Benji

• Conventionally, right speech means you pay attention to your speech, noticing if there are occasions where you are not exactly being truthful, you’re being harsh, or what you’re saying is divisive. Or maybe it’s just idle small talk, not amounting to much.

• My teacher said, “This is all good. But what will help you most of all is to taste silence.” I asked him why. He said, “When you learn how to live in even a little bit of silence and feel the beauty of it, the sacredness of it, then as soon as you open your mouth, you realize you’re wrong. No matter what you say, even if you use the most refined speech, it’s a crude instrument for expressing the deep experiences of being alive.”

• The more you listen and become sensitive to your speech, the more you taste silence. And the more you drink and taste the beauty of silence—real stillness—sometimes you don’t even want to speak. If you do speak, you want to say something that, in a sense, doesn’t sully the silence. Put another way, you hear when your speech is off, when there are false notes. You become more sensitive both in noticing what is not true and in being vulnerable, fragile