The Sound of Silence

A young student approached his teacher one morning and asked, 

“What is the sound of one hand clapping?”

 The teacher, unhurried and composed, simply looked at him and said, “Why do you wish to know?”

“I must know the answer,” the student said, his voice urgent. The teacher looked at him for a moment before replying. 

“The answer is not something you can hear. You have to listen in a different way, not with your ears, but with your whole being.”

The student did not understand. For days, he thought about the question from every possible angle, but the answer always stayed just out of reach, like a shadow that moves away when you try to catch it.

One evening, as the sun set, the teacher found the student sitting alone, looking tired and restless. “I have thought of nothing else,” the student said. 

“Day and night, I still have no answer. What is the sound of one hand clapping?”

The teacher sat next to him and spoke softly. “The sound of one hand clapping cannot be understood by thinking. It can only be experienced. It is the silence between thoughts, the calm beneath restlessness, the moment your mind stops searching and just is. When you stop chasing the answer, you will see you have always had it inside you.” In that moment, something in the student let go. The answer was not a sound. It never was. It was the deep quiet that appeared as soon as his mind stopped searching

Moral: 

The deepest answers do not come from effort. They appear on their own when we become quiet enough to notice them.