It’s an unusual thing to hear from a prolific writer, but Pico Iyer, 68, says he measures joy not in words as much as silences.

He was 34, adds the British-born author and journalist of Indian origin, when a California wildfire burned his childhood home to the ground in 1991. His mother was away from her home when she lost everything; he fled with just what he was wearing, and their cat.

With nowhere to go, a friend suggested a Benedictine monastery in Big Sur. There, he says, after journeying and writing about far-flung countries such as North Korea, Paraguay, Japan and Bhutan, he finally made the journey within.

It’s an unusual thing to hear from a prolific writer, but Pico Iyer, 68, says he measures joy not in words as much as silences.

He was 34, adds the British-born author and journalist of Indian origin, when a California wildfire burned his childhood home to the ground in 1991. His mother was away from her home when she lost everything; he fled with just what he was wearing, and their cat.

With nowhere to go, a friend suggested a Benedictine monastery in Big Sur. There, he says, after journeying and writing about far-flung countries such as North Korea, Paraguay, Japan and Bhutan, he finally made the journey within.

What he found, and began to hold sacred, was a pulsating silence.

The books that followed were of a different kind. Iyer, author of the bestselling Falling off the Map (1993) and Video Night in Kathmandu (1988) wrote The Art of Stillness (2014) and The Half Known Life (2023).

His new book, Learning from Silence (February; Penguin Random House India), traces that first inner journey at Big Sur, a place he has returned to scores of times since. Expect meditations on meditation in his trademark Spartan prose, but also musings on joy, and encounters with the poet and singer Leonard Cohen. Excerpts from an interview.

* What is silence?

It’s the place on the far side of our thoughts and assumptions and ideologies. The place where our truest self and the deepest reality lie…

At a time when the whole world is so divided, it seemed particularly useful right now to throw a spotlight on silence because it’s our words that cut us in two. And I think it’s often our silences that bring us together in some deeper identity where we’re connected rather than at odds.

The silence I’m talking about is not just an absence of noise, but a very particular kind of positive presence that I have found in monasteries and convents everywhere in the world.

Being silent on a mountaintop or on a deserted beach is wonderful, but this active, wide-awake silence is something even beyond that.

* Even before the fire, at 29, you left a successful journalistic career in New York and moved to Japan…

Having been to Japan a few brief times, I could see it was a more inward-looking society.

The idea was to get as far from New York as possible and open the door to a radically different way of seeing the world. I’ve now been in Japan 37 years, and I am living quite a bit the life I conceived of then: simple, uncluttered, in the middle of nowhere.

I’ve always had a longing for monastic places in the way some people will see cheesecake or a bottle of whiskey and feel a great pull.

* How has this life of minimalism altered your writing?

I think there’s much more silence in the writing than there used to be. I think Japan has been a training in uncluttering.

If you compare my first book with this book, the main difference is there’s much more white space; and with the few words that emerge, the hope is that you can feel the silence like a deep well beneath them.

Working on this book, over 34 years, I’d accumulated about 4,000 pages of notes. Eventually, I tried to make each passage almost a parable: very, very brief, but archetypal, out of time.

So many of us are caught up in a world of rush and distraction. I’m trying to offer release from that by writing in a very slow, human-paced way. Some readers have told me that, as they’re racing from one place to another, they pick up this book and it slows them down and even calms them down.

* Is it strange that some of this change, for you, has come in the wake of wildfires?

I’ve lived with wildfires all my life. When my family moved from Oxford to California in 1965, we moved to Coyote Road where, just a couple of months earlier, a wildfire had devastated all the houses. We were living next to the ashes and rubble.

In those days, fires of that kind occurred maybe every 15 or 20 years; now it’s more like every 15 or 20 months.

The monastery where I go has been through four or five pretty devastating fires in the time I’ve known it. When I flew into California last month and drove up to our rebuilt house, it was to find it pitch-dark, with no phone service, because the winds were so high and authorities assumed a fire could break out close to our house any moment.

Unfortunately, we’ve grown really conditioned to it because we’re living where humans were never meant to live. Anyone who’s in the Californian hills knows that that landscape needs fire as a cleansing agent and for the regrowth of so much. Which means we have to face the question: How can we live with fire?

* How have you lived with fire?

By being humbled, I hope, and not taking anything for granted.

For many years after our house was rebuilt, anyone who walked through the front door was greeted by six full suitcases. My mother was permanently packed, ready to evacuate. All her recent photos, mementos and important papers were in those six suitcases.

The one big change I made after our house burned down, because I do all my writing by hand, was to keep all my notes in a safety deposit box in the bank.

These fires cure us of the assumption that we’re the centre of the world. They remind us we’re at the mercy of much larger forces.

* You write about meeting Leonard Cohen at a Zen Buddhist monastery…

I first met him in 1995, while he was living as a Zen monk in the high mountains of Los Angeles. I had been listening to his songs since boyhood, so he’d been a hero of mine for decades already. But when I met him, he had so disappeared into his ragged robes that I didn’t recognise him.

He had more or less erased the entity that the world knows as Leonard Cohen. We quickly connected, because I’d spent a lot of time in monasteries already; we could speak the same silence.

It made a great impression on me that this man of 61, who could be doing anything in the world, had chosen this backbreaking regimen of scrubbing floors and shovelling snow and taking his aged teacher to the doctor. It was inspiring and humbling.

Later I would go and spend time with him in his house in Los Angeles. When he died, I travelled from Japan just for a day to speak at his Zen funeral. He really occupied a special place in my heart.

* The monastery as an institution is undergoing a fair amount of change, particularly in the US…

I am really worried about that. In the US, for example, there are a lot of yoga centres and new-age retreat houses, but most of them are built around a single individual who is mortal or a single philosophy that excludes those who don’t subscribe to it. Most are not based on a single, unwavering, lifelong commitment.

Meanwhile, monasteries and convents around the world are closing. I don’t know what the answer is, and the monks by their nature aren’t necessarily concerned by any of this. They see the larger picture and know that tides rise and fall.

* In Vipassana, the ancient Buddhist meditation technique, writing or speaking isn’t allowed, except to one's teachers. You, on the other hand, commit to silence and yet write prolifically.

You're right. Yet the striking, sovereign quality of this monastery is the monks leave you absolutely free. There are no rules, no expectations. You're asked to be quiet, if possible, but you can walk along the monastery road and engage in conversations as you're walking away from the central area. I go there with my wife now and although we stay in separate rooms, we share lunch and take long walks together.

They're open minded enough to feel that whoever you are, whatever your background, you will find what is deepest in you and most sustaining to you in that silence. Whoever you are, this is a place that allows you to do what you need to do. Not in the sense of taking care of your daily obligations, but rather your debts to the soul and your obligation to your inner life that otherwise gets lost in the tumult of the day to day.

You're right about the incongruity of words in silence. And one of the important lessons I learned there is that it's the only place in my life where I allow myself not to write.

But you've put your finger on something essential. I knew Peter Matthiessen a little bit, the great American writer who was also a Zen priest and he told me to remember that the main point of going on retreat is to put away your pen and paper. That's the important letting go or renunciation you have to practice. Clearly, it's one I haven't mastered to this day.

* Your friends, mother and wife in the book often seem exasperated and envious of your monastic life…

I took great care to include that. I'm usually in a kind of ecstasy when I go there, so I felt it was essential to challenge myself and have all these friends ask searching questions about me. Doesn't it make you selfish? Isn't this a way of stepping away from the world? Don't you feel guilty about relying on the hospitality of these monks even though you don’t share their faith?

I thought that it's fine for me, relatively unencumbered, to go and spend three days in silence and feel deeply clarified. But what about the mother with two kids in the backseat rushing from place to place whose life is feeling very stressful? She's not going to be so delighted to read about a freelance writer sitting there above the beautiful ocean in Big Sur, feeling happy.

Besides, being there and feeling happy is not the point of the exercise or the point of the book. I deliberately incorporated all those voices to demystify it and to demystify me and to remind me the point of retreat is not in the going away from the world but in the coming back to the world, in the hope you’re a better husband or father or friend than you would be otherwise.

* Your father was a philosopher and your mother taught comparative religion. How did that shape your childhood and your relationship with spirituality?

I think, like any only child, I was eager when young to be as far from my parents interests as possible. So I ran in the opposite direction. But at some point in life I saw that of course I inherited their DNA and their blood. The great benefit was my parents were Theosophists, which meant they were already interested in many religions. They both grew up in British India, which meant that they knew the Bible backwards and forwards, as well as all the Hindu scriptures.

My first name is Siddharth, so they also named me after the Buddha. And I think they were preparing me for a global existence very wisely, in ways that I didn't perceive until much later in my life.

And I suspect I also benefited from the fact of growing up in a Hindu household while going to Anglican schools all the way through my education in England. So already I was getting two forms of knowledge, just as they had had, growing up in Bombay. I remember as a little boy we would have Tibetan monks in the household, which was a rarity in 1961. And my father took me to meet His Holiness, the Dalai Lama when I was a teenager in Dharamshala.

* How old were you when you met the Dalai Lama for the first time?

Seventeen. When I was two years old, my father would turn on the radio every day and we would hear this story of a little boy-king fleeing over the highest mountains on earth to get to freedom and exile in India, which to me, sounded like a fairy tale.

My father went to meet the Dalai Lama as soon as His Holiness came into India in 1959-60, and brought back for me a gift from the Dalai Lama, which was a picture himself when he was 4 years old, already on the Lion Throne in Lhasa, ruler of 6 million people and 14 million Tibetan Buddhists.

From the time I was three years old, I had that picture of the Dalai Lama on my desk. And whenever I was feeling sorry for myself, or thought that I was going through trials, I just had to look at this little boy who was leading 6 million people from the age of 4 and I was put into place.

* Do you have a religion or faith?

I think I'm less interested in what I believe than in how I act. Because there are a lot of people of great belief who act in ways that we may unsettling. There are other people we know who have no belief, who act with a compassion and selflessness that would humble a cardinal. Besides, I've never been good at belonging to a group, maybe because I grew up between many cultures and I've never been so interested in adhering to a belief system or a single ideology.

And I've always been impressed that His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, one of the great religious figures on the planet, actually titled one of his books Beyond Religion because he's seen how much less than exalted action can be done in the name of religion.

* In your book, there is love, joy, grief…

It was a very deliberate decision on my part to include a lot of death in the book, and to include a lot of joy, because I feel we can’t afford to neglect either. We can’t look away from the reality of impermanence, and we can’t look away from the reality of beauty and the many reasons for gratitude.

Most of my work, for many books now, has been about holding those two in balance.

The central question, not just of the book, but of most of our lives now, is how we remain hopeful amid the imperatives of today. How we remain calm in the face of mounting uncertainty. So the book, at one level, is about how can we acknowledge the difficulty and suffering of any life and yet not give up on hope and not overlook the many causes for rejoicing that still remain.