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Essay

On Silence

Why the contemplative traditions guard the tongue, still the mind and keep their strength

By The Editors21 minute read

Near the end of Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates finishes a long argument for the immortality of the soul, and his friends do not answer at once. Phaedo, telling the story, says that “for a considerable time there was silence”: Socrates himself seemed to be meditating on what had been said, and so were most of the others.1 It is a small moment in a great dialogue, but it is the right kind of silence: not an absence, in which nothing is happening, but a fullness, in which something is being taken in. Words have been spoken, and before more are spoken they are given room.

Every contemplative tradition prizes silence of this second kind. Monks keep it, hermits seek it, yogis vow it, Quakers gather in it, and the mystics of every faith report that the deepest things they knew were found in it and could not be carried out of it whole. Yet the word covers several different things, and the traditions value it for several different reasons. This essay tries to set them out: what silence is, what it is for, what is lost when it is neglected, and what the traditions mean when they say, as many of them do, that speech spends a strength which silence gathers.

Three silences

It helps to distinguish three silences, which the traditions themselves distinguish, though not always in these words. The first is the silence of the tongue: refraining from speech, or from unnecessary speech. It is the easiest to describe and the hardest to keep, and it is where every tradition begins. The second is the silence of the mind: the quieting of the inner talk that goes on when the mouth is shut, the commentary, rehearsal, argument and complaint that most people carry with them all day. The third is the silence that the traditions place at the very end of the path: the silence before the ultimate, or of the ultimate itself, which they say no word can reach.

The three are connected. Outward silence is a training for inward silence, and inward silence is, in the traditions’ view, the only condition in which the third can be met. But they are not the same, and confusing them causes trouble. A person can keep the mouth closed while the mind roars; a person can talk all day, as teachers must, and remain quiet within. The Dhammapada makes the point sharply: a man is not a sage, a muni, because he keeps silence, if he is foolish and ignorant; he is a sage by weighing good and evil and choosing the good.2 The Sanskrit word for silence, mauna, means the condition of a muni, the silent sage, so the verse turns the word against itself. The silence that makes the sage is not the silence of the lips.

The guarded tongue

Still, the traditions begin with the lips, because that is where the habit can be seen. The Rule of Saint Benedict, written in the sixth century and still followed in Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries, gives a whole chapter to restraint of speech. It allows that good and edifying talk exists, and still asks that even such talk be seldom permitted to the monks, because of the weight of silence. After Compline, the last office of the day, the Rule asks for silence through the night. The Cistercians of the Strict Observance, the Trappists, kept the custom so closely that they developed a language of signs for the necessities of the day. Contrary to popular belief they take no vow of silence; but silence is the air their life is lived in.

The desert fathers of Egypt, two centuries before Benedict, had already made silence one of the pillars of the monastic life. Their collected sayings tell of Abba Agathon, who carried a stone in his mouth for three years until he had learned to keep silent. They tell of Arsenius, a learned man from the imperial court, who prayed to be shown the way of salvation and heard a voice telling him to flee from men, to be silent and to be still. The same Arsenius is reported to have said that he had often repented of having spoken, but never of having kept silent. The sayings are not records in the modern sense, and the same words are sometimes given to different fathers, but the teaching they carry is consistent from one collection to the next.

Other traditions hold the same discipline in the same place. Greek biographers of Pythagoras, writing many centuries after him, report that those who came to his school had to keep silence for as long as five years before they were admitted to the inner teaching. Whether or not the report is true of Pythagoras himself, it shows what later Greeks thought a school of wisdom should ask of a beginner: first, learn to listen. The rabbis of the Mishnah, in the tractate known as the Sayings of the Fathers, call silence a fence around wisdom, and record a sage’s remark that he had grown up all his days among the wise and had found nothing better for the body than silence. Ibn ʿArabī, the great Andalusian master of Sufism, named silence first among the four pillars of the spiritual life, with retreat, hunger and wakefulness.

The Imitation of Christ, the fifteenth-century handbook of the inner life, gives the reason in the plainest terms. Its author, usually identified as Thomas à Kempis, writes of the talk of ordinary company: “Many a time I wish that I had held my peace, and had not gone amongst men.”3 He asks why we talk and gossip so continually, when we so rarely return to silence without some hurt to the conscience, and he answers his own question with unusual honesty: we talk because we hope for comfort from one another, and to refresh a tired mind with variety. A little later he puts the difficulty in a single sentence: “it is easier to be altogether silent than it is not to exceed in word.”4 Complete abstinence, that is, is easier than moderation. The tongue, once started, does not easily stop where it should.

The Buddhist teaching on speech makes the same distinction more systematically. Right speech, the third factor of the Noble Eightfold Path, is defined in the early discourses as abstaining from four things: false speech, divisive speech, harsh speech and idle chatter. Silence is not the goal; truthful, kind, timely and useful speech is. But the fourth abstention, from idle talk, covers a great deal of what most people say in a day, and the Buddha is remembered as telling his monks that when they gathered they should do one of two things: discuss the teaching, or keep a noble silence. The Dhammapada adds its verse on restraint: good is restraint in the body, in speech and in thought, and good is restraint in all things.5 The Bhagavad Gītā describes the austerity of speech in similar terms: words that cause no one distress, words that are true, kind and helpful, and the recitation of scripture.6

There is an ethical reason in all this, and the traditions do not hide it. A great deal of harm is done with the tongue: lies, slander, cruelty, the careless repetition of what one has heard. Thomas à Kempis writes of “how good and peacemaking a thing it is to be silent concerning others,” and not to believe every report or pass it on.7 Much of the restraint that the monasteries ask for is simply the refusal to do this harm. But the deeper reason, which this essay is chiefly about, is not that speech can wound others. It is that speech, even harmless speech, spends something in the one who speaks.

What speech spends

Most people know the feeling without needing a doctrine for it. After a long day of talk, of meetings, calls, conversations and arguments, one is tired in a way that has little to do with the body’s labour. Thomas à Kempis quotes an older writer on it: “As oft as I have gone among men, so oft have I returned less a man.”8 The thought is usually traced to the Roman philosopher Seneca, who wrote in one of his letters that he came home from the crowd worse than he had gone out. Whoever said it first, it names an experience that the contemplatives took seriously: something leaks out of a person in speech, and the leak can be stopped.

The Tao Te Ching says it in its fifth chapter, with an image from the forge. The space between heaven and earth, it says, is like a bellows: emptied, it loses none of its power; moved, it sends out more. Then, in James Legge’s rhymed rendering: “Much speech to swift exhaustion lead we see; / Your inner being guard, and keep it free.”9 The bellows is powerful because it is empty, and it keeps its power by keeping its emptiness. The person who speaks without pause is like a bellows that never draws breath: what goes out is not replenished, and the end is exhaustion. Elsewhere the book praises the sage who conveys his instruction without the use of speech,10 and says that few in the world attain to the teaching without words.11

The Upaniṣads give the same counsel as a method. In the Katha Upaniṣad, Death himself teaches the young Naciketas that the wise should hold speech in the mind, the mind in the intellect, the intellect in the great self, and that in the self of peace.12 Swami Paramananda, whose translation is in the Library’s reader, explains in his commentary that speech here stands for all the senses, and that the mind must be withdrawn from its objects and “cease to waste its energies on nonessential things.” The teaching is a gathering in: each power is drawn back into the one above it, until the whole person rests in what the Upaniṣad calls the Peaceful One. Speech comes first in the series because it is the most outward of the powers, the place where the inner life most easily spills out into the world.

The banked fire

Several traditions speak of this gathering in the language of energy, and it is worth hearing their language before translating it into ours. In India the word for austerity, tapas, means heat. The disciplines of fasting, vigil, continence and silence were understood to kindle an inner fire, and that fire was power: in the Vedic hymns the creator brings forth the world through tapas, and in the epics a sage who has practised it long enough can make the gods tremble. The Bhagavad Gītā, in its seventeenth chapter, lists silence, mauna, among the austerities of the mind(Vyāsa 1882, XVII.16), and Arnold’s verse calls it the “Sway of the silent Spirit.”13 Silence, on this view, is not merely the absence of noise. It is a fire banked and kept.

The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali make a parallel claim about another restraint: when continence is firmly established, vigour is gained(Patañjali 1914, II.38). The logic is the same. Energy that is not spent outwardly is not lost; it is turned inward and becomes available for the work of attention. The fifth limb of yoga, pratyāhāra, the drawing back of the senses from their objects, applies the same movement to the senses as a whole, and the Gītā’s yogi sits in a still place, restraining heart and senses, “silent, calm.”14 Daoist inner alchemy describes three treasures of the body, essence, energy and spirit, jing, qi and shen, and teaches that essence must be conserved before it can be refined into energy, and energy into spirit. Much of its practice is a discipline of not leaking: of breath, of vital essence, of attention, and of words.

The opening prayer of the Kena Upaniṣad, chanted before study, asks that the limbs, speech, life-force, sight, hearing, strength and all the senses may gain in vigour.15 Speech stands in that list beside breath and strength, as one of the powers by which a living being acts in the world. Like the others, it can be squandered, and it can be husbanded. The rabbi in the Mishnah who found nothing better for the body than silence was saying the same thing in another idiom: silence is not only good for the soul, it is good for the whole person, and its benefits are felt in the body first.

A modern reader may want to translate all of this into physics, and the translation is instructive if it is not pressed too hard. The law of the conservation of energy says that in a closed system energy is never created or destroyed, only changed from one form into another. But a second law follows close behind it: in every real change some of the energy becomes less available for work, scattered as heat, vibration and sound. A machine that runs noisily is a machine that wastes. Noise, in the literal sense, is energy escaping where it was not meant to go. The comparison is only a comparison; the traditions’ energies are not measured in joules, and no one has weighed the tapas of a sage. But the shape of the teaching is the same. What is spoken without need is not destroyed; it is dispersed, and it cannot be gathered again for the work at hand. Silence is the closing of the vessel, so that what is there can be collected and turned to use.

The point can be seen in a life that was anything but withdrawn. Mohandas Gandhi, who led one of the great political movements of the twentieth century, kept a day of silence each week for many years, usually on Mondays, and on those days communicated, when he had to, by writing notes. By his own account the practice began as a way of finding relief from the strain of his work and time for his correspondence, and it became for him a spiritual discipline as well. Gandhi was not a hermit. He spoke to crowds, negotiated with governments and wrote without cease, and he found that a life of so much outward action needed a regular day in which nothing went out.

The silence of the mind

Closing the mouth is the beginning, not the end. Anyone who has tried to keep silence for a whole day discovers that the talk does not stop; it goes inward. The mind rehearses conversations, replies to imagined critics, comments on everything it sees and plans what to say next. This inner speech spends the same energy as the outer kind, and perhaps more, since it has no listener to bring it to an end. The second silence is the quieting of this inner talk, and it is the real subject of most contemplative practice.

The Tao Te Ching asks for emptiness brought to the utmost degree, and for “stillness guarded with unwearying vigour.”16 The phrase is a paradox worth dwelling on. Stillness is not laziness; it takes vigour to guard it, because the mind’s habit is to move. All things, the chapter goes on, rise and flourish and return to their root, and the return to the root is stillness. The Eastern Christian contemplatives called the same state hesychia, stillness, and gave its name to a whole tradition, hesychasm, in which the monk sits in the cell and gathers the mind into the heart with the short, repeated Jesus Prayer, until prayer, breath and attention become one movement. The desert fathers said that the cell would teach a monk everything, if he stayed in it. What it teaches is mostly silence.

Heinrich Suso, the fourteenth-century Dominican, has the soul address itself in the same spirit: “collect thyself from all external things, into the tranquil silence of the inner man.”17 Kabīr, the weaver-poet of Banaras, says it in his own register: in the temple of the sky the sun and the moon are shining, and the right response is to “still your mind to silence before that splendour.”18 Brother Lawrence, the cook of a Carmelite house in seventeenth-century Paris, gave up, he says, all set forms of devotion except those his state required, and kept himself in God’s presence by a simple attention, which he also calls “an habitual, silent and secret conversation of the soul with GOD.”19 His silence is not empty. It is a conversation without words, carried on in the middle of a busy kitchen.

The meditation traditions of Buddhism teach the quieting of the mind in great detail, and retreats in many of them are still held in what is called noble silence, in which participants do not speak, and sometimes do not even meet one another’s eyes, for days at a time. The point is not to suppress thought by force, which does not work, but to stop feeding it. Speech feeds the inner commentary, and the commentary feeds speech; when the outer channel is closed, the inner one gradually slows, and the mind becomes able to see what it has been doing. The Dhammapada says that one word of sense, which brings quiet to the one who hears it, is better than a thousand words without sense.20 A mind that has grown quiet is one that can hear such a word.

The silence beyond words

The third silence is the one the traditions speak of with most reluctance, because it is the one about which, by their own account, nothing can be said. The Kena Upaniṣad, asking what moves the mind, the speech and the senses, answers that there the eye does not go, nor speech, nor mind21, and gives its instruction: “That which speech does not illumine, but which illumines speech: know that alone to be the Brahman.”22 The ultimate is not something that speech can reach, but the light by which speech itself is possible. To talk about it is like trying to see one’s own eyes.

Hence the strange fact that several of the great teachers are remembered most vividly for their silences. When the wanderer Vacchagotta asked the Buddha directly whether there is a self, and then whether there is not, the Buddha said nothing, and afterwards explained to Ānanda that either answer would have been misunderstood. In the Vimalakīrti Sūtra, a gathering of bodhisattvas each give an account of how one enters the teaching of non-duality; Mañjuśrī, the bodhisattva of wisdom, says that it lies beyond all words and explanations; and then the layman Vimalakīrti, asked for his own answer, says nothing at all, and Mañjuśrī praises his silence as the true entrance. In India, Śiva as Dakṣiṇāmūrti is pictured as a young teacher seated beneath a banyan tree among aged disciples, whose doubts are dispelled by his silence. In the twentieth century Ramana Maharshi, the sage of Tiruvannamalai, spoke of silence as the highest form of teaching, and many who came to him said they had learned most by sitting quietly in his presence. Rūmī, who wrote some of the most torrential poetry in any language, closed many of his lyrics with the word khāmūsh, silence, as if all the words had been a way of arriving there.

The Hebrew Bible has its own version of this silence. When the prophet Elijah, fleeing for his life, stands on the mountain of God, there passes a great wind, then an earthquake, then a fire, and the text says that the Lord was in none of them. After the fire comes what the Hebrew calls qol demamah daqqah, a phrase that can be rendered as the sound of a thin silence, and it is then, not in the storm, that Elijah wraps his face in his mantle. A psalm makes stillness the condition of knowing: cease, it says, and know that I am God. The Christian mystics carried the theme into the language of the negative way. Jan van Ruusbroec, describing the divine nature as the enlightened mind contemplates it, names among its attributes “dark silence and wild waste.”23

This silence is not the same as the absence of speech, and it is not reached simply by being quiet. But the traditions agree that it is not reached without being quiet either. The silence of the tongue prepares the silence of the mind, and the silence of the mind is the only place in which the third silence can be met, because it is the only state in which a person is not busy filling the space with their own words. The Imitation of Christ puts the whole movement into a single sentence of prayer: “before Thee my mouth is without speech, and my silence speaketh to Thee.”24 Silence here is not the end of the conversation but its deepest form.

Tagore, in Gitanjali, turns the relation around and speaks of God’s silence rather than the soul’s: “If thou speakest not I will fill my heart with thy silence and endure it.”25 The poet waits, as the night waits for the morning, and trusts that the silence is not an absence. In another song he asks the lord of silence to come with peace and rest when the din of work shuts him out from what lies beyond.26 For the contemplatives, the silence of God and the silence of the soul are two sides of one meeting.

Silence between people

It would be a mistake to think of silence only as a solitary discipline. Some of its most important forms are shared. The Society of Friends, the Quakers, have gathered for worship in silence since the seventeenth century, without liturgy or appointed minister, waiting together and speaking only when one of them feels moved to speak. The silence is not the absence of the service; it is the service. Those who have attended such a meeting often describe the quality of a gathered silence, which is quite different from the silence of an empty room.

Silence is also the condition of listening. A person who is always preparing a reply does not hear what is said to them. The silence the Pythagoreans were said to keep, the monastic custom of speaking little, the Buddhist counsel against idle talk, all serve among other things to make room for another voice: the teacher’s, the scripture’s, the neighbour’s. The most basic courtesy, in the end, is to let another person finish, and the most basic attention is to go on listening after they have.

And silence is sometimes the only right response to suffering. In the Book of Job, when Job’s three friends come to comfort him in his ruin, they sit with him on the ground for seven days and seven nights, and none of them speaks a word to him, because they see that his grief is very great. Their trouble begins when they open their mouths. Anyone who has sat with the grieving knows that words are often a way of protecting oneself from another’s pain, and that presence without words can be the greater kindness.

Silence also guards the speaker. Thomas à Kempis advises that when others think ill of us and say so, “It is no small prudence to keep silence in an evil time” and to turn inward, rather than spend oneself in self-defence.27 Marcus Aurelius, writing to himself in the middle of a war, puts a related thought more bluntly: “No longer talk at all about the kind of man that a good man ought to be, but be such.”28 A great deal of speech is self-presentation, and the energy it takes would be better given to the thing itself.

When silence is wrong

The traditions are not naive about silence, and an honest account must say where it fails. The Dhammapada records an old saying that people blame the one who sits silent, the one who speaks much and the one who speaks little: no one on earth escapes blame.29 No form of speech or silence is beyond criticism, and none is right in every circumstance. The book of Ecclesiastes says that there is a time to keep silence and a time to speak, and the hard part is knowing which time it is.

There is a silence of cowardice as well as a silence of wisdom: the silence that watches injustice and says nothing, the silence of the bystander, the silence that protects the powerful. There is the silence imposed on the weak, which is not a discipline but an oppression. There is the sullen silence of resentment, which punishes others while calling itself peace. None of these is what the contemplatives meant. The silence they praise is chosen, not imposed; it is turned toward the truth, not away from it; and it makes a person more able to speak rightly when speech is needed, not less. The prophets of Israel, who spoke with terrible directness to kings, were men who had first been struck silent by what they saw.

There is also a spiritual danger, and the teachers knew it well: silence can become a performance, one more way of being admired. Thomas à Kempis warns against virtue made known and too hastily praised, and the Dhammapada’s verse on the false muni is a warning against exactly this. A silence kept in order to be seen keeping it spends as much as any chatter, and perhaps more, because it adds pretence to the cost.

A world without quiet

The traditions developed their teaching on silence in worlds that were, by our standards, very quiet. A monk in the Egyptian desert or a nun in a medieval cloister had to make an effort to talk; the background of their lives was wind, birds, bells and their own breathing. Ours is different. Traffic, machines, music in public places and the constant availability of other people’s voices through screens make silence something that has to be sought on purpose, and many people now live whole days without a single quiet hour.

The cost of this is not only spiritual. Public health bodies now treat environmental noise as a pollutant. The World Health Organization’s European office, in a report published in 2011, estimated that traffic noise alone costs the people of western Europe at least a million healthy years of life every year, through disturbed sleep, stress and the illnesses that follow from them. Researchers studying the effects of music on breathing and heart rate have reported that short pauses of silence between pieces were more relaxing, by those measures, than the music itself. The traditions’ claim that silence restores is not only a figure of speech.

But the deeper cost is the one the contemplatives described. A mind that is never without input never has occasion to settle, and a person who is never silent never discovers what is there when the noise stops. The noise of the modern world is partly outside us and partly within, and the inner kind follows us into the quietest room. That is why the traditions’ teaching remains practical. Silence is not something the world will provide; it has to be kept.

Keeping silence

What would it mean to keep silence today, for someone who is not a monk? The traditions offer a few simple counsels, and they are much the same everywhere.

Begin small, and keep it regularly. A short period of silence every day, kept faithfully, does more than a long retreat followed by neglect. Many traditions place it at the beginning of the day, before the first conversation, while the mind has not yet been filled. Some people keep a longer silence weekly, as Gandhi did, or a few days each year in retreat.

Speak less, and speak deliberately. Before speaking, an old counsel goes, ask whether what you are about to say is true, whether it is kind and whether it is necessary. Much of what goes unsaid by that test will not be missed. Notice especially the urge to comment, to explain oneself and to repeat what one has heard about others; these are the leaks that the monastic rules were written to stop, and they are where most of the strength runs out.

Let the outer silence lead inward. When the mouth is quiet, notice the talk that goes on within, without fighting it. The practices of attention that this site has described elsewhere, the repeated prayer, the watching of the breath, the simple turning to presence, are all ways of letting that inner talk slow down until it is no longer the loudest thing in the room.

And do not make silence an end in itself. Its purpose, in every tradition, is to make something else possible: the hearing of a word that cannot be heard in the noise, the gathering of a strength that speech disperses, the meeting with what no speech can reach, and at last a return to speech that is truer, kinder and less wasteful than before.

The source of speech

Near its beginning, the Bhagavad Gītā shows Arjuna, overwhelmed by what he must do, declaring that he will not fight and falling silent.30 The whole of the great teaching that follows is spoken into that silence. It is a fitting image. The contemplative traditions do not ask for silence because words are bad, or because the world is not worth speaking to. They ask for it because the most important words can only be heard by someone who has stopped talking, and because a life that is always pouring itself out in speech has nothing left with which to listen. Silence, in their teaching, is not the opposite of speech but its source: the still place from which a true word can come.

Notes

  1. 1.Plato, Phaedo, paragraph 367, translated by Benjamin Jowett: “When Socrates had done speaking, for a considerable time there was silence; he himself appeared to be meditating, as most of us were, on what had been said; only Cebes and Simmias spoke a few words to one another. And Socrates observing them asked what they thought of the argument, and whether there was anything wanting? For, said he, there …” Read in context Back
  2. 2.The Buddha (traditional), The Dhammapada, verse 268–269, translated by F. Max Müller: “A man is not a Muni because he observes silence (mona, i.e. mauna), if he is foolish and ignorant; but the wise who, taking the balance, chooses the good and avoids evil, he is a Muni, and is a Muni thereby; he who in this world weighs both sides is called a Muni.” Read in context Back
  3. 3.Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, paragraph 1.10.1, translated by William Benham: “Avoid as far as thou canst the tumult of men; for talk concerning worldly things, though it be innocently undertaken, is a hindrance, so quickly are we led captive and defiled by vanity. Many a time I wish that I had held my peace, and had not gone amongst men. But why do we talk and gossip so continually, seeing …” Read in context Back
  4. 4.Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, paragraph 1.20.2, translated by William Benham: “One hath said, "As oft as I have gone among men, so oft have I returned less a man." This is what we often experience when we have been long time in conversation. For it is easier to be altogether silent than it is not to exceed in word. It is easier to remain hidden at home than to keep …” Read in context Back
  5. 5.The Buddha (traditional), The Dhammapada, verse 361, translated by F. Max Müller: “In the body restraint is good, good is restraint in speech, in thought restraint is good, good is restraint in all things. A Bhikshu, restrained in all things, is freed from all pain.” Read in context Back
  6. 6.Vyāsa (traditional), The Song Celestial, chapter 17.6, translated by Edwin Arnold: “Words causing no man woe, words ever true, / Gentle and pleasing words, and those ye say / In murmured reading of a Sacred Writ,-- / These make the true religiousness of Speech.” Read in context Back
  7. 7.Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, paragraph 3.45.5, translated by William Benham: “Oh, how good and peacemaking a thing it is to be silent concerning others, and not carelessly to believe all reports, nor to hand them on further; how good also to lay one's self open to few, to seek ever to have Thee as the beholder of the heart; not to be carried about with every wind of words, but …” Read in context Back
  8. 8.Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, paragraph 1.20.2, translated by William Benham: “One hath said, "As oft as I have gone among men, so oft have I returned less a man." This is what we often experience when we have been long time in conversation. For it is easier to be altogether silent than it is not to exceed in word. It is easier to remain hidden at home than to keep …” Read in context Back
  9. 9.Laozi, The Tâo Teh King, chapter 5.2, translated by James Legge: “May not the space between heaven and earth be compared to a bellows? 'Tis emptied, yet it loses not its power; / 'Tis moved again, and sends forth air the more. / Much speech to swift exhaustion lead we see; / Your inner being guard, and keep it free.” Read in context Back
  10. 10.Laozi, The Tâo Teh King, chapter 2.3, translated by James Legge: “Therefore the sage manages affairs without doing anything, and conveys his instructions without the use of speech.” Read in context Back
  11. 11.Laozi, The Tâo Teh King, chapter 43.2, translated by James Legge: “There are few in the world who attain to the teaching without words, and the advantage arising from non-action.” Read in context Back
  12. 12.The Upanishads, The Upanishads, verse Third part, XIII, translated by Swami Paramananda: “A wise man should control speech by mind, mind by intellect, intellect by the great Atman, and that by the Peaceful One (the Paramatman or Supreme Self). Here Yama gives the practical method to be followed if one wishes to realize the Supreme. The word "speech" stands for all the senses. First, therefore, a man must control his outgoing senses …” Read in context Back
  13. 13.Vyāsa (traditional), The Song Celestial, chapter 17.7, translated by Edwin Arnold: “Serenity of soul, benignity, / Sway of the silent Spirit, constant stress / To sanctify the Nature,--these things make / Good rite, and true religiousness of Mind.” Read in context Back
  14. 14.Vyāsa (traditional), The Song Celestial, chapter 6.5, translated by Edwin Arnold: “Sequestered should he sit, / Steadfastly meditating, solitary, / His thoughts controlled, his passions laid away, / Quit of belongings. In a fair, still spot / Having his fixed abode,--not too much raised, / Nor yet too low,--let him abide, his goods / A cloth, a deerskin, and the Kusa-grass. / There, setting hard his mind upon The One, / …” Read in context Back
  15. 15.The Upanishads, The Upanishads, verse Peace Chant, translated by Swami Paramananda: “May my limbs, speech, Prana (life-force), sight, hearing, strength and all my senses, gain in vigor. All is the Brahman (Supreme Lord) of the Upanishads. May I never deny the Brahman. May the Brahman never deny me. May there be no denial of the Brahman. May there be no separation from the Brahman. May all the virtues declared in the …” Read in context Back
  16. 16.Laozi, The Tâo Teh King, chapter 16.1, translated by James Legge: “The (state of) vacancy should be brought to the utmost degree, and that of stillness guarded with unwearying vigour. All things alike go through their processes of activity, and (then) we see them return (to their original state). When things (in the vegetable world) have displayed their luxuriant growth, we see each of them return to its root. This returning …” Read in context Back
  17. 17.The German mystics, selected by W. R. Inge, Light, Life, and Love, paragraph suso.29: “Servitor. Come then, my soul, collect thyself from all external things, into the tranquil silence of the inner man. Woe is me! My heavenly Father had adopted my soul to be His bride; but I fled far from Him. Alas, I have lost my Father, I have lost my Lover. Alas, alas, and woe is me! What have I done, …” Read in context Back
  18. 18.Kabīr, Songs of Kabir, poem XLIV, translated by Rabindranath Tagore: “The Hidden Banner is planted in the temple of the sky; there the blue canopy decked with the moon and set with bright jewels is spread. / There the light of the sun and the moon is shining: still your mind to silence before that splendour. / Kabir says: "He who has drunk of this nectar, wanders like one who …” Read in context Back
  19. 19.Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God, paragraph letter-2.11, translated by an anonymous translator: “I have quitted all forms of devotion and set prayers but those to which my state obliges me. And I make it my business only to persevere in His holy presence, wherein I keep myself by a simple attention, and a general fond regard to GOD, which I may call an actual presence of GOD; or, to speak better, an …” Read in context Back
  20. 20.The Buddha (traditional), The Dhammapada, verse 100, translated by F. Max Müller: “Even though a speech be a thousand (of words), but made up of senseless words, one word of sense is better, which if a man hears, he becomes quiet.” Read in context Back
  21. 21.The Upanishads, The Upanishads, verse First part, III, translated by Swami Paramananda: “There the eye does not go, nor speech, nor mind. We do not know That; we do not understand how It can be taught. It is distinct from the known and also It is beyond the unknown. Thus we have heard from the ancient (teachers) who told us about It. These physical eyes are unable to perceive that subtle essence. …” Read in context Back
  22. 22.The Upanishads, The Upanishads, verse First part, IV, translated by Swami Paramananda: “That which speech does not illumine, but which illumines speech: know that alone to be the Brahman (the Supreme Being), not this which people worship here.” Read in context Back
  23. 23.The German mystics, selected by W. R. Inge, Light, Life, and Love, paragraph ruysbroek.105: “It is then necessary to consider and examine the sublime nature of God; how it contains simplicity and purity, inaccessible height and abysmal depth, incomprehensible extension and eternal duration; dark silence and wild waste; repose of all the saints in unity and joy in itself and in all the saints in eternity. This enlightened man will also examine the attributes …” Read in context Back
  24. 24.Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, paragraph 3.21.4, translated by William Benham: “O Jesus, Light of Eternal Glory, solace of the wandering soul, before Thee my mouth is without speech, and my silence speaketh to Thee. How long will my Lord delay to come unto me? Let Him come unto me, His poor and humble one, and make me glad. Let Him put forth His hand, and deliver His holy one from …” Read in context Back
  25. 25.Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali, poem 19, translated by Rabindranath Tagore: “If thou speakest not I will fill my heart with thy silence and endure it. I will keep still and wait like the night with starry vigil and its head bent low with patience. The morning will surely come, the darkness will vanish, and thy voice pour down in golden streams breaking through the sky. Then thy words will take …” Read in context Back
  26. 26.Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali, poem 39, translated by Rabindranath Tagore: “When the heart is hard and parched up, come upon me with a shower of mercy. When grace is lost from life, come with a burst of song. When tumultuous work raises its din on all sides shutting me out from beyond, come to me, my lord of silence, with thy peace and rest. When my beggarly heart sits crouched, …” Read in context Back
  27. 27.Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, paragraph 3.28.1, translated by William Benham: “"My Son, take it not sadly to heart, if any think ill of thee, and say of thee what thou art unwilling to hear. Thou oughtest to think worse of thyself, and to believe no man weaker than thyself. If thou walkest inwardly, thou wilt not weigh flying words above their value. It is no small prudence to keep silence …” Read in context Back
  28. 28.Marcus Aurelius, The Thoughts of the Emperor M. Aurelius Antoninus, section 10.16, translated by George Long: “No longer talk at all about the kind of man that a good man ought to be, but be such.” Read in context Back
  29. 29.The Buddha (traditional), The Dhammapada, verse 227, translated by F. Max Müller: “This is an old saying, O Atula, this is not only of to-day: `They blame him who sits silent, they blame him who speaks much, they also blame him who says little; there is no one on earth who is not blamed.'” Read in context Back
  30. 30.Vyāsa (traditional), The Song Celestial, chapter 2.5, translated by Edwin Arnold: “So spake Arjuna to the Lord of Hearts, / And sighing,"I will not fight!" held silence then. / To whom, with tender smile, (O Bharata! ) / While the Prince wept despairing 'twixt those hosts, / Krishna made answer in divinest verse:” Read in context Back

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Chicago (bibliography)

The Editors. “On Silence.” Metanoia (2026). https://www.unitiveknowledge.org/metanoia/articles/on-silence.

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The Editors, “On Silence,” Metanoia (2026), https://www.unitiveknowledge.org/metanoia/articles/on-silence.

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The Editors. “On Silence.” Metanoia, 2026, www.unitiveknowledge.org/metanoia/articles/on-silence.

BibTeX
@article{articles-on-silence,
  author = {{The Editors}},
  title = {{On Silence}},
  journal = {Metanoia},
  year = {2026},
  publisher = {Unitive Knowledge Society},
  url = {https://www.unitiveknowledge.org/metanoia/articles/on-silence}
}

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