Meditation Sounds

Sound and silence in the texts

The early discourses prize quiet. In the Thorns (AN 10.72), “several well-known Licchavis” drive into the Great Wood at Vesālī to see the Buddha and make “a colossal racket”. The senior monks leave for the Gosiṅga Sal Wood, “free of noise and crowds”, because “the Buddha has said that sound is a thorn to absorption.” He agrees with them, and lists ten thorns, among them “Sound is a thorn to the first absorption.” Each thorn is a thorn to something in particular: sound to the first absorption, but breathing to the fourth, and relishing company to someone who loves seclusion. The list ends somewhere else entirely: “Greed, hate, and delusion are thorns.”

Sound is also something to meditate on. Among the six sense fields in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta (MN 10), the meditator “understands the eye, sights, and the fetter that arises dependent on both of these”, and the sutta takes the ear and sounds the same way. Ajahn Chah, in a talk of 1970, turned the old complaint about noise round: “If we investigate a little deeper, we will see that it’s we who go out and disturb the sound! The sound is simply sound.”

Listening as a practice

In the Śūraṅgama Sūtra, a Mahāyāna scripture that appeared in Chinese in the early eighth century (traditionally 705) and whose Indian origin has been disputed ever since, Guanyin describes awakening through the ear: “Initially, I entered the flow through hearing and forgot objective states.” Mañjuśrī, asked which of the twenty-five methods suits Ānanda and will be the easiest door for the beings of this world after the Buddha has gone, chooses that one, because “In this land the true substance of teaching / Resides in hearing the sounds purely”, and tells the assembly: “Turn yourselves around and revert the hearing.”

Zen keeps stories of awakening at a sound. Xiangyan Zhixian (Kyōgen in Japanese) was sweeping, as Dōgen retells it in the Shōbōgenzō, when “he accidentally sent a piece of tile flying, which hit the bamboo. Upon hearing the knocking sound it made, he suddenly had a great awakening” (trans. Hubert Nearman). The earlier Chinese account, in the Jingde Chuandeng Lu, has him clearing undergrowth on the mountain when the tile strikes the bamboo. Zen also uses sound as a test. In case 46 of the Blue Cliff Record, Jingqing asks a monk, “What is that sound outside the door?” “The sound of raindrops,” the monk says, and Jingqing answers, “People are backwards—they lose themselves and pursue things” (trans. Thomas Cleary).

In the Plum Village tradition the sound is a call home. Thich Nhat Hanh said in a 1996 Dharma talk that the Upper Hamlet has a veranda named for listening to the rain: “If you are a free person you only need to sit there and listen to the rain, and you can be very happy already, because the rain is something wonderful.” And, as Plum Village quotes him, “A bell of mindfulness, whether it is an actual bell or some other sound, is a wonderful reminder to come back to ourselves, to come back to life here in the present moment.” Our mindfulness bell sounds one through the day.

Should you sit with sounds at all?

We know of no traditional meditation instruction that asks for background sound. Asked by a student whether they could listen to music when meditating, Lama Shenpen Hookham, who teaches Dzogchen and Mahāmudrā in the Tibetan tradition, replied, “I think listening to music would be relaxing and perhaps even help settle the heart and mind so that it could then focus attention”, but that there would then “need to be a recognition of one’s own mind – not just latching onto sense objects like music”; otherwise “that is not the meditation we are looking for”. With that caution, these sounds can help in three plain ways:

• To cover a noisy room. Keep to one low, steady layer, such as rain or the stream.
• As the object. Rest attention on hearing itself: sounds arising and passing, and whatever takes hold of the mind because of them. The Satipaṭṭhāna takes the ear the same way, with the ear, sounds, and “the fetter that arises dependent on both”.
• To keep time. Set the length, and let the fade and the bell end the sitting, so you need not look at a clock.

If the sounds become something to enjoy in place of sitting, turn them down or off. Silence is a perfectly good setting; for a timer with only a bell, use our meditation timer, and for how to sit, our guide to how to meditate.

What you are hearing

None of this is a recording. The rain is noise shaped by filters, with dozens of tiny pings a second for the drops; the waves are noise that swells and draws back every ten seconds or so; the wind is noise through a filter that sweeps up and down in gusts; the stream is many short, rising tones, like bubbles, over a low hiss; the crickets are short bursts of a high tone. The singing bowl is the same set of tuned tones as our virtual singing bowl, and the temple bell is a deep, generic struck bell, softened as if far off: it is not modelled on, or recorded from, any temple’s bell. We make no claims for any of it beyond being pleasant to sit with. Singing bowls in particular come wrapped in claims of “sound healing”, and their Tibetan history is doubtful; our guide to singing bowls sets out what is known.

For a single bowl to strike yourself, try the singing bowl; to log your sittings, the meditation journal. See all our free tools.