Famous Practitioners and Ordinary Devotees

Several well known modern Hindu spiritual teachers have observed extended periods of mauna as part of their own practice or teaching method, most famously Meher Baba, who maintained public silence for several decades until his death, communicating through an alphabet board and later hand gestures alone, a case widely cited, including well beyond his own specifically Hindu influenced eclectic religious movement, as an extreme and long sustained example of the practice, and Ramana Maharshi's teaching placed considerable emphasis on silence, mauna, as itself a form of instruction and transmission understood to communicate more directly than spoken teaching for a sufficiently receptive disciple. Jain ascetic practice incorporates mauna within its own broader disciplinary framework of restraint, consistent with Jainism's wider emphasis, expressed also in ahimsa and the anuvratas and mahavratas, on minimising harmful or unnecessary activity of any kind, speech included, and ordinary lay Hindu devotees frequently undertake shorter, time bound periods of mauna, a day, part of a day, or a specific religious observance, as an accessible devotional discipline available without the extended lifetime commitment the practice's most famous exemplars are known for.