cracking open
On my pillow bit by bit waking,
suddenly I hear a cicada cry—
at that moment I know I’ve not died
Ch’i-chi, trans. Burton Watson
from “Start of Autumn: Hearing a Cicada While Sick in Bed”
The old story goes that Xiangyan, the bright and dedicated Zen student, learning for decades at the feet of the masters, one day realized that he would never understand the heart of Zen. For all his listening and note-taking, he was no closer to wisdom than he had been before entering the monastery. Then one day — perhaps just as he was packing up to leave this life, according to some versions of the story — as he swept the stone path, a piece of gravel flew out of place and struck a nearby bamboo stalk, and that crack was the sound of his enlightenment. “One strike and all knowledge is forgotten,” he wrote (trans. Andy Ferguson, 2000). “No more the mere pretense of practice.”
Daily I’m struck by something. Yesterday, the unexpected splash of water from a pitcher. Last week, messages arriving at opportune times. Never enlightenment, though. Never the sudden flash of all-knowing, if such an experience exists.
The appeal of enlightenment and awakening experiences is that it’s easy to be hit in the face. As we reexamine all the ways that we exist in the world — touch, proximity, labor, isolation — we now engage in so many experiences that we might never have otherwise considered, had they not been so quickly forced upon us.
Learning is often like this. It comes most fully in the company of discomfort: the challenge of not knowing, and of asking a question. The challenge of being wrong and being told so. How much easier it would be if awakening were always like Xiangyan’s: if, in a moment, we became new. If, on the other side of realization, every lesson stuck for good.
The other appeal of enlightenment and awakening experiences is that the experience makes you “enlightened”. We tend not to be so interested in the hard work of realizing something as much as we are interested in who we become after we’ve realized it. Those reckoning with their ignorance of and complicity in racial injustice have been eager to enter sort of a boot camp phase of growth: an intensive period of reading, listening, and donating after which they will achieve the vaunted title of Anti-Racist. It’s no different than any other desire to be seen as good — not necessarily to be good oneself, but for others to approve of our goodness. Acting the right ways, saying the right things, being correct rather than truly understanding, and being approved of rather than truly virtuous.
It’s a system built on the false notion that once a status is achieved, it remains intact for life. Good, enlightened, successful, mindful — these are not descriptors of people or characters, but of actions. It’s quite easy, and in fact quite common, to take a racist action one moment and an anti-racist action the next. And in fact there is no action, no type of action, and no number of actions that make a person “good”. A “good” business owner can suddenly lose it all; a “good” friend may not live up to the standard sometimes. “Good” is a judgment made in one moment. It doesn’t really say anything about how a person has acted or will act, and it doesn’t tend to last very long.
Nothing about our selves lasts very long anyway. The statement “I am a child” is true only for a short while, just like “I am hungry” or “I am awake”. Given that our selves can change with every instant and every action, we are less “humans” (or any other noun one might use) and more “beings”.
How am I being right now?
In class last week, Scott Schwenk offered this insight: that in meditation, when we experience a moment of that effortless, flowing awareness that is the heart of the practice, we should rest in it with the delicacy of a butterfly’s landing. When we try to maintain, decipher, or describe that awareness, we’ve already left it.
Perhaps the same is true for all of growth and learning: that moments of enlightenment also land like a butterfly, or like the crack of gravel against bamboo, and they fly off just as quickly as they came.
No wonder we seek the grand awakening. It’s easy compared to the work of constantly opening and reopening oneself to the lessons of small things. Even the scale of global pandemics and uprisings seems subtle compared to the overarching creative forces of the universe, and the puny timeline of human existence within that.
Nothing is learned all at once. Knowing comes from hearing, reading, practicing, forgetting, making mistakes, being reminded, and so on, and so on. What if everything around us were a teacher — every splash of water, every passing bird, just cracking us more open one hairline fracture at a time.
“After the ecstasy, the laundry,” the saying goes. Perhaps ours is a life in which there is no ecstasy, nor laundry — no judging good or bad, helpful or unhelpful. Perhaps ours is a life in which everything is everything, and everything is simply as it is: each moment both mundane and fascinating, each wonder simply another in a long list of wonders comprising this life.
