The sounds of silence: Thai meditative practice for personal and political change

Abstract

In the middle of Benjamin Tausig's (2019) Bangkok Is Ringing: Sound, Protest, and Constraint, amid the clamor of crowds protesting military suppression and the voices of those who would not be silenced, the narrative suddenly becomes quiet. Tausig focuses in on a man named Kittisak Janpeng (Diew) sitting silently among the protestors. He was protesting without words, a nonverbal reaction to political violence. By meditating, Tausig tells us, “Diew created a striking visual and sonic contrast with the busy event around him.” When Tausig later contacts Diew for an interview, Diew explained how “I sat and meditated in front of the tanks for five or six hours [that day]” (90). His actions, though silent, reflected their own kind of affective reverberations among the noise. “With quiet and silence as dynamic poetic resources, it is possible,” Tausig says, “that his silence achieved a political mobility that no sound could have matched” (91).

In a much less politically charged space, in the far north of the country, a woman named Gaew had also decided that meditation was a key to solving problems. In the quieter but still bustling city of Chiang Mai, Gaew explained to me that I wouldn't be seeing her for a while, as she was about to begin a 10-day silent meditation retreat at the nearby vipassana center of Wat Pradhatu Sri Chom Tong. “I've been really scattered lately,” Gaew told me when I asked her why she was going to the retreat. Her life was so busy, with her job and an extended family all relying on her, and I was surprised she would prioritize the time away. “I've been forgetful, and it will help.” I had noticed this, too: Gaew had recently started missing appointments and forgetting to bring things with her when she went out. The silent meditation, she felt, could help her to develop what she saw as her increasingly muddled mind, just as Diew felt that his practice could develop the potential for social change.

But how? Amid the different contexts for practice that Diew, Gaew, and the thousands of others who participate in Buddhist meditation in Thailand, silence is regularly enacted as a purposeful, pragmatic practice. Silent meditation is well known as a technique of discipline and development in Thailand, ensconced in a large tradition of Thai Buddhist practice, with social implications for those who undergo it. In this essay, I address some of the ways that silence as practice works through meditation in Thailand, as a means to explore the multivocal, affective effects that can emanate from them.

In bringing together the silent political protest of a Buddhist activist in Bangkok with the kinds of encounters that my friend Gaew engaged with in silent meditation, I consider the shared potential of both. Such a consideration speaks to an anthropology of silence that, as Ana Dragojlovic (2023) writes, neither “celebrates the silent agency that resides in radical alterity nor imposes the idea of speech as the only pathway for achieving equality and empowerment.” By paying attention to silence as affectively laden attuned listening, and to the altered connection with sound that its enactment affords, we can start to make sense of some of the social reverberations that occur in contemporary Buddhist expressions of silent practice. Silence as attuned listening becomes not only relationally meaningful but also political (Dragojlovic and Samuels, 2023; Cassaniti, forthcoming), with effects that are loaded with culturally elaborated ideas about power and influence.

Gaew didn't talk about her experience with meditation after her retreat. I have found that people rarely do. In my own experiences of meditation (Cassaniti, 2015, 2018), I had, in early retreats, taken part in long conversations after leaving, as if a dam of silence had broken, but following later retreats I found I had less of a need to talk afterward, and almost reveled in the quiet. Michal Pagis (2010, 2019) found a similar pattern among meditation practitioners; even journaling about one's experiences of meditation decreased over time, as ruminative discourse lessened within the mind as well as without. This trained, purposeful movement toward silence and nonrumination makes meditation difficult to write about. How do we understand the affective space created through meditative training, then, without demanding discourse about it? The logic of silent, corporeal practice eludes straightforward representations. Our bodies and minds, our personal histories and social contexts, are all so different from one another that simply “doing what others do” does not necessarily mean “feeling what others feel.” Practice, though, may be a useful methodological tool to explore the silence of meditation, particularly when we take into account, as cultural phenomenologists do (Csordas, 1999; Desjarlais and Throop, 2011; Luhrmann, 2020), an attention to the contingencies of personal stance. Keeping these factors in mind, it can help us to get closer to the “ineffable horizon” of affective experience (Gregg et al., 2010).

Because meditation becomes understandable largely by experiencing its bodily techniques, I signed up for a retreat at the renowned Wat Pradhatu Sri Chom Tong a few weeks after Gaew finished hers at the same monastery. By practicing silence in this way, I learned some of the phenomenal, corporeal practices of meditation that Gaew experienced, and by extension those of Diew and the many others who undergo some of the various styles of meditation found in Thailand. Each day at the monastery I woke up with the morning bell at 4 a.m. and had morning and midday meals at 6 and 11 a.m. I met very briefly with a monk in the evenings to report on my progress, and like the hundreds of others quietly moving around the meditation grounds, the rest of the day was spent in silence, walking or sitting for preset periods of time. At our own personal(ized) levels of meditative skill we were all instructed to aim for a set number of hours of meditation a day, for an uninterrupted hour at a time. I was given the task of scanning my body for changing sensations while sitting or walking, and later of focusing on particular spots on my feet, head, and back. The monastery was tranquil, with the feeling of quietness understood to be both an effect of silence and a tool for its development. One is taught to cultivate silence, but in addition to the idealized meditator practicing undisturbed in a jungle (McDaniel, 2011) or cave (Jirattikorn, 2016), it is thought that one should aim not to be distracted even amid a cacophony of sound, even of the kind Diew positioned himself in during the Bangkok protests.

I was almost completely silent throughout the days at the monastery, though now and then I and others would quietly joke or whisper to each other. The short, 10-minute “reporting” time each evening was the only break from the silence. These meetings were restrained and straightforward in their delivery; I described my progress, was given advice, and then returned to my silent practice. Their contrast to the rest of the day was marked, drawing attention to the relationality of silence, where silence is always, in a sense, related to sound. In addition to the expression of spiritual expertise that marked these encounters, it may have been in part because of the silence surrounding them, still unusual to ears used to being bombarded with sounds and thoughts, that the space opened up in those few minutes of speech seemed especially significant.

It is not just in allowing affective space for the “important” work of speech, however, that practicing silence is understood to work to craft change. In addition to the speech that silence contrastively indexes, it also operates through a process of orienting corporeally in new ways. Meditative silence shifts the directionality of attention by “listening,” in the sense of attending and attuning, to modes of expression that are not just verbal. In the first few days at the monastery, my mind was filled with discursive rumination, but as the days went by, I felt my mind become quieter and, at the same time, my senses sharpen. I noticed more and more subtle sensations, even in the relatively early stage of meditative training that I was in, and I heard sounds that must have been there the whole time but that I hadn't noticed earlier. I became more attuned to my own body and mind, and in doing so became more attuned as well to the interpersonal space that I and the others were occupying. Although I didn't interact with the others verbally, there was a shared sense of being and practicing together that became more pronounced over time, in the construction of a nondiscursive shared environment. Without consciously thinking about another's subjective experience, the heightened awareness created a subtle affective attunement to others.

The phenomenal experiences that Gaew, Diew, and I will encounter in silent meditation are all different; beyond the differences that our own personal histories and bodies bring to bear, there are many different lineages and cultural traditions at play in meditative centers in Thailand (Schedneck, 2015; Skilton, Crosby, and Kyaw, 2019; Violi, 2008). But from my experience at Wat Pradhatu Sri Chom Tong and in retreats and ethnographic interviews with hundreds of other monastic and lay practitioners in Thailand, I have come to appreciate some of the shared affective characteristics that meditation cultivates. Silence invites, or “kindles” (Cassaniti and Luhrmann, 2014), a different way of relating to others, and it is here that silence can be seen, at least in this context, for its potential to craft change. When one isn't thinking or preparing, as we often do, for the performative requirements of a potential social encounter, silence shifts sensory focus and allows the mind to attend with a sharper sensitivity to a situation. Following Foucauldian and Aristotelian models of ethical pedagogy, through this new mode of attention, the silence of meditation crafts a series of dispositions that reshape intersubjective as well as individual experience. Although changes indirectly alluded to through silence aren't necessarily easy to surmise (Samuels, 2023), on her return from the monastery, Gaew seemed to me to move a little more slowly, to think a little more, and, importantly, to provoke others to do so too. The trained effects of silent practice afforded—both in Gibson's (1979) and in a practical sense—others space to attune to her, and to change themselves in the process.

The effects of silent practice were also felt by Diew and others during the protest, this time at a larger social and political level. In sitting silently, Diew was not only putting into the space a particular kind of affective reverberation but also summoning others to “tune” into the reverberations as well. The affective reverberations developed through interpersonal attunement can, of course, occur in speech as well as out of it. But the particular kind of “sound” created through Diew's demonstration of silence had its own significance, through the symbolic and corporeal alignment with a moralized Buddhist understanding of mental discernment. The slowing down of actions is here tied to a different modality of attention to social atrocities of the kind being protested against than the typical rhetorical practice of political protest. The creation of a silent space can reorient as it reduces the pace of the action, allowing for a reconnection and recognition of shared humanity that can be dangerous for regimes used to imposing their will through speech and violence. It is here, I think, that silent protest can serve, as Sophia Hatzisavvidou (2015) puts it, to disrupt an established set of routine practices.

It is not just as symbolic representation of a moral high ground or a slowing down of space as a contrast to sound that silent meditation works here to disrupt the structural stability of particular and entrenched social patterns. The practice of silence as its own kind of “sound” is as much about corporeal experience as it is about symbolism or semantic indexicality. As the phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty (2002) drew our attention to, we shape and are shaped by our physical and sociocultural environments. The socially meaningful environment of Thai meditation represents an important shared site for this reshaping. In emphasizing a somatic mode of attention (Csordas, 2002), silence shifts the ways in which we attune (Throop, 2017; Zigon, 2014) to each other and our environment.

“I just meditate,” Diew says. “Sometimes someone sees me sitting, and her husband died, so she sits for a long time . . . we feel pity (songsan) for each other. We feel sympathy for our brothers and sisters who died. Sometimes we have to meditate as our tears run” (Tausig, 2019, 91). Even as meditation is a personal—some would say very individual—activity, here as elsewhere it is also deeply interpersonal. Zigon (2019, 1006) points out, using Levinas's idea of the Other, that ethical subjects come to be constituted largely through relationships with others, and that this relationality begins in the bodily materiality of the face of the Other. When confronted with another—whether a general in a tank, a friend at a meditation retreat, or a stranger whose husband had died—we are called on, and call on others in the process, to attune as ethical subjects. Language is typically central to discussions on attunement in anthropological scholarship, but here we can see silence as a potent medium for this intersubjective, affective communication.

In this essay, I have described some of the methods and effects by which silence acts meaningfully for Diew, Gaew, myself, and others in Thailand. The experiences that I have drawn attention to demonstrate how silence can be thought of as not just a state of being or a relative absence but a practiced process cultivated in culturally meaningful ways. As anthropologists interested in understanding the mechanisms of social change, silence can serve as a key site in which to attune to our informants, as we attend to the affective reverberations of interpersonal space. The idea of “attuning”—along with that of “reverberations”—invokes metaphors of sound, but the attunement of silent meditation reflects not just silence as speech, or even the intervals between speech, but the bodily and affective practices that are part of relating to others. By attending to the affective reverberations developed and expressed in silence—in meditation and elsewhere—we create spaces that open new analytic possibilities for understanding others, and creating personal and social change.