The life of St Nikephoros the Hesychast
He returned afterward to the Holy Mountain and gave himself to a life of silence and inner prayer.
He became known as a teacher of watchfulness, guiding other monks in a discipline of unceasing attention to the heart joined to steady, quiet breath, and he left behind a short treatise on the subject, later gathered into the Philokalia. Nikephoros reposed on Athos around the year 1300. It was chiefly through that written treatise that his teaching passed on: it went on to shape the Hesychast tradition of prayer that Gregory Palamas, arriving on the Holy Mountain only after Nikephoros's own repose, would take up and defend in the following century. Nikephoros is remembered less for any single event than for having handed on, patiently and in writing, a way of praying that outlived him.
