One Time, One Meeting

Of the sounds of this world, few are more pleasing than that of tea being poured, quietly and gently, into a porcelain cup.

That sound may he heard every Sunday evening, when the Falling Leaf Sangha, our local sitting group, meets to practice seated and walking meditation. With the striking of a gong, one of our members rises from her cushion. One by one, she serves us, pouring hot green tea into each of our cups. Amplified by the spacious, silent room, the trickling sound of tea brings to mind a bubbling stream or a miniature waterfall.

Listening to that sound in that place, I am sometimes reminded of the story of the monk Kyosho, who asked his teacher, Gensha (834-908), how to enter the practice of Zen.

“Do you hear the murmuring of the mountain stream?” asked Gensha.

“Yes,” Kyosho replied.

“Then enter there.”

With that reply, we are told, Kyosho experienced a spontaneous awakening.

To be sure, Gensha could have chosen other means. He could have advised his disciple to study Zen teachings and traditions. He could have prescribed a course of instruction. Instead, he exhorted Kyosho to listen: to put his logical, reasoning faculties in abeyance and to open his body and mind to the sounds of the world. In so doing, Gensha also pointed Kyosho toward an encounter with absolute reality and a deeper understanding of the self.

To listen with full attention to any sound is to awaken from one’s daydreams and speculations and return to the reality of the here and now. In the story of Gensha and Kyosho, the sound could have been almost anything: the sough of wind in the trees, the scrape of sandals on the road, the sound of Kyosho’s own name. By choosing water, however, Gensho called Kyosho’s attention to a phenomenon that was unmistakably concrete, liquid, and transitory. As anyone who has listened to the flow of water knows, the sound induces a sense of calm, a mood of tranquility. But it also places the contemplative in the presence of impermanence, fostering the realization that what appears to be fixed is really fluid and subject to change. In time, the water in the mountain stream may become a lake, or ice, or a cloud, or water vapor. It is anything but solid.

And what is true of the stream is also true of all conditioned things, including the entity we are pleased to call the self. Zen teachings and the larger body of thought from which they derive do not propose that the self does not exist. Rather, they urge the recognition that what we imagine to be a solid self is in fact a fluid collection of experiences, a shifting aggregate of “form, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness.” And though we imagine that self to have an intrinsic existence, separate from the rest of the world, it is really an integral element in the web of life, susceptible like water to changing causes and conditions. The Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck likens it to a whirlpool in a river. Certainly that whirlpool exists, but it has no permanent form. We don’t have to expend our energies pretending that it does, or attempting to hold it in place.

Paradoxically, the way to engender that liberating recognition is not to analyze the concept of emptiness, or struggle to envision the One Body of absolute reality, or engage in abstract thinking generally. Rather, it is to reconnect with what Zen calls our relative existence: our day-to-day, ordinary lives, experienced with openness and full awareness. And one of the best ways we can do this is through the act of listening, both to ourselves and to the world around us.

If you would like to demonstrate this to yourself, please sit still for a few minutes, following your breathing and collecting your scattered energies. Then do nothing but listen to whatever is occurring within and around you. If you are in a public space, listen to the voices in your environment, as they express their anxieties or joys, their elation or their sorrows. Listen, if you can, to what the novelist George Eliot called the “roar” on the “other side of silence”—the roar of human suffering. If you are at home, listen to your breathing, to the processes of your body, and to your ego as it arises, asserts itself in speech, and dissolves into the silence of awareness. Then, when you are ready, pour yourself a cup of tea, and listen to the sound.