which the characters are painted that gives
the Mattavilasa its humorous character. The Buddhist monk and the
pasupatin provide sotto voce evidence of their erotic interest in the kapalin’s
concubine. At one stage, she tries to pull the monk by the hair, but unlike
the Hindu ascetics, Buddhist monks shave their heads and there is no hair
for her to pull. This gives the monk yet another opportunity to praise the
prescient wisdom of the Buddha, and the author one to satirise the
insistence of religious establishments everywhere that there must be a (divine)
reason for all rules of conduct, no matter how abstruse they may appear
to be. The play satirises the religious establishments of ancient India as only a
play written by a king, designed to be performed at court, could be expected
to do.
Of course, whether king Mahendravikrama-varman actually wrote the play
remains open to debate. It is always possible that an anonymous author,
hoping for royal favour, attributed authorship to the king. Still, the play is
mentioned in an inscription attributed to him, and the action takes place in the
city of Kanci (Kanchipuram in modern Tamil Nadu), the capital of his realm.
If he did write it, he is unique in another respect: he would be one of the few
ancient Indian authors of whom we have a near-contemporary portrait. His son
and successor Narasimha-varman had a relief sculpture of Mahendravikramavarman
and two of his wives carved in the cave temple complex of Mahabalipuram
(Tieken and Schokker, 1991, pp. 61–62).
Indian Comic Drama: The Kick
The Padataditaka or The Kick by Syamilaka (Tieken and Schokker, 1991, pp. 95–
163) presents us with yet another strand of ancient Indian humour. It is a bhana,
a form of entertainment in which dozens of characters play a part, but only
obliquely, because only a single actor is on stage for the entire performance,
who describes their comings and goings as he pretends to walk through the
seedier parts of the city. The closest equivalent in contemporary society would
probably be stand-up comedy.
The prologue in this play involves only the director and is quite short. He
is followed on to the stage by the actor, who portrays a vita, a kind of
gentleman pimp who arranges meetings between courtesans and young aristo108
Michel Clasquin
crats, settles disputes among the harlots and generally acts as a man-abouttown:
[This] form was an actor’s medium in which laughter was evoked as
much by the mimic and acrobatic dimensions of the play as by the
script.… In the bhanas a single actor played the part of a parasite, the
persona of the satirist, a cultured and often jaded expert in sexual
etiquette and amorous arts, who earned his livelihood as a counselor or
go-between for a more wealthy patron, an aristocrat or a merchant
aspiring to aristocratic manners. The parasite walks through the streets
of a city, frequently for the sake of conducting an erotic business
transaction for his patron; he describes the people he meets … He
mimics their gestures and speaks their lines for them. With urbanity and
wit, the parasite does the satirist’s dirty work as he exposes the degradations
around him. He is at once a spokesman for the satirist and yet, as
part of the motley world he describes, he is also an object of satire, a
satirist self-satirised … (Siegel, 1987, pp. 59–60)
There is a plot of sorts in The Kick, involving a parody of judicial procedure
among the vitas as they adjudicate between a prostitute and the customer
whom she kicked in the face, but that is hardly the point of the play. The real
interest lies in the vita’s description of and reported interaction with those he
meets. To give just one example, it is well known that our word ‘barbarian’ is
derived from the Greek expression of disgust at those who could not speak a
civilised language, ie Greek. The Padataditaka shows that linguistic prejudice
was not limited to the Greek world:
Who is this other woman? Ah, yes, that must be the Greek girl called
Karpuraturishta … although she is a friend of mine, I shall not go and
speak to her. After all, who would of his own accord speak to a Greek
courtesan? Her voice sounds like the screeching of an ape; her speech
consists mostly of [ee] sounds, the consonants are indistinguishable
… Away with her, then! (paraphrased from Tieken and Schokker,
1991, p. 154)
Although internal evidence in the play points to Kashmir in Northern India
as its origin, only South Indian manuscripts have come down to us. It was
probably written around the Žfth century CE. The author, Syamilaka, is
mentioned in a number of other ancient texts that quote him as an authority on
poetics, but little else of his work has survived.
Ancient Indian Humour: the Wider Milieu
Not only did ancient India have comic literature, but the social environment
itself was far from a mirthless place: in the Ambatthasutta, a brahmin complains
to the Buddha how the Sakyas, the Buddha’s own clan, had once made fun of
him:
Once, Gotama, I had to go to Kapilavatthu on some business or
other … and went into the Sakyas’ congress hall. Now at that time there
Attitudes towards Humour and Laughter in Ancient India and China 109
were a number of Sakyas, old and young, seated in the hall on grand
seats, making merry and joking together, nudging one another with
their Žngers; and (I think) it was I myself that was the subject of their
jokes … (Rhys Davids, 1977, p. 113, see Siegel, 1987, p. 206)
The pan-Asian belief in reincarnation was a rich source of ironic comment
as well. From a Tibetan source, we get the following story:
Once Saint Katyana went begging alms and saw a householder, holding
a boy in his lap, eat a tasty-looking Žsh and throw a stone at a bitch
gnawing at the Žsh bones. Having clairvoyance, Katyana saw that the
Žsh was a rebirth of the man’s father. The bitch was his mother’s rebirth
and an enemy whom he had killed in a former life, and who now
wished revenge, had been reborn as his son. Katyana said, ‘He eats his
father’s esh and throws stones at his mother. In his lap he holds an
enemy that will kill him. The wife gnaws at the husband’s bones. I feel
like laughing at the realities of life’. (Dpal-sprul, quoted in Lichter and
Epstein, 1983, p. 234)
In the villages that made up the bulk of Indian society until very recently,
the village idiot was a well known Žgure: ‘You must have one, just as you must
have a well. You cannot be a self-respecting village without one’ (Siegel, 1987,
p. 245–46). Most of these would remain simply that, village idiots. A few might
make it to the role of vidusaka (court jester) at the court of a local aristocrat. And
some, beneŽting from the Indian tendency to see divinity in all things, might
end up with a reputation as a Holy Fool, one who could see God because he
was too simple to see the complicated world the rest of us live in. The Holy
Fool archetype can even be found within the religious establishment: a Buddhist
monk called Little Walker (Culapanthaka) for instance, was said to have
been unable to memorise even a single verse of the Buddha’s teachings, but
nevertheless attained enlightenment after some personal coaching by the
Buddha (Siegel, 1987, pp. 264–65, see the Dhammapada Commentaries,
Burlingame, 1979a, pp. 299–310, where Culapanthaka is translated as ‘Little
Wayman’). The next step was for a holy man to refer to himself as a fool, in a
deliberate casting aside of all pretensions to wisdom in favour of undiluted
devotion (bhakti). Ramakrishna, for instance, was fond of referring to himself as
a fool (Siegel, 1987, p. 270), though this example takes us rather far away from
Indian antiquity.
Philosophical Perspectives on Laughter and Humour
From the above discussion, it will be clear that ancient India has a rich tradition
of humour, both in the form of unintentionally humorous passages in otherwise
serious texts, and in that of deliberately written humorous texts in a
variety of genres. We can now start to reconsider the question with which I
started this essay: why do real Buddhas not laugh, at least not in India? And
yet, why do Chinese Zen masters laugh, loudly and uproariously?
To start with the Žrst part of this question, one could suggest that an
avoidance of boisterous laughter is part of an aristocratic world view. Like
110 Michel Clasquin
Plato’s guardian class (Republic, 388e), Buddhist monks were supposed to be far
above mere worldly things. Indeed, advice such as that found in the Buddhist
scriptures can be found in another aristocratic milieu, far removed in space and
time from ancient India: in 1748, Lord ChesterŽeld wrote to his son:
Having mentioned laughing, I must particularly warn you against it,
and I could heartily wish that you may often be seen to smile, but never
heard to laugh while you live. Frequent and loud laughter is the
characteristic of folly and ill manners … In my mind, there is nothing so
illiberal and so ill-bred as audible laughter. (Holland, 1992, p. 15)
But merely to say that an avoidance of laughter, and hence of humour, is
commonly observed in communities with aristocratic pretensions is still not to
explain why humour should be avoided by such communities. For such an
explanation, we need to dig a little deeper, to ask, ‘What are these things called
laughter and humour?’ And for this we must turn to philosophy.
Both Indian and Western philosophers have considered the phenomenon of
humour. Indian literary theory sees laughter as falling into two main types.
Bharata and his commentator Abhinavagupta saw them as laughter at the
perception of ludicrous incongruities and improprieties, and as laughter caused
simply by the laughter of others — infectious laughter, as we might put it.
Later commentators construed these categories as ‘laughter at oneself’ (atmastha)
and ‘laughter at another’ (parastha), which Siegel understands as roughly
equivalent to the contemporary western concepts humour and satire (Siegel,
1987, pp. 50–51). But these concepts do not seem to have been taken up into
general Indian philosophical discourse from their origins in literary theory.
Western philosophers, too, have long considered the phenomena of laughter
and humour (a useful compendium of both historical and contemporary
philosophical approaches to laughter and humour can be found in Morreal,
1987), and in my opinion, the results of their efforts will be of greater utility in
understanding both the Buddha’s low opinion of laughter and the subsequent
use of humour in Zen as a method of attaining enlightenment.
There are three main strands of thought in Western philosophy of humour.
It is interesting to note that the vague beginnings of all three can be found in
scattered remarks by Aristotle (Morreal, 1987, pp. 129–31). Superiority theory can
be found in the writings of Plato, Aristotle and Hobbes. It maintains that
people laugh because of feelings of superiority over other people, or of
superiority over our own former position. Feinberg (1978) reŽnes the superiority
theory by making playful aggression the key concept of his theory, but it
remains in essence a form of superiority theory. Elsewhere, the theory seems to
be less in vogue these days. No doubt there is something of this element
present in the cruder sort of joke, or in the antics of the circus clown, but does
it explain the full range of humour?
Relief theory, which is prominent in the writings of Spencer and Freud,
enquires into the physiological basis of laughter and attempts to place the
ancient idea of catharsis in a modern scientiŽc setting. Inevitably, such an
attempt is limited by contemporary ideas of physiology: Spencer, for example,
is forced to use the metaphor of hydraulic power as he tries to show how a
Attitudes towards Humour and Laughter in Ancient India and China 111
feeling can lead to a physical expression. Just as liquid under pressure requires
an outlet valve, so does ‘nervous energy’ require a release system, and laughter
is one of these. Freud’s ideas are considerably more subtle, but underlying both
views is the idea that laughter (and other behaviours) is a socially acceptable
outlet for an excessive amount of nervous ‘pressure’. This theoretical approach,
with modiŽcations, continues to be popular among psychologists.
Incongruity theory, which can be found in the writings of Kant, Schopenhauer,
Kierkegaard and many other writers since then, places the source of
amusement in a perceived incongruity or inconsistency between the world as
we expect it to be. Again the perception of an incongruity may not necessarily
be humorous. If I were to Žnd a large pumpkin in my bathroom, I might Žnd
it funny. A snake in my bathroom is equally incongruous, but would not be
likely to cause much laughter (Morreal, 1987, p. 130). This suggests that
incongruities can cause a number of possible reactions, arranged somewhat like
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (Hjelle and Ziegler, 1981, pp. 368–74). An incongruity
is humorous only when it is perceived as non-threatening and pleasant.
Nevertheless, as Morreal suggests, this is probably the best explanation
for humorous laughter, as opposed to, say, laughter resulting from tickling
(Morreal, 1987, p. 130).
Combinations of these three approaches are of course possible. A perception
of incongruity may lead one to feel superior to others, or a perceived
superiority may turn out to have been incongruously wrong. Increasingly,
philosophers see laughter and humour as a complicated mixture of these
approaches. Nevertheless, the main distinctions between the theories remains
a useful one, and it gives us the tool to see both why early Buddhism rejected
humour and why Zen Buddhism later embraced it. In short, they were using
different theoretical approaches to laughter and humour.
Let us look again at the latter part of the injunction from the Anguttara
Nikaya: ‘Enough for you, if you are pleased righteously, to smile just to show
your pleasure’ (Woodward, 1979, p. 239). The term ‘righteously’ (dhammapamoditanam)
leads one to believe that a superiority theory is being used here.
But the Buddhist monk was already superior to other people merely because
of his vocation: to show off this superiority by laughing loudly would not only
be ill-mannered, but might alienate the lay support base on which the monastic
community relied for physical sustenance. The Buddhist monk displays his
superiority, paradoxically enough, by an outward display of humility, by
eating whatever supporters care to give him, by owning nothing and speaking
little. By extension, this attitude may answer the question why aristocratic
subcultures generally have played down laughter and humour: If laughter
expresses a feeling of superiority, and if one is already convinced of one’s
superior status, then laughter becomes otiose and humour, the object of
laughter, an unnecessary luxury.
Clues can be found elsewhere in the early Buddhist scriptures. In one of the
homiletic tales that make up the Dhammapada commentaries, a woman laughs
and when forced to divulge the reason for her laughter, tells us that while
another character took great pride in his own accomplishments, she had been
the power behind him all the while, even saving his life on one occasion
112 Michel Clasquin
(Burlingame, 1979a, p. 265). In another story, a man laughs and his concubine,
who mistakenly believes herself to be the mistress of the house, jealously
imagines that it is because he is in love with another woman (Burlingame,
1979b, pp. 104–5). In yet another story, a king is about to slaughter all
pretenders to the throne along with their families. A queen, trying to dissuade
him, laughs and weeps in turn. Once again, she is pressed to explain here
reasons for laughing and crying. She explains that she has been going through
many lifetimes of suffering to expiate her evil karma in a former existence,
hence she cried at the memories, but that this unhappy series of incarnations
is now over, hence the laughter. All those unhappy lifetimes were the result of
killing a single sheep. What fate, then, awaits the king if he proceeds with his
genocidal plans? (Burlingame, 1979c, pp. 109–10).
In each of these cases, we see that laughter is something that arouses
suspicion, something that needs to be explained. One of the characters is even
threatened with death if she does not explain her laughter. And in each case,
the explanation is squarely within the parameters set by superiority theory. The
characters feel superior to other characters, the sight of another person laughing
makes them doubt their own superiority, or they feel superior to their own
former position. These cases make it highly likely that superiority theory
played an important role in the ancient Indian, or at least the ancient Buddhist,
views of laughter and humour.
Another example of the ancient Buddhist approach to humour can be found
in the Suruci Jataka (Frances and Neil, 1981, pp. 198–205), in which we Žnd the
story of ‘the prince who could not laugh’. For seven years, the king holds a
feast in order to make his son (one of the Buddha’s disciples in a previous life)
laugh. In the end, even the gods join in the effort. And while the Žnal result
is only a little smile on the part of the prince, the clowning around and
self-abasement (jugglers, tumblers, men dancing in garments made of owers,
and Žnally a god dancing with one half of his body while keeping the other
half perfectly still), has the rest of the assembly roaring with laughter. Again,
the kind of slapstick humour described in this tale is largely consonant with the
superiority theory.
But in Zen, we do not Žnd the superiority theory employed. The two Zen
masters we have seen above engaged in a duel of words even invert that
theory, each vying with the other to abase himself as far as possible. Admittedly,
one could see a measure of superiority in that, a superiority measured in
inferiority, as it were. But the Žnal word in that engagement ‘wins’ the
encounter by advancing an incongruent element (a worm going on a summer
vacation) into the discussion. The argument ends not when one of them can
think of no lower station for himself, but by a change of tack in a completely
unexpected direction.
Similarly, the humour in the story of Teng Yin-Feng (above), who died in
a handstand position, lies in the incongruity between the actions of his
disciples, who are awed by their master’s unique accomplishment, and that of
his sister, who sees it as just another example of her brother showing off. In
Zen Buddhism, incongruities are not hidden away, to be thought of only as
religious mysteries accessible only to gods and Buddhas. Instead, they are
Attitudes towards Humour and Laughter in Ancient India and China 113
brought out into the open, to demonstrate the absurdity of the human condition.
Laughing at this absurdity is the Žrst step in transcending it. And,
perhaps, the Žnal one too. Incongruity can be used to bring us ‘down to earth’,
to show concretely how realisation is not necessarily something to be sought
far in the future, sought for in lofty dogmas, but that it can be found in the
here-and-now:
A novice once asked master Chao-chou, thinking to obtain some lofty
teaching or profound discourse: ‘I have just entered the brotherhood and
am anxious to learn the Žrst principle of Zen. Will you please teach it to
me?’ Chao-chou responded, ‘Have you eaten your supper?’ The novice
replied, ‘I have’. ‘Then go wash your bowl!’. (Hyers, 1974, p. 77)
There is always the possibility of another ‘why’ question, and perhaps we
have merely succeeded in shifting the central question from ‘Why did Zen
Buddhism adopt a different approach to humour?’ to ‘Why does Zen use
incongruity theory instead of the superiority theory prevalent in Early Buddhism?’
Perhaps the answer lies in its Mahayana heritage, in the concept of
Buddha-Nature that holds that we are all inherently enlightened, needing only
to realise this fact, rather than having to attain a higher state called ‘enlightenment’.
Or it may be a legacy from Taoism, which saw life as the dynamic
interplay between ‘the way’ and the ‘ten thousand things’. What is clear is that
incongruity, not superiority, is the basis of the widespread use of humour in
Zen Buddhism.
Indeed, once we start using the idea of incongruity as the basis for humour,
we see that Asian religion and philosophy is inherently humorous. For the
incongruity of normal humour is one between matters as they are and as we
expect them to be, between the real world and the one we have built up in our
expectations. But in different ways, Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism all
undermine our conŽdence in the ‘real world’. What we see is the lila (play) of
the gods, it is maya (illusion), the ongoing unfoldment of Tao (the way),
profoundly empty of any ontological Žnality, and our insistence on taking the
‘real world’ seriously is the result of our own foolishness. In the end, the Asian
world view leaves us with the incongruity of clashing perceptions and opinions,
but these point only to other perceptions and opinions, not to a concrete