Once a week, I stop in at Stearns Poultry Farm in Alfred, New York to buy a dozen eggs. On the wall above the egg cooler, looking worse for the wear, is a poster depicting a rooster standing on a country road. Over his head, a thought-balloon reads, “I dream of a world where chickens can cross the road without having their motives questioned.”
That riff on a well-known conundrum seldom fails to make me smile. And on certain days, it reminds me of a slogan from the lojong system of Tibetan Buddhist meditation. Based on a 12th-century text (The Root Text of the Seven Points of Training the Mind), this system consists of fifty-nine numbered “slogans,’ i.e., themes for daily living, all of them designed to generate resilience and compassion. With the guidance of a teacher, practitioners memorize a particular slogan, reflect on its meaning, and allow it to percolate into their conscious awareness during the course of the day. In this way, they train their minds and modify their outlooks and conduct accordingly.
The slogan evoked by the poster is number 26:
Don’t figure others out.
In his book Training in Compassion: Zen Teachings on the Practice of Lojong, Zen priest Zoketsu Norman Fischer Roshi discusses this slogan in the context of interpersonal relationships. In Fischer’s view, human relationships are inherently prone to conflict. And the human impulse, however well-intentioned, to figure others out is often a source of discord. By becoming aware of that impulse, and by observing its often harmful effects, we can learn to refrain from engaging in the reflexive pondering of others’ motives. Or, failing that, we can learn to approach that self-appointed task with greater discernment and humility.
As Fischer observes, “[E]ven a cursory investigation . . . shows us that we barely understand ourselves. . . . If it’s hard to fathom ourselves, how could we seriously believe we can figure out someone else?” All of our motives, it might be argued, are ulterior, insofar as they are hidden even from us. Yet on we go, attributing feelings, thoughts, and motives to our spouses, friends, and even public figures, as if we could read their minds. As Fischer notes, “[W]e assume the intentions of others based on our understanding of their outward acts. And we are usually wrong.”
Depending on the situation, the human costs of attributing—or misattributing—motives can be slight or great, trivial or momentous. It’s fair to say that no one relishes being told, even by a well-meaning friend or relative, what he or she is feeling, wanting, thinking, or intending. “I’m really sorry,” I once said to a person whose feelings I had hurt. “No, you’re not,” she shot back. “You’re just feeling guilty.” That rebuke only widened our emotional divide. “I can imagine what you’re feeling,” sympathetic friends sometimes say to the recently bereaved, inadvertently deepening their sense of separateness and isolation. As one grieving husband, still reeling from the sudden loss of his wife, lamented, “How could they know what I’m feeling, when I don’t even know myself?”
As Fischer acknowledges, “There are times when it may be a good idea to try to imagine what someone else is feeling, thinking, needing or wanting.” “Don’t figure others out” is a motto, not an absolute. Rather than treat the slogan as a rigid rule, to be followed in every situation, it might better be understood as a cautionary mantra: a reminder, in Fischer’s words, that “we don’t really know what is in another’s heart and . . . whatever we imagine is probably incorrect.” “What heart can know itself?” asks the poet Anthony Hecht, in his poem “Upon the Death of George Santayana.” To that rhetorical question we might add: “What heart can know another’s?”
Yet, if we are not to “figure others out,” what, in times of conflict or crisis, are we to do? “In the end,” Fischer suggests, “probably the best thing we could do . . . for anyone . . . is to let them alone, profoundly alone, in the recognition that they are so much more than we could ever understand.” By doing so, he adds, we are “recognizing their full human dignity.”
Perhaps so. But leaving others alone when they are fearful or distraught can be tantamount to abandonment—or be felt as such. To Fischer’s advice, and to the lojong slogan generally, I would add these complementary words by Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, which I keep not far from my meditation cushion: “The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers.” Allowing others their full human dignity by refraining from trying to figure them out, we can also be fully present for them in their time of need. The two principles are not incompatible. Held in balance, the one supporting the other, they can constitute an appropriate and compassionate response.
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Norman Fischer, Training in Compassion: Zen Teachings on the Practice of Lojong (Shambhala, 2012), 105-106.
Anthony Hecht, “Upon the Death of George Santayana,” The Hard Hours (Atheneum, 1967).
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