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Inner world

Silence as a Practice

An essay on silence as presence, silence as avoidance, and the return to speech. Its proposed six-part map is explored through philosophical and spiritual traditions, with attention to their different aims.

Andrey Zarinsh · Maria Evilkut27 min readI41
Questions & AnswersIn Plain Words
In this article 26

How different traditions describe work with silence

Andrey Zarinsh & Maria Evilkut · United Wisdom · Inner Transformation · Author series

Archival translator’s note. This is a full translation of the archived essay. Its assertion of one universal structure, its historical accounts, and its quotations remain the authors’ interpretations and inherited attributions, not findings independently established here. The cited mouse experiment does not establish human neurogenesis, clinical benefit, or the truth of religious teachings. The essay’s generalizations about symptoms, cultures, and traditions must not be used for diagnosis or to judge someone who cannot speak safely. Quotations are rendered from the Russian archive rather than presented as newly checked original wording.

Buddhism, hesychasm, Cistercianism, Quakerism, Sufism, Daoism, Judaism, Hinduism, Japanese culture, twentieth-century philosophy, and modern neuroscience are compared here through the authors’ six-part scheme: stopping speech, stopping inner speech, listening, encounter, preservation, and returning to speech.

I. The Noise We Live In

Modern people live in a density of sound and information that no previous generation has known. Over a century, urban background noise has risen by tens of decibels. An average working day is punctuated by hundreds of switches between tasks and contacts. By ten at night, a person feels exhausted without understanding exactly why—there seems to have been no hard physical work.

Against this background, silence has ceased to be perceived as a value and has come to be perceived as emptiness. It is awkward to remain silent. If a conversation dies down, someone must “save the situation.” If a room feels lonely, a phone is switched on. In a car, background sound is compulsory. The everyday assumption is that silence is what remains when everything else has been switched off.

This article shows something different. The world’s mature traditions—Buddhist, hesychast, Cistercian, Sufi, Daoist, Jewish, Hindu, Quaker, and Japanese—describe silence as a reality in its own right, not a remainder. It has its own laws, its own density, its own work. Nothing else can replace what happens within it. That is precisely why, without it, people gradually become less exact in speech, thought, and action.

II. What This Article Does Not Do

It does not call for a vow of silence. Retreating into silence as a pose is as much a trap as excessive talkativeness.

It does not set silence against speech. The Swiss philosopher Max Picard, whose The World of Silence (1948) remains one of the most subtle books on the subject, put it directly: “Language and silence belong to each other: language knows of silence, just as silence knows of language” (A Working Library; Goodreads). The aim is not to be silent instead of speaking; the aim is for speech to arise from the right source.

It does not address pathological silence—the muteness of trauma, the deadening silence of depression, the silence of estrangement within a family. That is different material, requiring work with a therapist or another person, rather than a philosophical structure.

Nor does it offer a “five minutes a day will change your life” technique. Silence is not a life hack. It is a layer of reality that a person either enters or does not enter; “trying” it as a procedure is as strange as “trying love.”

III. Two Kinds of Silence

There are two kinds of silence.

The first is silence as avoidance. A person remains silent because they are afraid to speak. Afraid to tell the truth. Afraid to discover that they do not know what they think. Afraid of an encounter. This silence accumulates in relationships like sediment: in a family where nobody speaks about what matters; at work, where uncomfortable subjects are avoided; within a person who has a thought they will not allow themselves to follow through.

The second is silence as presence. A person remains silent because, at that moment, silence is more exact than any words. Not instead of words, but because words are not needed now. This silence opens a space in which something essential can happen: hearing another person, hearing oneself, hearing a fact that words would have concealed.

This article concerns the second. The central observation of mature traditions is that these two kinds of silence are not opposite ends of a single scale. They differ in kind. Silence as avoidance makes a person more tense; silence as presence makes them more exact.

IV. A Map of One Structure

When texts from different traditions are placed side by side, a common sequence becomes visible.

The first step is stopping outward speech: ceasing to speak aloud. The second is stopping inner speech: ceasing to chatter with oneself. The third is listening: attending to what is there without judgment or commentary. The fourth is encounter: with reality, oneself, another person, or what a tradition calls God, Dharma, Dao, or Truth. The fifth is preservation: not immediately translating what has been heard into words, but letting it settle. The sixth is returning to speech, changed by what has been heard.

This is the same six-part architecture found in working with suffering, acknowledging an error, and axial consciousness. In describing different inner practices, mature traditions arrive at the same structural map of human experience.

V. The Buddha: Noble Silence

In the Pali canon, the Buddha several times addresses the assembled monks with a phrase that became one of Buddhism’s best known (SuttaCentral, discussion):

Monks, when you gather together, do one of two things: speak about the Dhamma or maintain noble silence.

“Noble silence”—ariya tushnim-bhava in Pali—is not a prohibition on speech. It is the positive condition of someone sitting in jhana, a meditative absorption in which the mind is collected and does not wander. The Buddha does not order people to be quiet; he points to a quality of silence worth preserving, because without it any speech about the Dharma falls apart.

Alongside this stands vipassana, the principal practice of observing what is. In vipassana there is no “conversation with oneself”: there is observation of the breath, the body, and thoughts passing like clouds. This is silence as another way of being conscious, rather than a pause in conversation.

From this practice emerges a striking paradox. The Buddha spoke for forty-five years. The Pali canon is enormous. Yet at the center of his teaching remains something discovered only when speech falls silent.

VI. Hesychasm: Hesychia and the Prayer of the Heart

In the fourth century, the first Christian hermits—Anthony the Great, Macarius, and Evagrius—retreat into the Egyptian desert. They discover what will be systematized between the ninth and fourteenth centuries as hesychasm, from the Greek hesychia, “stillness” or “rest.” In the fourteenth century, in his dispute with Barlaam of Calabria, Gregory Palamas formulates the theology of uncreated energies: through hesychia and the unceasing Jesus Prayer, a person becomes capable of experiencing God (OrthoChristian).

Saint Ignatius Brianchaninov, a nineteenth-century Russian hesychast, put it more briefly: “Silence is the mystery of the age to come. Words are the instruments of this world.” Not because words are bad, but because silence has a different ontological status.

Hesychast work does not consist in forcing the mind to fall silent; direct will cannot accomplish that. It consists in moving attention from the surface layer of thoughts into the heart—the place where, according to this tradition, the mind encounters God. When attention is there, thoughts continue to pass, but lose their power to dictate.

VII. Cistercians: The Myth of a “Vow of Silence”

There is a widespread belief that Cistercians and Trappists take a “vow of silence.” It is a myth. No such vow has ever existed in the monastic tradition (Trappists.org; Holy Cross Abbey).

What did exist was monastic silence, silentium. This is a discipline of silence, rather than a ban on speaking: monks remain silent at certain times and in certain places, during work and sleep. They speak when necessary: in worship, with guests, and on practical matters. The norm is not “do not talk,” but “do not talk unnecessarily.”

This subtle but important difference explains why a monastery is a living community rather than a prison of silence. One monk from Holy Cross Abbey puts it this way: “Our silence, like silence in any relationship, cannot be something that divides. It must be a silence that knows how to listen.”

In his sixth-century Rule, Benedict devotes a separate chapter—the sixth—to silence. Its purpose is to restore weight to speech, not to prohibit it. A word spoken in an environment where people are silent by choice rather than fear sounds different.

VIII. Quakers: Waiting Together

In England in 1652, George Fox founds the Society of Friends, later known as the Quakers. From the beginning, the central form of their worship is waiting worship: they gather in a circle, remain silent, and wait for the “movement of the Spirit.” If someone receives an inward prompting, they stand and speak—a brief vocal ministry. Then silence returns (Quaker.org; QuakerSpeak; Friends Journal).

William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania and a first-generation Quaker:

True silence is rest for the mind, and is to the spirit what sleep is to the body: nourishment and renewal.

The Quaker tradition matters because it shows that silence is possible in a group, not only in the solitude of a monastic cell. A gathered meeting, a “gathered silence,” in which dozens of people sit together and enter silence at the same time, is described as one of the most intense experiences of human connection. Not “connection through words,” but “connection in which words have become unnecessary.”

This gives Quakers an ethical foundation on which they have built four hundred years of concrete social work, from the abolition of slavery to the antiwar movement. Silence did not make them passive; it made them more exact.

IX. Sufism: Samt, Khamushan, Khalwa

Islamic mysticism has several words for different registers of silence. Samt is restraint in speech, the ability not to say more than is needed. Khalwa is a voluntary solitary retreat lasting from a few days to forty. Khamushan, from the Persian “the silent ones,” is Rumi’s word for those who remain in silence after meeting the Beloved.

Rumi, in thirteenth-century Konya, presents a striking paradox: one of world literature’s most prolific poets constantly returns to the idea that what matters most is spoken through silence (Islamonweb English; World Literature Today):

Amid silence I cry out. I have come speaking without words.

This is not a rhetorical gesture. In Sufi metaphysics, through fana—the dissolution of the ego—the Sufi reaches a place where ordinary speech no longer carries. What was once “I speak about Truth” becomes “Truth speaks through silence.”

Alongside this, Attar, Rumi’s teacher, offers The Conference of the Birds (around 1187): a poem of 4,724 couplets ending with thirty birds who reach the Simurgh and discover that they themselves are the Simurgh. Beyond that lies the silence in which alone this experience is possible.

X. Daoism: “Those Who Know Do Not Speak”

The Dao De Jing, chapter 56 (Goodreads; Harinam):

Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.

This is not a rebuke to talkativeness. It is an ontological statement: the Dao, the ground of everything, cannot be expressed in speech; any “definition” of the Dao is already not the Dao. The Dao De Jing opens with the same point in its first chapter: “The Dao that can be named is not the eternal Dao.”

Zhuangzi develops this through the image of zuo wang, “sitting in forgetfulness”: the sage stops clinging to words, names, and distinctions, and something otherwise concealed by speech opens up. This is not a rejection of thought—Zhuangzi himself writes a philosophical treatise—but a rejection of the illusion that speech is the only, or even the main, means of access to reality.

Daoism offers the most subtle formulation of silence as a method of knowing: what is known through silence cannot be deduced from texts or transmitted through instruction; it reveals itself to those who know how to remain silent beside reality.

XI. Judaism: Shetikah as a Fence Around Wisdom

The Talmud, tractate Avot 3:13, Rabbi Akiva:

Silence is a fence around wisdom—seyag le-hokhmah, shetikah.

This is not rhetoric. The Jewish tradition has an entire system of practices of silence: the Sabbath, when thirty-nine kinds of work are prohibited, including certain kinds of speech; shiva, seven days of mourning, during which a visiting comforter must remain silent until the mourner speaks, based on Job 2:13, where Job’s friends sit silently with him for seven days; and hitbonenut, a contemplative practice in Hasidism, especially the Chabad school, in which thought gradually descends from the verbal layer into a subtler one.

For the sages of the Talmud, shetikah is the fence around speech, not a ban on it. Words spoken without measure cross its boundary and lose their force. Words in the right measure, surrounded by silence, retain their form.

XII. Hinduism: Mauna and Muni

The Sanskrit word for a sage is muni, from the same root as mauna, “silence.” In the Indian tradition, this etymological connection is no accident: a sage is someone who knows how to remain silent.

Mauna in Hinduism is outward silence, a vow observed by some of the twentieth century’s greatest teachers. Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950) taught mainly through silence; disciples who came with questions said that in his presence their questions dissolved of themselves, without an answer. Meher Baba (1894–1969) remained silent for forty-four years, communicating with disciples through gestures and an alphabet board.

Antar mauna, “inner silence,” is a yoga practice in which thoughts are observed rather than suppressed until they quiet down of their own accord. This is the same structure as Buddhist vipassana and Christian watchfulness: attention does not fight the mind’s movement, but becomes the environment in which that movement settles.

Ramana Maharshi:

Silence is the most powerful form of instruction.

That sounds strange to a culture in which teaching necessarily proceeds through words. But Ramana is speaking of something else: a transmission that happens through presence rather than content. This transmission cannot be recorded or quoted; it can only be encountered.

XIII. Japan: Ma, Omoiyari, Hara Hachi Bu

Japanese culture differs structurally from European culture precisely in assigning silence a positive role in communication rather than treating it as an absence.

Ma is a pause, an empty space in speech, music, architecture, or painting. It is “active silence,” without which sound has no form, rather than an “absence of sound.” The seventeenth-century poet Basho builds his hokku around ma: what means something is what lies between the words.

Omoiyari is the ability to sense another person without everything having to be spoken. In Japanese family and business life, an interlocutor is expected to understand what has not been said directly; a blunt explanation may even be considered rude.

Hara hachi bu, literally “belly eight-tenths,” is the rule of leaving the table before one is entirely full. The principle applies to speech as well as food: say less than everything, leaving room.

This does not mean Japanese culture is “better.” It is different, with shadows of its own. But as a map of silence in communication, it shows something that twentieth-century Western culture largely lost: silence in conversation is meaning, rather than a failure.

XIV. Wittgenstein: The Boundary of Language

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), seventh and final proposition:

What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

In the original: “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen” (Prismatically; Philosophy Forum).

The early Wittgenstein is often misread as prohibiting discussion of metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics. Yet his correspondence with Engelmann reveals another thought: what matters most in the Tractatus is what it does not say. The ethical, aesthetic, and mystical show themselves but cannot be stated. When we try to express them in ordinary language, we make things worse.

This is astonishingly close to Dao De Jing 1: “The Dao that can be named is not the eternal Dao.” The twentieth-century Viennese logician and the ancient Chinese philosopher are speaking about exactly the same thing.

XV. Heidegger: Schweigen as a Mode of Speech

In Being and Time (1927), Martin Heidegger includes silence in his analysis of human discourse. For him, Schweigen is one of the modes of Rede, speech, rather than its absence. Only someone capable of speaking can remain silent; an animal’s silence, in this sense, is simply an absence of speech.

Heidegger distinguishes Gerede, “idle talk,” from “authentic speech.” Idle talk is conversation in which language runs on empty, passing along ready-made opinions rather than reality. Silence takes a person out of Gerede and restores the possibility of authentic speech.

Here is a bridge between the classical monastic tradition of silence and twentieth-century philosophy. Heidegger is not a believing monk, but his Schweigen performs the same work as Benedict’s silentium: it restores weight to speech.

XVI. Max Picard: Silence as a Reality in Its Own Right

In Welt des Schweigens—The World of Silence (1948), the Swiss philosopher Max Picard formulates what the others approach from different directions (Goodreads; A Working Library):

Silence is not simply what happens when we stop speaking. It is more than a negative renunciation of language; it is more than a condition that can be produced at will. Silence is a phenomenon in its own right. It is an independent whole, existing in itself and through itself.

Then comes a striking thought: silence is not subordinate to speech. Rather, language is born from silence and returns to silence. Between two words in a conversation there is always an interval of silence, and without that interval the words merge into noise. Silence is the source of speech, rather than a pause within it.

Picard’s book ends with a quotation from Kierkegaard, which he presents as the final diagnosis of the age:

The present state of the world is a disease. If I were asked for advice, I would answer: create silence! Bring people to silence. The word of God cannot be heard in today’s noisy world.

This was written in 1948, before television, mobile phones, and the internet. Today that diagnosis has only grown stronger.

XVII. Kirste: Neurogenesis in Silence

Neuroscience offers another perspective: the mouse experiment tests the effects of absent sound, not the claims of spiritual traditions. In 2013, Imke Kirste’s group at the Center for Regenerative Therapies in Dresden published a study in Brain Structure and Function: mice spending two hours a day in complete silence showed significantly increased neurogenesis—the birth of new neurons in the hippocampus (Kirste 2013, PMC; PubMed; TIME).

The paradox is that the researchers originally expected “naturally relevant” sounds, such as mouse-pup calls, to be the most active stimulus. Silence turned out to be the only condition in which new neurons were not only born but survived after seven days. Kirste’s explanation was that silence is highly unusual in a natural environment; the brain responds to it with heightened alertness, as if receiving the signal “something is happening—we need to be ready.”

The experiment concerns neurogenesis in mice. Its juxtaposition with monastic experience is the authors’ analogy, not evidence of a shared mechanism.

XVIII. Merton: A Bridge Between West and East

Thomas Merton (1915–1968), an American Cistercian monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, is one of the twentieth century’s most subtle voices on silence. His journals and correspondence with Daisetsu Suzuki, a Zen master; Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist; and the Pakistani Sufi Abdul Aziz offer a model of how mature traditions can speak to one another through silence without dissolving into one another.

Merton put it this way:

We all need a silence that goes deeper than the noises of the world. A silence in which there is Someone who speaks.

His last book, Zen and the Birds of Appetite, published after his sudden death in Bangkok in 1968, attempts to show how Christian hesychasm and Buddhist vipassana describe overlapping spaces of human experience while remaining distinct. Merton did not blend everything into an undifferentiated mush; he made distinctions. That is precisely why his bridge holds.

XIX. Six Voices Speaking of One Thing

Choose one phrase from each of six traditions—without comment or explanation, simply placing them side by side—and a shared tone can be heard.

When you gather together, speak about the Dhamma or maintain noble silence. — The Buddha, Pali canon.

Those who know do not speak; those who speak do not know. — Laozi, Dao De Jing 56.

Silence is a fence around wisdom. — Rabbi Akiva, Avot 3:13.

In silence I cry out. I have come speaking without words. — Rumi, the divans.

True silence is rest for the mind. — William Penn, Quaker.

What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence. — Wittgenstein, Tractatus 7.

These are six voices from different eras, languages, and cultures. The shared tone we hear arises in this comparison; it does not by itself establish the historical independence of these lines.

XX. Where the Traditions Meet

The structural parallels the authors see in the selected texts are gathered into a six-part scheme.

Stopping outward speech. Ceasing to speak aloud. Buddhist tushnim-bhava; Cistercian silentium; Quaker gathered silence; Jewish shetikah.

Stopping inner speech. Ceasing to chatter with oneself. Hesychast hesychia; Daoist zuo wang; Hindu antar mauna; the Sufi samt of the heart.

Listening. Attending to what is there. Quaker waiting; Buddhist vipassana; hesychast attention of the heart; Japanese ma as an active pause.

Encounter. With reality, oneself, the Other. Sufi fana; Quaker encounter; hesychast theosis; Buddhist insight.

Preservation. Not rushing to translate into words. Wittgenstein’s boundary of language; Heidegger’s Schweigen; Picard’s silence as an ontological reality; the Daoist prohibition on naming.

Returning to speech. A word changed by silence. The Cistercian “word from silence”; Quaker vocal ministry; Rumi’s speech after muteness; Heidegger’s “authentic speech.”

The resonance among the Buddhist, Hindu, hesychast, Cistercian, Quaker, Sufi, Daoist, Jewish, Japanese, and philosophical-scientific lines is striking in this comparison. The proposed architecture is a way of reading these materials. Resemblance alone explains neither their historical origins nor a universal law of human consciousness.

XXI. Where the Traditions Differ

Honesty requires saying this too. Structural agreement does not cancel differences in content.

In hesychasm, silence leads to an encounter with God that is personal. In Buddhism, silence leads to insight in which the concept of “God” is not used. In Daoism, silence is an encounter with the Dao, an impersonal ground. In Hinduism—Advaita Vedanta—it is dissolution in Atman-Brahman, an impersonal unified reality. In Sufism, it is an encounter with the Beloved, at once personal and beyond the personal.

These differences are serious and cannot be reduced to a common denominator. Saying “it is all the same” would flatten things rather than make them precise. But in the technical and phenomenological aspect—how silence is organized as a practice—the authors see similar movements in the selected materials. This is not “everyone says the same thing”; it is a proposal to read different practices through a shared working scheme.

XXII. Silence as Avoidance

We return to where we began. Not every silence is silence as practice. Some silence destroys.

In a family, nobody speaks about what matters. Two people have lived under the same roof for ten years without telling each other what both already know. This silence does not free speech; it suffocates it.

Within oneself, there is a thought a person will not allow into consciousness. Jung called this the “unlived life,” saying that it always finds a way out: through the body, a symptom, dreams, or an unhappy marriage to someone who repeats the father’s traits.

In a culture, silence becomes conformity. “I kept quiet because I did not want to argue.” If this comes from a choice of attention and precision, it is silence as practice. If it comes from fear, it is silence as avoidance, and its effect on life is no different from that of a lie.

Distinguishing these two kinds of silence is a separate task that the traditions describe as carefully as the practice itself.

XXIII. Returning to Speech

Every tradition described here contains a step usually left out of popular writing on silence: returning to speech.

After his chapter on silentium, Benedict writes chapters on service, work, and receiving guests. From silence he goes back into the world. Having described tushnim-bhava, the Buddha immediately gives the instruction “speak about the Dhamma.” A Quaker sitting in a gathered meeting may rise to offer vocal ministry—a word born in shared silence. All Rumi’s poetry is speech that has emerged from silence and returns to it.

This matters. Silence is not self-sufficient. It is the environment in which speech takes shape so that it can go out and do its work in the world. If someone has learned to be silent but cannot return to speech, this is not mature silence; it is a stupor. If someone speaks eloquently but knows no silence, their speech—as Heidegger might say—is most likely Gerede, idle talk.

The exact measure lies between the two. This is what a mature tradition teaches: their right alternation, rather than a choice between speech and silence.

XXIV. Silence as an Ethics of Communication

Everything above leads to a simple but difficult ethics of communication.

Do not say what would be more exactly left unsaid. If a phrase adds no reality and merely fills emptiness, it is unnecessary, and its absence is more exact than its presence.

Remain silent beside someone who is grieving until they speak first. This is the Jewish rule of shiva, but it works in any culture. When someone has suffered a loss, they do not need words of consolation; they need a presence that does not fill their pain with its own speech.

Do not fear a pause in conversation. Most people rush to fill it to avoid awkwardness. Yet a pause is often where something essential can happen: one person can finish a thought, and the other has time to feel what has been heard.

Discern the other person’s silence. Are they silent because they are listening, or because they have shut themselves off? These are different kinds of silence; confusing them is a serious mistake.

Finally, examine your own silence from time to time. Where does it come from? From presence, or from avoidance? An exact answer is not always flattering, but it is always useful.

XXV. What Needs to Be Said at the End

This article concerns a reality that modern culture has almost lost. Silence has ceased to be a layer of the world and become “what remains after switching things off.” Along with that, we have become less able to hear one another, ourselves, and what is actually happening in the world.

Mature traditions—Buddhism, hesychasm, Cistercianism, Quakerism, Sufism, Daoism, Judaism, Hinduism, Japanese culture, twentieth-century philosophy, and modern neuroscience—each say in their own language that silence is a reality in its own right, that it has work to do, and that without this work a person gradually loses their own precision.

This is not a call to enter a monastery or a reproach to modern people. It points to the possibility, in ordinary life—in a family, at work, on the road, and in brief intervals between tasks—of entering silence briefly and regularly. Not as a practice of self-improvement, but as a condition in which speech, thought, and action retain their form.

According to the testimony of the Buddha, Rabbi Akiva, Laozi, Rumi, William Penn, Ramana Maharshi, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Max Picard, Thomas Merton, and Imke Kirste’s group, this silence has always been sufficient for human beings when they knew how to enter it.

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References Inherited from the Archive

These links accompanied the archived original and have not been newly verified.

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