Every Minute Zen

A Zen koan (original source unknown)

Zen students are with their masters at least ten years before they presume to teach others. Nan-in was visited by Tenno, who, having passed his apprenticeship, had become a teacher. The day happened to be rainy, so Tenno wore wooden clogs and carried an umbrella. After greeting him Nan-in remarked: "I suppose you left your wodden clogs in the vestibule. I want to know if your umbrella is on the right or left side of the clogs."

Tenno, confused, had no instant answer. He realized that he was unable to carry his Zen every minute. He became Nan-in's pupil, and he studied six more years to accomplish his every-minute Zen.


A few minutes after completing my last post, i was walking down a hallway in a similar direction as a colleague of mine. Absently -- as i was considering two articles i had just read -- i asked him how he was, or some permutation of that question. His answer was startlingly honest, describing how he hadn't been feeling that well lately, etc. etc...
He never realized it, but i felt terribly embarrassed by his (unintentional) chastisement. Here i had just finished writing about that sort of social interactions, and i was falling into the same old rut. I had lost my Every Minute Zen.

Of course, you can't care about everything all the time. You'd probably go insane. From one perspective of that statement, i can't truly interact with every person i ever pass in a hallway. It might be nice to imagine, but there are simply too many people, and no one has a memory quite that amazing. From another reading of that statement, there are just too many issues to worry about at one time before you crumple under the combined stress of a thousand injustices. The humanitarian crisis in Darfur, AIDS in Africa, civil conflict over the Tibetan Plateau, global warming, crooked (lecherous) politicians, the food industry...

I often shy away from debates about such things. It's not that i don't feel they're important, but i haven't got the time to re-evaluate my position on each subject three times a day. That's the providence of the politicians we elect. They get paid to re-evaluate based on new information; they also have dozens of staffers. Once a position has been carefully considered, most of us have no desire to think about it again, unless we are actively working with that particular problem.

This is what i had done with my previous post. I had been considering human interactions as an anecdote to push an architectural ideal. Architecture is my work, and although work absorbs a large part of my thought and life, there are (*gasp*) times when i am not thinking about architecture. Is this enough?

Is it good enough to be a paragon of certain ideals while at work if you can not uphold those ideals elsewhere?

I have three answers for that. First, the politician argument. A politician is a professional face, a symbol of our ideals. In public, the politician is expected to uphold certain ideals. Like the see-no-evil monkey, we're content if we don't know about the adulterous secret life of the person behind the politician. When we do know, however, it becomes problematic. Our symbol no longer stands for the same things. In this way, the private persona is inextricable from the public works. The best the politician can hope for is to conceal his/her clandestine acts for as long as possible. This lack of every-minute Zen is unacceptable. You are free to disagree. Thomas Jefferson, for example, kept slaves while simultaneously writing the Declaration of Independence, which includes wording which is anti-slavery. You might argue that his lack of every-minute Zen was outweighed by the triumph of his public works.

One the other hand, you have the Luke Skywalker type of hero. I use a fictional example because all real heroes will in some way fall into the third category. Luke Skywalker is essentially perfect. He makes mistakes, but he makes them in good faith. He consistently strives to heal the overtly Fascist regime of the Empire (ever looked up "stormtrooper"?). If he slights a friend while drinking in a cantina, no one is going to disbar his hero status as Savior of the Galaxy. He is not a person, he is a symbol. His every-minute Zen is irrelevant.

The third example is Christopher Columbus. Columbus Day is a national holiday here in the United States. Columbus Day commemorates the "discovery" of the New World. Columbus also started wars, spread disease, and abused the good faith of many native American tribes. How is this different from the Thomas Jefferson example? Both did um, great things...well, maybe accidentally finding 10 million square miles of land isn't so great, but that's not the point. Columbus committed such blatant atrocities that he cannot ascribe to the Luke Skywalker status of symbolic hero. I refuse to accept him as a symbol of greatness, because other people view him as a symbol of suffering, and i choose not to disenfranchise those people with my opinions.

The answer then to all this might be: Keep as much Every-Minute Zen as it takes to be sure your legacy is not affected by it. When in doubt, err on the side of caution, though. The moment we stop trying to get better at it is the moment we aren't doing enough.