Advice for Silence
In a monastery we ought to follow the advice of the psalm which says: I have resolved to keep watch over my ways so I may not sin with my tongue. I am guarded about the ways I speak and have accepted silence in humility, refraining even from words that are good.
Several years ago I attended a several day silent Zen retreat. On the drive back home, I commented to the people in the car that I thought it had been a particularly noisy retreat with lots of talking. The people in the car disagreed saying that they felt it was a particularly silent retreat.
Needless to say, these comments left me puzzled. Not wanting to argue, I started looking at why I thought the retreat was so noisy. If what the people in the car observed about the retreat was accurate, what was I hearing? Where was the talking, I kept hearing, coming from? It took quite awhile and a fair amount of concentrated effort for me to finally understand that the talking I heard at the retreat was in my own head. The talking, I thought I was hearing, was in my head. My thoughts were making so much noise I believed it was other people.
A basic Buddhist teaching is: To study the Buddha way is to study the self. If it hadn’t been for the quiet, silent setting of a retreat, I wouldn’t have even noticed my thoughts. My realization about my noisy thoughts opened a way for me to study myself.
I’ve always seen myself as a quiet person. I was comfortable with long stretches of silence. I once drove from Maine to Colorado and back in a car with no radio. I now see that this image of myself tricked me. I may in fact be a quiet person, but the continual roar of thought meant I really wasn’t in silence. I was still in the midst of the noise of the world. I mistook not talking with knowing myself. It wasn’t enough to just be aware of all the thoughts that continually circulated in my mind I wanted to learn more about the self that needed all the thoughts
One meditation instruction is to see your thoughts come and go like soap bubbles. Let them just float through your mind. Just see your thoughts and don’t grab them. Let them just float in and out. This instruction doesn’t work for me. My thoughts don’t come as individual thoughts. They are moving rivers, whole novels, intricate plans, a narrative that never turns off.
In Chapter Six, Benedict encourages us to guard the way you speak. This is how one begins to learn to cherish silence. What I’ve learned about myself is that before I can guard my speech, I need to guard the way I think. There are two practices that I have learned and that I continually work with. The first is a practice of memorization. I memorize Buddhist chants. When I notice my thoughts trying to take over, I mentally substitute my racing thoughts or anxious thoughts or planning thoughts or fixing thoughts or remembering thoughts or should-have-done thoughts with a chant. I do this over and over throughout the day. When I am able to do this substitution I become aware that I am not my thoughts.
The second practice is concentration. I have learned that I need time in a day to do concentrated work. I’d like to say I can concentrate on any task, but I’m not that practiced. Right now I am hand sewing a queen-size patchwork quilt. I try to work on it a couple of hours each day. When I make the effort to engage in this concentrated activity, I can feel my mind settling. This settling isn’t immediate. It takes time to get settled into the rhythm of sewing. And for me when I am in the rhythm of the sewing the thoughts slow down and I can focus on the needle going into the cloth and coming out again, over and over. This practice of concentration carries over into the rest of my day. Over and over again I notice that I am not my thoughts.
To study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. When my mind is quiet I can begin to find…the vast inconceivable self that can’t be faced or turned away from…the silent source that is clear and bright…and that in each moments thought a lotus flower blooms and each lotus flower contains a Buddha.
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