Madhyamaka-Prasangika: why silence alone is not enough

For many years I taught meditation the way many people teach it today: relax, calm the mind, observe. Silence will reveal everything else by itself. This idea is very popular in and around the New Age movement: stop your thoughts, and freedom, peace and enlightenment will come.

Over time I saw that it is not that simple.

What I noticed in my students

The method worked. Within a year or two most students reached silence: a stable, calm state almost free of thoughts. That is a serious achievement, and it really changes life for the better.

But beyond that, almost nothing happened for almost anyone. People came to me again and again with the same question: "I sat for two hours in almost complete silence. What next?"

Besides, silence did not free people from their habitual clinging. After meditation the same grudges, fears and desires came back, the same struggle for their "self". Silence muted them but did not remove them. I saw it in myself too: even after very deep states, sooner or later the mind returned to its old ways.

Where I found the answer

I found the answer in the Lamrim Chenmo ("The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path") by the Tibetan teacher Tsongkhapa (1357–1419). Tsongkhapa relied on the Indian philosophical school of Madhyamaka (Sanskrit, "the middle way"), and more precisely on its Prasangika branch, developed by Nagarjuna, Buddhapalita and Chandrakirti.

Tsongkhapa says plainly that calm abiding (shamatha) does not liberate by itself. It can bring peace, clarity, even unusual abilities. But if vipashyana — "insight", a clear understanding of how things exist — is not added to it, such practice can turn out to be a dead end. Silence suppresses restlessness but does not pull out its root.

What the root is

According to Tsongkhapa, the root lies in how we perceive ourselves and the world.

It seems to us that inside there is a solid, separate, independent "I". It seems to exist by itself, independent of anything. It has to be protected, pleasures have to be won for it, it gets offended, it gets praised. In the same way it seems that things around us exist by themselves: "this person is bad", "I need this thing" — as if "badness" and "neededness" were built into them from the start.

All forms of clinging grow out of this sense of a solid "I": passion, anger, envy, fear. As long as we grasp at such an "I", the passions will arise again and again. You can calm them for a while in meditation, but while the root remains, they will come back.

What the right view changes

Madhyamaka states that such an independent "I" does not really exist. This is not a dogma to be taken on faith but a conclusion you can reach through your own investigation. If you honestly look for where this "I" is — in the body, in the thoughts, in the feelings — you cannot find it in any of the parts, nor apart from them. And yet the "I" exists in the ordinary sense: I walk, I work, I am responsible for my actions. What does not exist is only that solid, independent "I" we hold on to.

This is what is called emptiness: things are empty not of existence but of independent, self-standing existence. I write about emptiness and interdependence in more detail in separate articles.

When this understanding matures and joins deep silence, something happens that silence alone cannot give. Clinging has nothing left to hold on to, and it weakens not just for the duration of a meditation session but for real.

The question that needs to be asked

There is another reason why silence is not enough. In silence you can indeed understand a great deal. But to get an answer, you have to ask the right question.

Imagine someone who needs a goat. If he does not know that he needs a goat and that it grazes in the east, he will never go east. It is the same in meditation: if you know nothing about emptiness, the question about it simply never arises. You can sit in beautiful silence for years and never once turn the mind toward where the key lies.

That is why the path I teach now looks like this: silence plus the right view. Silence gives the mind strength and clarity, and the view shows where to direct that strength.

Not as simple as it seems

This does not mean that meditation for the sake of calm is useless. It is useful, and I still consider it a necessary foundation. But promises like "just stop your thoughts and you will become enlightened" mislead people. Liberation requires not only silence but understanding. And understanding requires study, reflection and verification — the way it has always been done in serious traditions.