Wisdom tells me I am nothing.
Love tells me I am everything.
Between the two, my life flows.
—NISARGADATTA MAHARAJ
The idea of don’t know mind originates in a story about two Buddhist monks in ancient China: Fayan, a young wanderer, and Dizang, his teacher.
Dizang saw Fayan dressed in his traveling clothes and embarking on a journey.
Dizang asked, “Where are you going?”
Fayan responded, “On a pilgrimage.”
Dizang asked, “What is the purpose of your pilgrimage?”
Fayan answered, “I don’t know.”
Dizang said, “Not knowing is most intimate.”
Being a koan, this story is about more than just a pilgrimage in ancient China. The pilgrimage is a metaphor for daily life. It says something about our journeys, the way we can either wander around aimlessly, or get fixated on a certain destination. We could easily reframe Dizang’s questions as, “Where are you going in your life? Why do you think being someplace else will be better than where you are now? What is the purpose of all this searching?”
Since we were children, people have asked us a similar question: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” As adults, when we first meet someone, usually one of the first questions they ask is, “What do you do for a living?” When we respond, we want to sound like we have it together. We want to be perceived as intelligent and focused. So we have our answers all lined up, perhaps even an elevator pitch about what we have done and what it is that we plan to achieve. The point is that we know things. And in our culture, knowing is power.
Now Fayan was a pretty smart guy, a mature student who had studied a lot of spiritual texts and practiced meditation for years. Surely he could have offered a more virtuous or impressive response to his teacher than “I don’t know.” But what is delightful about this story is that Fayan answered in an undefended way, with a kind of childlike innocence, saying, “I wish I knew, but honestly I can’t tell you.” Maybe he hoped his teacher had the answer. Maybe, like many of us, he imagined he had a destiny to fulfill and that a wise person could point him to the right path. But a good teacher doesn’t tell you what to know, he or she shows you how to see.
This teacher, in a disarming way, replied, “That’s fantastic, Fayan. It’s great that you don’t know. Not knowing is most intimate.”
In Zen, the word intimate is synonymous with awakening, realization, or enlightenment. But all those words seem to imply a far-off, special state of mind or a supernatural, metaphysical, transcendent experience that somehow transports us to another dimension beyond life’s day-to-day problems.
I prefer the word intimacy because it is an invitation to come closer, to fully embrace and lovingly engage with your life right where you are, rather than trying to move beyond it. It is a recognition that we already belong. To me, intimacy better expresses what I imagine enlightenment might actually feel like. It’s relaxed, receptive, ordinary even. It is not found elsewhere, apart from life, but in the middle of it. As another Zen teaching says, “The path is right beneath your feet.” Intimacy offers an encouragement to connect to the sound of the birds, the spring breeze, each other, and this very life, here and now.
We’ve all had moments when we discovered solutions to our problems without needing to “figure them out.” We’ve said things like, “All of a sudden, it became clear,” or “The answer just came to me,” or “There was no question in my mind what I had to do.” When we slow down enough to listen carefully, we can hear what the Quakers call “the still, small voice within,” what we often refer to as our intuition. It is a quality of mind that senses what is needed without relying solely on rational processes.
When we don’t know where we are going, we have to remain fully present, carefully feeling our way inch by inch, moment by moment. We have to stay close to our actual experiences. When we don’t know, anything is possible because we are not limited by old habits of thinking or others’ points of view. We see the bigger picture. Not knowing leaves room for wisdom to arise, for the situation itself to inform us.
At the deepest level of intimacy, subject and object fall away. There are no longer any hard and fixed boundaries. “I” am not intimate with “you.” Our separateness dissolves. We experience undefended openness, complete union. This is the real heart and beauty of don’t know mind.
In the days before his death, my friend John was in a kind of waking coma. His face was full of tension, his head thrust back, the muscles in his throat tight and constricted. Every breath was a struggle.
As I sat at John’s bedside one night, I worried, wondering what to do.
A well-known Buddhist teacher with experience in such matters told me that John’s spirit was trying to leave his body and that I should touch the top of his head to show it the way. So I did this, but nothing changed.
John’s doctor phoned to say that I should increase the morphine a bit to relax John’s breathing. So I did this, but nothing changed.
Later that evening, a bodyworker came by. He encouraged me to hold two special points on John’s feet. The acupressure would relieve his tension. So I did this, but nothing changed.
All this knowing wasn’t helping. So I turned inward. I let go of everyone’s advice and my own fear, and I took a few deep breaths.
I began to sense an urge arising within me. Instinctively, I realized, I just wanted to wrap myself around this suffering man. Not something I would normally do. But I trusted my gut. I climbed into bed and cradled John in the curve of my arm. Rocking him back and forth, quite spontaneously, I started singing John sweet lullabies. Not the nursery rhyme variety, but the kind you make up as you go along. Words and sounds mixed together randomly, not making any sense at all. Love sounds, I call them. Every parent has done this for a sick or frightened child. And as I sang softly in John’s ear and kissed his forehead, my hands knew what to do, although I had no goal in mind. My fingers gently caressed his throat and stroked his face. My hands circled around his heart, very softly.
We lost all sense of time. I could feel John sink into me, my body cushioning what was left of his bony form. Eventually, his throat relaxed and his head came forward. His eyes opened for a moment. He looked relieved. Then he fell asleep.
Later, I wondered briefly if I had done the right thing. Had I pulled John back from a near-death state, stopped a spiritual process of release too soon? I don’t know. But I do know that the heart has to be soft before any of us can be free.
In retrospect, I realized the problem underlying all the expert strategies I had employed prior to simply holding John: they all stemmed from the idea that what was happening to John was not okay. Those methods were aimed primarily at alleviating his symptoms. Along the way, John, the person, seemed to get lost. It wasn’t until I became exhausted by the inefficacy of all of these strategies that I was willing to surrender, to let go of my preconceived ideas about what was supposed to happen. Then my mind relaxed, and my heart started to lead the way. I could see possibilities that I hadn’t recognized before. I could allow myself to move naturally, without any interference from my knowing mind. All I needed to do was listen and get out of my own way. And in doing that, I was able to honor and connect to John, who he really was and what he really needed in that moment. Not knowing is most intimate.
A willingness to not know is, at times, our greatest asset. The degree to which we are able to live in this ever-fresh moment—that’s the measure of our ability to be of real service.
When Tom, a sweet young Zen Hospice volunteer, attempted to move JD, a resident, from the bed to the commode, Tom failed miserably. JD’s toothpick legs collapsed from under him, and he tumbled to the ground. There he lay on the cold tile floor, his pajama pants down around his ankles, his diaper partway off, his arms tangled. Physically, JD was fine, but everything was a terrible mess. Tom was an absolute wreck. He phoned me, embarrassed and full of self-criticism, asking me to review the nursing procedures for positioning a frail person. Tom wanted to arm himself with more information so that he wouldn’t “screw up the next time around.”
Now, having trained Tom myself, I was quite certain he knew the procedures. What’s more, I had a sense that more information would not settle the fear and doubt that were running rampant through his mind. Instead, I tried to address the heart of his concerns with a simple instruction. “Next time, before you move JD, check your belly. Notice if it is tight or contracted. Don’t do anything until it is soft.”
Tom responded with impatience. “Yeah, yeah, I know all that stuff, but how do I cross his legs? Are you supposed to move the lower body first, or the upper?”
I persisted. “Just check your belly. Feel the breath there and let it soften before you take action.” Then I told him to phone me at the end of his shift.
Later that evening, Tom called back, enthusiastically saying, “I went to position JD, and the most amazing thing happened. As I leaned over the bed, I thought of what you said. I noticed that my belly was hard as a rock. I saw that I was scared. For a few moments, the fear seemed to course through my body. Then, with an inhale and exhale, it began to dissipate, and my belly softened. The next thing I knew, I was cradling JD in my arms like he was a lover or a small child. Moving him to the commode was effortless. Everything happened so gracefully. I instinctively understood what to do. It was really lovely.”
Not knowing is a gateway to a deeper appreciation of the potency of our basic nature, which cannot be known by the conceptual mind alone. It takes us beyond our ordinary way of thinking and seeing things, and into intimacy with this very moment.
* * *
One characteristic of all humans that death illuminates is our desire for security in an ever-changing world. We believe who we are and how things are for us should remain fixed and permanent. We want to know what the future will bring. Most of all, we don’t want who we think we are to die.
When we take our personalities, our separate sense of self, to be all that we are, death becomes “the external other” that we fear. It threatens our long-held belief in the primacy of a bounded and unique identity. Who will “I” be without my familiar story of self? It’s no wonder we are afraid of letting go. We don’t know anything else but this all-powerful “me.” We cling to the known, and we fear entering into the unknown.
Watch children in a playground swinging from the monkey bars. They move freely, letting go of one rung and reaching for the next in a fluid motion. Have you ever noticed adults on the same structure? Rarely happens. But when it does, you’ll see that they maintain a tight grip on one bar and won’t let go until they have a good hold on the next.
Even with superficial reflection, we can see that our attempts to make ourselves solid, separate things opposes the way reality works. When we mistakenly attempt to pull ourselves out of the river of change, we wind up feeling increasingly alone, isolated, and afraid. This causes a great deal of suffering at the time of our dying, but also right now in the middle of our lives today. In the end, pursuing security leaves us feeling even more insecure.
We are in a fight against nature.
Reality cannot be mapped. It is beyond description or any one view. It is not a single static truth, but rather an endless, unfolding mystery. It is alive, dynamic, and constantly being expressed through form and formlessness.
The Heart Sutra is one of Buddhism’s most renowned, beautiful, and confounding teachings. Its most central lines read:
Form is emptiness; emptiness itself is form;
Emptiness is no other than form;
Form is no other than emptiness.
The words are almost incomprehensible upon first reading. The first time my son encountered this teaching, he said, “Dad, is this gobbledygook what you talk to people about on your meditation retreats? This is what you do for a living?” It made me laugh.
But if we stick with it, we can see that the sutra describes the nature of our minds and of reality quite accurately. Just as we cannot pull life and death apart, neither can we separate form and emptiness. They are a package deal, always arising together.
Emptiness is a difficult word for most Westerners. We normally associate empty with deficiency, sterility, a void. Most of us relate more easily to the words openness, spaciousness, or better still, boundlessness. I like to think of emptiness as an open expanse, a field with no edges that is not limited by any concepts.
Think of how, upon walking into a large room, we first notice the objects in it: the tables, chairs, sofa, artwork, and lamps. But with a bit more attention, we might observe how the light is shifting from moment to moment. We become aware of the space that surrounds and holds the objects as they abide in it.
Similarly, when we look at our minds, first we see the objects in it—our thoughts, feelings, memories, daydreams, plans, as well as the sensations coming to us from our bodies, our perceptions of the events that are happening to us. A little bit more reflection reveals that we are cognizant of these activities in our minds because they are occurring in the open space of awareness. This awareness is always there; we just don’t normally pay attention to it because we’re preoccupied with the objects, our perceptions, and emotions—just as when we walk into the furnished room, our attention went to the tables and chairs, not the empty space. So we could say that the open space of our boundless awareness, which contains the “forms” of our thoughts and perceptions, is “empty.”
The funny thing is we usually think of forms as permanent. They are what we turn to in our search for security. Yet upon closer examination, we discover that even the forms themselves are empty, impermanent. Our ideas, fantasies, and physical sensations—we may think of these as solid things, but they are more like bubbles. They appear for a while, then dissolve. They come, they go. Just like us. Just like everything in the universe. We exist, and then we don’t. Each life, each occurrence, each feeling, every lovemaking, every breakfast, every atom, every planet, every solar system is fleeting. Every form takes its turn on the wheel of living and dying.
Emptiness, on the other hand, is never ending. Emptiness, in fact, gives birth to form. Emptiness makes everything possible.
Jennifer Welwood, a psychotherapist, author, and dedicated Buddhist practitioner, writes about the “poetic beauty” of form and emptiness in an insightful essay. She states:
In both the inner and outer worlds, whenever we look deeply into emptiness, we discover form; and whenever we look deeply into form, we discover emptiness. This is the sense in which form and emptiness are inseparable, indivisible, and nondual. In tantric language, we could say that they are lovers joined in eternal embrace—distinct yet not separate; not one, not two …
Taking ourselves to be some kind of solid form, we see emptiness as something that could undermine or annihilate us. Rather than recognizing emptiness as our own nature, we see it as an enemy that we have to avoid or defeat. And we see form as something that we have to fabricate or defend or promote. So when we fail to recognize the non-duality of form and emptiness, they become divided, and rather than being inseparable from one another as lovers, they become opposed to one another as antagonists. We have to avoid emptiness and we have to fabricate form.
When we take ourselves to be separate, solid forms, death becomes the enemy. Death is the emptiness that threatens our forms. We can relax some when we realize that our true nature is open, spacious, and boundless and that flowing through that huge valley of emptiness is a river of constant change.
Emptiness need not scare us because it doesn’t mean complete nothingness, that we don’t exist or that we don’t have any value or that we are not each unique, beautiful individuals. We are all of that. It’s just that we don’t exist apart from everything else. We are a tentative expression of the great field of seamless emptiness. Emptiness is not some kind of heaven or absolute reality apart from us. It is a fertile boundlessness from which all form perpetually arises. But no individual or thing has a separate independent existence; emptiness is woven through the fabric of all life. Without emptiness we would never have arrived here in the first place.
The great Tibetan master Kalu Rinpoche famously wrote, “We live in the illusion and appearance of things. There is a reality. You are that reality. When you understand this, you will see that you are nothing. And being nothing, you are everything. That is all.”
The story of Tommy and his mother, Ethel, is a good illustration of form and emptiness at play in the world. Ethel had brain cancer. She came to live with us at the Zen Hospice Project when caring for her at home became more than her family could manage. Her son, Tommy, had Down syndrome. Although he was in his young teens, his emotional and psychological development were similar to those of a six-year-old child. He visited his mother frequently, and we came to enjoy each other’s company. Over the months, we developed a certain level of trust.
The morning Ethel died, I called her husband, Peter, Tommy’s father, and asked if he would like to bring the family to be with Ethel’s body.
“What should I do about Tommy?” Peter asked. I suggested that he bring Tommy along. Peter hesitated, explaining that first he wanted to talk with Tommy’s therapist about it.
A while later, Peter called back. “The therapist doesn’t think it’s a good idea. She told me that when she was a little girl, she went to a family funeral and was forced to kiss her dead grandfather. She thinks exposing a child to a dead body might be too traumatic.” He paused for a moment, then added, “I don’t know what to do because Tommy is asking to see his mother.”
“Why don’t you bring Tommy and invite his therapist to come, too?” I suggested.
An hour later, the hospice doorbell rang. There stood Peter, Tommy, his therapist, and a few other family members. Tommy had a small Instamatic camera dangling from around his neck.
“Hi, Tommy,” I said. “I see you have your camera. What do you want to take pictures of today?”
He smiled. “You, Mr. Buddha, and my mom.” So we went to the living room, where Tommy took photos of me and the big Buddha statue. Then we went upstairs to Ethel’s room.
Everyone was quite apprehensive. How would Tommy react to seeing his dead mother? He and I walked hand in hand to her bedside. He spontaneously reached over the bed rail and kissed his mother on the forehead, as he had done on most every visit. Then Tommy turned and looked at me, not with fear, but with innocent curiosity, and asked, “Where has all that gone?”
Form and emptiness. What was animated and full of life before was now empty. Tommy could sense the absence of Ethel, even though her body was still present. A silence fell over the room. Most of the adults squirmed nervously, trying to imagine how to respond.
I said what I usually do. “I don’t know, Tommy,” I said. “What do you think?”
Tommy thought about it for a minute before launching into an animated description born from his imagination. The story of what might have happened to his mother included images of a butterfly emerging from a cocoon and scenes from the popular movie Terminator 2, in which human forms morph from one shape into another.
The adults exhaled and relaxed. They could see that Tommy was not frightened. In fact, he was incredibly curious about what was absent. We drank tea and Coca-Cola as we visited in a natural way.
Before the family left, I asked if Tommy and I could spend a few minutes alone with Ethel. I sensed his need to be with his mother one last time. Since we had built up so much trust over time, Peter agreed.
Once the room had cleared, Tommy moved to his mother’s bedside again and asked a few more questions.
“When you are dead, can you feel?” he asked.
“I don’t know if dead people can feel, Tommy, but can you feel your mom?”
“Yes, I can,” he responded. “But she’s not moving.”
“Yeah, when people die, they don’t breathe or eat or talk anymore,” I said. My simple, matter-of-fact answers seemed to satisfy him for the moment. Then I said, “Tommy, if there’s anything you want to say to your mom or do for your mom, now would be a really good time.”
I watched as Tommy gently touched his mother’s arm, feeling its texture and changing temperature. After a moment, he did the sweetest and most remarkable thing. Leaning over his mother’s body, he smelled her from head to toe. It reminded me of watching a whitetail deer fawn once on a country road. The fawn’s mother had been hit by a car. The young deer moved tenderly, sniffing her mother’s body with curiosity. Tommy’s movements had a similar, almost primitive feel. They were completely uncensored.
Of course, Tommy would still need to grieve and take time to understand the loss of his mother. But in this moment, there was nothing more that needed to be done or said. Tommy’s way of knowing was visceral and palpable. I doubt many grown-ups would ever allow themselves that sort of intimacy with death.
I wondered, what if death could be as natural for adults in our culture as it was for Tommy?
* * *
Suppose we became more intimate with form and emptiness in everyday life?