Mauna In Spirituality

Relevance of Mauna in various Spiritual Sects

Almost all spiritual traditions emphasize, explicitly or implicitly, the importance of practicing mauna. Mauna or silence in spirituality is often a metaphor for inner stillness. Many religious traditions imply the importance of being quiet and still in mind and spirit for transformative and integral spiritual growth to occur. In Christianity, there is the silence of contemplative prayer. The Sufi mystics insist on the importance of finding silence within. In Buddhism the descriptions of silence and allowing the mind to become silent are implied as a feature of spiritual enlightment. In Hinduism, including the teachings of Advaita Vedanta and the many paths of yoga, teachers insist on the importance

In yoga, mauna is maintained with the aim of achieving uninterrupted concentration (ekagrata, Sanskrit: एकाग्रता). Side effects of such practice would include constraining outgoing emotions of the mind, such as anger, excessive argumentativeness, etc. In Ashtanga Yoga, mauna would be part of a larger body of practices called tapas (Sanskrit: तपस्).

This term can be used on different levels. They are vak mauna, karna mauna , kashta or arya mauna, sushupti mauna, and Maha-mauna. Buddha in his eight fold path to get out of misery mentions Samyak Mauna- the right type of silence.

The common goal of all forms of mauna is to experience silence of the mind, the calming of the thought waves, culminating in “maha-mauna”, the great silence. Mauna is therefore not different from the classic definition of Yoga as given in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras: “Yogas citta vritti nirodha” - “Yoga is the cessation of mental fluctuations.”

During the practice of yoga, sadhakas discover from their own experience that silence happens naturally. This could be one of the reasons why Patanjali does not explicitly refer to mauna in any of his sutras.But one can experience that from the definition of yoga to Kaivalya all practises gears towards how to get silence. Whether it is kriya yoga , asanas, pranayams,pratyahara, dharana, dhyana or Samadhi, Mauna is present in