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.
Later, many, many years later, somebody decided to continue this story, which is from Genesis, of course, about the naming of the animals. It happened all in one day, the story goes, and established who was who, and what was what, who was over what, the relationships between one and another. Unfortunately for 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. She decides to unname all the animals, ending with herself. 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. Next, she unnames the yaks, who, at first, put up a fight, because they feel that "yak" feels just right. After all, they've always been called yak. It's the females who finally convince the bulls that from the yak's perspective, the name is redundant, since they don't really use it themselves. The males agree, and they let it go. Next, Eve unnames the horses and the cows, the 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. The cats, of course, deny ever having had a name, other than the self-given ones, which no one has ever known 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 the name "dog" or "rabbit" or "crow" or "mina" that we're getting rid of. Eventually, with a bit of nudging, they too agree to give up their names. Insects and fish, they just give them up without pause, all those letters and syllables disappearing into thin air or into the waters of the ocean.
Finally, when there's no one left to unname, Eve realizes that what she was hoping for has come to pass. She feels closer to the animals than ever, and they to her. 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. All the animals move through the air and the sea and on land, and under it, exactly as they were meant to do—as one great, unified body. 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 look up when she approaches. 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." Adam's still not paying very much attention. He says, "Okay, just put it over there. When's dinner, by the way?" Eve’s a little disappointed. She was expecting having to defend herself.. She was expecting at least a little bit of a fight, or an argument of some sort. But she just says, "I don't know. I'm going. I'm going, and take good care. I hope the key to the garden turns up."
She begins to say that she's going to go with all the animals. But then she realizes she can no longer name them, and that's when she realizes 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. 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—my longing for it, my hunger. I was thinking about this as I wrote this talk, that I didn't realize how not silent this week would be—all the work that would be happening and all the hubbub. I thought, well, maybe even more reason to bring silence to light, dust it off. Then I remembered this story, which is by Ursula K. Le Guin, and Eve's impulse to take those words, those names back and drop them into silence in order to let it do its work, its work of unification. 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 about this unification as it relates to silence. 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—the deep meditative states which the Buddha described a practitioner moves through in their practice of meditation—the point, ultimately, is to see things as they really are. In the first jhana, there is still directed thought. There's evaluation. But 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. The sutras say that this is like someone taking a bath and making a ball with powder soap, and they're wetting and kneading the bowl of soap, letting all the water suffuse the ball until it is completely steeped in that water. It's active, it's engaged. You're doing the kneading. You're doing the work of taming the mind. But in the second jhana, there's a little less effort involved. There's unification of awareness, free from directed thought and evaluation. This is the moment in which you become the breath. You're not trying to concentrate. You're not trying to follow your breath or even be your breath. You are it. You're resting in the natural, bright, luminous state of mind. The sutras say this is like a river flowing effortlessly in one direction, or like a lake that has no outflow. The water is just slowly rising as water will when there's no place for it to go.
Slowly, the water is drenching and steeping and filling the lake. But it’s happening naturally, without impediment and without effort. This is what noble silence is, according to Moggallayana.
Tilopa, a 10th-century Buddhist teacher—Naropa's teacher—taught the six points for sustaining meditation, or six ways of resting. He says: do not recall, do not think, do not anticipate, do not meditate, do not analyze, do rest naturally.
The first three avoid getting tangled up with past, present, and future.I just came across this article about a man, a Russian man, who had incredible recall. He couldn't forget anything he had in mind. 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 and repeat it verbatim. What they found, was that his power of imagination was also extremely sharp, extremely strong. He saw numbers as individuals.Number one was a very thin, ramrod-straight, kind of cranky man, bald. Number two was a plump woman with a beehive. Actually, I think I made that up. This was in the twenties, before the beehive, but it was some elaborate hairdo. He could see each image in his mind, and that's what he would remember.
There's that well-known technique where you're in a house or a palace and you place each of your memories into the rooms in sequence, making your way around the house. He would do the same 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.
There was another study with a man who was in a motorcycle accident and who lost his short-term memory. But not only had he lost the ability to remember, he couldn't imagine the future either. His power to imagine had been lost. Past, present, and future are completely interrelated. We don't think about it that way unless we stop and look very precisely. But we hear this in the teachings all the time. Where is the past? Where is the future? Where is the present? That’s why Tilopa says, don’t try to est in any of these states.
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. You're not fabricating anything. You're not adding anything. It’s like the practice of taking up a koan and trusting that what you have been given is all the information you need. Yet, often, we don't trust it. We read the two lines of a koan and we think there's something missing. "They didn't give me the information, so let me just create it." I used to do that all the time. And my teacher would say, "Why are you adding to the koan? You don't need to add anything." But I didn’t trust it.
If you're with the 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. We do, in fact, judge it, which is normal. But Tilopa is saying, well, just 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. If in one moment your mind is distracted, you rest in distracted mind. In another moment, your mind is quiet, yso ou rest in quiet mind. You don't have to fix it and change it, control it. But Tilopa is not saying there's no effort. He’s not saying there's no concentration. He’s 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, while we're worrying or planning or judging or analyzing. In zazen, we’re 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.
Silence is not just an absence of sound. It's really a space that is filled with presence. I can tell when somebody in the other room is on their cell phone, for example, because there's a vacuum. It's like the air, everything gets sucked out of the room. It's a silence that is very… empty. This isn't that. This is brimming with life.
Silence is that life itself—if it's not the silence of repression or oppression. For me silence has been the place in which I can most readily, most easily feel myself and hear myself and 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. Even in a place like this, that's perfect for silence, I still crave it because there's still so much to do, and there's so many times when we're not silent, actually.
So I keep working, I keep practicing letting silence fill my activity, because its opposite, noise, is so jarring. We don't just hear it with our ears. We feel it. We feel it with our whole being.
At one point I was sitting here in the zendo, alone. It was seven o'clock, so it was a little before the evening sit, and somebody started pounding almonds in the kitchen, which is right now in the dining hall because of the renovation. I was sitting here and I just kept hearing, pok, pok, pok, pok, pok. For about ten minutes, I thought, It's okay. I can just be with this. I can just enter this. But my whole body was tense, I realized at one point. I finally went downstairs and I said, "Do you really need to do this right now?” The cook said, "Oh, no, I'm done. I'm done. I'm almost done." And he stopped.
It’s like the sound of the exhaust fan. The moment we turn it off, you feel it. You feel it in your whole being. I'm sorry that you have to listen to the noise machine outside the interview room, because I remember what it was like to sit in the zendo and hear it constantly on. It’s not an unduly unpleasant sound, but it's this constant ssshhhh. The moment you turn it off, something happens in your body, right? Be aware of that—that it's not just your ears that are hearing this, that are feeling this.
Kaz did a session with the residents on Zen chants, and he was speaking about dharani 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. I do very much think about it as that sense of space and as a sense of connection.
There's a man called Gordon Hempton who calls himself an acoustic ecologist and a silence activist. He's traveled all over the world the last thirty years recording natural sounds, but also silence, and cataloging places of silence. 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—one square inch of silence, where he says there's absolutely no sound. This is deep in a national state park—I don't remember the name—where everywhere else you can still 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. 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 the talk and are getting ready to go downstairs, putting on shoes, and 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
There have been studies showing that people are less likely to help one another in noisy places. It makes sense: when there is too much noise, we can’t hear, see, or sense clearly what’s happening around us. But more importantly, we can’t be intimate—with ourselves or with one another. So we might say that noble silence is the practice of intimacy, of learning to be in true relationship—with ourselves and with each other.
Octavio Paz hints at this in his Coda to “Letter of Testimony”:
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.
The oak and the linden appear in one of Ovid’s fables. Baucis and Philemon were a poor couple, living in a small village. When Jupiter and Mercury came knocking on doors disguised as travelers during a storm, everyone turned them away—everyone except Baucis and Philemon, who welcomed them into their humble home.
The gods, who were not known for their tolerance, destroyed the rest of the town and flooded it beneath a lake. But they spared the couple and transformed their home into a temple. Then Jupiter offered them a wish. They asked to be made guardians of the temple, and that they be allowed to die together, so that one would not have to mourn the other.
Years passed. One morning, the old man was digging in his garden when his wife called to him. He saw her standing outside the temple, staring at her feet—where her toes had taken root and brown bark was spreading up her legs. He hobbled toward her and put his arms around her waist. She wrapped her arms around his back. As they held each other, they could feel buds emerging from their fingertips; he felt leaves growing from the crown of his head. As the bark spread across their faces, they looked at one another and said goodbye.
The temple is long gone now, but the lake still lies where it always did. Beside it stand two trees—an oak and a linden—their branches intertwined as though embracing. Hanging from every bough and branch are ribbons, gifts left by passing lovers.
Perhaps, as Paz wrote, to love is to learn to walk through this world. To draw a bow. To wield a brush with a kind of movement that is still, silent, and active. The original line says to “be still like the oak and the linden,” but of course no tree is ever completely still or completely silent. The archer, the artist—each uncoils from stillness and silence into movement, into sound, into relationship: with themselves, the target, the brush, the paper, the mark.
Blaise Pascal once wrote, “All of humanity’s problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” I’ve thought for some time that silence and stillness may be the two qualities that can save us from ourselves, that can show us the way back to harmony.
Silence and stillness may be the two qualities that can save us from ourselves
I love stories, as many of you know. I believe stories are how we make sense of ourselves and of our world. A psychoanalyst once told me that the goal of psychoanalysis was to replace a faulty story with a healthy one, while the purpose of Zen practice was to show that there is no need for a story at all. In one sense, this is true. The moment we realize that the self we thought was so solid and real is actually empty, all the stories we’ve told ourselves about it can dissolve. Yet, to navigate the sometimes stormy waters of a human life, it helps to have a map. That is what a good story—a universal story—does.
Still, I understand that there are realms where even the best story cannot go. Places and moments that not even the most eloquent words can touch. The best names, the most appropriate labels, are always far away from what they name. At worst, words become walls—boundaries that define what the other is or is not. I’m Shiite, you’re Sunni. I’m Jewish, you’re Palestinian. I’m white, you’re black. At best, words can only point toward closeness. But true closeness can only be reached in silence. All the mystics tell us this.
That is why I believe silence is the way of wonder, humility, and reverence. Why it can be the doorway to the unification of awareness that the sages speak of. Not so that we erase our differences—denial has never been the goal—but so we can see that difference is not all that we are, not by a long shot.
Saint Teresa of Ávila said that the important thing in prayer is not to think much, but to love much. I remember looking back at notes for a talk I gave six years ago, also on silence. I had just returned from visiting old friends from grade school—people I hadn’t seen in twenty years. First they had to get over my shaved head, which I had at the time. Then came their most pressing question: “Can you have snacks at the monastery?” They were deeply concerned by the fact that I couldn’t eat whenever I wanted, that meals were set. To them, that seemed the height of unfreedom.
They asked what I was doing there, and I mumbled something about “freedom from suffering.” But afterward, I felt dissatisfied—it was too abstract. The question kept churning in me until one day it hit me: I came here to learn how to love. Which is just another way of saying, I came here to learn how to be a human being—not what the names and labels say, but the truth of it.
I came here to learn how to love
The Dalai Lama says, “My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.”
The more one practices, the more one notices the moments when one falls short of that kindness. But the more one also senses the possibility of it—the vastness of what love and silence together can reveal.
Perhaps to love is to learn to be silent like the oak and the linden—like the maple, the ash, the bluestone, the river rock, and the sky draped with cloud cover. Perhaps to be silent is to know ourselves, once and for all, as indivisible.