Mauna
मौन (mauna)
Silence as discipline - the deliberate practice of not speaking, from which the sage (muni) takes his name.
Mauna is silence practiced deliberately - for an hour, a day, or in some renunciate traditions, for years. The word shares its root with muni, the sage: the one defined, literally, by silence.
The practice is not merely the absence of talk. Its early hours reliably reveal how much internal activity speech was carrying away: unfinished arguments, the urge to narrate, the habit of discharging every thought into words. Mauna dams this flow, and what backs up behind the dam becomes visible in a way it never is while the outlet stays open.
Householder traditions adapted the practice to ordinary life: a silent morning hour, one silent day a month, silence during meals. The scale matters less than the regularity; even a small, regular mauna teaches the difference between what needs to be said and what merely wants to be.