I have fallen behind on posting talks and other musings and news. Here begins a flurry of catch-up posts. This is a talk I gave on January 12, 2023.

This is an extended version of Case 35 in The Gateless Gate:

Ch’ien was the beloved only child of a merchant who one day announced he had found a good husband for her. But her cousin was her secret lover and they had known each other since childhood.

That night the cousin, distraught, set off up the yellow river, but he saw running along the banks a form in the moonlight, and it was Ch’ien, and she joined him. They settled upriver and had two children, and made a life, but she longed to see once again her home and her father. They returned and Ch’ien waited in the boat while her husband approached the house to see what sort of a reception he would get.

To her husband’s surprise, the father was delighted to see him. The young man confessed, “Ch’ien ran off with me that night, and we lived together and had two children. She is waiting in the boat, eager to see you.” And the father said, “Is this a joke? Since the time you left, she has been sick in bed, unable to arise or speak.” The father told the woman in the sick bed what he had heard, and at this, she rose to her feet and stepped out the door. At that moment, the woman from the boat herself arrived at the garden gate. The two women walked towards each other, embraced, and became one.

Wu-tsu asked a monk, “The woman Ch’ien and her spirit separated. Which is the true Ch’ien?”

Fran and I have been reflecting on and talking about shadow work and its relationship to Zen practice for over a year. (Fran initiated and has been driving this discussion, and I am grateful to her for that.) The term “shadow” is from Jungian psychology. It’s the idea that there are elements of oneself that are hidden to us but still influence what we feel, think, say, and do.

It’s important to understand that shadow elements are neither good nor bad. Anger may be a shadow element for some of us—an emotion one has difficulty discerning in oneself and expressing in functional ways—but anger is not bad. If the conscious part of oneself is cut off from anger we are more likely to behave passive-aggressively to get our needs met in relationship. As a result, we may not be very effective at meeting our needs and we may damage our relationships. Others are likely to feel manipulated or feel we’re hard to read and something of a burden. Maybe some people even will take advantage of us because we can’t let them know we’re upset by their behavior. When we do express anger, it’s likely to be expressed explosively, because angry energy has been building up for so long—most of a lifetime, perhaps. If we had been in touch with it all along, if anger were not in the shadows, it could be channeled and expressed more constructively. Anger calibrated, expressed, and channeled constructively sometimes even can help us do great things, like standing up against human rights abuses.

It’s not just feelings and impulses that we tend to think of as bad, like anger, that can be banished to the shadows. Our capacity for love, healthy pride, and courage can reside there, too, similarly limiting one’s capacity to show up as the best version of oneself.

What does all this have to do with this old Chinese fable that Wu-tsu used as a koan? I see it as encouragement to call forth our shadow elements and embrace them.

Like many good stories, there’s a central moral dilemma, and moral dilemmas often divide us—not just divide one person from another but divide one person internally. Chi’en is a young woman in a traditional, patriarchal culture in which family is a primary value and social structure. Respect for and obedience to one’s elders is a key requirement in this culture. Chi’en would have felt duty-bound to respect her father’s judgement and wishes about her marriage and obligated to stay near her birth family to care for her parents in old age. Even today, Chinese culture is relatively more relationship-based than many Western cultures. It places relatively more emphasis on group harmony and stability. The needs and preferences of individuals are important, yet they tend to be addressed in what might seem to many of us to be more nuanced (and, from our perspective, often less personally satisfying) ways within one’s web of close and distant relationships.

Add up all these factors and we can imagine that Chi’en would have felt as if she had little personal agency to declare her true love and speak and act against her father’s wishes. (In fact, I know from reading the work of a Chinese-American expert in Chinese moral philosophy that Chi’en might even have thought of her flight from home as something she had to do for her family, because remaining home as a malcontent would have made life intolerable for them.) We can imagine that a young woman like Chi’en, in this family and social context, might be conditioned to repress certain feelings and impulses that can help make us happy and whole, but which would have felt risky to express—feelings and impulses like eros and a sense of our own worth, power, and agency. But those feelings exist as shadow elements nonetheless.

Chi’en may have felt divided between the love she felt for the young man of her dreams and the obligation she felt to conform to her parents’ and culture’s expectations. She may have felt divided internally between love of her boyfriend and love of her family, including her father. Chi’en and other women then and now often have felt constrained—unjustly, or at least unfortunately, subject to other shadow elements operating at the level of a group, like one’s family or workplace, or even an entire culture—yet we can also imagine that Chi’en genuinely loved her father, even as he enacted cultural scripts that constrained her agency in keeping with prevailing social norms regarding his social role. We can feel both love and distaste for another person, and this ambivalence very often gets resolved internally by embracing one feeling and repressing the other, rather than accepting and dealing with our complex reality in a more functional way.

What is Chi’en to do with her dilemma? What does she do?

In the first chapter of this brief story, Chi’en runs away with her boyfriend and lives the life of her dreams, seemingly strong and self-possessed, showing that her capacity for love and her personal power do not reside in the shadows. (Then again, as noted above, perhaps Chi’en felt she ran away as much for her family’s benefit as for her own.) But the plot thickens when Chi’en’s heart longs for her home and father, and she returns home.

Chi’en’s husband discovers that her father is not angry, but rather is thrilled to see him. It seems there’s another Chi’en who stayed behind and has been heartbroken and bedridden ever since her father told her about the marriage he had arranged and Chi’en’s true love ran away.

Were Chi’en’s passion and personal power residing in the shadows after all? Did the man her father introduced sense that she had given her heart to someone else and decide not to marry her? Did a despondent Chi’en then withdraw from life, paralyzed?

Which life did Chi’en really live? When we ask the question that way, the story provides no answer. This is myth and allegory. Chi’en’s physical body didn’t really duplicate itself, with each double going in different directions to live different lives.

But Wu-tsu doesn’t ask the monk which life Chi’en really lived. He asks, “Which is the true Chi’en?”

If most good stories have a central moral dilemma, most also have a good twist at the end. This isn’t just a good story; it’s a great story. There are two twists at the end. The first twist is that one Chi’en returns after many years to encounter another. The second is that the bedridden Chi’en, who had been longing for her lover all these years, gets up and walks right past him. She does not immediately embrace the man for whom she has been longing. Instead, she embraces herself, and the two Chi’ens become one. She really can’t love her husband or her father fully and well until she can love all the parts of herself, healing her internal divide.

I see this koan as an allegory about the necessity of making self-integration, or atonement within oneself (at-one-ment), an important feature of what it is to be a Zen practitioner. When those aspects of ourselves that are hidden are coaxed out of the shadows and embraced, we become one. We can’t consciously be one with that which we don’t (yet) see in ourselves. We can’t be our true selves, or at least our best selves, if we don’t fully know ourselves. And the parts we refuse to know will assert themselves somehow if we don’t see and embrace them, and only to ill-effect, perhaps even causing grave harm.

We can’t be whole personally if we don’t peer into the shadows and invite what resides there to come forth, and we can’t be whole collectively either. We don’t know what happens after the two Chi’ens merge, but we’re left with this sense that the relationships among the three central characters in this story—Chi’en, the man she loves, and her father—now are on a better trajectory. You also get the sense that the father and husband have grown and perhaps glimpsed and embraced their own shadow elements, in turn making it easier for Chi’en to greet and integrate hers. Her father seems to have liberated tenderness, compassion, and self-confidence from the shadows. It must have taken all three to accept how his conformity to convention had injured his daughter and so to welcome her true love when he returned.

While I see this koan as evidence that we are encouraged to seek self-integration and at-one-ment, I don’t think Zen traditionally has offered all the tools we need to do that work. In fact, it’s possible to use our practice as a defense—to engage in what’s sometimes called “spiritual bypassing,” which is turning to meditation and spiritual practice to avoid uncomfortable emotions and experiences, much like one might turn to alcohol or gambling. I want to be quick to add that meditation, koan work, and other elements of our practice can really help us discover and integrate what’s hidden. They can help prepare the ground for and can positively reinforce modern shadow work practices. And it’s not just Zen practitioners who sometimes become curious about and explore those other practices. Psychologists have become quite curious about Zen and are exploring it and integrating it into their practices.

We’ll have more to say about Zen and shadow work in the coming weeks and months. We want to spark a broader dialogue about it and create elective opportunities to integrate shadow work into our practice.

The true Chi’en, the true you and me, is the whole person, ever more intimately known to herself. Zen practice really must be a practice—a set of practices—for ever increasing at-one-ment.