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

by Douglas E. Harding

The fact is that in us all lurks an existential terror, a powerful and altogether natural resistance to what - seemingly - amounts to sudden death and annihilation. All that long-drawn-out and often agonizing effort, urged on by every kind of social pressure, to paper over the void within and to build on it a somebody right here, a face that belongs to oneself (instead of to everyone else), a distinct personality of one’s very own, a stable character to match up to those around us - and now (God help us!) it’s being exposed as not just a collapsing card-castle but (to the degree that it stands up at all) as the cause of our troubles! This is bad news indeed, and specially for those of us who seem to be progressing quite satisfactorily through this “vale of soul-making”.

Just as, when I “confront” you, it’s your face there presented to my absence-of-face here - face to no-face - so, whatever I’m taking in, I have to be free of: to be filled with water, the cup has to be empty of it. The difference is total.

(i) In appearance I’m a thing moving about in Space. In reality I’m that unmoving Space Itself. Walking across the room, I look down, and my head (no-head) is the infinite and empty Stillness in which those arms and legs are flailing.

(ii) While I appear to others over there (viewing me from a distance) to be a mobile and limited human thing, I am really here (viewing myself from no distance) this immobile and unlimited and non-human No-thing. This No-thing or Space I perceive to be packed with all manner of things - moving, coloured, shaped, noisy, pleasant and unpleasant, sensory and non-sensory, and so on. And paradoxically, just because this Space is absolutely unlike and absolutely uncontaminated by its contents, it is absolutely identified with them. I don’t believe this, I see it. The Space is the things that occupy it. This Stillness-Silence is the motions and the sounds of which it is the background. As something I am merely that thing, as no-thing I am all things.

(viii) I come to realize that my seeing into the Absence here isn’t seeing into my Absence, but everyone’s. I see that the Void here is void enough and big enough for all, that it is the Void. Intrinsically, we all are one and the same, and there are no others. It follows that what I do to anyone I do to myself, and what happens to them happens to me. It’s a fact that I must take very seriously. Call it unconditional love, or compassion, or a truly generous heart - without this, and the spontaneous living out of this, my in-seeing is tentative indeed.

(iv) Finally, all of a sudden the crowning (and at last perfectly obvious) truth dawns on me. Self-origination isn’t an impossible feat pulled off by someone else, far away, once and for all, long ago, but is going on right here and right now! The Impossibility is sustained, inexhaustible and ever present. Here, in this despised, they tell me tiny, overlooked place, supposedly bunged up with a head, here the whole wildly extravagant drama of Self-creation is being enacted as if for the first time (omit as if) in all its pristine wonder, at this very instant! Right here and now, this mind-blowing mystery - this shout “I AM!” - is my shout, is - my mystery, is my Self. I have to take it on board. Right here and now, I can no longer evade my responsibility for Isness itself - let alone for all that is.