On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious

“What actually happened was something absurdly simple and unspectacular: I stopped thinking. [...] Reason and imagination and all mental chatter died down. For once, words really failed me. Past and future dropped away. I forgot who and what I was, my name, manhood, animalhood, all that could be called mine. It was as if I had been born that instant, brand new, mindless, innocent of all memories. There existed only the Now, that present moment and what was clearly given in it. To look was enough. And what I found was khaki trouserlegs terminating downwards in a pair of brown shoes, khaki sleeves terminating sideways in a pair of pink hands, and a khaki shirtfront terminating upwards in—absolutely nothing whatever! Certainly not in a head.It took me no time at all to notice that this nothing, this hole where a head should have been was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary, it was very much occupied. It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything—room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far above them snowpeaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world.”

“We suffer because we overlook the fact that, at heart, we are all right.”

“So unprivileged, indeed, is my head in the mirror, that I don’t necessarily take it to be mine: as a very young child I didn’t recognize myself in the glass, and neither do I now, when for a moment I regain my lost innocence. In my saner moments I see the man over there, the too-familiar fellow who lives in that other bathroom behind the looking-glass and seemingly spends all his time staring into this bathroom - that small, dull, circumscribed, particularized, aging, and oh-so-vulnerable gazer - as the opposite in every way of my real Self here. I have never been anything but this ageless, measureless, lucid and altogether immaculate Void: it is unthinkable that I could ever have confused that staring wraith over there with what I plainly perceive myself to be here and now and always!”

“I lost a head and gained the world.”

“You never enjoy the world aright, till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars.”

“It took me no time at all to notice that this nothing, this hole where a head should have been was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary, it was very much occupied. It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything - room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far above them snow-peaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world.”

“The body,” Rinzai (d. 876) tells us, “does not know how to discourse or to listen to a discourse ... This which is unmistakably perceivable right where you are, absolutely identifiable yet without form - this is what listens to the discourse.” Here the Chinese master, along with Kabir and the rest, is echoing the Surangama Sutra (a pre-Zen Indian scripture) which teaches that it’s absurd to suppose that we see with our eyes, or hear with our ears: it’s because these have melted together, and vanished into the absolute Emptiness of our “original bright and charming Face,” that experience of any sort is possible.”

“The foolish reject what they see, not what they think; the wise reject what they think, not what they see ... Observe things as they are and don’t pay attention to other people. HUANG-PO (9th C.)”

“As a beauty I am not a star; There are others more handsome by far, But my face - I don’t mind it For I am behind it; It’s the people in front get the jar.”

“the double-barbed arrow of attention, simultaneously pointing in at the Void and out at what fills it.”

“modern science itself agrees that we don’t really see with our eyes. They are merely links in a long chain stretching from the sun, through sunlight and atmosphere and illuminated objects, through eye lenses and retinae and optic nerves, right down to particle/wavicle-haunted space in a region of the brain, where at last (it’s said) seeing really occurs.”

“(i) What you are now looking at is this printing; what you are now looking out of is empty Space for this printing. Trading your head for it, you put nothing in its way: you vanish in its favour. (ii) What you are now looking out of isn’t two small and tightly fastened “windows” called eyes but one immense and wide open “Window” without any edges; in fact you are this frameless, glassless “Window”. (iii) To make quite sure of this, you have only to point to the “Window” and notice what that finger is pointing at - if anything. Please do just that, now...”

“It was a ceasing to ignore something which (since early childhood at any rate) I had always been too busy or too cleaver or too scared to see.”

“In a sense this attempt at domestication is absurd, because no argument can add to or take from an experience which is as plain and incontrovertible as hearing middle C or tasting strawberry jam. In another sense, however, the attempt has to be made, if one’s life is not to disintegrate into two quite alien, idea-tight compartments.”