Unfathomable Silence

Zen talk 2013

Rahulabhadra’s ‘Hymn to the Wisdom beyond all Wisdom’ is an overflowing treasure chest. I pick out a few pearls.

Hail, unfathomable Silence, hindered by nothing,
vast as the endlessness of the universe.
All who truly experience You in this way
thereby touch the Buddhas as well.

Unfathomable silence. Months before the sesshin I had already decided to speak about this text. I read and listened to it countless times. It was the most-played track in my iTunes library. And every time I fell silent. No words came — only silence. I grew anxious about whether I would be able to speak about it at all. I had no choice but to wait until I was sitting in front of the group during the talk, feeling naked, not knowing whether any words would come.

Rahulabhadra addresses Prajnaparamita and calls her an unfathomable silence, a silence hindered by nothing. How deeply we long for silence. We seek it out, even in meditation.

That’s how it goes. You want to meditate, you wait until everyone has left the house, you unplug the phone, you light a stick of incense, you settle onto your favorite cushion… and then your neighbor a few doors down starts mowing the lawn. Or at sesshin, there you sit, finally withdrawn from the hustle and bustle of daily life, in a beautiful place, with lovely people, in the silence of the zendo, the deep resonance of the gong… and then it turns out there’s a scout camp two kilometers away that has decided to treat the neighborhood to blaring music that morning.

Over all the years I have been meditating, I have often heard sesshin participants complain about the lack of silence. There are children living on the grounds, a busy road nearby, another group in the same building… It disturbs our concentration. We think we must bring everything we have to bear on just one thing: counting the breath, holding the koan… Everything else is disturbance. The same goes for the inner noise. ‘All those thoughts are keeping me away from that deep inner silence I so want to reach,’ someone once told me on a retreat.

But there are two kinds of silence. There is the silence that tries to exclude all sounds. You aim for a deep concentration no longer disturbed by sounds, from within or from the outside. Certainly, such intense, sustained concentration can lead to all kinds of intense experiences, if that is what you are looking for.

Rahulabhadra speaks of an entirely different silence, a silence ‘vast as the endlessness of the universe’. In the universe there is a great deal of space, an enormous amount of space. It is a silence in which all sounds are welcome. A silence that excludes nothing. A silence in which every sound, as the composer John Cage put it, is the voice of the Buddha. Not only the sounds from outside, but everything that presents itself.

Can we sit on our cushion while those scouts are having the time of their lives, something they might still be talking about years later? And can we sit there in an unfathomable silence hindered by nothing, not because we can shut out the noise but because we allow it? Perhaps we can even resonate with their enjoyment? And can we sit on our cushion and allow the torrent of thoughts and feelings, give it space?

Can we find liberation in that?

Hail. All who have awakened have always sung of You,
out of compassion for those who long for light,
as though You had a thousand forms and a thousand names.
And yet in that multiplicity You are the One.

At a sesshin not so long ago, I was walking with someone into the nearby forest during a break for a talk (so as not to disturb the others’ silence), when suddenly someone in an expensive car came driving up the forest path at far too high a speed. We both looked at each other with a feeling of indignation. There are just those kinds of people who…

When we returned from our short walk, we saw the car parked by the ‘grotto of Lourdes’ at the entrance to the monastery where we were meditating. The driver was sitting by the grotto, absorbed in prayer. We looked at each other again. Who are we to judge?

Afterwards I went to sit in that spot myself more than once, and there was always — I don’t know why — an unmistakable deep silence. To my great surprise there were also always candles burning. Apparently people were still finding their way to this place in these times of secularisation, a few kilometres outside the village.

Beneath the image of Mary stood the mysterious words: Que soi era immaculada concepcion (I am the Immaculate Conception). Then I began to wonder whether that might be what people came there seeking. (All the absurd discussions about what a feminist theologian once called ‘Catholic gynecology’ notwithstanding.) A receptivity blemished by nothing, an openness unsullied by nothing, an unfathomable silence hindered by nothing, a place where you are welcome with your longing and your sorrow, with your hope and your despair. Where you may be as you are. And I began to ask myself: what gives us the right to think that what we do there on our cushion is superior? What arrogance to think that this form and this language are the only right ones!

No, Prajnaparamita has ‘a thousand forms’ and ‘a thousand names’ and ‘yet in that multiplicity she is the One’. Once you start paying attention, you find them everywhere. Not only in temples and sanctuaries, but also in nature, in art, in music and in literature, in a conversation, in a chance encounter…

You find it in Kumaré’s ‘Blue Light’, Priscilla’s ‘Creación’, Millet’s Angelus, Bodhidharma’s ‘Vast Emptiness’, Masao Abe’s ‘You are accepted just as you are’, Thich Nhat Hanh’s Mindfulness, Ton Lathouwers’ ‘You cannot fall out of it’…

I notice that this awareness takes away all my enthusiasm for discussions about differences between traditions, between historical and ahistorical Buddhas, between theistic and atheistic traditions. I can’t bother about it anymore. Yes, there are differences in skin color and hair color, but there is something more important: a deeply human reality that transcends all differences.

It makes something else visible as well. Someone told me she was completely put off by the word ‘Hail’. It brought back only painful memories of her school years in a convent, where every joy in life, every sense of the body, every awakening sexuality, every hint of creativity had been ruthlessly stamped out.

Corruptio optimi, pessima, the corruption of the best is the worst of all. No wound cuts deeper than being hurt in the depths of one’s soul. That is how people close themselves off, how we lose touch with that vast open space. Of the ‘thousand forms’ and ‘thousand names’, some of them have been seriously compromised. People then let go of one tradition and seek refuge in another. Abuse is no more characteristic of one tradition than of any other. Sadly, you find it everywhere.

Our practice is one of opening our heart and our mind. It shows us that vast open space, it allows us to discover the groundless silence, but it also shows us abuse for what it is, and tragedy for what it is.

Someone asked the Dalai Lama why he did not hate the Chinese. ‘They have already taken my country, must I now let them take my mind as well?’ was his answer. Let us not allow tragedy to deny us access to that unfathomable silence. On the contrary, it is precisely with that tragedy and its pain that you are entirely welcome here. Like being with someone who, every time you want to say sorry, answers: ‘It doesn’t matter, you are welcome, completely, just as you are.’

And perhaps we then need a thousand and one forms and a thousand and one names to sing the Wisdom beyond all Wisdom, ‘out of compassion for those who long for light’.