Silence
Photo by Lennart Hellwig
Zuisei speaks of silence as the way of wonder, humility, and reverence; of noble silence as the unification of awareness. Drawing on stories and poems, she highlights the importance of silence in our increasingly noisy and harried world.
This talk was given by Zuisei Goddard.
Transcript
This transcript is based on Zuisei’s talk notes and may differ slightly from the final talk.
Silence
Out of the ground, the Lord formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.
And later, many, many years later, somebody decided to continue this story, which is from Genesis, of course, about the naming of the animals. And this happened all in one day, and it established who was who, and what was what, who was over what, the relationships to one another. And, unfortunately, to the animals, and to our detriment, the original story established man at the top of the pyramid and gave him dominion over every living thing that moves over the earth.
But in this other story, this new story, Eve decides to undo the process. And she decides to unname all the animals, ending with herself. And it's something that needs to happen, she realizes, to return the names of each of the animals to silence, and therefore to free their beingness by unlabeling, uncategorizing them.
So she starts with the whales and the dolphins and the seals and the sea otters, and they all take to their namelessness gracefully. And next, she unnames the yaks, who, at first, put up a fight, because they feel that "yak" feels just right. And, you know, they've always been called yak.
And it's the females that finally convince the bulls that, you know, from the yak's perspective, the name is redundant, so they don't really even use it themselves. And so the males agree, "Oh, right, yeah, we don't really need the name," and so they let it go. And next, she unnames the horses and the cows, pigs and sheep, and mules and goats, and they all give up their names happily.
The same goes for the chickens and the geese and turkeys and guinea hens. But when she gets to the pets, the problems start. And, you know, the cats, of course, deny ever having had a name, other than the self-given ones.
And no one has ever known those names except for them. But the dogs and the parrots insist that they want to keep the names their masters gave them. Eve has to patiently explain, if you want to be still called Bootsy or Bubbles or Sisko, you can do that, but it's just, it's the name "dog" or "rabbit" or "crow" or "mina" that we're getting rid of.
And eventually, with a bit of nudging, they, too, agree to give up their names. Insects and fish, they just give them up without a pause. And all those letters and syllables just disappear into thin air or into the waters of the ocean.
And finally, when there's no one left to unname, Eve realizes that what she was hoping for actually has come to pass. She feels closer to them than ever, and she closer, and they to her. And scales and feathers and fur—they're all there, but somehow they're no longer limits.
They're no longer boundaries, contours. They're no longer lines that establish when one of them begins and the other one ends. And so all the animals move through the air and the sea and on land, under it, exactly as they were meant to do—as one great, unified body.
And no one can tell any longer the hunter from the hunted. And the effect, Eve realizes, is even more powerful than she had imagined. But she can't, in all good conscience, now make an exception of herself.
So she goes to Adam, who's busy doing something. He doesn't even really look up when she comes. And she says, "You know, your father and you gave me this, and it's been very useful. Don't get me wrong, it's been very useful. But it doesn't seem to fit lately, so I'm just going to give it back." And Adam's still not paying very much attention.
So he says, "OK, just put it over there. And when's dinner, by the way?" And Eve, you know, she's a little disappointed. She thought she was expecting to have to defend her decision.
She was expecting at least a little bit of a fight, or an argument of some sort. And she just says, "You know, I don't know. I'm going. I'm going. And take good care. I hope the key to the garden turns up."
And she's starting to say that she's going to go with all the animals. But just as she's about to say that, she realizes she can no longer name them. And that's when she realizes, you know, how difficult it would have been to explain herself.
How difficult to show that there are times when silence speaks truth in a way that even the most eloquent words can't. And she realizes she can no longer chatter away as she used to, taking it all for granted. Her words now must be as slow, as new, as single, as tentative as the steps she took down the path away from the house, between the dark-branched, tall dancers, motionless against the winter shining.
I've been thinking about silence quite a bit lately. And just my longing for it, my hunger for it. And as I was thinking about this talk and writing this talk, I didn't realize how, in one way, not silent this week would be, you know—all the work that would be happening and all the hubbub that we would be finding ourselves in the midst of.
And I thought, well, maybe even more reason to bring it to light, dust it off. And as I was thinking about this, I remembered this story, which is by Ursula Le Guin, and Eve's impulse to take those words, those names back and to drop them, or, if you will, invite them into silence in order to let the silence do its work, its work of unification—in order to let it blur the boundaries, defeat the labels, unmean all the meanings that keep us apart and bounded.
In the Kolita Sutra, Moggallayana, who was one of the Buddha's foremost disciples, is speaking really about this unification as it relates to silence. And he says, "Friends, once I was withdrawn in seclusion, this train of thought arose to my awareness: Noble silence."
"Noble silence," it is said. But what is noble silence? And then the thought occurred to me: there is a case where a practitioner, with a stilling of directed thought and evaluation, enters and remains in the second jhana—rapture and pleasure born of concentration, unification of awareness, free from directed thought and evaluation, internal assurance. This is called noble silence.
In these jhanas that he's speaking of—they're deep meditative states, which the Buddha described a practitioner moves through in their, well, in the practice of meditation—but really, the point of them ultimately is to see things as they really are. And in the first one, there is still directed thought. There's evaluation, right? So we make a resolution to focus on our breath wholeheartedly.
To distinguish: this is my breath. This is a thought. This is a thought that is coming in the way of me experiencing my breath directly.
So I will let it go, and I will return to my breath. And the sutras say that this is like someone taking a bath and making a bowl with powder soap, and they're wetting and kneading the bowl of soap, letting all the water suffuse the bowl until it is completely steeped in that water. So it's active, it's engaged.
You're doing something. You're doing the kneading. You're doing the working of your mind, of taming the mind.
Very much so in the beginning stages of practice. But in the second jhana, there's a little less effort involved.
There's unification of awareness, free from directed thought and evaluation. So this is the moment in which you, even for a short moment, become the breath. You're not trying to concentrate.
You're not trying to follow your breath or be your breath. You are it. And you're resting in the natural, bright, luminous state of mind.
Many of the Tibetan teachers call it: you're resting within the breath. And the sutras say this is like a river flowing effortlessly in one direction, or like a lake that has no outflow, and the water is just slowly rising as water will when there's no place for it to go.
And slowly, this is drenching and steeping and filling the lake with cool water. But again, this is happening naturally, without impediment and without effort. And so this is what noble silence is.
According to Moggallayana. And Tilopa, who was a 10th-century Buddhist teacher—he was Naropa's teacher—taught the six points for sustaining meditation, or six ways of resting, he called them. And he says: do not recall.
Do not think. Do not anticipate. Do not meditate.
Do not analyze. Do rest naturally. So the first three avoid getting tangled up with past, present, and future.
And I just came across this article about a man, a Russian man, who supposedly had incredible recall. He couldn't—he, in fact, couldn't forget anything that he remembered. And so he was given increasingly long strings of random numbers, and he could remember them.
He could remember a passage read to him from a book verbatim and repeated. And what they found was that his power of imagination was extremely sharp, extremely strong. So he saw a number, he saw numbers as individuals.
And he described, you know, number one, I think, was a very thin, ramrod-straight, kind of cranky man, bald. Um, number two was a, was a plump woman with a, with a beehive, uh, hairdo. Actually, I think I made that up.
This must be in the twenties. So this was before beehive, some, some elaborate hairdo. And so he could see, he could see each image.
And therefore that's what he would remember. And, you know, there's that well-known technique where you're in a house or a palace and you place each of your memories, things you need to remember, in sequence. And you're, you're then making your way around the house.
He would do that with Gorky Street. He would place all his memories along the street and he would, in his mind, walk up and down the street visualizing them. And so they did a study with another man who was in a motorcycle accident and who lost his short-term memory.
And what they found is that not only had he lost the ability to remember, he couldn't imagine the future either. His power to imagine had been lost as well. So, to me, that's so interesting.
Past, present, and future are completely interrelated. We don't think about it that way unless we stop and, and look very precisely. And we hear this in the teachings all the time.
Where is the past, right? Where is the future? Where is the present? Then the fourth of these six ways of resting, "do not meditate," means you simply rest in awareness. Rest on the breath. Rest with a koan.
So you're not fabricating anything. You're not adding anything extra. You know, that practice of taking up a koan and trusting that what you have been given is all the information that you need.
And how often we don't trust that. You know, there's two lines and we think there's something missing. "They didn't give me the information that I needed. So let me just create it." I used to do that all the time. And then it would be like, "Why are you adding? You don't need to add."
You have everything that you need. And I didn't trust it. I didn't trust it.
And so this is a profound trust that if you're with that breath and you're thinking, "This is completely boring," trust that. I've always thought that you have to get to that point of utter boredom and stay with it because it's not until you move past it that something can open up. It means trusting the absolute completeness of this moment, of your breath, of your body.
"Do not analyze" means you don't judge your state of mind, your ability, the quality of your zazen. You don't get frustrated when your mind won't settle. You don't get excited or restless or fearful when it starts to get quiet.
And we do, in fact, which is normal. And this is saying, well, just stay, stay with it. Don't judge it.
Don't compare. Don't criticize. Don't measure.
Resting naturally is exactly that. Resting in the mind as it is. There's nothing to create and nothing to fix.
So if in one moment your mind is distracted, you rest in distracted mind. In another moment, your mind is quiet, you rest in quiet mind. You don't have to fix it and change it, control it.
It's not saying there's no effort. It's not saying there's no concentration. It's just saying don't turn it into something that it's not.
Mind is placed in ordinary mind. It rests in mind's own nature, which is, in fact, free and luminous and bright. But it's very difficult to see that when we're talking to ourselves, right? While we're worrying or planning or judging or analyzing.
So in Zazen, we are training in the practice of being silent, of listening and seeing and feeling ourselves from the inside, and seeing and feeling and hearing our environment also from the inside.
And "inside" is just one way to talk about it. But it points to a different way of perceiving because we're so often so outward-oriented and we get lost. And so the silence is not just an absence of sound.
It's really a space that is filled with presence, right? I've spoken before, you know, how the absence of… I can tell when somebody in the other room is on their cell phone because there's a vacuum. It's like the air, everything gets sucked out of the room. It's a silence that is very… Well, it feels to me exactly like that.
Like something's just been taken out of the room. This isn't that. This is filled, brimming with life.
I was going to say it's the potential for life, but it's not really. Its form is exactly emptiness. Emptiness is exactly form.
Silence is that life itself—if it's not the silence of repression or oppression. And for me, you know, silence has been the place in which I can most readily, most easily feel myself and hear, listen to myself.
You know, the stream of life that is moving through me and of which I am a part, but which is so easy to lose track of in our noise and our busyness. And, you know, even in a place like this, that's in a sense perfect for silence, I still crave it because there's still so much that we do. And there's so many times when we're not silent, actually.
And so I feel that I keep working. I keep practicing, letting it fill my activity, letting it fill, or the opposite, or resting really in that silence, in that space. Because the opposite, you know, that noise, it's how jarring it can be.
And we don't just hear it with our ears. We feel it. We feel it with our whole being.
You know, at one point I was sitting here in the Zen Dojo. It was seven o'clock, so it was a little before the evening sit.
And somebody who was a resident was pounding almonds downstairs in the kitchen, which is now the dining hall. And I was sitting here and I just kept hearing, pok, pok, pok, pok, pok. And, you know, I withstood it for about ten minutes, I think.
And I kept thinking, it's okay. I can really just be with this. I can just enter this.
And my whole body, at a certain point, I realized, you know, it was kind of like this. So I finally went down and I said, "You really need to do this right now." He said, "Oh, no, I'm done. I'm done. I'm almost done." And he stopped.
And, you know, the hearing of that, the sound of the fan, you know, is that the moment we turn it off, you feel it, right? You feel it in your whole being. I'm sorry that you have to listen to the noise machine, you know, outside the interview room, because I remember when I would sit here and I would hear it.
And it's, you know, it's not an unduly unpleasant sound, but it's this constant shh. And the moment you turn it off, something happens in your being, right? And so to be aware of that, you know, that it's not just our ears that are hearing this, that are feeling this. Koss did a session with the residents on Zen chants, and he was speaking about Dharanis and their power, the power of sounds, the power of words, which of course wouldn't be present without silence.
Without silence there wouldn't be any words, there would be no music. And so I do very much think about it as that sense of space and as a sense of connection, you know, that we're less and less intimate, true connection, that we're less and less used to and are so, and sometimes even downright afraid of, and yet we're so hungry for, we so crave.
There's a man called Gordon Hempton who calls himself an acoustic ecologist and a silence activist. And he's traveled all over the world the last thirty years recording natural sounds, but also silence, and cataloging places of silence. And he defines silence as the decibel level has to be under a certain number for fifteen minutes or more during daylight hours.
He says there's only twelve of those places in the United States, and none of them are protected. And so he's made it his life's work to protect these places, and he has one in Washington State, which is just one square inch—you may have heard of that—one square inch of silence, where he says there's absolutely no sound of, you know, the overhead airplanes. And this is deep in a national state park—I don't remember the name—where everywhere else you can still hear, you can hear the cars in the parking lot, you can hear the airplanes droning above, and there's this one square inch where it's actually completely silent. So he's created this foundation to protect that square inch.
That is why we so often speak of silence here, why we ask, that as we finish here, the talk, that as we're, you know, getting ready to go downstairs and putting on shoes and the residents are resetting the Zendo, that we do that in silence, that we do it quietly. This is a designated space of silence, the Zendo, and we'd like to keep it that way. Let's really protect it.
Without silence there wouldn't be any words, there would be no music
The cell phone fight we've kind of lost. Now everybody comes into the monastery with cell phones, and we ask that you put them away for the weekend, and many people don't, and that's fine—that's your choice—but silence is, in fact, becoming endangered. It's a dwindling species, if you will, and if we don't protect it, who's going to? And so they've done studies that in places where there's a higher level of noise, people are less likely to help one another, and to me that makes sense. You know, not only can’t we hear or see or sense what's happening around us, we can't feel ourselves or one another.
We can't be intimate, and so you could say that the practice of noble silence is to be intimate, deeply intimate. And someone sent me this cartoon: there's a couple sitting in a restaurant, and she says to him, "You know, this is the nicest conversation we've had in months; let's not spoil it by talking."
This is the Coda to Letter of Testimony by Octavio Paz:
Perhaps to love is to learn to walk through this world, to learn to be silent like the oak and the linden in the fable, to learn to see. Your glance scattered seeds, it planted a tree. I talk because you shake its leaves.
And this oak and linden appear in one of Ovid's fables. Baucis and Philemon were a couple, an older couple, and they were very poor villagers. One day, Jupiter and Mercury decide to come to this village and really test them, test their hospitality. So they dress up as poor villagers also, and they start going door to door, and they throw a storm down over the village, and they go knocking, asking for asylum and for food, and they get turned away time and time again—until they get to Baucis and Philemon's house. They welcome them very warmly, and, like I said, they're very poor, they have very little, and they bring out everything that they have.
They have a goose in the backyard, and oh, then there's a carafe of wine, and Baucis sees that every time she pours wine to her two guests, the carafe is full again. She realizes, and she goes to her husband and says, "You know, these are gods, so we have to actually take care of them." And so she says to him, "Go and kill our goose outside." And she's trying, she's making noise—she's banging pots and pans so they won't hear the goose screaming in the back—and Philemon is chasing the goose in the backyard.
Finally, Jupiter realizes what they're doing, and he stops them, and he reveals who they are. He says, "No, you don't have to kill your goose. You have shown more than enough your goodness and your hospitality, so come with us."
And they take them up this hill, and when they turn, the gods—who are not exactly known for their mercy, the Greek gods—have decided that to punish the town, the village, they're just going to raze it to the ground. And they do. They send another huge storm, and they flood the town and turn it into a lake. Only Baucis and Philemon are saved. And then Jupiter turns to them and says, "I'll grant you a wish. What would you like?"
And Baucis says, "Build us a temple here so that we can…," it's a little strange, "so that we can pay homage to you after you've killed our whole village. Let's raise the temple, and we'll be the guardians, we'll be the guardians." And Jupiter says, "Okay," and the temple appears.
Then he turns to Philemon and says, "I'll give you a wish also." And he says, "Let us die together. Let us die at exactly the same time so the other—one or the other—doesn't have to suffer when the other one dies." And so they're granted that too.
The years pass, and they're taking care of the temple. One day, Baucis is out in the garden, and she calls to Philemon. When he comes out, she's looking at her feet, and her toes have taken root, and slowly bark is spreading, you know, up her legs and going up her trunk. Philemon just hobbles up to her, and he hugs her waist. She holds his back, and they're completely intertwined, and they just look at one another and say goodbye.
As the story goes, buds are emerging from their fingertips, and Philemon can feel leaves growing out of his head. The lake is still where it's always been, and the temple now is gone, but beside it are two trees, an oak and a linden, whose branches are intertwined as though they're embracing. Hanging from every bough and every branch are ribbons, gifts from passing lovers.
And so that's the story that Paz is referencing. It reminded me, this poem, this coda, reminded me that I had given a talk on silence about six years ago, just after one of my visits home to Mexico, and I had just seen a group of my friends I hadn't seen in twenty years.
First, I had to get over my shaved head, which I had at the time, and then their most pressing question, if you can believe it, was: "Can you have snacks at the monastery?" They were really concerned that I couldn't eat any time that I wanted. I assured them, yes, I had snacks stashed in my drawer. But then they asked, "What are you doing? What are you doing there?" And, you know, I mumbled something about suffering and putting an end to it and saving all beings, or something like that.
Later, I was so dissatisfied with that answer. It felt so abstract to me and so not showing them anything about what my life really was. I just kept being with it, sitting with it. And one day it came: I came here to know how to love, to learn how to love, which is really just another way of saying to learn how to be a human being—what the names and the labels say, but what it actually means to be a human being.
The more you practice, the more you realize when you're falling short in that department. At least I do. But also, the more I practice, the more I sense the possibility of it. So it's hard to turn away, and it's hard to settle, even in those times when you don't feel up, you know, to the task.
Perhaps to love is to learn to walk through this world, is to know how to draw a bow, how to wield a brush with the kind of movement that is still, that is silent, and it is all-encompassing. Right? So when you see a true master—archer or artist—their movement is indistinguishable from stillness. There's no static, no noise in it. It's flowing. Actually, that's extra. It's not flowing or not flowing. It's just itself.
And the original poem in Spanish actually says “to be still,” like the oak and the linden, not “to be silent.” But, you know, I think silence and stillness, of course, are so completely intertwined. And yet, in one sense, no tree is completely still or silent. Just so, as the archer, the artist uncoils from that silence, from that stillness, into movement, into sound.
And the relationship—the relationship with the target, relationship with the brush and the paper, the character, the form, the mark, the relationship with our own being. Pascal—Blaise Pascal—said that all of humanity's problems still stem from our inability to sit still in a room alone.
Perhaps to be silent is to know ourselves as we truly are, which is indivisible.
I've thought often, and lately especially, that stillness and silence may be the two qualities that actually will save us from ourselves, that will show us the way to harmony. Because we speak so much, and often we know so little about what we speak, because we know so little about ourselves.
I love stories. As many of you know, I feel they're a very important way in which we make sense of our world and ourselves. We seek that understanding. A psychoanalyst once told me that the goal of psychoanalysis is to replace a faulty story with a healthy one. But practice shows us that you don't need a story at all. In one sense, this is true: the moment we realize that the self we thought so solid, so real, is actually empty, then all the stories we've told about ourselves can dissolve, can be set aside.
On the other hand, to navigate the sometimes—or often—stormy waters of human life, it's helpful to have a map. And I think this is exactly what a good story, a universal story, does.
I also understand there are realms that not even the best story can penetrate. There are places, there are moments, when not even the most eloquent words can describe that. Even the best names—the most appropriate names—are far from the object that they name. And at worst, they become walls; they become boundaries and limits that define what something is and is not. I'm Shiite, you're Sunni; I'm Jewish, you're Palestinian; I'm white, you're black.
At best, they point the way to closeness, but they are not that closeness itself. That closeness most readily can be reached in silence. The mystics across traditions tell us that. That's why I believe that silence is the way of wonder, of humility, of reverence, and that it can, in fact, be the doorway into that single-minded awareness, that unification, that mobility—that's what Moggallayana was speaking of—not so that we can erase our differences—I mean, that would just be blatant denial—but so we can see that difference is not all there is to us. Not by a long shot.
So perhaps to love is to learn to be silent like the oak and the linden, like the maple and the ash, and the river rock, and the sky draped over with cloud covers, and the dew shining, you know, on top of the grass early in the morning.
Perhaps to be silent is to know ourselves as we truly are, which is indivisible.