In Indian and Chinese religious discourses, silence is rarely viewed as a mere absence of sound; it is frequently positioned as a concept related to the ultimate reality. In the Upaniṣads and Bhartṛhari’s writings, silence serves as the unmanifest ground of both language or reality; Buddhist arguments often frame silence as a signal of the ineffability of ultimate reality or liberation. Daoist texts describe silence as an attunement to the Way or Nature’s spontaneity, while early Confucians view “Heaven’s silence” as the ultimate expression of effortless efficacy. By bringing together presentations of early Confucianism, Bhartṛhari’s linguistic philosophy, Advaita Vedānta, and Chan Buddhism, this panel examines the philosophical and soteriological implications of silence across the Asian religious landscape. Together, the panel reveals the cross-cultural potency of silence as a privileged site for musings about metaphysical problems.
In Bhartṛhari’s sphoṭa (“flash”) theory, Silence—which I use to render paśyantī, the highest level in the threefold hierarchy of speech—represents the purely non-verbal phase of speech and the point of origin from which articulated speech emerges. Bhartṛhari characterizes this through the metaphor of a peahen’s egg: just as a full, multicolored peacock is implicitly present within the egg’s yolk, the complete sentence and its sequential constituents are held implicitly in Silence as an undifferentiated whole. This paper addresses three interrelated questions addressed in Bhartṛhari’s Vākyapadīya: how Silence can be understood as pure, non-conceptual subjectivity; how it differs from mere ineffability; and how it unfolds in a way that it generates an appearance of the world.
This paper argues that the prominent Chan monk Hongzhi Zhengjue 宏智正覺 (1091–1157) expanded the significance of the term mo 默 (silence) from its more narrow use as a method of meditation practice to signify the very goal of meditation (an enlightened state), and even ultimate reality in his new vision of a Caodong-School path to cultivation. The many meanings Zhengjue ascribed to mo (silence) are clearly articulated in his portrait encomia (zhenzan真贊). This paper first places Zhengjue’s portrait encomia within the contemporary monastic practice of fundraising and literati relations to demonstrate the effect Zhengjue’s literary achievements had on contemporary literati. Subsequently, through close readings of the encomia, the article analyzes how Zhengjue employed the character mo 默 in 94 of his 434 portrait encomia as both a reflection of the path to self-cultivation and a symbol of its ultimate goal.
Within dualistic Yoga and Jainism, mauna (silence) is considered as a form of tapas (austerity) or a supporting practice for non-violence or truthfulness. However, as this paper argues, within non-dualistic systems, silence is not just the conscious restraint of speech, but an ontological state. The c. sixteenth-century Aparokṣānubhūti reframes mauna as one of its fifteen yogic steps on the path to the realization of Advaitic oneness. It defines mauna in the words of the Taittirīya Upaniṣad (2.9.1) as that state “from which words turn back, together with the mind.” According to the Aparokṣānubhūti, silence by merely restraining speech is child’s play and true silence is equated with brahman. The passage preceding the Taittirīya Upaniṣad verse explains that a wise person journeys through the increasingly subtle sheaths of food, breath, mind, wisdom, and bliss. This bliss is brahman—one who knows it is never afraid and transcends dualistic conceptions of silence.
In China, writing arises to divine the divine, to let heaven speak. Yet contra the cosmology of early divination, early philosophy mostly agrees with Confucius (Kongzi): “heaven doesn’t speak.” For Kongzi, Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Hanfeizi, heaven’s silence is its perfectly effortless efficacy, which we should try to emulate; for Xunzi, it is a silence we should distance ourselves from via ritual, creating worldly order and stability instead. This presentation expounds Mengzi’s speculatively rich middle position, building on Franklin Perkins’ reading. For Mengzi, we should perfect our naturally good and heaven-bestowed, yet thereby ‘unscripted’ (spontaneous, divinely unplanned) dispositions, for want of maximal resilience in the face of everything heaven in complete moral silence enacts, viz., the outrageous caprice of human fates and fortunes. Human self-cultivation thus flips heavenly silence back on itself, achieving heaven’s absolute self-knowing as humanity’s tragic self-consciousness. Our very inability to reconcile with fate is heaven’s "heavening" in silence.