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

by Douglas E. Harding

I had lost a head and gained a world.

utterly free of "me", unstained by any observer.

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

This very spot, this observation-post of mine, this particular “hole where a head should have been” - this is the Ground and Receptacle of all existence, the one Source of all that appears (when projected “over there”) as the physical or phenomenal world, the one infinitely fertile Womb from which all creatures are born and into which they all return. 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.

The sense itself was I. I felt no dross nor matter in my soul, No brims, no borders, such as in a bowl We see. My essence was capacity.

And, in a better-known passage: “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.” This is none other than the Zen experience of satori - only the language differs a little. At the moment of satori there is an explosion, and a man has no body but the universe. “He feels his body and mind, the earth and the heavens, fuse into one pellucid whole - pure, alert, and wide-awake,” says master Po Shan: The whole earth is but one of my eyes, But a spark of my illuminating light.

“I am the Centre, I am the Universe, I am the Creator!”

“I am

the cause of mine own self and ...

“The streets were mine, the temple was mine, the people were mine, their clothes and gold and silver were mine, as much as their sparkling eyes, fair skins and ruddy faces. The skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and stars, and all the World was mine: and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it.”

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.)

It seems that, from a very early age, our learned view of ourselves from outside begins to overshadow, to superimpose itself upon, and eventually to blot out, our original view of ourselves from inside. We have grown down, not up. Instead of being present and together with the stars - and all things under the stars - we have shrunk away and withdrawn from them. Instead of containing our world, it now

contains us - what’s left of us. And so, reduced from being the whole scene into being this tiny part, is it any wonder that you and I find ourselves in all sorts of trouble - if we grow greedy, resentful, alienated, frightened, defeated, tired, stiff, imitative instead of creative, unloving, plain crazy?

Greedy - as we try to regain and accumulate at any cost as much as possible of our lost empire, Resentful or aggressive - as we seek revenge on a social order that has cruelly cut us down to size, Alienated, lonely, suspicious - because we morbidly imagine that people, and even animals and inanimate objects, keep their distance from us, are aloof and stand-off-ish: and we refuse to see how that distance folds to nothing, so that in reality they are right with us here, our bosom companions and intimates, closer than close, Frightened - as we see ourselves to be things, at the mercy of and up against all other things,

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, Tired - because the building and maintenance and constant adjustment of this imaginary box for living in, right here, uses up so much energy, Stiff, solemn, unnatural, phony - because we’re living from a lie, and from a lumpish, inflexible, predictable, petty, limiting lie, at that, Uncreative - because we cut ourselves off from our Source and Centre and see ourselves as mere regional effect, Unloving - because we shut all others out from the volume we imagine we occupy, pretending we are not built open, not built for loving, Crazy - because we “see” things that aren’t present, and actually believe (contrary to all the evidence) that we are at 0 metres what we look

like at 2 metres - solid, opaque, coloured, outlined lumps of stuff. How can our life and our world stay sane if t...

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.

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.

(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 ...

Even my own actions become acceptable. My silliest mistakes are somehow not mistakes after all. And anyway, whatever I’m doing - from washing the dishes to driving my car to thinking about this paragraph - I find myself doing it worse

while I’m imagining a headed somebody right here doing it, and better while I’m seeing him off. Consciously living from the truth of the No-thing-I-am works much, much better than living from the lie of the thing-I’m-not - which is hardly surprising.

It’s all a matter of putting first things first, of never losing touch with THIS. When as a person I aim directly to be out in front and involved in life and truly with it, I am in fact alienated from life, up against it, ultimately its victim. Whereas when my aim is indirect - via the perceived Absence here of that person seeking involvement - why then I’m not just out in the world, not just with it: I’m relishing the experience of being it. I’m at large, world-asserting, enlightened (as Zen master Dogen so delightfully puts it) by all beings. Enlightened b...

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...

Seeing into No-thingness is consciously connecting up with the Source of all thingness, with the originality of the Origin and the creativity of the Creator, with the fountainhead of all truly spontaneous feeling and action and what is new and therefore unpredictable. As always, ...

It is the experience of unknowing, of one’s profound and all-inclusive ignorance. In fact, it follows from “I am nothing” that “I know nothing”, for obviously an informed nothing is not a nothing but a something, form and not void.

This unknowing falls into two quite distinct parts: (1) The first is the abandonment of our assumption

that of course things are and have to be what they are. It is giving up our adult, sophisticated, man-or-woman-of-the-world assurance that (as we say) we know it all, that we’ve seen it all before, that there’s nothing new under the Sun, that we have it all taped, that “wow!” is childish and a yawning “so what?” is grown-up. (Suddenly raise your little finger, blink an eyelid, notice the hospitality you’re according to these printed shapes and those sounds - the vividness they owe to the depth and clarity of the room you give them - and admit you have no idea how you perform these and a million other miracles.) It is a kind of global forgetting, a laundering of our soiled universe, washing away accumulated layers of names, memories, associations, and leaving it all unfamiliar and fresh and sweet-smelling. It...

that was there all along. It is actually looking at the “meanest” stone and fallen leaf, at the “nastiest” piece of garbage, at “irrelevant” things like the shape and colour of shadows and the reflection of coloured city lights in wet roads at night (which we’ve ceased to see because we don’t drive round them). It is consciously being what we really are - Capacity for things - the Space in which each of them is allowed to arrive at its peculiar kind of perfection. It is consciously viewing everything from its Source, reuniting it with the Infinity that lies this side of it. It is hearing, seeing, smelling, touching things as if for the first time, relieved of the crushing load of time past. It is the revitalizing and extension of our childhood astonishment. It is being present at Creation’s morning, before Adam name...

This unknowing has no limits. It extends beyond what we perceive to all we feel and think and do. It is ceasing to know how to cope with life, where we are going, what to do after this immediate task is done, what’s going to happen to us tomorrow, next week, next year. It is walking one step at a time and blindfolded, in the assurance that the Space here - which is nothing and knows nothing but Itself - will nevertheless come up, moment by moment, with what’s needed. It is living like the lilies of the field, taking no thought for the morrow, trusting our Source. (Of course, this can be...

The life of unknowing, and the extraordinary joy and workability of it, are not to be aimed at directly. They can only be had by giving up any claim ...

However, they may be counted on to arrive in their own good time, provided we attend to their background, to the Nothingness here. Seek first this barest of Kingdoms (the Kingdom within) and all these beautiful things will be added: seek them, and they will be taken away. Let us stay with the Emptiness we know (and unknow) so well, and It will supply the filling ...

Why should existence itself exist? The difference between these two unknowings is immeasurable; they aren’t in the same class. The first sees as miracles the things we are aware of. The second sees as the Miracle the aware No-thing from which they come. The first is comparatively mild, gently on-going, ever-changing, a matter of degree. The second is a knock-out, an all-or-nothing insight not remotely like any other.

The stupendous fact (at once infinitely exalting and infinitely humbling) is that our amazed delight in his achievement is nothing less than his own amazed delight - the real thing and no reflection of it, or even participation in it. At this level, what others are there for him to share it with?

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 ...

If at the very centre of my universe there had been a blob - a little and tightly packed and intensely personal box-full of neural material and processes - how crazy to suppose that ...

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. That’s its proper business. What’s more, I can be sure that this same meanest yet grandest, most private yet least private, nearest and best known yet least known of places, packs many more - immeasurably more - surpr...

“The self in its first purgation has cleansed the mirror of perception; hence, in its illumined life, has seen Reality ... Now, it has got to be Reality: a very different thing. For this a new and more drastic purgation is needed - not of the organs of perception, but of the very shrine of the self: that ‘heart’ which is the seat of personality, the source of its love and will.” In a certain sense, this is the real start of the Way, of the true spiritual life, which is nothing else than self-surrender, self-abandonment, actually underwriting whatever happens to one, dying as the separate and illusory ego (I am a somebody) and being reborn as the one and truly egoless Ego (I AM). It could be said that all spiritual “progress” up to this point was merely preparation for this, the essential and by far the hardest stage of the Way, leading eventually to the Breakthrough.

It is the realization at gut level (so to say) that one’s deepest desire is that all shall be as it is - seeing that it all flows from one’s true Nature, the Aware Space here.

It was the essential quantum leap from the fiction of egocentricity to the fact of zerocentricity.

the gaining of our separate

and personal goals yields only the briefest satisfaction, and after that delusion and boredom, if not disgust: whereas, whenever we have the grace to say YES! to our circumstances, and actively to will (rather than passively to acquiesce in) whatever happens, why then there springs up that real and lasting joy which Eastern tradition calls ananda.

How frequently we saw only what we wanted to see, and our intention played havoc with our attention!

The barrier is none other than the culminating defense-effort of our wilfulness or ego, its most formidable but desperate stand against sustained attack by the inescapable facts;

our breakthrough is our unconditional and ever-renewed surrender to God’s will as perfectly revealed in our circumstances - to God’s will clearly on show all around us and within us, in the shape of all that’s going on right now. Insofar as his will becomes ours, we see his world as it is; and, insofar as we see it as it is, our will becomes his and from our hearts we welcome all that world is bringing to us. Here, in short, our seeing and our willing merge - not once-and-for-all of course, but moment by moment, so long as life lasts.

Nirvana? In the same sermon it is described as “the Peace, the Highest ... the end of craving, the turning away from desire.”

Here at last the split is mended; there is no wound dividing the Nothing that is so clearly seen from

the Nothing that is now deeply felt - as unconditional surrender of the will. Or, to repeat the Buddha’s ...

total self-loss is total self-fulfillment.

“If you abandon all restraint, carry your wishes to their fullest limits, open your heart boundlessly, there is not a single moment when you will not find all you could possibly desire. The present moment holds infinite riches beyond your wildest dreams.”