The Mountain's Silence

On the southern slope of a small red mountain called Arunachala, in a country of warm rocks and sudden temple bells, there lived a young man who had walked away from his home and his name. He had been a boy in a town not far from there. He had had a mother who worried about him. He had had a school book with a tear on the cover. Then one afternoon something inside him had become very quiet, and he had got up and walked, and not turned back.

The mountain took him in. He lived first in a cave, then in another cave, then in a small hut at the foot of the rocks. He did not speak much. When people came, he sat. When they asked, he sometimes answered with a word or two, and sometimes only looked at them with eyes that seemed to see right through whatever they had brought to him — the question, the grief, the pride — and to rest on the small bright thing behind it.

They began to call him Ramana. The crowds grew. A scholar came from Madras with a folder full of philosophical doubts. A young widow came carrying her grief like a clay pot too full of water. A European traveller came in trousers and a hat, with a notebook ready. Ramana sat. The morning light moved across the floor. He did not give long teachings. He did not raise his voice. Sometimes he laughed softly. Sometimes he asked one question back. Sometimes he said nothing at all, for an hour, for two hours, for an afternoon.

A visitor once complained. Master, I have come from very far. You have not spoken a single word to me. How am I to take back your teaching? Ramana smiled. He pointed, very gently, at the mountain behind him. He pointed at the visitor's own chest. He folded his hands. The visitor sat down again and did not leave for three days. On the morning of the fourth, he walked down the path with no notes and no folder and a kind of light in his face that he could not have described if he had tried.

The mountain did not move all those years. It simply sat there, red in the morning, gold in the evening, dark at night, the same shape under every sky. And the saint sat at its foot, and the silence of the mountain and the silence of the saint became one silence, and the people who came near them came away changed without quite knowing why.

You are halfway now. One hundred and forty days behind, one hundred and forty days ahead, and inside you a small life is listening for what your silence sounds like. Not the silence of an absent room — the silence of a room where someone steady is sitting. Tonight, sit for two minutes the way Arunachala sits. Do nothing. Say nothing. Be the mountain that does not have to teach because it is teaching all the time.