Chinese Silence

The Relaxation Channel          You Tube 2015

The book entitled: “In Praise of Blandness” written by French sinologist and scholar Françoise Jullien is an elegant treatise on the Chinese perspective of “blandness”, as seen through the wide lenses of Daoism, Confucianism, Chinese aesthetics and the classical literature and prose of the Sung and Tang Dynasties. Although here the author chooses "blandness” as the translated term for his essay, in truth it can also be interchanged (some of the time) with similar words such as; emptiness, nothingness, void, space and so on.

Although it’s a slim manual, it’s not exactly light reading. Many times I’ve had to go back over some passage again and again, in order to get the gist of it. It can be hard work, but the rewards I’ve gained more than make up for it. The following is but one example of some of the treasures that I’ve found, in a chapter called “The Blandness of Sound”  Jullien writes: 

     “Such then, is the bland sound: an attenuated sound that retreats from the ear and is allowed to simply die out over the longest possible time. We hear it still, but just barely; and as it diminishes, it makes it all the more audible that soundless beyond into which it is about to extinguish itself. We are listening, then, to its extinction, to its return to the great undifferentiated Matrix. This is the sound that, in its very fading, gradually opens the way from the audible to the inaudible and causes us to experience the continuous movement from one to the other. And as it gradually sheds its aural materiality, it leads us to the threshold of silence, a silence we experience in plenitude, at the very root of all harmony”.

So, the next time you are deeply absorbed in a sublime piece of music, see if you can hear that soundless beyond that carries each audible note simultaneously in its manifestation and in its extinction. Maybe ultimately, both silence and sound are one and the same! At least on the meta meta level of all things, I guess.

 

I'll bet you John Cage knew this all along!