The Cup

I was maybe fourteen the first time I purchased a book about Zen. I found it in a little used book store in Honolulu. I don’t remember the title of the book but I do remember this koan titled “A cup of Tea”:

Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1868-1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen. Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor's cup full, and then kept on pouring. The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. "It is overfull. No more will go in!"

"Like this cup," Nan-in said, "you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?"

I was writing a email to a friend the other day trying to explain why I thought programs like al-anon were difficult. “I am too smart for al-anon.” I said. “I have familiarized myself with eastern and western religions, spirituality and philosophies, and when I hear them echoed back to me in meetings I think ‘right, humility’ or ‘right, meditation. I know about those things.’” I went on to explain that knowing about a thing and doing a thing are different, and that knowing about a thing might make the doing harder. Harder because I have my arsenal of explanations and justifications already built up. I can tell you why meditation is important, or exactly what I think humility means to me, and in my mind I might think, “I don’t need to do that.” Or worse, “I’ve covered that territory.” Thus the work doesn’t get done.

The best example I have is acceptance. Acceptance can be read by some as blind faith while others might interpreted it as spineless submission. It’s an old orators trick, anyone who questions the content can easily be sidetrack by retorting with a series of definitions. The audience feels the question is addressed and the orator goes away unchallenged. Getting hung up on definitions is a great example of how I can be “too smart,” accept that in this case I am both orator and audience. The one that I deceive is myself.

The wisdom of the empty cup is obvious. Matthew 5:3 says something similar, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” This poor corresponds to the notion of “emptiness.” The temptation is to imagine the heart or mind emptied of “self and all things” and ready to receive the Spirit. But this is a mistake. Read carefully the “poor in spirit” is not one becoming poor, but one who has lost everything. Not only are we to empty our cup, but we are to lose the cup itself! The individual poor in spirit has completely emptied themselves of both content and cup and is open to the inexhaustible possibilities of god, where god is not only the work (tea) but the works (cup).

I am a little afraid that some of you might raise the proverbial red flag here, as the last paragraph is pretty dense. I have to agree and add that this kind of spiritual mumbo-jumbo is exactly the kind of thing I am talking about when I say I am “too smart.” Still I think the koan of the empty cup is important Mainly because in a time of universal propagandism of the easy life where information and solutions are literally a click of a button away, the message of the empty cup is more important than ever.

As I was talking about the other day in my post “If you meet the Buddha, kill him” Zen cautions against acquisition of Knowledge. For knowledge in Zen terms is the equivalent of Ignorance, for knowledge fills us up and leads us astray. In Christian terms you might say mankind has eaten from the tree of knowledge and become ignorant. How then do I empty my cup if I can’t even think about the contents that I want to empty? Is this some kind of sophists trick? If I am not to think about these things am I not really substituting one kind of ignorance with another? Again the definitions plague me.

I think the thing that comes at the end of the day, when you’ve spent time meditating on how to empty your cup and how then to lose even the cup you hold is to realize that even if you lost all of these things you would still be the ordinary person that you are. In al-anon meetings I have heard this described as “turning my will over to the care of god as I understood him.” In Zen it is to cast away attachments to experience or as the Bhagavad Gita says “you have the right to your action, but not the fruit of your action.

Again, I don't think that the answer lies in denying the self or the world of experiences. I think that emptying my cup is really about making me ready for whatever comes next. It is a kind of universal readiness that comes from being truly empty or absolutely poor. The possibilities are endless. But If grab hold of them, then my cup becomes full and I lose that state of potentiality that I have attained. Instead, I release my concerns and my joys and embrace the world in the moment, always mindful of what the next moment might bring.

If I had to sum up what I think the koan is really trying to say, I think it would have to be this:

“Trust yourself and be happy.”