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

by Douglas E. Harding

The notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do by ... melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid. BLAKE

“I think I’ll go and meet her,” said Alice ... “You can’t possibly do that,” said the Rose. “I should advise you to walk the other way.” This sounded nonsense to Alice, so she said nothing but set off at once towards the Red Queen. To her surprise, she lost sight of her in a moment. THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

All twoness - all duality of subject and object - has vanished: it is no longer read into a situation which has no room for it.

Present experience, whatever sense is employed, occurs only in an empty and absent head.

It takes an innocent eye and an empty head (not to mention a stout heart) to admit their own perfect emptiness.

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!

this new vision must transform my attitude to other men, and indeed to all creatures. Firstly, because it abolishes confrontation. Meeting you, there is for me only one face - yours - and I can never get face-to-face with you. In fact, we trade faces, and this is a most precious and intimate exchange of appearances.

Secondly, because it gives me perfect insight into the Reality that lies behind your appearance, into you as you are for yourself, I have every reason to think the world of you.

because we all are one Body, and that Body is one Void.

It is absolutely Nothing, yet all things; the only Reality, yet an absentee. It is my Self. There is nothing else whatever. I am everyone and no-one, and Alone.

After the body has been cast off to a distance like a corpse, the Sage never more attaches himself to it. SANKARA

No place can be found in which to put the Original Face; It will not disappear even when the universe is destroyed.

“This matter (Zen) is like a great mass of fire: when you approach it your face is sure to be scorched. It is again like a sword about to be drawn; when it is once out of the scabbard, someone is sure to lose his life ... The precious vajra sword is right here and its purpose is to cut off the head.”

Well, as we have already noted, 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.

“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.

But why all this emphasis on the disappearance of the face and head, rather than of the body as a whole?

“To Zen, incarnation is excarnation; the flesh is no-flesh; here-now equals emptiness (sunyata) and infinity.”

“Till now you seriously considered yourself to be the body and to have a form. That is the primal ignorance which is the root cause of all trouble.”

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.)

The purloined letter, in Edgar Allan Poe’s story (1845), “escaped observation by being excessively obvious.” The villain “deposited the letter immediately beneath the nose of the whole world, by way of best preventing any portion of the world perceiving it.”

Defeated - because working for this individual something is making sure of failure: the probable end of even our most “successful” enterprises is disillusion, the certain end is death,

If, in our day-to-day lives, we are quite often sensible, loving, generous, laughter-filled, and even happy, that is because all of us - at whatever stage we happen to have arrived - are rooted in and living from our common Source and central Perfection, from one and the same Headlessness, or Original Face or Transparency or Aware Nothingness. All along we are fully enlightened by one and the same Inner Light, whether we let it shine through or not. Our happiness is deep-rooted and real, while our misery is shallow-rooted and unreal, born of delusion, of ignorance. We suffer because we overlook the fact that, at heart, we are all right.

Really to appreciate What we are, with clarity and impact, we must first be identified with what we are not.

Who would want to be held up for longer than necessary in this painful region? And who, having already made such progress along the Way, would not want to continue - specially as our next stage is by far the easiest and most straightforward of them all?

The Katha Upanishad puts it this way: “God made the senses turn outwards, man therefore looks outwards, not into himself. But occasionally a daring soul, desiring immortality, has looked back and found himself.” In fact the “daring soul” doesn’t lack encouragement. He’s surrounded by countless reminders and opportunities, countless means of reversing the arrow of attention - if only he’s sufficiently inquisitive about his true identity, and if only he’s willing to drop for a moment opinions about himself based on hearsay and memory and imagination and to rely on PRESENT EVIDENCE.