The Zen Art of Seeing Things As They Are - A Story
Summary: Zen stories illustrate profound truths through simple narratives revealing how mental conditioning distorts perception. Seeing things as they are requires releasing judgments, expectations, and conceptual frameworks that color direct experience. Mind constantly interprets reality through filters of likes/dislikes, beliefs, and past conditioning rather than perceiving freshly. Zen practice cultivates beginner's mind—open awareness free from predetermined conclusions. Stories often feature masters responding unexpectedly, breaking disciples' conceptual habits and revealing assumptions limiting perception. True seeing involves dropping mental commentary and experiencing reality nakedly before thought interferes. This direct perception reveals interconnectedness, impermanence, and emptiness obscured by conceptual thinking. Liberation comes through recognizing how mind creates suffering through interpretations rather than accepting what simply is.
Zen master Dogen Zenji returned to his homeland, Japan, after spending several years in a monastery practicing meditation under an enlightened Zen master. When they met on a street, a casual acquaintance asked him what he had learned in the monastery. The Zen master replied with a serene face, "I have learned that my eyebrows are horizontal and my nose is vertical." When he heard his reply, the acquaintance exclaimed, "What is new in that? Everyone knows it!" He left with a disappointed look on his face, wondering why he spent so many years in the monastery to learn a simple truth.
Indeed, simple truths are difficult to learn and even more difficult to remember. We learn many simple truths about life when we are children, but we either forget them or ignore them as we grow up. Zen master Dogen Zenji spoke an obvious truth, which we all know but do not really pay attention to or care to follow. He admitted to the fact that after years of Zen practice, he learned to see things clearly and plainly as they were, without putting himself in between.
The mind is a major obstacle as it does not let us see things as they are due to functional limitations and compulsions. What the Zen master did during those years of practice was to remove himself from his seeing and thinking so that he could see the truths clearly without distortions. This kind of clarity is difficult and requires sustained practice: learning to quiet the mind and stop inserting the self into experience.
Every seeing requires an object and a subject. When you remove the subject, yourself, from the equation, only the object remains. Those whose minds are filled with fear, anxieties, desires, and expectations find it hard to understand. They cannot see the truth because they are not ready for it. They do not understand it because they have become comfortable with the illusions that have become integral to their personalities.
Most of us take things for granted. We go through the motions of life as if we know everything about it already and as if we have been through it before. We rarely stay in the moment; we are often stuck somewhere, either in the past or in the future, with some notion, fear, fantasy, idea, or illusion. We do not see things as they are, but according to our mental states. Our judging, calculating, and measuring minds get in the way of our seeing and knowing.
Our thinking stands between ourselves and the reality around us. Our perceptions, conclusions, knowledge, and the so-called wisdom we acquire through analysis and conditioning may give us the satisfaction that we have achieved some erudition or intellectual superiority; however, in truth, we remain as ignorant as ever because we have not learned to open ourselves to the beauty and the truth that surrounds us. Through practice, the Zen master learned to see the truth as it was, in a simple way. The complexity of life is an illusion we want to believe to justify whatever desires and ambitions we entertain.
The world's profound wisdom is hidden in the simple truths of life. Most of us go past them because we are preoccupied with our memories, feelings, beliefs, fears, anxieties, and expectations. Our knowledge is an accumulation of memory. It is rooted in the past rather than the present. When we perceive things, we superimpose this knowledge on what we perceive and, in the process, do not actually see them, but their memories, mental images, or impressions. The seeing is further distorted by conditioning, beliefs, authority, faith, and comparison to which we are usually subject. We cannot go beyond this habitual functioning of the mind and see current reality unless we shake off the past and live in the present moment with a subdued and tranquil mind.
Therefore, to see truths as they are and return to the simplicity and purity of seeing the world with childlike innocence and an unassuming mind, we must remove the fog of impurities that clog our minds and prevent us from being in the moment and flowing with the flow. To return to the simplicity and purity of our perception, knowledge, and understanding, we must stay aloof and indifferent to the world we perceive, suspending judgment, desires, attachments, likes, and dislikes. True awareness of things and people arises from insightful and mindful observation when the mind is not clouded by judgment, preconceived notions, fears, anxieties, and expectations. We must return to the witness state, without becoming involved with what we see.