Hidden in White
Not Knowing, January 13-20, 2025
Note. My posts will be coming at a slower pace. There are ten months of new practices scheduled for the year. They demand so much energy and attention, so much contemplation. For each of these practices, we meet as a group for instruction, then break into pairs for the week and share our experiences with each other. These posts will include excerpts from those talks and journal fragments. Each will conclude with a verse distilling the essence of the practice.
“If you can say what Zen is, you’re missing something. It’s always one step further than you can reach. Zen practice points to something called the original mind. One of the qualities of that mind is that it’s unknown. It’s always different from what can be said; it can’t be grasped. However, let’s say something about it.
There’s a stillness, an openness, a deep awareness. That mind receives reality like a great mirror. That direct reflection is intensely beautiful. There’s no interpretation of things. There’s no past or future. There’s no self. It’s so open it’s empty. And within all this, there’s an intense luminosity. That mind is here within each of these human beings. It’s underneath our conditioning. The self covers that clear and bright mind.
Our practice is to return to that mind. When that mind expresses itself, all of its qualities are there at the same time. The original mind cannot be cut into pieces; it’s just one thing. But we approach it by looking at one quality to use as a gateway. It’s often said the first gateway is not knowing. It’s a good place to begin because we’re so full of ideas about things that it stops us from finding something new.
How do we melt this massive iceberg of knowledge? If it’s possible to melt this conditioning even a little bit, this is what freedom means. As knowing dissolves, then what is truly here arrives, and with that comes a release. This is like the mind cracking open. It’s important to have a taste of this—not as an idea, but as a state of being. We will be working with the kōan: only don’t know. See how deep you can take it.”
I fall asleep repeating the kōan and wake up in a pool of light—the full moon in my window. Immediately, I give it words, and then the kōan resumes.
My partner writes me. “During practice this morning, I observed a potted plant with nothing else, without knowledge—just me and that plant, intimately.” I write back that his experience reminds me of a haiku by Mitsu Suzuki:
white magnolia blossoms —
for a moment
a white universe
Then the group sitting begins. For a while, I count my breath, settling into myself, then I let it go and replace it with only don’t know—pressing it out along the length of the out-breath. The room is incredibly cold. It fills the sleeves of my robes. I begin to feel underneath and behind the kōan, trying to observe the speck of dust and the emptiness it floats in. Just the white wall before me, and for a moment, a white universe too.
Later, when my partner reads this, he says, “Very interesting—white moon, white magnolia, white wall, white universe. Today your color is white and its shades. Maybe not knowing is also white. What do you think about this?”
I return my gaze to that wall, on and off the cushion, all week. When I repeat this phrase, feel into it, the winds of thought settle down, and I observe what the eyes see as well as the sensation of my body. I try to sense the whole moment at once, everything, right now. I turn the light around and try to sense the root of awareness. There are moments when it feels close, like the root is exposed.
With forty-eight hours to go, my teacher tells us to double our intention. To practice deeply. To remove all knowledge and see clearly. “There is an innocent seed in your mind; allow it to bloom into a deeply mature innocence.”
At the wall that final day, floating in that space—an ensō made of cold and subtle light.
hidden in white — the empty wall shines back