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What Confucius taught about sitting quietly

Karen Armstrong

ZHUANGZI, THE great Daoist sage who lived in the 4th century BCE, told an illuminating story about Confucius. One day his favourite disciple Yan Hui triumphantly announced that he could not remember anything Confucius had taught him. "What do you mean?" Confucius asked uneasily. "I sit quietly and forget!" beamed Yan Hui. Instead of being dismayed, Confucius acknowledged that his pupil had surpassed him. The intellect, he explained, could only "tally things up," but the deepest core of the human being, whence enlightenment comes, was vacant and receptive. "The Way is found in emptiness. Emptiness is the mind's fast."

I was reminded of this story recently, when I learned with horror that because of the new security restrictions I would not be allowed to take a book on my flight home from New York. How on earth was I going to "sit quietly" with an empty mind for seven hours? This Daoist ideal is alien to our pragmatic modernity. We are happy to limit our intake of food to achieve bodily health and agility, but the idea of deliberately starving our minds to achieve greater spiritual acuity is repugnant — even frightening. So is the Daoist principle of wu wei (doing nothing). We feel a duty to be active and productive.

But poets and artists have always known how to hold themselves in an attitude of silent waiting. Keats called the creative process "negative capability ... when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."

We cannot all be poets and mystics, but we now face unprecedented dangers, and need to be creative as never before. This means we must "forget" old ideas that cannot speak to our present situation. The policies of the Cold War, which was between nations and empires, cannot be effective when the enemy is within.

In our restlessly talkative culture, we find silence difficult. We expect instant sound-bites from our pundits and politicians about "Islam" and the so-called "clash of civilisations." We find it hard, to "sit quietly" and take time to look at these highly complex matters impartially and in depth, admitting that we may not fully understand what we are talking about. But strident dogmatism abounds. Debates in parliament or in the media are emotional, aggressive, and often self-serving, when what is required is a coldly critical diagnosis of the crisis, empty of received opinion, prejudice and self-interest. At this terrifying juncture of history, we have to be ready to "forget" — to start from scratch and experience the frightening void of unknowing.

People who have no religious beliefs are often willing to talk to contemplative nuns, because these women, who have embraced silence and emptiness, know how to listen. Listening is rare in our chattering society. It is often all too clear that, while their interlocutor is speaking, participants in talk-shows and phone-ins are not really listening, but thinking up the next clever thing that they want to say. If we are to break the deadly cycle of escalating violence — of strike and counter-strike, atrocity and enraged reaction — we must listen intently to what everybody, even our enemy, is saying, and be sincerely ready to let it change us: to get beyond the rhetoric, decode the imagery, and hear the subtext of rage, grief, fear, pain, hatred, and despair.

Buoyed up with these thoughts, I approached the check-out desk at JFK thinking that it might be good for me to experience "the mind's fast" during my flight home. But I was reprieved. The ban on books had been lifted, and my fellow passengers and I boarded the plane, joyfully clutching our reading matter — if not yet our laptops, iPods, and computer games — as a shield against the new terrors of the air. I was relieved, but had a sneaking suspicion that I had missed an opportunity. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

(Karen Armstrong is the author of the Great Transformation: The World at the Time of Buddha, Socrates, Confucius and Jeremiah.)

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