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Day 44
The watching bird.
One Upanishad (say "oo-pah-nih-shahd") pictures two birds, inseparable friends, perched on the same tree.
Advaita
Day 43
Nobody else's job.
At a Chinese monastery in the 1220s, Dogen (say "doh-gen") found an old cook drying mushrooms in the midday heat, no hat, sweat running down his bent back.
Zen
Day 42
A little uselessness.
In the Zhuangzi (say "jwahng-dzuh"), a carpenter walks past an enormous oak that serves as the local altar and doesn't even slow down.
Taoism
Day 41
A useful handful.
Standing in a forest, the Buddha picked up a few leaves and asked the monks which was greater, the leaves in his hand or the leaves overhead.
Buddhism
Day 40
An old rule.
Notice the Buddha isn't claiming he discovered anything here, he calls it an old rule, the kind everyone already knows and nobody quite manages to use the next time someone cuts them off in traffic or fires back a sharp reply.
Buddhism
Day 39
The tenth man.
Ten friends waded across a stream together, and on the far bank one of them counted heads.
Advaita
Day 38
Water and firewood.
Layman Pang inherited a fortune, decided it was a problem rather than a prize, and sank it in a lake sooner than hand the problem to anyone else.
Zen
Day 37
Dreaming or awake.
Zhuangzi (say "jwahng-dzuh") wakes up certain he is himself again, and then cannot say which of the two was the dream.
Taoism
Day 36
Leave the raft.
One traveler in an old Buddhist story reaches a stretch of water too wide to wade and too deep to ford, with no ferry and no bridge in sight.
Buddhism
Day 35
Nobody wrote this line.
You've probably seen the line about the space between stimulus and response, the one that ends with your power to choose sitting right there in that gap.
Secular
Day 34
Wash your bowl.
A monk turns up at the monastery and asks to be taught.
Zen
Day 33
What survives the jar.
Break a jar and the sky it seemed to hold is unbothered.
Advaita
Day 32
Self-so.
Watch a tree grow this morning, if a tree happens to be nearby: no one is coaching it.
Taoism
Day 31
One person, not everyone.
Somewhere out there, someone you have never met is also just waking up.
Buddhism
Day 30
Every moment is profound.
The cosmos, in Harris's phrase, doesn't care about your plans: vast, indifferent, entirely unmoved by whatever you had scheduled for today.
Secular
Day 29
Waves and water.
Two modern teachers, working in entirely different traditions, both reached for the same picture: a wave on the ocean.
Advaita
Day 28
Not this, not this.
Long before the Buddha, a sage named Yajnavalkya (say "yahj-nyuh-vulk-yuh") in the Brihadaranyaka (say "bri-huh-dah-run-yuh-kuh") Upanishad taught a method of finding the self by subtraction, answering every question about it with the same two words: not this, not this.
Advaita
Day 27
Five remembrances.
An old Buddhist text, the Upajjhatthana Sutta, lists five facts worth reflecting on often: I am subject to aging, subject to illness, subject to death, I will grow separate from everyone and everything dear to me, and I am the owner of my own actions, inheriting their results.
Buddhism
Day 26
The uncarved block.
Pu (say "poo") is the old Taoist image of the uncarved block: wood before anyone has cut it into a bowl, a chair, or a chess piece.
Taoism
Day 25
What mindfulness is.
Sam Harris defines mindfulness plainly, with none of the incense: clear, nonjudgmental, undistracted attention to whatever is actually in consciousness right now, pleasant or not.
Secular
Day 24
Not always so.
Shunryu Suzuki (say "shoon-ryoo soo-zoo-kee") once told a group of students that the whole secret of Soto Zen fits into two words in Japanese, three in English: not always so.
Zen
Day 23
Unshakable balance.
Upekkha (say "oo-peck-kah") gets translated equanimity, and one Buddhist teacher described it as a perfect, unshakable balance of mind rooted in insight, which is a much higher bar than just staying calm.
Buddhism
Day 22
Stay supple.
Softness, in this chapter, is the sign of being alive; the stiff and hard are what death leaves behind, in a body or in a tree branch equally.
Taoism
Day 21
The spaces between.
In the Zhuangzi (say "jwahng-dzuh"), a ruler watches his cook butcher an ox with a knife that has lasted nineteen years and thousands of carcasses, still sharp as new.
Taoism
Day 20
The rope and the snake.
Picture walking into a dim room and seeing a coiled snake on the floor, heart racing, until someone turns on the light and it's just a rope.
Advaita
Day 19
The finger, not the moon.
A well-known Zen teaching device compares words to a finger pointing at the moon.
Zen
Day 18
The second arrow.
The Buddha's image for this teaching: being struck by an arrow, then striking yourself with a second one.
Buddhism
Day 17
What you are not.
Anatta (say "uh-nut-tah") is usually translated not-self, and it is worth being exact about what the teaching actually claims.
Buddhism
Day 16
The empty boat.
There's a parable, passed down among Zhuangzi's (say "jwahng-dzuh") later followers, about a man crossing a river whose boat is bumped by another, empty boat.
Taoism
Day 15
When the ground gives way.
Pema Chödrön (say "pay-muh chur-dren") names the exact moment her second marriage ended as the one where every shield she'd built finally gave out at once, not gradually, all together.
Buddhism
Day 14
Ask who is asking.
Ramana Maharshi (say "ruh-muh-nuh muh-hahr-shee") taught a method called self-enquiry, first given as answers to a devotee's questions around 1902, later gathered into the short text Who Am I? The method isn't to repeat the phrase "who am I" like a chant.
Advaita
Day 13
Just sit.
Shikantaza (say "shee-kahn-tah-zah") is the Soto Zen school's name for just sitting: not sitting in order to get somewhere else, but sitting as the complete act itself.
Zen
Day 12
A bag of skin.
Skin doesn't mark where you actually stop, Watts argues: the tidy little self you call "me" is a picture worth questioning, not a settled fact.
Secular
Day 11
The thirst.
Tanha (say "tahn-hah") is the Pali word usually translated craving, and the Buddhist teaching that names it as the engine of suffering is precise about what it does and doesn't mean.
Buddhism
Day 10
Maybe.
There's an old Chinese story, first written down in the Huainanzi over two thousand years ago, about a farmer near the frontier whose horse runs off.
Taoism
Day 9
Desire is memory.
Desire, on this account, isn't really about the future: it's a memory of some past pleasure, projected forward and mistaken for a promise.
Advaita
Day 8
Beginner's mind.
Shoshin (say "show-shin") is what Shunryu Suzuki (say "shoon-ryoo soo-zoo-kee") called beginner's mind: the openness you have before you've decided you already know a thing.
Zen
Day 7
Try softer.
Wu wei (say "woo-way") gets mistranslated as doing nothing, but the old texts say the opposite: the sage does nothing for its own sake, and so there is nothing left undone.
Taoism
Day 6
Only the seen.
Bahiya asked the Buddha for the whole teaching in a few words, on the street, in a hurry.
Buddhism
Day 5
Nothing holds still.
Anicca (say "uh-nik-uh") is the Buddhist term for the plain fact that conditioned things do not hold still: the coffee cools, the light shifts, the mood that felt unbearable an hour ago has already changed shape.
Buddhism
Day 4
The backwards law.
Alan Watts opens The Wisdom of Insecurity, in its Preface, with what he calls the backwards law: reach for something too hard and it slips away, ease off and it arrives on its own.
Secular
Day 3
Side by side.
Misery and happiness, in Laozi's (say "laow-dzuh") line, sit close enough to touch, so close that no one can say for certain where one truly ends and the other begins.
Taoism
Day 2
The mind multiplies.
Papanca is the mind's habit of turning one plain perception into a pile of commentary.
Buddhism
Day 1
Empty your cup.
There is an old Zen story, the first in the collection 101 Zen Stories, about a university professor who visits the master Nan-in to ask about Zen.
Zen
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