Authors: Sara Maitland
Zen silence is an
oppositional
silence. You are silent in order to escape from the self, and the dualisms of the world, to ‘protest’ against the veils of illusion and transcend them. Zen philosophy, and zazen as the practical working out of that philosophy, sees all the differentiations of the world as delusion. As Hofstadter explains it:
At the core of dualism are words – just plain words. The use of words is inherently dualistic, since each word represents, quite obviously, a conceptual category. Therefore a major part of Zen is the fight against reliance on words.
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The famously confusing Zen Koans are
meant
to confuse. Being bewildered allows the mind to operate non-logically and getting outside logical systems allows you to make the leap to enlightenment. Zen is profoundly anti-dualist, far more so than any Western philosophy. It urges people to stop categorising – there is no I/thou; no here/there; no differentiation, no categorisation; no autonomous self – there is only Buddha-nature and all the rest is illusion. Words create categories.
What is the way? asked a curious monk.
It is right before your eyes, said the master.
Why do I not see it for myself?
Because you are thinking of yourself.
What about you? Do you see it?
So long as you see double, saying ‘I don’t’ and ‘you do’, and so on,
your eyes are clouded, said the master.
When there is neither ‘I’ nor ‘You’, can one see it?
When there is neither ‘I’ nor ‘You’, who is the one that wants to see it?
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During that summer for similar motives I also started to attend Quaker meetings. At first sight the externals could not have been more different from Throstlehole. The Meeting I attended in Durham took place in a slightly grotty ‘community hall’ that lacked both the beauty and the glamour of the
dojo
– and we sat in a dowdy circle on stacking chairs. But in another sense Quaker Meeting is not unlike
zazen
, although Quakers come into silence for the silent meeting while the Zen monks bring their existing silence into meditation. The Quakers – or the Religious Society of Friends, as they are more properly called – are probably most famous in Britain for their commitment to pacifism and for the radical lead they have given since the seventeenth century in various forms of social work – the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, prison reform and mental health care. But at the heart of Quaker life is the Meeting for Worship and this is primarily silent – or, rather, a meeting in which any words emerge from silence. The modern Quaker, Pierre Lacout, describes the silence of the Meeting thus:
In silence which is active, the Inner Light begins to glow – a tiny spark. For the flame to be kindled and to grow, subtle argument and the clamour of our emotions must be stilled. It is by an attention full of love that we enable the Inner Light to blaze and illuminate our dwelling and to make of our whole being a source from which this Light may shine out.
Words must be purified in a redemptive silence if they are to bear the message of peace. The right to speak is a call to the duty of listening. Speech has no meaning unless there are attentive minds and silent hearts. Silence is the welcoming acceptance of the other. The word born of silence must be received in silence.
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Theologically what Zen Buddhism and the Friends share in common is a belief that we contain ‘enlightenment’ (Zen) or the ‘Inner Light’, the ‘divine spark’ (Quakerism), within ourselves and that all external definitions and codes – dogma, rituals, conventions, language itself – will only get in the way of dissolving the barriers between us and the infinite. But the differences are in fact profound.
Quakerism has its roots in the turbulent religious politics and political religion of the English seventeenth century. Initially Quakers found themselves in trouble not only because they would not serve in the armed forces, take oaths or pay tithes (a form of taxation to support the established Church), but because they would not show respect for outer forms – for example, they refused to ‘doff their hats’ in the presence of a social superior or legally constituted authority; worse still, they upheld the equality of women, who were able to speak, travel and bear witness equally with men. Within the Society itself there was no leadership, no paid or trained ministers, no credal formularies and no set rituals. Quakers gather together and sit in
collective
silence seeking to become ‘gathered’ – it is a gathered meeting, where hearts and minds are united beyond words, that can discern the fullness of truth. A Quaker friend described his experience of Meeting for Worship:
Not sure what I think of ‘a gathered meeting’ – it changes as I continue to attend – it started off as a quite private experience with me meditating and then praying, but amongst people. And when people ministered [spoke out in the meeting] it felt like an interruption that I couldn’t assimilate and had to make some effort not to be annoyed by before I returned to my private experience. But recently it’s begun to feel more seamless and I’m able to listen to people without feeling disrupted in what I was doing even if they don’t ‘speak to my condition’. I can see how it’s all reflective of my default settings with regard to other people and I expect other people’s experience must be quite different. There are similarities to
the appeal of scuba diving – another private experience in the essential vicinity of other people … Is one person’s gathered meeting another person’s fragmented one? And how do you know? Sometimes I’ve felt the room is ‘gathered’ and then someone ministers with obvious out-on-a-limb anxiety, which I can sometimes incorporate and continue in being gathered, but other times kicks me out of that collective feeling into a sense of us being a bunch of unconnected strangers sitting in a room. A lot of times people minister in rather obvious preaching-to-the-converted kinds of ways (especially about the Iraq war). But is being gathered about sameness of opinion? Isn’t true gatheredness about being able to articulate and bridge difference? Perhaps both gatheredness and fragmentation are true at once and the meeting is an attempt to cultivate the former.
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I enjoyed going to Meeting, especially once I discovered the older Quaker places of worship, often small, where 300 years of silence are gathered in buildings marked by simplicity and a lack of decoration. There was an earnestness and simplicity in Quakers that touched me, and I liked the sense of being linked back into a long radical history; in an odd way Meeting reminded me of early women’s liberation consciousness-raising groups – but without any of the din. I wonder retrospectively if we would have done better to ‘gather’ ourselves in silence rather than ‘speaking out’. It led me to question what Evelyn Underhill, the twentieth-century English writer on mysticism,
meant
when she said that the Quaker ‘sacrament of silence’ or ‘communal mysticism’ has offered us ‘nothing, no new understanding of the human soul’.
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Underhill can only see mystical experience as essentially and absolutely individual and ‘private’. I would have agreed with her, I suspect, before I had experienced Quaker Meetings and seen that you
can
run an international organisation for 300 years without a hierarchy; that out of shared silence a shared voice can emerge; that shared listening to the spirit leads to social action, especially for peace. The Quakers offer me at least a profoundly optimistic ‘new understanding of the human soul’ – a positive value for silence.
However, this sort of silence is quite different in its intention from Zen silence. Quakers are profoundly egalitarian: the Spirit may speak through anyone and therefore the silence of the Meeting for Worship is a
listening
silence. This is indeed ‘a silence that is waiting to be broken’. Because of the Friends’ understanding of the Inner Light there is no difference between an authentic breaking of silence from within an individual and the direct voice of God, but the silence is there to enable hearing, and hearing is meant to enable Quakers to ‘speak the truth in love’.
At both Throstlehole and at Quaker Meetings I found a silence that felt deeply liberating and spacious, but I know had a certain detachment because intellectually I do not believe in the underlying principles of either. However, when I went on Christian retreats I began to find the silence rather thin. Perhaps this was simply the name – retreat. I did not want to retreat from anything, but to move forward. Perhaps life already had enough silence in it for me not to need the rather oddly constructed silence of the monastic guest house. I found, even on private retreats, that however silent the monks or nuns may be, the retreatants were outsiders. The silence here was being given to us as a gift that we could somehow
use
when we returned to the noisy world, rather than being an invitation to help create the silence. Christian retreats really do seem to treat silence as an absence of sound – albeit a more positive rather than a purely negative one.
I did try various forms of formal retreat over those three years but I came to feel that I got a better understanding of Christian silence by reading about it than by going on retreat. Thomas Merton’s
The Seven Storey Mountain
describes in some detail the Trappist vision of silence in community. Trappists are a Roman Catholic religious order, growing out of a reform of the Benedictine rule, who live in extreme silence and austerity. Trappists are different from other silent orders like the Carmelites, or Carthusians: these orders emphasise their eremitic (hermit, solitary) nature; their communities are formed
functionally
to make being
hermits easier and safer. Trappists, on the other hand, see community as an essential part of their lifestyle. Carthusian novices, when they enter, are installed in their cells; Benedictine monks are installed literally – they are given a stall, a seat in the choir. This difference, like most of the practices of the older religious orders, is saturated with symbolic meaning.
Unlike Zen or Quaker silence, Trappist silence is about discipline. Its intention is to enable an individual to live ‘as perfectly as possible the Rule and Spirit of St Benedict – obedience, humility, work, prayer, simplicity, the love of Christ’. The community and the silence are two slightly different disciplines of
love
. The community is moreover a sign of mutual dependence, and as such is a corporate responsibility. This is not a silence that is waiting to be broken, like Quaker silence, but waiting to be completed.
Strangely enough Christian churches have never been seen as primarily silent places: the Victorian hush from which we are still emerging seems to have been a brief and short-lived exception. As late as the 1770s boys were still playing skittles unreproved in the aisles of Westminster Abbey.
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Very occasionally I would find deep pools of silence, usually in small country churches. When I found myself exhausted and overstimulated in a city I could seldom take silent refuge in churches – they were either locked up or, if more famous, filled with tourists, restless and noisy. One day, though, I discovered a new and for me unexpected sanctuary. I went to the Tate Modern and by chance found myself in the dim light of Room 3, where Rothko’s Seagram paintings hang: nine huge pulsating dense pools of silent energy.
Rothko himself said the paintings were designed for ‘contemplation’ and Simon Schama has described them as ‘A space that might be where we came from or where we will end up. They’re not meant to keep us out, but to embrace us.’ For me, that hot nervy afternoon, they were silence made visible; I was shaken by their power and their fierce dark beauty. This was something new for me, and I have become increasingly interested in painting and sculpture. The visual arts are obviously silent in a way that
literature and music can never be, although there is a great deal of ‘noisy art’ around – from the energetic business of medieval Christian narrative painting through to contemporary installation art. Nonetheless I began to look for and find silence in both traditional and contemporary art: the serene tender gaze of Raphael’s
Madonna del Granduca
; the startling moment of metamorphosis of Bernini’s
Daphne and Apollo
– where the still rigour of marble holds transformation steady for a silent moment; Turner’s sunsets; Andy Goldsworthy’s
Springing Arches
, leaping with silent joy across the Border hills of Scotland. These were all images that used silence itself as part of the work and generated silence in me. In all these, and many others, the silence seems to pour out of the work into the space around it. I came to believe that my silence was making my seeing more sensitive.
But more than any of these silences I found myself thinking about and experimenting with reading. Reading is a rare activity in that it is normally regarded as both silent and entirely positive. When I tried to describe my life to people they would often say, ‘I expect you read a lot’ and obviously feel reassured. But when I started to think about reading, I found myself in the presence of something very mysterious. Is reading silent in any sensible understanding of that word? Does it deepen the silence around us or break it up? When we read are we listening to the author, conversing with the author, or are we looking more directly into the author’s mind, seeing the author’s thoughts, rather than hearing her voice? How might one define silence in relation to the written, as opposed to the spoken, word?