"When you come to the end of the path, you don’t find a gate or doorway, or any sort of celestial mansion waiting for you. You don’t find anything at all. There’s nothing there. The path just ends - and there you are at the end of it.
In fact, you find yourself - to use another metaphor, which is also not to be taken literally - at the edge of a precipice. The path has gone on nicely, step by step, stage by stage, mile after mile. You have counted all those milestones, and you were expecting to arrive in comfort at the entrance to a great house. But no - you find the path ends right at the edge of a precipice. So there you are, standing on the edge, and the drop goes down not just a few feet, but what seems like miles. Somehow you know that it’s bottomless, infinite. What are you going to do?"
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→ 05 Apr 12 at 1 pm
→ 05 Apr 12 at 1 pm
But no one captures the profound and paradoxical nature of silence better than silent Buddhist retreat leader Gene Lushtak. Prochnik recounts a story Lushtak told him about Ajahn Chah, the most prominent leader of 20th-century Buddhism:
“A young monk came to live in the monastery where Ajahn Chah was practicing. The people who lived in the town outside the monastery were holding a series of festivals in which they sang and danced all night long. When the monks would rise at three thirty in the morning to begin their meditation, the parties from the night before would still be going strong. At last, one morning the young monk cried out to Ajahn Chah, ‘Venerable One, the noise is interrupting my practice — I can’t meditate with all this noise!; ‘The noise isn’t bothering you, ‘ Ajahn responded. ‘You are bothering the noise.’ As Lushtak put it to me, ‘Silence is not a function of what we think of as silence. It’s when my reaction is quiet. What’s silent is my protest against the way things are.’”
Courtesy of Brain Pickings.
