One day, Layman Pang and his daughter, Lingzhao, were out selling bamboo baskets. Coming down off a bridge, the Layman stumbled and fell. When Lingzao saw this, she ran to her father’s side and threw herself on the ground.
“What are you doing?” cried the Layman.
“I saw you fall so I’m helping,” replied Lingzao.
“Luckily no one was looking,” remarked the Layman.
This a koan from the book “The Hidden Lamp Stories from Twenty-Five Centuries of Awakened Women” (here at amazon.com), and is koan #83, from 8th century china. Koans are questions or statements that are meant to evoke the student’s mind beyond thinking, into reality beyond analysis and conceptual understanding (Wikipedia description here).
This book is a wonderful collection of 100 koans, all involving women, and from Zen traditions, across cultures and countries. Each koan is followed by remarks from 100 different modern women in zen, from nuns to yoga and zen practitioners. It is a beautiful read, one that I go back to every so often and which I reflect on may days or months after I’ve read.
The reflections on this koan are offered by Joan Sutherland (her website here). Although her entire reflection is helpful and insightful, my favorite passage is this”
“Lingzao obliterates the idea that there is a helper and a helped. Compassion isn’t a commodity we deliver but a commitment, […] to help liberate the intimacy already inherent in any situation. ‘What is most intimate?’ the koan suggests that we ask. Usually the most intimate response to another’s difficulty begins with the willingness not to flee. Fleeing can take the form of abandoning the situation, and it can also mean escaping into ‘helping’, into a whole constellation of ideas about what aught to happen. Intimacy is being willing to stay and accompany and listen, to be vulnerable and surprised and flexible. It’s a willingness to fall with someone else, and see what becomes possible when we do.”
The Hidden Lamp, Caplow and Moon (2013), pp. 294.
I love how she points out that fleeing from intimacy is not only actually leaving, but it is also a tendency to jump into ‘helping’, into ‘doing something’, into ‘taking charge’. This also reminds me of something Byron Katie said, which really struck me the fist time I heard it:
“When you hurt, I don’t! When I hurt, you don’t! So when I hurt, I can wake myself up so that I can put my own hurt aside and can connect [with you] again, in your own sorrow! What would disconnect me from you is on me, and that is a selfish state of mind. “
“If my child suffers, and then I suffer because my child is suffering, I am then turning to whole thing to being about me. And then I can’t help my child, because I need help.”
Byron Katie, YouTube videos on https://www.youtube.com/user/TheWorkofBK
What a delicate, yet true point! How intimate it really is, to be with someone in their difficulty, without interfering or ‘helping’, but rather being with them, allowing our common space to be felt and offering ourselves as a container for their condition.
How do you tend to other’s suffering? Do you ‘check out’, not really listening? Or do you get so involved that you begin to bring your own emotions into the foreground, acting out a pain which isn’t yours? Or do you immediately jump to help, or to soothe, or to console, or to ‘make feel better’, or some other action?
