One Time, One Meeting

“As everyone knows,” declares Ishmael, the narrator of Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick (1851), “meditation and water are wedded forever.”

Melville’s schoolmaster-turned-sailor makes this remark in the opening pages of Moby-Dick, as he reflects on the lure of water, especially to those of a contemplative disposition, who are naturally drawn to ponds, lakes, rivers, and the sea. Ishmael is not a meditative practitioner in any formal sense, and as Daniel Herman, a Melville scholar and Zen practitioner, notes, “Melville almost certainly never in his life heard the word ‘Zen’.” Yet Ishmael’s remark is relevant to the discipline of Zen meditation, insofar as that remark calls attention to two salient elements of the practice. By its nature, water visibly embodies the quality of impermanence, one of the primary objects of Zen contemplation. At the same time, water also embodies the quality of constancy, which Zen teachings urge us to contemplate. “How can I enter Zen?” a student asked a master. “Can you hear the murmuring of the mountain stream?” the master replied. “Enter there.”

The law of impermanence (annica) is one of the cornerstones of classical Zen teachings. “All composite things,” the Diamond Sutra enjoins us to remember, are “like a dewdrop . . . a bubble in a stream.” If we wish to become intimate with impermanence, we have only to look inward, observing our thoughts and feelings as they arise, abide for a while, and disappear. And should we choose to look outward, we can turn our attention to the phenomenon of water in its manifold forms and changes. Those changes may be dramatic, as when waves crash into rocks or white water tumbles over a waterfall. They may also be gradual and subtle, as when dewdrops evaporate or a dense fog lifts or the bubbles in a stream dissolve. But whether the changes are obvious or covert, water affords the contemplative mind an apt and endlessly eventful object. In its presence, we can readily observe what the poet Seamus Heaney, speaking of the river Bann, called “the steady go of the world.”

Yet, even as we are doing so, we are also contemplating constancy. Rivers, to be sure, are notoriously unpredictable. And with our growing awareness of climate change, oceans are no longer the emblems of constancy they once appeared to be. Those realities notwithstanding, however, bodies of water in general and lakes and pools in particular afford us rest and solace. They calm our unquiet minds. And if poets and artists of a meditative temperament–John Constable, William Wordsworth, Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop, to name a few–have often gravitated toward water and incorporated images of lakes, ponds, and pools in their works, it is in part because the imagery of still water reflects the composure of the contemplative mind. And for those of a more intuitive nature, the abiding presence of water, however dynamic, may also evoke the ineffable, immutable dimension of human experience.

So it was with the British contemplative poet Charles Tomlinson, who died last month at the age of eighty-eight. In his poem “Movements,” he records his sense of continuity amidst fluid change:

“Written on water,” one might say

Of each day’s flux and lapse,

          But to speak of water is to entertain the image

Of its seamless momentum once again,

          To hear in its wash and grip on stone

A music of constancy behind

          The wide promiscuity of acquaintanceship,

Links of water chiming on one another,

          Water-ways permeating the rock of time.

In the passage from which these lines are taken, Tomlinson is recalling his nightly visits to a deep, silent pool, a “visible church, where everything /Seemed to be at pause, yet nothing was.” In the presence of those tranquil waters, he sensed the constancy of an “unending present, traveling through / All that we were to see and know.”

Zen teachings admonish us to be mindful of “each day’s flux and lapse” and the impermanent nature of all conditioned things. We suffer, Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us, not because things are impermanent but because we expect them to be permanent when they are not. Yet, according to the Dhammapada, a foundational text for Zen practice, mindfulness is also “the way to the changeless.” By giving wholehearted attention to the unending present, we become acutely aware of the world of forms and their unending changes. But if we are fully attentive, we may also intuit the timeless, formless dimension of our experience, from which forms arise and to which they return. Listening to links of water chiming on one another, we hear, as it were, the music of impermanence. But can we also incline our minds, as Buddhist teachings advise, toward the changeless? Can we hear, however faint its strains, the music of constancy?

——-

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, (Random House, 1950), 2.

Daniel Herman, Zen and the White Whale (Lehigh University Press, 2014), 35.

Seamus Heaney, “Perch,” Electric Light (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 4.

Charles Tomlinson, Written on Water (Oxford 1972), 54.

Photo: View of Taughannock Falls, near Ithaca, New York, by Michael C. Rygel.