One Time, One Meeting

During my thirty-eight years as a teacher of literature and writing, I read and corrected thousands of papers, essays,  poems, and stories. Understandably, most of those words have long been forgotten. Now and then, however, a phrase coined by a student will arise out of memory, for reasons I can seldom explain.

That happened recently, as I recalled a phrase from a student’s poem. Nor sullied by conjecture, is what she wrote, some thirty years ago. And though I can’t recall the specific context, I find myself dwelling on the phrase itself, partly because its two main words, uncommon at the time, have grown increasingly rare, and partly because the phrase has a bearing on the practice of Zen.

Derived from the same root as “soil,” the word sully means “to pollute, defile, stain, or tarnish”. Shakespeare uses the word often, as in A Winter’s Tale , where Leontes abhors an act that would “Sully the purity and whiteness of [his] sheets,” or in Sonnet 15, where the forces of Time and Decay threaten to change his youthful subject’s “day of youth to sullied night”. In his first soliloquy, Hamlet expresses the wish that his “too too solid flesh might melt, / Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew”. Scholars are still uncertain whether Shakespeare wrote “solid” or “sullied.” The former is more consistent with the images of melting and thawing, but the latter is the more evocative.

Conjecture is also an arresting word. If it’s used at all nowadays, its context is usually formal or academic. A conjecture is an educated guess. Or a not-so-educated guess. Or, as defined by the American Heritage Dictionary, an “inference based on inconclusive or incomplete evidence”. The root of the word is the Latin jacere, which means “to throw”. Combined with the prefix con, which here means “together,” the word’s origins evoke an image of something hastily constructed—something thrown together, often with more ingenuity than concrete evidence. For examples, we need only watch cable news, particularly in the months before an election, or when a celebrity has been charged with a crime, or when someone has gone missing.

Such are the meanings of sully and conjecture, taken singly. But what might their combination mean, as the phrase relates to Zen meditation? What, exactly, might be sullied by conjecture, and by whom?

Imagine, if you will, that just as you are falling asleep, the village siren sounds its alarm. You wake, a little groggy. Is someone’s house on fire?  Has someone been in a serious accident? Or has someone burned a bag of popcorn in a microwave and set off a smoke alarm?

Those are conjectures, prompted by a sound. What is actual is the sound itself—its spiraling crescendo, its long sustained note, its sinking into silence. The rest is fabrication, the work of the ever-thinking mind.  And what is being sullied, as it were, is pure awareness, in this instance awareness of a sound. Lost in conjecture, we may scarcely hear that sound—or be fully aware of the thoughts and feelings it has just aroused.

To cultivate pure awareness is a primary aim of Zen meditation. Hindering that awareness are the ego’s ceaseless machinations, which include not only conjecture but also expectation, speculation, fantasizing, and escape into abstract thought. All of these mental activities, habitual and sometimes obsessive, distract us from seeing and hearing what is going on, within and around us. Yet with practice it is possible to live in full awareness much of the time, including a real-time awareness of the mind’s insididous deceptions. And though the odds are against it, it is possible to cultivate the concomitant of that awareness: a clear and balanced mind, unhindered by fear and unsullied by conjecture.