One Time, One Meeting

Let us imagine that it’s a Friday afternoon, and you are driving on the New York State Thruway. You are in the passing lane, going seventy-five miles per hour. The car on your right is not slowing down, and the SUV behind you is fast approaching. You can see its emblazoned grill in your rearview mirror. You do not want to increase your speed, but the driver behind you is leaving you no choice.

As the SUV draws closer, you feel your heart rate increasing, your anger arising. You can’t see the driver in your mirror, but you can well imagine him: an aggressive, insensitive lout, with no concern for anyone but himself. As you reluctantly speed up and move over, an epithet comes to mind, and you let it slip from your lips. It is not a nice word, but it gives you satisfaction.

Moments later, the SUV passes on your left, and you see that the driver is not a lout at all but a petite, professional-looking woman in her thirties, who is keeping her eyes on the road, apparently unaware of your distress. And a few minutes later, after she and her SUV have long since disappeared, you realize that your anger, too, has disappeared and your clarity of mind is slowly returning. It is as if a veil, through which you were viewing the world, has gradually been lifted.

Shodo Harada Roshi, a contemporary Rinzai Zen master, has coined a suggestive name for that veil. He calls it the “ego filter.”  In his book Moon by the Window, he describes its effect on the ways in which we experience the world:

When we look out the window at the moon, it is always the same moon. But if any thoughts or desires come between us and the moon, what we see changes completely. . . . When we live with no separation between ourselves and what we are experiencing, we know the truly bright and clear Mind that is our Original Nature. But as long as we carry around an ego filter, it’s impossible to experience this.*

As can be inferred from these observations, the “ego filter” consists of thoughts and their emotional subtexts, which come between our minds and our immediate experience. The moon itself is constant, but the ego filter colors what we see.

Lest Shodo Harada’s statement be misunderstood, it is important to note that the “ego” to which he refers is not that of Freudian theory. Nor is it quite the same as the “ego” of popular culture. In Freudian theory, the ego is one of three components of the psyche, the other two being the “id” and the “superego.” The ego mediates between the instinctual energies of the id and the moral and social values embodied in the superego. These days Freud’s theory is out of fashion, but his neutral, analytic term has survived in popular culture, where its aura is decidedly negative. In today’s American vernacular, the word ego evokes the Big Me, the Number One whom the egocentric person is always looking out for.

As used in Zen teachings, ego has a rather different meaning. In his article “The Psychology of Zen Buddhism,” the cross-cultural psychologist Reginald Pawle explains that in Zen the ego is seen not as the id’s executor but as the “root of mind,” the “principal operator” of the psyche. ** Zen teachings call it “discriminating mind,” and its function is to make dualistic distinctions: up from down, left from right, pleasant from unpleasant, good from bad, and especially, “self” from “other.” The ego picks and chooses, in accordance with our desires and aversions. Without it, we could not choose a detergent or read a map or wisely invest our savings. Indeed, we could not safely cross a busy street, much less drive a car.

Yet in Zen teachings the ego is also seen as the primary source of suffering, insofar as we identify with our preferences or posit a solid, separate, choice-making self. It is one thing to choose miso soup over cheeseburgers, PBS over Fox News, a Prius over a Hummer. It is another to conjure an immutable self who makes such choices, irrespective of changing conditions. “If you’re not sure whether you own an iron,” reads an ad for a popular men’s deodorant, “you’re a Mitchum man.” By such formulations, we reify our attitudes, beliefs, and patterns of behavior into fictive selves. More harmfully, we separate our illusory selves from others, and we pit our race, religion, gender, or economic class against the rest of humanity. By nurturing such habits of thought, Zen teachings tell us, we inflict suffering on ourselves and the rest of the world.

Shodo Harada urges us to “dig down” and “dig out” the illusory ego, to “get rid of the ego filter,” through the rigorous practice of zazen. By persistent effort, he assures us, we can find that place where the “water of clear mind is flowing freely” and “the ego isn’t directing our life.” That is a high aspiration, requiring years of patient practice. But should that practice come to fruition, we may find ourselves less tethered to the “me-story,” as Toni Packer has called it, and less inclined to divide “me” from “you” and “us” from “them.” And should we find ourselves being tailgated on the Thruway, we may find that we no longer see a virtuous driver being bullied by a bad one. Rather, we see a field of rapidly changing relationships: a dangerous configuration of cars and drivers, to which that entity we call the self would do well to pay full attention.

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* Shodo Harada Roshi, Moon by the Window (Wisdom, 2011), 21.

** Reginald H. Pawle, “The Psychology of Zen Buddhism: Possibilities for Western Psychotherapy,” Japanese Journal of Psychotherapy,
vol. 30, no. 1 (February, 2004), 17-23.