In the seventies, Larry Rosenberg gave up a promising career as a university professor to return to being a student — but not at any university. Rosenberg studied meditation, and in the years that followed, he traveled to Korea, Japan, and Thailand, and learned under such teachers as Krishnamurti, the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, Soen Sunim, and Ajahn Buddhadasa. Eventually, Rosenberg became a teacher himself, at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. Then, in Cambridge, Massachusetts — where he’d once taught at Harvard — Rosenberg founded the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center, and is now the resident instructor there.
In Buddhism, there are many sutras, or teachings of the Buddha. Rosenberg focuses on one in particular: the Anapanasati Sutra, which is best translated as the “sutra on full awareness with breathing.” While this sounds arcane, the practice itself is deceptively simple: meditators focus on the breathing, being attentive to every in-breath and out-breath as a means of centering their awareness in the present moment. This is only the beginning, however, and can lead — as Rosenberg describes in the following excerpt — to deeper states of consciousness.
David Guy is a novelist, freelance journalist, and contributing editor to Tricycle: A Buddhist Review. He has been Rosenberg’s student since 1991.
The teaching’s voice is total silence, amid the ringing wind chimes. — Horgzhi
At the heart of our practice, behind everything else, surrounding everything else, is silence. We have little experience of silence in today’s world; the culture seems to value only more and more elaborate kinds of sound. Yet our sitting practice is silent, our retreats profoundly so. Enlightenment has been called “the great silence.” In this respect, Buddhist practice is at odds with our culture — at odds with every culture.
Most of us appreciate certain kinds of silence. If we are in a room where the air conditioning is on, and it suddenly shuts off, we may breathe a sigh of relief. Parents of small children speak of the exquisite silence at the end of the day, when the children are finally in bed, the television is off, the house still. Some of us make a point to take vacations in quiet places, and even in our own houses value moments when we can go off to a room by ourselves to read a book or write a letter.
The silence I’m talking about, however, is deeper than any of these. It is sometimes — though not exclusively — reached in profound states of meditation, and extends all the way to the deepest stillness that human beings are capable of experiencing.
I became interested in teaching the subject of silence several years ago. A number of my students had progressed quite far in their meditation practice, reaching the threshold of a deep silence, but had at that point encountered a profound fear and pulled back. As my goal was to see my students progress as far as they could, I asked myself how I could deal with what was holding them back.
At roughly the same time, I saw an article in a newsmagazine about the exploration of the oceans, which said that the ocean was the last frontier left open to us. I couldn’t help but think there was one frontier the writer was ignoring: human consciousness.
We have explored certain parts of the mind, of course, and produced intricate analyses of them. But there are vast realms we have yet to touch. A few brave individuals have made inroads and come back to tell us what they’ve seen. Most people don’t even know these places exist. Meditators are “psychonauts,” to use Robert Thurman’s term. We’re explorers in the most fascinating realm of all.
For most people in our culture, life has much to do with verbalization: Talking. Reading. Writing. Thinking. Language is so embedded in our consciousness that we don’t realize how much we depend on it. It wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that we’re addicted to language. We equate it with living itself.
Another, related, aspect of life is action: Doing things. Creating. Moving things around, piling them up, arranging them. Engaging the body in physical activity, even just for recreation.
In these two forms of endeavor, our culture — compared to others today, and especially compared to cultures in the past — is rich. We have more things to buy, more things to do, more things to talk and read and think about than at any other time in human history. We’re beyond rich; we’re opulent.
Inwardly, however, we are paupers, our throats parched, our spiritual bodies gaunt. That is probably why we have so many outer things. We’re trying to satisfy a hunger that never relents.
Someone I know with a great interest in mountain climbing was recently extolling to me the wonders of the Internet. The night before, he said, he had been communicating with a fellow mountain climber in Siberia. That’s wonderful, I said, but have you talked to your wife lately? Your children? We have this marvelous technology, but it doesn’t seem to help with the life right in front of us. I have no doubt that if the Siberian mountain climber had simply showed up at my friend’s door, my friend would have called the police. He wanted to know him on a screen, not face to face.
I don’t mean to make light of technology. The computer is a marvelous invention, and the Internet a wonderful resource. But if accumulating information were ever going to save us, it would have done so a long time ago.
The shortcomings of that kind of knowledge were brought home to me more than twenty years ago, when I was in Korea studying with a monk named Byok Jo Sunim, one of the most memorable people I’ve ever encountered. He was extremely loving, had a wonderful sense of humor, and almost visibly glowed, radiating the joy that the practice brought him. He was also completely illiterate. He couldn’t even sign his name.
While talking with him one day, I discovered that he thought the world was flat. I was absolutely astounded, and naturally decided to straighten him out. I brought out the classic argument: If the world is flat, how can we sail around it? How come a ship doesn’t fall off the edge? He just laughed. He was adamant. I got nowhere.
Finally, he said, “OK. Maybe you Westerners are right. I’m just an illiterate old man. The world is round, and you know it, and I’m too stupid to grasp it.
“But has knowing that made you any happier? Has it solved your problems of living?”
It hasn’t, as a matter of fact. It hasn’t helped us with our problems at all. None of our knowledge has.
With all that we’ve learned, we human beings have not even solved the problem of living together. Our incredible technology can put us in touch with people on the other side of the world, but we don’t know how to get along with the people in our own neighborhood, or even in our own house. Culturally we’re soaring, but spiritually we’re barely crawling. We are caught up in an illusion, a marvelous conjuring trick that has convinced us the things we produce will make us happy. Not only are we the audience for this trick; we are also the magician. We have fooled ourselves.
We need to go much deeper into the mind. It’s as if we live surrounded by vast fields of fertile soil as far as we can see, but we’ve cultivated only a tiny patch. We’ve done a wonderful job with that patch. But we need to explore the fields all around it. We need to get away from all the building and doing, coming and going, all the talking and thinking and reading and writing.
Silence is not the perfect word for what I’m trying to describe: there is no perfect word for it. In a sense, I am using words to describe something that is the antithesis of speech (although all speech comes out of it). Other teachers have used such words as void and emptiness, but these words, too, have their shortcomings.
Silence, as I use the term, is a dimension of existence. You can live in it. It is what spiritual life is all about. It is unfathomable, limitless space permeated by a vast stillness. In a way, it is inside of us — because that is where we seek it — though, ultimately, spatial terms like “inside” and “outside” don’t mean a thing.
All of the accumulated history of human civilization — all language, culture, thought, commerce — is relatively small compared to the dimension of silence out of which it emerges. For some people, silence has been the primary dimension in which they exist. These have been our most extraordinary individuals. They have learned to inhabit the world of silence, and to carry silence with them into the world of action.
I’m not criticizing the material dimension of existence — the one with which we are all so familiar. My point is just that we have gotten out of balance. There is more to life than we realize. We have such a strong orientation toward the world of thought and action that we need to weaken it, to diminish its hold on us, before we can taste the vast richness of silence.
The initial push I got in that direction came from my first Buddhist teacher, the Venerable Seung Sahn. He had come to this country from Korea and knew perhaps only fifteen English phrases, but he was extraordinarily skillful at using them — a master of the dharmic sound bite. When he first arrived, he supported himself by repairing washing machines at laundromats, and seemed to get by with just two phrases: “That broke? I fix.” Before long he developed a reputation as a Zen master, and on Friday nights as many as a hundred people, most of them university-educated, would come to hear him give talks with those fifteen phrases.
In his Zen tradition, interviews between teacher and student were formal affairs, and every time I came to him for an interview, no matter what I said about my practice, he always responded in the same way: “Too much thinking!” Then he would ring the bell, and I would have to leave. It was extremely humiliating. Finally, one day I had a truly quiet sitting, and I came to him quite excited with the news. In that whole sitting, I told him, I’d had only a few thoughts — and weak ones at that. He looked at me with utter disbelief. “What’s wrong with thinking?” he said.
It isn’t thinking that is the problem, he was telling me; it is our misuse of it, our addiction to it.
Eventually, I went with him to Korea for a year, and on the flight over I pulled out a sack containing all my cherished Buddhist books, which had been so important in leading me into practice. “What’s that?” he said. These are my books, I said. “Oh, no,” he said, “you don’t read any books all this year.” No books! All year! He didn’t understand who he was saying this to — a Jewish intellectual book-junkie from Brooklyn.
“That’s the whole problem,” he said. “You know too much already. You merely know everything.”
That year was extremely difficult for me. I sometimes found myself reading the labels of ketchup bottles, I was so hungry for English words. But I followed his advice and didn’t read a single book all year. In the end, it was very liberating. Reading has been much different for me ever since — much lighter, with less attachment.
Silence is extremely shy. It appears only when it wants to, and comes only to those who love it for itself. It doesn’t respond to calculation, grasping, or demand; it won’t respond if you have designs on it, or if there is something you want from it. Nor does it respond to commands: you can no more command silence than you can command someone to love you.
There are concentration techniques that achieve a kind of silence, but that silence is relatively coarse, provisional, and brittle, and very much dependent upon conditions. The silence I’m talking about is much deeper. We don’t create it; we find our way into it. We have to approach it with gentleness, humility, and innocence. The road to this silence is filled with obstacles, the largest of which is ignorance: we can’t experience silence unless we know it exists.
Though I am emphasizing the difficulty of attaining silence, it is important to understand that silence is accessible to all human beings. It isn’t just for hermits who live in caves in the Himalayas. It is available to everyone.
The first part of the journey to silence is the practice of breath awareness. Typically, when beginners sit down to meditate and follow their breathing, they notice a tremendous amount of mental noise — pretty far from the exquisite stillness they might have expected. The Tibetans have an expression for this stage of practice: “attaining the cascading mind.” You notice that your mind is like a cascading waterfall, noisy and flowing all the time.
This may not sound like much of an attainment, but the fact is that everyone’s mind is like that, and most people don’t know it. It is a major step to come to this realization. Our world is run for the most part by people who don’t realize their minds are like Grand Central Station at rush hour. Is it any wonder that we’re in such bad shape?
There is an old Jewish joke about a man who gets his hands on a beautiful piece of cloth and decides that he wants to have a suit made out of it. He visits an expert tailor, who makes a number of measurements and tells the man to come back in a couple of days. But when the man returns, the tailor says, “No, I’m not done. Come back in a couple more days.” This happens four or five times, and the man grows quite concerned, but finally he shows up one day and finds that the tailor has created an absolutely beautiful suit. “This is exquisite,” the man says, “but do you realize that it took you longer to make this suit than it took God to create the world?”
“Maybe so,” the tailor says, “but have you taken a look at the world lately?”
We don’t wonder at the shape the world is in once we notice our cascading mind and realize that it is running the show. Still, there is no need to be impatient; impatience doesn’t help, anyway. Over a period of time, as you sit and stay with each in-breath and out-breath, your mind will quiet down, and you will experience moments when the breath is silky and soft, and you are just with it. You will also notice the stillness of the pause between breaths. This is a taste of silence, and you may find a certain refreshment even in this tiny bit. There is much more to come, but such brief encounters will give you faith to continue.
Much deeper kinds of silence are available, but not through striving to attain them. Once you’ve achieved a certain calm through breath-awareness practice, the way to silence is by making friends with your noise, really coming to know it. And the biggest noisemaker is your ego, your tendency to become attached to things, to claim them as “me” or “mine.” The ego knows that there is no place for it in the world of silence, because silence belongs to no one; there is nothing there for the ego to appropriate. Silence is where the ego isn’t.
When you are ready for it, an even better approach to deep silence is choiceless awareness. At first, as you sit with your breathing and allow everything to come and go — thoughts, feelings, sounds, sensations, mental and physical states — your attention will not be choiceless; you’ll be directing it at this or that. But in time that tendency will fall away; even the breath won’t be especially conspicuous, and you’ll notice, in an utterly undirected way, whatever arises. Sitting with undivided presence in this state of total receptivity, you won’t be for or against anything that comes up; you’ll just take a friendly, interested, accepting attitude toward it. When the mind is allowed to roam freely in this way, it eventually gets tired of itself — it is, after all, just saying the same things again and again. It grows tired of all the noise and begins to settle down. As it does, you stand on the threshold of the vast world of silence.
You are more likely to encounter such silence on a long retreat, when your mind has an extended period in which to slow down. Sometimes on retreats, meditators who have just been introduced to choiceless awareness say to their teachers, “Nothing’s happening.” We are so used to having things happen in our lives that we don’t know the value of this nothing. But it is extremely valuable, the first step into the realm of silence. There is no need to do anything but stay with it.
When you allow whatever arises to come into your mind, you see that all of it is impermanent. In that seeing, there is a letting go, and past that letting go is silence. A silent mind allows you to see impermanence even more clearly, which leads to more letting go, and in turn a deeper penetration into silence. These two things feed on each other, what I’m calling wisdom and what I’m calling silence. Each deepens the other.
It is true that on the threshold of silence we often experience fear. It is the ego that is afraid. In the panoramic attention required for choiceless awareness, the ego is not allowed to occupy center stage, where it thinks it belongs, and it begins to wonder what life will be like in silence, where it won’t be present at all. This fear resembles the fear of death, because entering into silence is a temporary death for the ego. Naturally, it is afraid.
When this fear comes up, you shouldn’t regard it as an obstacle or hindrance; it is just one more aspect of the noise. Your encounter with this fear is very valuable, and the skill called for is just to stay with it. In time, like every other phenomenon, it will pass away. When it does, all that will be left is silence.
The ability to attain silence is somewhat related to the ability to handle loneliness, and also to accept death. For the ego especially, these three are closely related. We are afraid of being alone and afraid to die, so we create company for ourselves with our thoughts, and they keep us from experiencing silence.
It is therefore often helpful for a meditator to practice with death awareness. Apart from its inherent value, it helps us enter the realm of silence, which we fear because — like death — it is unknown. Actually, the realm of silence is quite wonderful, an immense relief, but the mind doesn’t know that. It might also be helpful, when you feel ready, to go on prolonged solitary retreats, where you can encounter loneliness in a profound way. Once you have made friends with your loneliness, silence will be much more accessible.
The relationship between silence and death was made even more apparent to me recently when my father died after a long illness. We had been close all my life, and I had a great deal of grieving to do. At times I thought I was doing well with it, at other times not so well. I’m not exempt from the human tendencies to deny, repress, run away from, and intellectualize.
I took my father’s ashes to Newburyport, Massachusetts, where I frequently do solitary retreats, and floated them out to his beloved Atlantic Ocean by way of the Parker River. Afterward, I went to the house where I do my retreats. I had already grieved a great deal, but apparently at some level I hadn’t even begun, because that day I encountered more sorrow than I had thought possible.
Previously, there had been elements of self-pity in my grieving, along with pity for my father. My self-centeredness had not allowed sorrow to flower fully. But now I experienced sorrow directly, without any holding back, for an extended period of time. I developed a real intimacy with it. Finally, the sorrow ended. Beyond it was an immense silence.
I learned a great deal that day about the way that elements of the self keep us from fully experiencing our feelings, and what is available to us if we let them go. Another name for such silence is “absolute presence,” which, paradoxically, is possible only if there is absolute absence of the self.
My students often ask what to do when they get to silence. Some are still basically afraid of it, wanting to taste it briefly and get out. Others are full of anticipation, waiting for something to happen; they view the silence as a door to something else. It is a door, but if we attempt to use this door, it stays shut. If we look too hard for something special to happen, silence will collapse. We can also cause it to disappear by treating it like a personal experience: naming it, evaluating it, comparing it to other experiences we’ve had, wondering what we will tell our friends about it, planning how we will shape it into a poem.
So what I advise my students to do when they encounter silence is: absolutely nothing. Bathe in it. Surrender to it. Let it work on you. The experience will make you realize what an inadequate word silence is for what I’m talking about. It sounds like just a break from real living, but that is a failure of language. It is actually a highly charged state, full of life. It couldn’t be more alive. Its energy is subtle and refined, but extremely powerful. It need make no apologies to action.
Silence is also full of love and compassion. After you have been intimately embraced by silence, you come out feeling much more open to the world. You also come out — and this sounds strange, but it’s true — more intelligent. You haven’t acquired any information, of course; I’m speaking of another kind of intelligence, an intrinsic one. You’re kinder, more sensitive, more compassionate. You can’t achieve these things by trying, but if you value silence for itself, you will find them there.
Anyone who practices meditation has probably had some taste of silence. Maybe you’ve had ten seconds during a sitting when you were suddenly quiet and calm — although you had no idea how it happened — and you got up feeling refreshed, infused with a new energy. Or maybe you’ve come out of a sitting and noticed that the world looked different, or felt different, perhaps just for a little while. But the silence I’m talking about is not something you have to leave on the cushion. It is not actually affected by the noise of the world, because it is not the mere opposite of noise, but an inexhaustible energy. It is not dependent on the approval of others, or on what happens to us out in the world. Nor is it merely an experience that we have now and then. It is inherent fulfillment that can permeate our lives. We can take it into the world and act from it.
Silence in action is a doerless doing in which the ego is not present. There is only washing the dishes, vacuuming the floor. Typically, whatever we do, we bring an “I” to it, become attached to it, make it “me” or “mine.” But in silence there is no ego, and silence in action involves acting in the world without making the action “mine” or being aware that “I” am doing it. By uniting with a particular activity, we temporarily forget the self and become immersed in the vividness of the experience.
Various traditions come at this truth in different ways. In China, one answer to the question “What is enlightenment?” is “Eating rice and drinking tea.” Actually, you can be doing anything so long as the preoccupation with self goes into abeyance, and you are manifesting deep silence in the ordinary world. In Zen tradition it’s called “no mind” or “clear mind”: you step away from your past conditioning and become fresh, alive, and innocent in the moment.
Another answer to that age-old question is “The grass is green, the sky is blue.” We all know this, of course, but when the mind emerges from being bathed in silence, we really see it. It is an incomparable experience.
Early in my practice, I was meditating one afternoon in my apartment, then came out into the street to wait for a friend. I saw a Yellow Cab parked at the corner. Still in touch with my breathing, I focused on the cab, and I really saw it. I saw yellow. It brought me to tears. (In that state, anything could have had the same effect; a crushed beer can might have done it.)
This was no moment of great awakening. But it does show how, when the mind is clear of all obsession with “me” and “mine,” life is just there, and we experience it much more deeply. It has an enormous impact on us, one words can’t describe. Striving does not get us to this point. An open, clear seeing does.
The point is not that we should throw out culture, or abandon our involvement in the world, but rather that we should achieve a better balance. I have come in touch with silence only by going on extended retreats, with others or by myself. I need a period without responsibilities in order for my mind to exhaust its preoccupation with itself and settle into its inherent nature. But I don’t regard these retreats as the only, or even the most, worthwhile moments in my life. That would reduce my life to just a month or so per year — or, even worse, to just a few moments of special insight. Rather, it is important for me to bring what I learn on the cushion back into the world. The dharma quest is to grow more and more into the large mind that leaves “me” behind. What is then left is clarity.
In a way, all of these truths are expressed in one of the most famous stories in Buddhism: the meeting between Bodhidharma and Emperor Wu. Bodhidharma was the great Indian teacher credited with bringing Zen to China. By the time he arrived, the Chinese had already been exposed to the doctrines of Buddhism, but their interest was largely theoretical and scholarly. They were great with translations and commentaries, but no one was getting free. Bodhidharma, on the other hand, was a master of the practice, and following this encounter would spend nine years in solitary sitting.
The emperor had been anxious to meet Bodhidharma, and immediately posed a question: “I’ve contributed huge amounts of money for the building of temples, the financing of monks and nuns, the health of the practice in general. How much merit do I get for all that?”
“No merit whatsoever,” Bodhidharma said.
The emperor was stunned. He tried another approach: “What can you tell me about the holy dharma?” he said.
He was asking for Bodhidharma’s exposition of Buddhist theory, a subject about which Chinese scholars could have gone on forever.
“Nothing holy,” Bodhidharma said, “just vast space.”
The emperor was exasperated. He was getting nowhere. He felt personally insulted. “Who is it who is standing before me making these statements?” he demanded.
Bodhidharma looked him straight in the eye and said, “I have no idea.”
It is when we finally have no idea that we see things as they are.
— © The Sun Magazine, January 1998, by Larry Rosenberg, American Buddhist teacher