I gave this talk on November 11, 2023, during our Full Moon Zen sesshin. A recording follows the text.

This is Case 98 in The Blue Cliff Record:

While on pilgrimage, Tianping visited Xiyuan. He was always saying, “Don’t say you have understood Buddhism. There is no one who can have a dharma dialogue with me or examine me.”

One day Xiyuan saw him at a distance and called to him, “Come here, Congyi.”

Tianping raised his head.

Xiyuan said, “Wrong!” Tianping went on for two or three steps.

Xiyuan said, “Wrong!” Tianping turned and came closer.

Xiyuan said, “I have just said, ‘Wrong’ twice. Is it I who am wrong, or is it you?”

“It is I.”

“Wrong.” Tianping was silent.

“Stay here for the summer retreat, and I’ll examine this question of two wrongs
with you.” Tianping, however, departed.

Years later, when Tianping became an abbot, he addressed his assembly and said, “Once in my days of pilgrimage, I visited Xiyuan by chance, and he twice said, ‘Wrong.’ He advised me to stay with him for the summer retreat to examine this question of two wrongs with him. I don’t say I was wrong then, but when I left for the South, I realized for the first time that I had finished saying ‘Wrong.’

The Buddhist tradition begins with the story of one person’s wandering. Gautama Siddhartha leaves home and explores the world and himself, engaging in myriad spiritual experiments and enduring many privations, before finding what he was seeking.

This is an unusual origin story. Origin stories serve as anchors. They solve the “turtles all the way down” problem, among other functions. You know the World Turtle myth, right? We wonder, what anchors or supports the Earth, and so our own existence? It and we rest on the flattened back of a giant turtle, according to the World Turtle myth. So what does the turtle rest on? Another turtle, of course. And that turtle? Another turtle. It’s turtles all the way down. Infinite regress.

Many traditions get around the turtle problem by positing an absolute agent that created everything, gave us all the answers in a foundational text, and is the ultimate truth, authority, and judge on all matters temporal and beyond time. One can see how this sort of construct can be comforting and useful, for both individuals and groups, in this realm of existential vulnerability, change, and uncertainty.

Zen, and contemporary Buddhism generally, take a different approach. No turtle? What’s the problem? Or, as the ever quotable, Chogyam Trungpa said, “Existence is like jumping from an airplane. The bad news is you have no parachute. The good news is you discover there is no ground.”

The Buddha’s wandering yields the Eightfold Noble Path, of course, but that’s about our agency, not superhuman agents, and, well, it’s a path without a clear starting point or final destination. We do speak of the Absolute in Zen, but we also say it and the relative—this cushion on which I’m sitting, the cool morning air—are one and the same.

What are we to make of this tale of wandering at the start, and at the heart, of our tradition? What are we to make of the Buddha’s wandering, Tianping’s wandering, and our wandering with them? Spiritual wandering is a time-honored tradition, and some of us will put a lot of energy into it, wandering along many paths and meeting many adapts as we do.

I wandered in this way for many years. I explored several Christian denominations and multiple strands within one of them. I stepped onto the Buddhist path initially through the Tibetan tradition and also Zen Archery understood and taught as meditation. Along the way, I lived in a Quaker intentional community for two years. I later left law practice early on to study comparative religion. There were more twists and turns as I walked the straight road with 99 curves.

And then there’s the wandering we do inside. I’ve begun reading the work of a young philosopher, Zachary Irving at the University of Virginia, who is developing an empirically grounded theory of mind wandering. He works with cognitive scientists to conduct experiments that shed light on what mind wandering is and the functions it serves.

It turns out to be a rather complicated subject. There are many different types of mental activity scholars have labeled mind wandering: We can direct our minds away from the task at hand or our attention can just drift away from it. We can ruminate anxiously on something. We can be lost in thought. We can wander mentally about pursuit of a goal. And so on.

But Irving and his collaborators are homing in on a more precise concept of mind wandering that aligns with how most ordinary people like us think about it: Mind wandering as dynamically unguided attention. Unguided attention that simply shifts as time passes. Attention that isn’t guided, and which also isn’t ruminative, goal directed, or “lost” in the sense of complete absorption in thought.

It turns out that such dynamically unguided thought is associated with creativity; with the development of important types of personal agency; and with the default mode network, a part of our brain scientists still don’t understand fully but which is involved in things like our perception of beauty, feeling connected to others, and construction, maintenance, and dissolution of the boundaries of the self, or our sense of personal identity. Interestingly, scientists have found that meditation causes structural changes in parts of the default mode network.

Our practice of shikantaza sounds a lot like Irving’s notion of mind wandering. In shikantaza, we don’t focus on anything in particular, such as our breath. We gently disengage when we find ourselves ruminating, reasoning, plotting our way toward some goal, or just lost in thought. Dynamically unguided attention seems like an apt description of the state our minds are in much of the time we’re on sesshin.

I should end this meandering talk at some point, so let’s rest where we began.

Years later, when Tianping became an abbot, he addressed his assembly and said,
“Once in my days of pilgrimage, I visited Xiyuan by chance, and he twice said, ‘Wrong.’ He advised me to stay with him for the summer retreat to examine this question of two wrongs with him. I don’t say I was wrong then, but when I left for the South, I realized for the first time that I had finished saying ‘Wrong.’

What does Tianping seem to learn on his pilgrimage?

He seems to learn there’s no place to go. That wherever you go, there you are. That we are as we wander, and that we can wander in place.

He seems to learn he’s the bottom turtle. Or, rather, that he and all else, including the vast space below, above, and all around, together are the bottom turtle.

Some of us do seem to need to wander a bit to make our way home. I say there’s nothing wrong with that.