The Sound of One Hand Slapping
My Third-Grade Teacher's Lesson on the Heart Sutra
On the morning of his enlightenment, the Buddha described his experience of Nirvana like this:
“I have found a nectar-like dharma, profound, peaceful, free from reference points, luminous, and unconditioned.”1
I had never heard of this description until I read it in Karl Brunnhölzl’s engaging book, The Heart Attack Sutra. Since I have yet to experience Nirvana, I’ll take the Buddha’s (via Brunnhölzl) word for it. What really stood out for me in this description is the phrase "free from reference points." This seems key. If Nirvana is free from reference points, investigating reference points and understanding what they are might be illuminating. Fortunately for us, “The Heart Sutra” says this about Nirvana:
“With nothing to attain, a Bodhisattva relies on prajna paramita and thus the mind is without hindrance, far beyond all inverted views, one realizes Nirvana.”
That’s the line that intrigued me the most when I first chanted “The Heart Sutra” or “The Sutra of the Heart of the Glorious Lady Prajnaparamita” as Brunnhölzl translates it. We realize Nirvana when we rely on prajna paramita—the perfection of wisdom—because then the mind is not a hindrance, and this perfection of wisdom is far beyond all inverted views. However, if there’s nothing to attain, then why do practice zazen and study the sutras? I thought we were trying to end suffering and attain Nirvana: that peaceful, profound nectar-like dharma.
Since I am not a scholar of ancient Buddhist texts, I looked up a couple of other translations to try to deepen my understanding of this line. Red Pine translates this line as:
“Without attainment, Bodhisattvas take refuge in Prajnaparamita and live without walls of the mind. Without walls of the mind and thus without fears, they see through delusions and finally nirvana.”2
Edward Conze translates this line as:
“It is because of their non attainment-ness that a Bodhisattva, through having relied on the perfection of wisdom or insight, dwells without thought coverings. In the absence of thought coverings they have not been made to tremble, they have overcome what can upset, and in the end they attain nirvana.”3
It’s clear that “reference points" are "thought coverings" or "walls of the mind." The way for Bodhisattvas to taste Nirvana is to rely on the perfection of wisdom to see through these wall coverings and experience them as impermanent, not-self, and the source of suffering. This is how fear and trembling dissolve. Far beyond all these inverted views, we dwell in Nirvana. However, the more we believe in these reference points, the more blinded we are by these “thought coverings,” the more likely we are to harm ourselves and others.
Back in the 1970s, one of my favorite teachers at Saint Ursula, the Catholic grammar school I attended, gave me an invaluable Dharma lesson about identifying with reference points. Miss Joan Kopecky was my third-grade teacher, and I am not exactly sure why I loved her so much. She wasn't friendly or even funny. But she really wanted us to learn and was very enthusiastic and a little strict.
The lunchtime bell sounded and everyone hopped out of their chairs, grabbed their coats and lunchboxes, and started filing out of the classroom. As I was gathering my stuff, I saw Miss Kopecky staring at a compact mirror and dabbing some beige powder on her face. Since my mother didn't wear makeup, it was a routine that I was unfamiliar with.
So I asked her, "Miss Kopecky, what are you doing?"
"Well, I am putting on makeup," she responded.
"But you're just going to lunch, why are you putting on makeup?"
She put down the compact mirror and said, "Because I might meet Mr. Right at lunch."
Without hesitating, I blurted out: "But Mr. Right Is Dead."
Without hesitating, she smacked my face.
Hot shame rushed through my body, flushed red my cheeks, and unleashed a torrent of tears. I clenched my fists and dashed out of the classroom. As soon as I was in the empty hallway and out of sight, I flipped her off. I was seething. I was confused. What had I done wrong? There was this strong sense of I am not wrong. I am right. I've been misunderstood. I don't remember anything else from the rest of the day.
When I got home from school, I still felt ashamed and confused and angry. The emotional sting lingered much longer than the physical one. My mother was in the kitchen making peanut butter & jelly sandwiches. She looked up when I walked in and immediately asked me what was wrong. When I told her that I said Mr. Right was dead, she just stared at me, "You said that to your teacher?"
"Well, aren't Orville and Wilbur Wright dead?"
My mother guffawed—she was never one for subtleties. When I blurted out that my teacher slapped me, she stopped laughing.
"Yes, Heather, they are dead. But that's not the Mr. Right she was referring to. You insulted her because you told her that she was never going to find an ideal future husband."
[Subsequent to our conversation, my mother went to the school and demanded that my teacher I apologize to me, which she did.]
At the age of 8, my storehouse consciousness did not include any references to Mr. Right as An-Ideal-Future-Husband. It just included the lesson that Miss Kopecky gave us a few weeks before about the Wright Brothers and their flying machine and that they were dead. That was my reference point. Alas, it was not Miss Kopecky’s and hence the slap. Obviously, neither one of us was wrong. Her perception was her perception, and my perception was my perception. The whole thing pivoted on the concept of Mr. Right.
Had my teacher been a Zen practitioner, maybe she would have stopped herself from hitting me and taken that backward step to investigate the arising self. But she didn't. So my reference point bumped up against her reference point and we were both harmed. There are many names for this slap: the slap of separation, self-hatred, fear, and internalized patriarchy. Whatever all the causes and conditions were, Miss Kopecky had an internalized a story of herself as not being worthy.
She was so identified with the story that she was never going to find the Ideal-Future-Husband that her perception of me as an innocent third-grader was obscured by this wall of mind. In that moment, my grown-up teacher, who towered over me, took my eight-year-old self as an external threat.
Miss Kopecky's imagined story was that an imagined self needed protection and at the same time, that very same belief—an inverted view—was actually causing her to suffer. Because if she didn't really believe that reference point she would have never smacked me because she wouldn't have felt so wounded and threatened by my innocent remark.
Was she born with this story about having to find an Ideal-Future-Husband? Of course not, as a child she must've internalized these stories from her parents, relatives, friends, and societal mores. My teacher carried this unexamined story of self forward and overlaid it onto that present moment. The True Nature of her mind was obscured by this thought covering that made her feel separate from who she really was, from me, from life, and from Buddha Nature (these are all one!). This is the ultimate alienation.
Our stories create “the book of me,” a fairy tale of self. These tales are our belief systems—ego-centric karmic conditioning—that we inherit from innumerable causes and conditions. Our book is filled with pages and pages of the collected works of me, myself, and I: who I think I am, what I think of other people, what’s wrong or right with me or the world or other people.
In The Heart Attack Sutra, Brunnhölzl says that the reason prajna—non-conceptual, non-dual wisdom—is so threatening to our ego and our cherished belief systems is because it undermines our very notion of reality and the reference points upon which we build our world.
As long as our gaze remains focused outward, like my third grade teacher's was, we live out reified notions of ourselves and the different characters that populate our book. We play out the plot lines that we inherited from our families and society, and we look outside ourselves for someone or something to validate our reference points. It's not until we unflinchingly turn our gaze inward that we begin to see through the fantasies of self.
“The Heart Sutra” reminds us that all of these reference points, both the objects that we perceive and ourselves as the perceiver are marked by emptiness. I like to practice with the experience of emptiness by using a simple sound that we Buddhists hear a lot, especially at a monastery: the sound of the bell. It arises, it persists, and it fades away. It's impermanent like all objects of the senses and the body-mind that's perceiving it.
So does a sound have any independent, abiding self? If it did, it would never fade away. Does the sound exist independently of the instrument or the one who's striking it and all of our ears that are hearing it or our bodies that are feeling the sound waves. Other sentient beings hear the sound of the bell too: birds, squirrels, insects. And the sound is perceived by trees and flowers as well. And these bells are made of metal, but what is metal made of? All the elements and all the effort of the people who fashioned the bell. And bells come in countless shapes, sizes, etc. Bells and sounds and you and me are compounded phenomena that flash into existence dependent on unfathomable causes and conditions.
When we hear the sound of the bell, most of us do not cling to it and make it into a "me." There might be associations that arise dependent on many causes and conditions: Is the sound pleasing or harsh? What time is it struck? Is it calling us to the zendo? Is it ending zazen? Is it starting zazen? Relief or dread, we each respond to the sound of the bell differently, at different times. Brunnhölzl describes it this way:
“Not only is our perceiving mind dynamic, in that it changes from moment to moment, but the objects are too. Phenomena cannot be defined by themselves. Rather we can only talk about them as complexes of relationships with other phenomena, which in themselves are complexes of relationships with other complexes of relationships.”
So the “Heart Sutra” tells us that all dharmas—conditioned phenomena—are marked by emptiness, that they are empty of own-being. So if we substitute a thought-emotion for the sound of the bell, some insight might arise. That just like the sound of the bell, arising thoughts, emotions, and sensations, persist and then fade away. If we're able to be present with whatever arises with non-judgmental awareness and without creating a “fairy tale of me,” then arising dharmas [phenomena] fade away as does a sense of a separate self experiencing them. The walls of mind start to dissolve. The idea of a perceiver and a perceived object falls away.
The book of me is burned by the flames of prajna: there's no author, no characters, no plots, no words, no pages, no cover, and no binding. We meet each other in the perfection of each moment.
Brunnhölzl, Karl. The Heart Attack Sutra. Snow Lion, Boulder CO, 2012.
Red Pine. The Heart Sutra. Counterpoint, Berkeley, CA, 2004.
Conze, Edward. Buddhist Wisdom Books. Alden & Mowbray LTD, London, 1975.
Thank you Rev. Shoren. Your response is helpful.
That the painful slap was based on a make-believe story of self that Miss Kopecky held, would it also be true that a Mr. and Mr. Wright, all by themselves, invented an airplane, is also a make-believe story. Could you go as far as saying Mr. and Mr. Wright were never born and never died? And somehow these make-believe stories shape endless stories that also dissolve into emptiness.