Disciplines of Restraint: Fasting, Silence and Stillness

Start with the general account: voluntary abstention from food and drink for a set time, practiced for purification, penance, discipline, mourning or solidarity with the poor, in forms that range from a total fast to a restricted diet.

The Muslim month-long fast runs from dawn to sunset and is one of the Five Pillars. The obligation dates to the second year after the migration from Mecca to Medina, with exceptions for travelers, pregnant women and others, and the fast broken each evening at iftar.

A voluntary extension of the same fast: six days in Shawwal, the month after Ramadan, based on a hadith saying Ramadan followed by these days counts as fasting the whole year. All four Sunni schools treat it as an emphasized sunnah.

Where the fast is defined by dawn and sunset, the Arctic poses a problem. Scholars allow substituting days at another time, or communities follow the timings of Ottawa, Edmonton or Mecca, as the Tromso community did in 2013.

The Vaishnava fast on the eleventh day of each half of the lunar month, abstaining from grains and pulses, or in the strict form from food and water, and given to the worship of Vishnu. Vaikuntha Ekadashi is the most important of the year.

Latter-day Saints skip two consecutive meals on the first Sunday of most months and give the cost of those meals as a fast offering, which a local bishop uses for rent, food and medical bills. Here abstinence and charity are deliberately held together.

From abstaining from food to withdrawing from the world: seclusion in a mosque, most often in the last ten nights of Ramadan, grounded in Quran 2:187. The schools disagree on minimum periods and on whether women should do it in a mosque.

A period set apart from work, speech and distraction, from a day to many weeks, in monastery, hermitage or ashram. The Buddhist form traces to the vassa rainy season retreat, and the Christian form to the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola.

In Benedictine and Trappist houses silence is kept from Compline until the community gathers next morning. It traces to chapter 42 of the sixth-century Rule of St Benedict and remains a living custom.

The Hindu and Jain vow of silence, from a few hours to many years, taken up by sadhus, some Jain monastics and lay devotees. It carries special ritual weight on Mauni Amavasya, when bathing in silence is held especially meritorious.

The Jain discipline turns restraint to the body itself: standing or sitting entirely still with attention withdrawn, so that the body's activity, one of the three channels of karmic influx, is stopped. The Bahubali statue at Shravanabelagola, with creepers up his legs, is the famous image.

The path ends with the Buddhist monastic who owns nothing. He walks at dawn in silence, bowl in hand, accepts whatever is given without asking, and eats before noon. This is a daily act of dependence and renunciation of ownership that binds monastic and lay communities in daily exchange.