August 30, 2012
One HAND
At the neighborhood coffee house, W. and I were chatting
over our cups of coffee. About Eckhart
Tolle, about seeing without thinking, about being a dot of paint that somehow
managed to escape the canvas that all the other dots of paint take to be the
whole world.
He looked at me quizzically.
"Have you ever heard the Zen koan, 'What is the sound of one hand
clapping?'"
"What?"
"Do you know what a koan is?" he asked. I shook my head, No. "Koans
are these riddles that they use in Zen Buddhism to challenge students. They usually sound like nonsense. But the nonsense somehow leads the student to
a state of enlightenment. Then,
suddenly, the student understands the riddle."
"OK," I answered.
"So you have one that you're going to tell me?"
"Yeah. It goes
like this: 'What is the sound of one hand clapping?'"
"I give up. What
IS the sound of one hand clapping?" I said, waving my hand through the
air.
"That's not bad," said W. "It looks like you are clapping to an
imaginary hand. Not bad at
all." After a pause, in which he
reflected on what he THOUGHT I was doing, he said, "OK. Here is how I
think of it."
He reached out with his left hand and grabbed my right
wrist. "Can I borrow this?"
I allowed him to lift up my hand by the wrist. He held it about twelve inches above the
table.
"THIS is the sound of one hand clapping!" With that, he slapped his right palm against
my right palm. It made a strong
conventional clapping sound.
Next, he leaned toward me and caught my gaze in his. He held the stare. Lowering his voice he said, conspiratorially,
"And you know what?" I
waited. Softly, he said, "It's the
SAME hand!"
He let go of my hand.
It remained in the same place above the table where he placed it for the
clap. He put his hand near mine and slowly
looked back and forth from one to the other.
I was momentarily stunned.
Did I clap my hand against his?
Or did HE clap my hand against his.
For an instant, I couldn't be sure whether that hand--under his
control--was his hand or my hand. I,
too, looked from one hand to the other, and nodded. At a certain level of understanding, these
were not two hands. They were both
manifestations of a single HAND.
I reached over with my left hand and grabbed his right wrist
as he had done with mine. Then I slapped
my right palm against his right palm, making the clapping noise.
"That is the sound of one hand clapping," I
agreed. "It's the 'God-HAND'
reaching out into two separate manifestations and clapping itself."
In a moment of contentment, W. laughed softly. I laughed softly, too. W. and I laughed softly. We laughed softly. I and we laughed softly. I/we laughed softly.
Finally, one of us--and it doesn't really matter who that
was--said:
"Every single one of us is a God-HAND clapping other
God-HANDS."
