One Time, One Meeting

In a recent article for the New York Times (April 14), Jim Dwyer reported that the doctors and health-care workers at the front lines of the corona-virus pandemic are facing challenges not only to their health and safety but also to their previous medical knowledge. “What we thought we knew, we didn’t know,” said Dr. Nile Cemalovic, an intensive-care physician at Lincoln Memorial Center in the Bronx. As Dwyer explains, “certain ironclad emergency medical practices have dissolved almost overnight.”

By any standard, the circumstances under which doctors and health-care workers are currently laboring are extraordinary. At the same time, the experience of finding one’s knowledge obsolete or no longer useful is not unique to the present crisis. “Our knowledge is historical, flowing,” wrote the poet Elizabeth Bishop. And, according to Zen teachings, our previously acquired knowledge can also be an impediment to present understanding. Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh puts the matter this way:

Old knowledge is the obstacle to new understanding; Buddhism calls it “the barrier built of knowledge” . . . . Understanding is not an accumulation of knowledge. To the contrary, it is the result of the struggle to become free of knowledge. Understanding shatters old knowledge to make room for the new that better accords with reality.

As a prime historical example, Thich Nhat Hanh cites Nicolaus Copernicus, whose discoveries caused “most of the astronomical knowledge of the time [to be] discarded, including the ideas of above and below.”

In this context, “knowledge” refers chiefly to scientific consensus and conventional wisdom. But the principle also applies to the knowledge we gain through personal experience. “This famous experience,” asks one of the Irish novelist Sean O’Faolain’s characters, “what else is it but the carefully concealed record of our own past mistakes?” And, as the Zen teacher Zenkei Blanche Hartman reminds us, our cherished experience can hamper our ability to see what’s under our noses:

[T]here is that within which knows the truth of life as it is, the truth of things as they are, regardless of secular knowledge. Just what’s in front of us at every moment. But we screen it through such a barrage of preconceptions and judgments and personal agendas and habitual ideas of who we are and how we want to view the world that it is very hard for us to see directly what’s right in front of us. And Zen training and practice are all about coming to have confidence in that which knows and in that direct knowledge that does not come through words or intellectual activity.

As Hartman goes on to say, the aim of Zen practice is “to learn how to see what’s directly in front of us and to learn how to respond appropriately to whatever arises in the moment in the circumstances of our daily life.”

Is Hartman devaluing “intellectual activity”—or, more broadly, historical knowledge and formal education? Far from it. Nor does the Zen tradition do so. The literature of Zen is vast, and it is rich in complex paradoxical thought. What Hartman is urging is not the wholesale discounting of knowledge or experience but the capacity and the willingness to cast aside our preferences, our preconceptions, and the prejudices of our education, so as to able to “respond appropriately” to unprecedented conditions.

In Zen teachings this capacity is known as readiness. Its essence is captured in a metaphor propounded by Eihei Dogen (1200-1253), founder of the Soto school of Zen Buddhism. In his Shobogenzo Zuimonki (Treasury of the True Dharma Eye), Dogen admonishes us to view our lives in the same frame of mind as that of a man falling off a horse. As the Zen priest Shundo Aoyama explains, “In that brief moment before [the falling man] hits the ground, all his ability and learning [are] useless, and there is no time to think, no time for daydreams or self-reproach. When we face a matter of life and death, there is no time to look around or fantasize. All depends on readiness.”

For the doctors, health-care workers, and first responders who are dealing heroically every day with matters of life and death, Dogen’s admonition may be especially apt, but its relevance extends to the rest of us as well. In ways too obvious to enumerate, life as we knew it has fallen from its horse. Whether our collective response will prove appropriate or adequate remains to be seen. But how we fare, personally and as a society, may depend less on what we knew, or thought we knew, than how wisely and how skillfully we can set aside our preferences and expectations, our personal agendas and ingrained habits of mind, and adapt to rapidly changing conditions. Now more than ever, readiness is all.

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In a recent article: Jim Dwyer, “What Doctors on Front Lines Wish They’d Known a Month Ago,” New York Times, April 14, 2020.

“Our knowledge is historical”: Elizabeth Bishop, “At the Fishhouses.”

Old knowledge is the obstacle: Thich Nhat Hanh, The Sun My Heart (Parallax, 1998), 50.

[T]here is that within: Zenkei Blanche Hartman, Seeds for a a Boundless Life (Shambhala, 2015), 63.

“In that brief moment”: Shundo Aoyama, Zen Seeds (Shambhala, 2019), 34-35.

Photo: Andreas Cellarius’s chart illustrating Copernicus’s heliocentric model of the universe (1660).