A mind is like a parachute. It doesn’t work if it is not open.
—THOMAS ROBERT DEWAR, REPEATED BY FRANK ZAPPA
Zen koans are stories, dialogues, or phrases meant to help us deal with our very human problems. Koans often appear contradictory, but they are not intended as riddles or puzzles to be solved. Rather, they are meant to help us gain insight, freeing us up from our ordinary ways of seeing and knowing the world by propelling us toward our direct experience.
The koan “Cultivate don’t know mind” may seem confusing at first. Why should we seek to be ignorant? But this is not an encouragement to avoid knowledge. Don’t know mind is one characterized by curiosity, surprise, and wonder. It is receptive, ready to meet whatever shows up as it is.
Before I had open-heart surgery, my son Gabe, who was in his late twenties at the time, visited me in the cardiac care unit of the hospital. We fell into a tender conversation, reminiscing about our relationship. Our sharing was filled with love, kindness, and laughter.
At one point, Gabe stopped talking and became quite serious. “Dad, are you going to live through this surgery?” he asked.
Now, I love my son beyond words, and so like any father, I wanted to reassure him that of course I would live, I would be just fine. But I paused for a moment, searching for the right response. I felt into my experience before answering. Then I heard myself say, “I’m not taking sides.”
My answer surprised us both. What I meant was that I wasn’t taking sides with life or death. Either way, I trusted that everything would be okay. I don’t know where the words came from; they spilled from me without censorship. I wasn’t trying to appear sage or to be a good Buddhist. Yet we both were reassured by my response. I think it was because we knew we were in the presence of the truth spoken with love.
We hugged, and Gabe went home with a promise to return in the morning.
As we go about our day-to-day lives, we rely on our knowledge. We have confidence in our ability to think through problems, to figure things out. We are educated; we have training in specific subjects that permits us to do our jobs well. We accumulate information through experience, learning as we go. All this is helpful and necessary in moving through our lives smoothly.
Ignorance is usually thought of as the absence of information, being unaware. Sadly, it is more than just “not knowing.” It means that we know something, but it is the wrong thing. Ignorance is misperception.
Don’t know mind represents something else entirely. It is beyond knowing and not knowing. It is off the charts of our conventional ideas about knowledge and ignorance. It is the “beginner’s mind” Zen master Suzuki Roshi spoke of when he famously said, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”
Don’t know mind is not limited by agendas, roles, and expectations. It is free to discover. When we are filled with knowing, when our minds are made up, it narrows our vision, obscures our ability to see the whole picture, and limits our capacity to act. We only see what our knowing allows us to see. The wise person is both compassionate and humble and knows that she does not know.
This moment right here before us, this problem we are tackling, this person who is dying, this task we are completing, this relationship we are building, this pain and beauty we are facing—we have never experienced it before. When we enter a situation with don’t know mind, we have a pure willingness to do so, without attachment to a particular view or outcome. We don’t throw our knowledge away—it is always there in the background, ready to come to our aid should we need it—but we let go of fixed ideas. We let go of control.
Don’t know mind is an invitation to enter life with fresh eyes, to empty our minds and open our hearts.