Wash your bowls–meditation in daily life

There’s an old Zen story that I like very much. A monk comes to the monastery of the master Zhaozhou and asks for teaching. The master asks him,

“Have you had your breakfast?”

The monk says that he has.

“Then wash your bowls,” is the teacher’s reply, and the only meditation instruction he offers.

Zhaozhou wants to bring the monk down to the immediate present moment, as if saying “Don’t look for some profound metaphysical or yogic instructions here. Be present to this moment.”

Meditation reveals how many fixed ideas and opinions we have. How much judgment, expectation, and how much preconception we carry around with us all the time.

Have you noticed?

I come back to this simple story again and again. “Wash your bowls” for me means just do what you are doing, and that’s enough.

I think it gets even more interesting when we look at why we even bother with meditation in the first place.

When was the last time you asked yourself why you do this stuff–you know, read spiritual books, show up to a meditation group, download–upload, sit attending the breath, walk attending to walking, whatever you do…

Why do you do this? Is there something gnawing at you? Some question you want settled, once and for all?

(OK, if you are honestly in this thing out of curiosity or for stress reduction, that’s fine. But if you are still at it after a few months, well, it’s time to ask a few questions).

I do acknowledge there is something gnawing at me; often below the level of my day to day awareness. Yeah, after 40 years of doing this stuff, I do have an inner gnawing going on.

Some part of me wants to believe in something.

Maybe it’s part of our evolutionary biology; we may be wired to believe in something as a way of insuring our survival. Just look at historical frenzies around nationalism, fundamentalism, and now with the upcoming election.

This is what makes fundamentalism appealing for so many: So and so said it, I believe it, and that’s the end of it.

Our conditioning leads us to believe that there are answers to the questions which gnaw at us. And if we just work hard at it we will find those damned answers and be happy, and everything will be fine, no more gnawing.

I would love to believe in something, sure. But let’s say we did find an answer. Let’s say we did believe in something. Would we then be happy?

I know of many incredibly brilliant people, experts in evolutionary biology, philosophy, and religion who seem to have some major gnawing going on. Just ask their spouses.

OK, maybe we need to re-frame this, and consider the process rather than the imagined destination, of living the question.

The best answer I can come up with comes from a Jesuit priest whose work was banned by the Vatican. Here is Anthony de Mello, S.J.

“As soon as you look at the world through an ideology you are finished. No reality fits an ideology. Life is beyond that. That is why people are always searching for a meaning to life… Meaning is only found when you go beyond meaning. Life only makes sense when you perceive it as mystery and it makes no sense to the conceptualizing mind.”

So much of what is taught as Buddhism comes across as a little flat: life is all wrapped up in a nice logical package: this is why we suffer, and this how we end suffering.

Once we are given an answer, the questions are supposed to take a back seat. Or if they come up, we are redirected to work hard on the so-called answer.

Consider this well-known passage by Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet (1903):

…I would like to beg you dear sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.

Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now.

Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

But what if we never “live our way to the answer?” What then?

Wash your bowls.

One of the genius aspects of some radical teachers within Buddhism and other traditions is that they know this very well, that the answer to such questions is not a statement, fact or teaching but rather, is the experience of awareness itself.

What we are doing in meditation is simply developing the capacity to experience awareness itself. And not some fancy, esoteric mystical awareness, just this awareness right here and now.

Let’s take the example of loneliness. I read an article recently claiming that fifteen percent of (North) Americans report experiencing an intense feeling of loneliness once a week.

There is a simple remedy, and this is the heart of the meditation practice for me: just ask yourself:

Is what experiences loneliness, lonely?

Living our ordinary, everyday awareness with greater and greater capacity allows us to savor every instant. Every moment is a treasure, and time is never killed or wasted.

We become, to borrow a line from Kahil Gibran, “a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music.”

And we just wash our bowls.