Zen: Charlotte's Empty Rowboat

Charlotte Joko Beck, Everyday Zen

Empty rowboat drifts along on Long Pond bumping other boats (Whitney Wolf/osteologos)

  
Suppose we are out on a lake, and it’s a bit foggy... and we’re rowing along in our little boat having a good time. And then, all of a sudden, coming out of the fog, there’s this other rowboat, and it’s heading right at us. And… crash! 

  

Well, for a second we’re really angry -- What is that fool doing? I just painted my boat! And here he comes -- crash! -- right into it. 

  

And then suddenly we notice that the  rowboat is empty. 

 

What happens to our anger? Well, the anger collapses... I’ll just have to paint my boat again, that’s all. But if that rowboat that hit ours had another person in it, how would we react? You know what would happen! 

  

Now our encounters with life, with other people, with events are [all] like being bumped by an empty rowboat. 

  

But we don’t experience life that way. We experience it as though there are people in that other rowboat, and we’re really getting clobbered by them. 

 

What am I talking about when I say that all of life is an encounter, a collision with an empty rowboat? What’s that all about? More

Rowboats are like that

Empty man (cloudkooky)

Roshi Beck is talking about anatta ("not-self," the Buddhist teaching that the Five Aggregates of existence and clinging are ultimately impersonal). It is a very advanced teaching to be realized and seen directly. It is perceiving the emptiness of phenomena. In an ordinary way, of course, things are things. And we regard them as continuing stable through time. But they are so unstable as to be insubstantial. Physicists know it. But mystics know-and-see it directly. All the constituents of being are falling away. We identify with them even as they drop away. We regard the replacement phenomena as identical with the things we cling to. We cling to ourselves -- our bodies, sensations, perceptions, formations, and (reflexive) consciousness. But when the mind becomes still, it has the chance to see things as they really are. Then it is liberated. We escape to reality. And having seen nirvana, we are happy here and everywhere. But so long as we see things as personal, we are bumped into, oppressed and offended. Even our rowboat is empty. The Heart Sutra says it far more beautifully. But that is its message, for this stunning and impossible realization is the "perfection of wisdom."

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