The Zen of Not
Knowing
Zenkei Blanche Hartman JUL
21, 2015 tricycle
“In the beginner’s mind
there are many possibilities, in the expert’s there are
few.”
Beginner’s mind is Zen
practice in action. It is the mind that is innocent of
preconceptions and expectations, judgments and prejudices.
Beginner’s mind is just present to explore and observe and see
“things as they are.” I think of beginner’s mind as the mind that
faces life like a small child, full of curiosity and wonder and
amazement. “I wonder what this is? I wonder what that is? I wonder
what this means?” Without approaching things with a fixed point of
view or a prior judgment, just asking “What is it?”
I was having lunch with
Indigo, a small child, at City Center [a Soto Zen practice center
in San Francisco]. He saw an object on the table and got very
interested in it. He picked it up and started fooling with it:
looking at it, putting it in his mouth, and banging on the table
with it—just engaging with it without any previous idea of what it
was. For Indigo, it was just an interesting thing, and it was a
delight to him to see what he could do with this thing. You and I
would see it and say, “It’s a spoon. It sits there and you use it
for soup.” It doesn’t have all the possibilities that he finds in
it.
Watching Indigo, you can
see the innocence of “What is it?”
Can we look at our lives in
such a way? Can we look at all of the aspects of our lives with
this mind, just open to seeing what there is to see? I don’t know
about you, but I have a hard time doing that. I have a lot of
habits of mind—I think most of us do. Children begin to lose that
innocent quality after a while, and soon they want to be “the one
who knows.”
We all want to be the one
who knows. But if we decide we “know” something, we are not open to
other possibilities anymore. And that’s a shame. We lose something
very vital in our life when it’s more important to us to be one who
knows than it is to be awake to what’s happening. We get
disappointed because we expect one thing, and it doesn’t happen
quite like that. Or we think something ought to be like this, and
it turns out different. Instead of saying, “Oh, isn’t that
interesting,” we say, “Yuck, not what I thought it would be.” Pity.
The very nature of beginner’s mind is not knowing in a certain way,
not being an expert.
As Suzuki Roshi said in the
prologue to Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, “In the beginner’s mind
there are many possibilities, in the expert’s there are few.” As an
expert, you’ve already got it figured out, so you don’t need to pay
attention to what’s happening. Pity.
How can we cultivate this
mind that is free to just be awake? In zazen, in just sitting, in
sitting and noticing the busyness of our mind and all of the fixed
views that we carry. Once we notice the fixed views that we are
carrying around with us, the preconceptions that we are carrying
around with us, then it is possible for us to let them go and say,
“Well, maybe so, maybe not.” Suzuki Roshi once said, “The essence
of Zen is ‘Not always so.’” Not always so. It’s a good little
phrase to carry around when you’re sure. It gives you an
opportunity to look again more carefully and see what other
possibilities there might be in the situation.
I don’t know about you, but
when I started to sit, I really began to see how many fixed ideas
and fixed views I had. How much judgment was ready right on the tip
of my tongue. How much expectation, how much preconception I was
carrying around with me all the time, and how much it got in the
way of actually noticing what was happening. I don’t want to tell
you that after years I’m free of all that, but at least I notice it
sooner, and I sometimes don’t get caught in believing
it.
First, before you can let
go of preconceptions and expectations and prejudices, you have to
notice them; otherwise, they’re just carrying on unconsciously and
affecting everything you do. But as you sit, you begin to recognize
the really persistent ones: “Oh my gosh . . . you again! Didn’t I
just deal with you yesterday?” And again. And again. Pretty soon,
you can’t take them seriously. They just keep popping up and
popping up and popping up, and after a while you become really
familiar with them. And you can’t get so buried under something
once you realize that it’s just a habitual state of mind and
doesn’t have much to do with what’s right in front of you. It’s
just something that you haul around with you all the time and bring
out for every occasion. It hasn’t much to do with the present
situation. Sometimes you can actually say, “Oh, I think I’m just
hauling that around with me. I don’t think it has anything to do
with this.”
In her poem “When Death
Comes,” Mary Oliver has a few lines that say, “When it’s over, I
want to say: all my life / I was a bride married to amazement. / I
was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.”
This is beginner’s mind:
“I’ve been a bride married to amazement.” Just how amazing the
world is, how amazing our life is. How amazing that the sun comes
up in the morning or that the wisteria blooms in the spring. “A
bride married to amazement, . . the bridegroom taking the world
into my arms.” Can you live your life with that kind of
wholeheartedness, with that kind of thoroughness? This is the
beginner’s mind that Suzuki Roshi is pointing to, is encouraging us
to cultivate. He is encouraging us to see where we are stuck with
fixed views and see if we can, as Kosho Uchiyama Roshi says, “open
the hand of thought” and let the fixed view go. This is our effort.
This is our work. Just to be here, ready to meet whatever is next
without expectation or prejudice or preconceptions. Just “What is
it? What is this, I wonder?”
So please, cultivate your
beginner’s mind. Be willing not to be an expert. Be willing not to
know. Not knowing is nearest. Not knowing is most
intimate.