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

by Douglas E. Harding

What actually happened was something absurdly simple and unspectacular: just for the moment I stopped thinking. Reason and imagination and all mental chatter died down. For once, words really failed me. I forgot my name, my humanness, my thingness, all that could be called me or mine. Past and future dropped away. It was as if I had been born that instant, brand new, mindless, innocent of all memories. There existed only the Now, that present moment and what was clearly given in it.

It took me no time at all to notice that this nothing, this hole where a head should have been was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary, it was very much occupied. It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything - room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills,

utterly free of "me", unstained by any observer. Its total presence was my total absence, body and soul. Lighter than air, clearer than glass, altogether released from myself, I was nowhere around.

it felt like a sudden waking from the sleep of ordinary life, an end to dreaming.

reality for once swept clean of all obscuring mind. It was the revelation, at long last, of the perfectly obvious. It was a lucid moment in a confused life-history.

It was naked, uncritical attention to what had all along been staring me in the face

There arose no questions, no reference beyond the experience itself, but only peace and a quiet joy, and the sensation of having dropped an intolerable burden.

Somehow or other I had vaguely thought of myself as inhabiting this house which is my body, and looking out through its two little round windows at the world. Now I find it isn’t like that at all.

In fact, only one window appears on this side of my facade, and that one is wide open and frameless and immense, with nobody looking out of it. It is always the other fellow who has eyes and a face to frame them; never this one.

I had been blind to the one thing that is always present, and without which I am blind indeed - to this marvelous substitute-for-a-head, this unbounded clarity, this luminous and absolutely pure void, which nevertheless is - rather than contains - all that’s on offer.

In fact, these coloured shapes present themselves in all simplicity, without any such complications as near or far, this or that, mine or not-mine, seen-by-me or merely given. All twoness - all duality of subject and object - has vanished:

Above all, what about these touch-feelings which arise when I explore here with my hand? Surely these findings add up to massive evidence for the existence of my head right here and now after all? I find they do nothing of the sort. No doubt a great variety of sensations are plainly given here and cannot be ignored, but they don’t amount to a head, or anything like one.

In any case, when I start groping around for my lost head, instead of finding it here I only lose my exploring hand as well: it, too, is swallowed up in the abyss at the centre of my being.

Present experience, whatever sense is employed, occurs only in an empty and absent head. For here and now my world and my head are incompatibles: they won’t mix.

This is not a matter of argument, or of philosophical acumen, or of working oneself up into a state, but of simple sight - of LOOK-WHO’S-HERE instead of IMAGINE-WHO’S-HERE, instead of TAKE-EVERYBODY-ELSE’S-WORD-FOR-WHO’S-HERE. If I fail to see what I am (and especially what I am not) it’s because I’m too busily imaginative,

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

he would again find what I find - that this vacancy is filled to capacity with the scene.

During my lucid intervals, however, I am clearly headless here. Over there, on the other hand, I am clearly far from headless: indeed, I have more heads than I know what to do with. Concealed in my human observers and in cameras, on display in picture frames, making faces behind shaved mirrors,

But there is one place where no head of mine can ever turn up, and that is here on my shoulders, where it would blot out this Central Void which is my very life-source: fortunately nothing is able to do that.

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

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!

There neither is nor can be any evidence for two parallel worlds (an unknown outer or physical world there, plus a known inner or mental world here which mysteriously duplicates it) but only for this one world which is always before me, and in which I can find no division into mind and matter, inside and outside, soul and body.

And yet (I tell myself) it seems to work out well enough for all everyday, practical purposes. I carry on just as if there actually were, suspended here, plumb in the middle of my universe, a solid eight inch ball.

No wonder these bits and pieces of a body appearing in the corners of the picture, with no controlling mechanism of a head in the centre to connect or operate them - no wonder they look perfectly natural to me: I never had any other sort!

can find no shell enclosing this void which I am, no shape or boundary or limit: so it cannot help but merge with other voids.

There are no obstructions here, no inside or outside, no room or lack of room, no hiding place or shelter: I can find no home here to live in or to be locked out of, and not an inch of ground to build it on. But this homelessness suits me perfectly - a void needs no housing. In short, this physical order of things, so solid-looking in appearance and at a distance, is always soluble without residue on really close inspection.

Discussion, on the other hand, proved almost invariably quite fruitless. “Naturally I can’t see my head,” my friends would say. “So what?” And foolishly I would begin to reply: “So everything! So you and the whole world are turned upside down and inside out ...” It was no good. I was unable to describe my experience in a way that interested the hearers, or conveyed to them anything of its quality or significance. They really had no idea what I was talking about

Zen Buddhism has the reputation of being difficult - and almost impossibly so for Westerners, who for this reason are often advised to stick to their own religious tradition if they can.

The famous Heart Sutra , which summarizes the essence of Mahayana Buddhism and is daily recited in Zen monasteries, having begun by stating that the body is just emptiness, declares that there is no eye, no ear, no nose.

he happened while out walking to look down into a pool of still water. There he discovered those human features the Buddha was talking about - on show where they belonged, where he had always kept them: over there at a distance,

Soto, which is today Zen’s largest sect.

Hui-neng’s Original Face (No-face, No-thing at all) is the best known and for many the most helpful of all Zen koan-anecdotes:

For me here the face with its sense organs happens to be quite special in that it’s always absent, always absorbed in this immense Void which I am; whereas my trunk and arms and legs are sometimes similarly absorbed and sometimes not.

Yengo (1566-1642) writes of Zen: “It is presented right to your face, and at this moment the whole thing is handed over to you ... Look into your whole being ... Let your body and mind be turned into an inanimate object of nature like a stone or a piece of wood; when a state of perfect motionlessness and unawareness is obtained all the signs of life will depart and also every trace of limitation will vanish. Not a single idea will disturb your consciousness, when lo! all of a sudden you will come to realize a light abounding in full gladness. It is like coming across a light in thick darkness;

The characteristic lightness which Yengo refers to was experienced by the Taoist Lieh-tzu (c.400 B.C.) to such a degree that he seemed to be riding on the wind. This is how he describes the feeling: “Internal and external were blended into a unity. After that, there was no distinction between eye and ear, ear and nose, nose and mouth: all were the same. My mind was frozen, my body in dissolution, my flesh and bones all melted together. I was wholly unconscious of what my body was resting on, or what was under my feet.

I felt clear and transparent.” “Mind and body dropped off!’ exclaims Dogen (1200-1253) in an ecstasy of release. “Dropped off! Dropped off! This state must be experienced by you all; it is like piling fruit into a basket without a bottom, it is like pouring water into a bowl with a hole in it.” “All of a sudden you find your mind and body wiped out of existence,”

Sankara (c.820), the great sage and interpreter of Advaita or absolute non-duality, taught that a man has no hope of liberation until he ceases to identify himself with the body, which is a mere illusion born of ignorance: his real Self is like space, unattached, pure, infinite.

With our attention fastened upon the physical world, we fail to see through it. Disregarding our inside information, we look on our little human bodies as opaque and divided from our total Body, the Universe, which as a result seems equally opaque and divided.

Here, we distinguish eight: (1) The Headless Infant, (2) The Child, (3) The Headed Grown-up, (4) The Headless Seer, (5) Practising Headlessness, (6) Working It Out, (7) The Barrier, (8) The Breakthrough.

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.

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”.

To make quite sure of this, you have only to point to the “Window” and notice what that finger is pointing at - if anything.

The treasure of treasures they wore themselves out searching for is in fact the most accessible, the most exposed and blatantly obvious of finds, lit up and on show all the time.

there are no preconditions for this essential in-seeing.

The clearest and most distant of views out is found to be shallow - a view down a cul-de-sac - compared with the view in, to the headlessness which plainly goes on and on forever.

Fifth and last, this seeing into one’s Nothingness is always on tap, whatever one’s mood, whatever one is up to, however agitated or calm one happens to be at the moment - in fact, just whenever one needs it. Unlike thoughts and feelings (even the “purest” or most “spiritual” of them) it is instantly available, simply by looking in and finding no head here.

just because it’s so obvious and easy, so available on demand and natural and ordinary, it’s tragically easy to under-value, even dismiss offhand as quite trivial.

(5) Practising Headlessness Now the “hard” part begins, which is the repetition of this headless seeing-into-Nothingness till the seeing becomes quite natural and nothing special at all; till, whatever one is doing, it’s clear that nobody’s here doing it. In other words, till one’s whole life is structured round the double-barbed arrow of attention, simultaneously pointing in at the Void and out at what fills it. Such is the essential meditation of this Way.

It consists of ceasing to overlook the looker - or rather, the absence of the looker. Some find the practice very hard going for a very long time.

As the animal and infant of Stage (1), you were unselfconscious: all your arrows of attention were aimed outwards: you overlooked your presence.