The vast majority of us know Pythagoras for his famous theorem, which we learn at a young age in school. What isn’t explained to us, however, is that there are doubts about whether he actually posed this numerical relation, and many more about whether he was capable of solving it.
The Pythagoras we have inherited has been magnified by those who remained in his wake, lifting him to the status of a “demigod.” What we can glimpse in his story, as reflected in National Geographic History, is his role as a spiritual leader of a strict community that sought wisdom.
And to belong to it, you had to agree to keep silent for the first five years. For the thinker, it is in silence where the truths hidden by noise are discovered, and the education of the soul begins by learning to listen.
Two silences, two places
Personally, I am amazed to discover how movements incredibly similar arose in parts of the world so distant from one another. Buddha and Pythagoras were nearly contemporaries. According to the most accepted timelines, their birth dates differ by only about 10 to 40 years. When it comes to the coincidence, we must remain silent to recognise it: silence.
In Croton, Pythagoras founded a community where philosophy, religion and mathematics walked hand in hand to converge in a stringent way of life. His disciples, the Pythagoreans, spent their days meditating, embraced a frugal lifestyle and followed a vegetarian diet. They also had to keep silent during the first five years in the Pythagorean school. For those by nature serene, there were two.
In the other part of the world, in present-day Bihar, Buddha sat beneath a Bodhi tree and attained Nirvana. The encounter happened after he had known excesses: the hedonistic life of a prince, the austere life of a samāna. It was silence, the fundamental basis of mindfulness and of Buddhism, that, through meditation, enabled him to achieve his great revelation.
Silence. A word that in the 21st century has lost all meaning. Never before has it been so easy to speak without saying anything. “A fool is recognised by what he says; a wise person, by their silence,” Pythagoras would also say.
The silence and wisdom
For both Pythagoras and Buddha, silence represents the first step toward wisdom. In the Pythagorean school, the first five years of silence have a reason. For the thinker, remaining silent trains us to listen, rather than to speak.
This silence becomes transformative for the learner, because it first allows them to assume their authentic role in relation to the world. The learner must learn. And to learn, one must listen. To detach from the ego that claims to know everything.
On the other hand, silence has a purifying purpose. The aim, as Siddhartha Gautama (the historical Buddha) would have asserted on the other side of the world, is to quiet the mind. Not only external silence, but internal stillness as well. Because only when we still the mind does the most remarkable observation arise: self-knowledge. And there, with the right concentration and a mind free of judgement, the magic of self-understanding, the purest form of wisdom, unfolds.
Silence was, therefore, another route to teaching and, at the same time, a lesson in itself. “Listen, and you shall be wise. The beginning of wisdom is silence,” Pythagoras explained to his students.
Keep quiet in modern times
In an era of unbridled hyperactivity, the words of these two great sages of wisdom cast a stark contrast. We now believe all opinions must be voiced, and the faster the better. The time to think has vanished, replaced by a frenetic pace from which it is hard to step back.
That is why silence is more important than ever. And not only because, as the journal Brain Structure and Function notes, we can promote neurogenesis, improve concentration, reduce stress and give space to our emotions to regulate themselves. No. The need for silence also arises as a philosophical summons. Without silence, we cannot think.
“Thinking is narrative, thinking is succession. Thought is attention and disobedience,” declares philosopher Santiago Alba Rico in an interview with this magazine. He also cites two great twentieth‑century women thinkers who reflected with equal lucidity as Pythagoras or Siddhartha about silence, though perhaps with a different aim: Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil. It is Weil who said: “Attention consists in suspending thought, in leaving it available, empty and penetrable to the object.” In other words, in silencing all noise, external and internal. In achieving the purest form of silence.
We need fewer discourses, fewer opinions, less haste, and more attention. For, as the French philosopher also observed, “attention is the most rare and the purest form of generosity.” And there is nothing in the twenty‑first century that demands solidarity, generosity and empathy with more ferocity than ever.
