Zen: The Ordinary Mind

You are washing a cup. Warm water over your hands, the smooth weight of it, the small clink against the sink. And you are not there at all. You are drafting tomorrow's email in your head, or back inside yesterday's meeting, wishing you had said it differently. The cup comes clean. You could not say how. Your hands did it while you were away.

This happens a hundred times a day. We move through the ordinary as if it were a hallway to somewhere better, barely touching it, saving our attention for the moment that finally matters, which keeps not arriving. Zen makes a blunt claim about all of this. The moment that matters is this one. Calm is not waiting in a quieter room or a deeper state of mind. It is here, in the cup, the instant you actually arrive. This chapter is short on purpose. Zen distrusts long explanations of things that can only be known by doing them.

The tradition has an emblem for exactly this. A painter loads a brush, breathes once, and makes a single circle in one unbroken motion, then leaves it precisely as it fell.

The circle is often left open, and the line is never quite round, and it is never touched up afterward. That is most of the teaching, in one stroke. This moment, brushed once, imperfect, complete.

There is a famous exchange, set down in a thirteenth-century collection of teaching cases called the Gateless Gate. A monk named Zhaozhou asks his teacher Nanquan a beginner's question: what is the Way? Nanquan answers, "Ordinary mind is the Way." Zhaozhou, reasonably, asks how to turn himself toward it. Nanquan tells him that the moment he tries to head for it, he has already turned away. You cannot aim at where you are. The seasons arrive on their own and so does this. The verse attached to the case ends, "If useless things do not hang in your mind, any season is a good season for you."

Read "ordinary mind" carefully, because it is one word away from its counterfeit. It does not mean the dull, half-present mind that let the cup wash itself. It means this everyday mind, the plain one you already have, met without the layer of commentary and grasping we keep stacking on top of it. Nothing exotic is being pointed at. There is no special trance to enter, no altered state to earn. The calm is what is left when you stop adding. That distinction runs through the whole book: the settled mind that Buddhism maps is not a checked-out one, and neither is this.

So Zen keeps pointing at the most ordinary things it can find. Decades on from that beginner's question to Nanquan, Zhaozhou is the old teacher now, and a monk asks him for the real teaching. Zhaozhou asks whether he has finished his breakfast. The monk says yes. "Then go wash your bowl." Another time, to one monk after another, whatever they answer, he says only, "Go drink your tea."[Recorded Sayings of Zhaozhou] The line is not a riddle with a secret tucked inside. The bowl is the teaching. The tea is the teaching. A Tang layman named Pang said it as plainly as it can be said: drawing water and carrying firewood, this is the wondrous activity. You have probably met a popular version of this, "before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water." It is a good line. It is also a modern, Western one with no home in the old texts, and it slightly misses Pang's point.[provenance note] He is not describing a before and an after. He is saying the carrying itself, right now, is already the miracle. There is no after to wait for.

Around the time those cases were being collected, a Japanese monk named Dōgen brought back from China a way of practicing so spare it barely counts as a method. He called it shikantaza, which comes out in English as something like "just sitting." You sit. That is the whole of it. Not sitting in order to follow the breath, not sitting to crack a koan, not even sitting in order to become calm. Just sitting, with nothing to attain and nowhere to get to.

This sounds like doing nothing, and it is the most radical move in this book. Every other practice here hands you something to do now for a result later. Dōgen takes the result away. For him the work and the reward are one thing: the sitting, done completely, already is the awakening it looks like it is straining toward. "Body and mind of themselves will drop away," he wrote, and what is left is just this, nothing missing.

That is the Sōtō road. There is another, the Rinzai road, that looks like its opposite and, from a distance, ends in the same place, though the two schools have not always been that generous about it: Hakuin mocked quiet Sōtō sitting as "dead sitting," a doze mistaken for awakening. Set the quarrel aside and look at the method itself. Rather than dropping the question, it sharpens one until it cuts: a koan, like the case of the monk who asked whether a dog has buddha-nature and got back a flat "No" that the doctrine says cannot be right, or Hakuin's "what is the sound of one hand?" You stay with it until the thinking mind, which cannot solve it, finally wears itself out and lets go. The version you have heard, "the sound of one hand clapping," is a later embellishment, and it spoils the thing: one hand does not clap, full stop, and that is exactly what the koan is asking you to sit with. Both roads aim past the calculating mind at the same uncontrived presence. The old word for that presence, borrowed by swordsmen, was mushin, no-mind. Not a blank mind. As the monk Takuan wrote to a swordsman, it is a mind that does not stop or stick anywhere, and so stays free to meet whatever comes next.

The practice below is just sitting carried into motion. Pick one plain act, give it the whole of your attention, set the screen down, and when the mind leaves, which it will, bring it back without making it a problem. The coming back is the practice.

Why is it so hard to simply meet the cup? Because you already know what a cup is. You filed it long ago under nothing-to-see-here, and your attention obeys the file. The expert's mind is efficient and a little asleep. It has stopped looking because it is certain there is nothing left to see.

Shunryu Suzuki, the teacher who did as much as anyone to plant this tradition in American soil, named the antidote: shoshin, beginner's mind. "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities," he said, "but in the expert's there are few." The line opens his talks, which his students gathered from his lectures into a small book.[Suzuki 1970] Beginner's mind is not ignorance but a trained, deliberate willingness to meet a familiar thing as though you had never seen it, which turns out to be the only way anyone ever really sees anything. The cup you have washed a thousand times, looked at once as if for the first time, is strange and specific. Most of the world is hiding in plain sight, under the label we slapped on it years ago and stopped checking.

Two more pieces of the Zen aesthetic say something quiet about calm. The first is ma, the interval: the empty space around things and the pause between them, treated not as nothing but as a presence of its own. It is the silence that gives the music its shape. Squeeze the gaps out of a life and the calm goes with them. The gaps are where it lives. This is the enough route in another language. Leave room.

The second is the taste now usually gathered under the term wabi-sabi, a feeling for the imperfect and the weathered. The packaged word is mostly a modern coinage, popularized in the West, though the older feeling under it, the austere beauty the tea masters prized, is real and centuries deep. Put ma and that feeling together and you get the open, slightly crooked circle from the start of the chapter. The brush did not close the loop. The line wavered. Nobody fixed it. And it is whole. You do not need this moment to be finished and polished before you are allowed to meet it. It is already enough, exactly as unfinished as it is.

It is the end of a long day and there is a sink full of dishes, and everything in you wants to be anywhere else. Watch what the mind does first. It reaches for the phone to prop against the window, so the chore can be endured rather than done. Set it down. One act, no second screen.

Now meet the first plate the way Suzuki points at, as if you had never washed one. The warmth of the water is, in fact, pleasant. The weight of the plate, the squeak of it going clean, these are real, they are happening, and they are not boring once you are actually here for them. The mind leaves anyway, off to tomorrow. You notice it has gone, and you come back to the plate. That noticing and returning is the same small rep you trained in the quiet mind, now done over a sink. Between one plate and the next there is a brief pause, ma, and you let it stay a pause instead of rushing to fill it. Nothing here got fixed. The day was still hard. But for the length of the dishes you were not at war with your own life, waiting for it to improve before you would agree to live it. The calm was in the dishes the whole time. It usually is.