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

by Douglas E. Harding

I had lost a head and gained a world.

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

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.

That small, headed, solid-looking person I pass in the street - that one is the apparition which never stands up to close inspection, the heavily disguised one, the walking opposite and contradiction of the real one whose extent and content are infinite: and my respect for that person, as for every living thing, should be infinite too.

“Behead yourself!” “Dissolve your whole body into Vision: become seeing, seeing, seeing!”

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.

“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.”

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.

It is seeing them with their Creator’s eye, as very good. In Zen terms, again, it is “being enlightened by all beings,” because there’s nothing here to cloud their light.

It is God himself who is the arch-unknower! God (or whatever you call him or her who is No-thingness and Source and Awareness and Being) can’t possibly understand how he gave rise to himself, how he pulled himself up by his own bootstraps out of blank non-existence, how he woke himself from that deepest of sleeps, from that long and dreamless night. To understand himself would be to stand under himself in an infinite and futile regression. An absurd and self-defeating contortion! He loves being an absolute mystery to himself - a God who had himself eternally taped would suffer eternal boredom. Nor is this divine ignorance a shortcoming in his nature. Quite the reverse: it’s the reason why he stands forever in rapturous awe of himself, beyond all measure. It’s the reason for his much-more-than-human humility, his trembling in the face of his own unspeakable grandeur, his vertigo as he gazes into his own bottomless depths. (Only we complacent humans are conceited enough to claim Being as our natural right, as much in the bag, and to be taken for granted, as if we had it served up regularly for breakfast!)

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.

how crazy to suppose that such a puny thing could meaningfully encompass the Cosmos and its origin and the whole mystery of Being! Fortunately I perceive - I could say this headless Place itself perceives - that as absolutely uncluttered and infinitely extended Awareness it is ideally fitted for that tremendous task.