The Invisible Mirror

I once read a book called “The Empty Mirror: Experiences in a Japanese Zen Monastery”

The guy, the novice who wrote the book, is frustrated because he isn’t told anything by the Zen monks. He has to figure it out from his own experience
And all he gets is inscrutable advice to that effect.

And I can’t put it any better than this book summary that I found on the web:

“As a straightforward, modest account of a young Dutchman’s year-and-a-half stay in a Japanese Zen monastery, van de Wetering’s book will deflate chic, romanticized Western notions about Oriental religions. Engaged in the proverbial soteriological quest, van de Wetering rejects philosophy and turns to Zen as a more immediate sort of profundity. He soon discovers that Zen offers no dramatic revelations, no “”gales or collisions”” of the spirit. In the monastery, his metaphysical speculations are discouraged, even punished. His stay is, in many respects, traumatic. He is permitted only four hours of sleep a day; for one week he must endure the excruciating torment of the lotus position for fifteen hours a day; he learns to graciously accept a daily beating; he undergoes countless humiliations due to problems of language and custom. And he discovers that this quest for meaning is doomed precisely because it is a quest. After being directed to look into a mirror to find his real face, he can succeed in doing so only when he sees that the mirror is empty, like the Zen master whose story he recounts, he learns to “”perform the most astounding feats. If he slept, he slept, and if he ate, he ate.”” The year-and-a-half is recalled with ambivalence – affection, resentment, and confusion. But the book effectively documents one man’s authentic confrontation with his own myths.”

The Zen approach is the opposite to the Western mental approach. It’s purely experiential and based not on thinking, but being the truth. Behind all this, and quite counter to spirit of the approach, it is quite nihilistic, to use a Western philosophical term. But even in making that statement I have drifted into a complete paradox because I am believing/thinking the nihilism through the super-ego rather than feeling/being it via the id.

I think the Zen guys are saying you either have to be 100% Zen or there is no point even trying. If you can’t or won’t be Zen then they will do it for you and they will hang around the edges of society in case you ever change your mind.

Another way of looking at it is that the book ‘spoiler’ above doesn’t change anything; you still need to read the book to absorb the ‘feeling’ of the message. Similarly there are no ‘spoilers’ in life; it has to be experienced to be Zenned.

I am going to go away and attempt to experience certain Zen-like activities and see if a part-time absorption of the same can impact or influence my life. It’s worth looking into even if the Zen monks would say I am doomed before I start because of the bitsy nature of my efforts. They would say that the mirror is invisible to me.