Between Silence and Speech

Written By Rory Singer

On the War Inside American Buddhism, and the One I Have Not Resolved in Myself

I feel this argument in my own chest before I feel it as an idea. The world sits in a genuinely precarious place. 

Trump, Gaza, Israel, Iran, the accelerating climate, the sheer unaccountable weight of billionaire power, all of it presses in, and on some days headlong condemnation feels like the only honest response. 

Condemnation is also the water we are all swimming in now. Search any of those words and you will find no shortage of people already shouting about them. The strange effect of all that shouting is that its targets appear entirely unmoved by it. 

It reads less like persuasion and more like noise thrown into a void, filed by whichever side did not want to hear it as fake news, further confirmation that the two camps were never really listening to each other in the first place. 

What I am trying to work out, in my own writing and in my own life, is whether it is possible to stay engaged with what is genuinely at stake in the world without adding one more voice to a shouting match neither side can hear over its own noise. Whether I can reach someone to examine what is good and true, rather than simply recruiting them to a verdict.

I recognise this same dilemma playing out, in miniature, within American Buddhism right now. There is a real fight running through the tradition that has nothing to do with meditation technique or which teacher trained where. It is about whether the dharma should speak.

On one side, Vince Fakhoury Horn has accused some of the most senior teachers in the Insight tradition (Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, Trudy Goodman) of complicity through silence over Gaza. Not complicity in the crime itself, but in the older sense: the silence of people with real moral authority who had something to lose by speaking out. Thanissara goes further still, arguing that the whole convert tradition has curdled into what she calls “personal introversion and quietism,” and that a Buddha who once instigated real change now presides over rooms of people practising stillness while the world burns. 

On the other side sits the establishment position, best represented by Kornfield himself: cultivate inner steadiness first, act from that steadiness rather than from reactivity, and resist collapsing the dharma into any single political position.

I have written before about the Dīghanakha Sutta and the two postures the Buddha encounters in that dialogue: the wanderer who says “nothing pleases me any more,” an exhausted withdrawal from feeling itself, and the one who says “nothing is acceptable to me,” the sceptic’s pride dressed as clarity. 

The teacher who stays officially silent on Gaza is close kin to the wanderer who has stopped letting anything touch him. The teacher who issues the searing public statement is close kin to the one who has finally found, in certainty, a place to stand. Both postures can be genuine. Both can also be a defence dressed as depth.

What the texts ask

It is worth looking at what the Pali canon actually supports here, since both camps cite it selectively.

The strongest text for the speak side is not really about politics at all. In the Abhaya Rājakumāra Sutta, the Buddha gives an explicit test for whether to say something: is it true, is it beneficial, and, only once both are answered, is it the right moment? 

He is entirely willing to say something true and beneficial, even if it is unwelcome. What he rules out is saying nothing true and beneficial merely because it will cost him socially. That is a much narrower bar than the reflexive caution “let’s not get political” usually claims to represent.

The structural case is there too. In the Kūṭadanta Sutta, a king asks the Buddha how to end banditry, and the answer is not harsher punishment. It is grain for farmers, capital for traders, wages for those in service: the plain observation that deprivation produces violence. The Cakkavatti-Sīhanāda Sutta tells the same story as a slow collapse. Unaddressed poverty leads to theft, theft to punishment, and punishment to a whole society that has learned to lie. Whatever else the canon is, it is not a text that treats material injustice as spiritually beside the point.

There is also the near enemy of equanimity to consider, namely the idea, systematised later by Buddhaghosa in the Visuddhimagga, that upekkhā’s counterfeit is indifference. The tradition itself names the failure mode Thanissara is pointing to. Equanimity was never meant to travel alone. It is the fourth of four, there to keep loving kindness and compassion from burning out, not to replace them. An equanimity that has stopped caring is not what the texts describe.

The texts also complicate the activist reading. The Buddha's interventions in conflict were occasional, not routine. He is said to have stepped physically into the road between the Sakyans and Vidūḍabha's army (a story found in the commentaries rather than the earliest suttas), and he did this three times. On the fourth occasion, he did not do so again. He let it happen. 

Even the tradition's most dramatic image of a teacher intervening in violence has a built-in limit. It is not a licence for permanent political confrontation. It is closer to trying, then knowing when trying again will not change what has already been set in motion.

The composure that isn’t peace

Here is where I think the therapy room offers something the sutta commentary doesn’t quite reach.

I have written elsewhere about the particular composure Britain inherited from empire and class: the stance that says we do not bow, we do not break, we do not lose face. That composure was never peace. It was armour, built to protect a self that could not survive being seen as small. 

It is worth asking whether some of the silence in Western Buddhist institutions is actually upekkhā, or whether it is the same inherited composure wearing saffron. A teacher who has built decades of authority on appearing undisturbed has a great deal to lose by admitting that something has affected them. Staying above Gaza can be equanimity. It can also be the ego’s oldest trick for avoiding the vulnerability of being affected, being wrong, or being disliked by half the room.

The same suspicion must fall on the other side, or this becomes a one-sided accusation wearing the mask of insight. The Sallatha Sutta says an untrained person struck by pain is struck twice, once by the event and once by their own reactivity to it. 

Public denunciation can be the first arrow, answered with clarity. It can just as easily be the second arrow: the discharge of an unbearable feeling, dressed in the vocabulary of ethics because that is more respectable than admitting one is enraged, frightened, or grieving. 

Righteousness has its own pleasure, the relief of finally knowing which side you are on. Horn’s essay names real cowardice. It does not follow that every teacher who has spoken has done so from clear seeing rather than from the same discharge he diagnoses in others.

Attuned speech, attuned silence

I do not think the honest question is whether to speak or stay silent. I think it is: where is this coming from in the body?

Silence that arises from a regulated nervous system, from having metabolised the grief and helplessness rather than flinching from them, can be real equanimity: the capacity, as the suttas describe it, to feel everything and be ruled by nothing. 

Silence that arises from contraction, from the old fear of losing standing, of being expelled from a community, of being wrong in public, is not equanimity. It is a nervous system in freeze, mistaking its own numbness for depth.

Speech that arises from that same regulated place (true, beneficial, offered with care for its timing) is what the Buddha describes in the Abhaya Sutta and what the Kūṭadanta Sutta assumes a teacher owes a king who asks a genuine question. Speech that arises from reactivity, from the second arrow, from the relief of certainty rather than the discomfort of staying with what is actually true, is not courage. It is discharge, borrowing the authority of the dharma to avoid feeling something unbearable alone.

Neither posture can claim virtue simply by being itself. The test was never which side of the argument a teacher lands on. It is whether they can tell the difference, in themselves, between the silence and the speech that arise from contact, and the silence and the speech that arise from the old, familiar work of not having to feel this.

What am I actually trying to do?

I said at the start that I feel this argument before I think it, so let me end where I began, without the suttas' shelter.

Outrage recruits allies. In my experience, it does not make anyone think. The people already shouting about Gaza, Iran, or the climate are mostly shouting to their own side, and the people they are ostensibly addressing seem entirely unreached by it, protected by an old, ordinary fact about the mind: once someone feels accused, they stop listening and start defending. Nothing said after that point registers as information. It registers as an attack to be managed.

The fake news collapse is really a collapse of trust in the messenger, not a disagreement about the facts. Once a reader has decided which tribe wrote a sentence, the sentence is already filed before it has even been read. 

The real lever is not a sharper argument. It is being legible to someone who is still looking, rather than to someone who has already arrived and is now delivering a verdict.

 A reader can feel the difference between “I have concluded this and you must conclude it too” and “here is what troubles me and here is as far as I have got.” The first invites debate. The second occasionally brings company.

This is what I am trying to do, in this essay and in whatever comes after it. Not neutrality, which is its own kind of hiding. Specificity, honesty about my own uncertainty, and a willingness to say plainly what troubles me, without pretending that my outrage is not sometimes seeking its own relief. 

If that reaches anyone towards examining what is good and true rather than towards a side, it will not be because I shouted loudest. It will be because I don’t need to.

Pali Glossary

Dhamma (dharma): the Buddha's teaching, and, more broadly, the nature of things as they actually are.

Sutta: a discourse of the Buddha, one of the basic textual units of the Pali canon.

Upekkhā: equanimity, the fourth of the four brahmavihāras (divine abidings). The capacity to remain steady and open in the face of pleasure, pain, and neutrality, without being ruled by any of them.

Dīghanakha Sutta: “To Long-Nails” (MN 74), the Buddha's dialogue with the wanderer Dīghanakha, who declares that nothing is acceptable to him. The Buddha uses this to show how both craving and aversion are forms of clinging.

Abhaya Rājakumāra Sutta: “To Prince Abhaya” (MN 58), in which the Buddha sets out his criteria for right speech: whether it is true, whether it is beneficial, and only then, whether the moment is right.

Kūṭadanta Sutta: the discourse to the brahmin Kūṭadanta (DN 5), in which the Buddha advises a king that banditry is ended through economic security for farmers, traders, and workers rather than through punishment.

Cakkavatti-Sīhanāda Sutta: “The Lion's Roar on the Turning of the Wheel” (DN 26). Cakkavatti means wheel-turning or universal monarch; sīhanāda means lion's roar. The sutta traces how unaddressed poverty leads a society through theft, punishment, and moral collapse.

Sallatha Sutta: “The Arrow” (SN 36.6), the teaching that an untrained person struck by pain is struck twice, once by the event itself and once by their own reactivity to it, the second arrow being avoidable.

Visuddhimagga: “The Path of Purification,” Buddhaghosa's systematic fifth-century treatise on Theravāda doctrine and meditation, and the source of the “near enemy” analysis of the brahmavihāras, in which indifference is named as equanimity's counterfeit.

Vidūḍabha: the king whose destruction of the Buddha's own clan, the Sakyans, is recorded in the Dhammapada commentary. The Buddha is said to have sat in the path of his army three times before accepting that the destruction could not be averted a fourth time.

References

Rory Singer

You can also read this post on our Substack journal, Unfolding.

Rory Singer https://newroadpsychotherapy.com
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