Written by Noel Coakley

“Practicing mindfulness meditation is like practicing the perspective of the mirror-like mind. Rather than getting caught up in any given reflection occurring in the mirror, we remain holding the perspective of the mirror itself: awareness.”

When Zen monks were learning the art of swordfighting, part of the day would be spent drilling the physical skills, getting the muscle memory down, and the rest of the time would be contributing to the communal living spaces: washing the dishes, cleaning the garden, sweeping up, and so forth.

Once they get the basic skills down, the teacher would start to surprise them. In the middle of washing the dishes, the teacher would start beating on them with the bamboo sword.

Now the student is on to the game, so they think.

The next time they wash dishes, they have an eye on where the teacher jumped out last time. The teacher is a step ahead and jumps from the other side. Twap.

The student becomes hypervigilant, trying to anticipate the teacher, how to counter, and what they'll use to defend. Yet, every time, the teacher is out ahead. The student has not only depleted energy stressing themselves out, but they also waste energy engaging in the counter-move based on the imagined scenario and then having to correct for the actual situation.

Time goes by. The student remains on edge.

The teacher doesn’t attack for days on end, escalating the anxiety. It keeps building until, one day, the student just says, “Screw it, I’m just going to wash the dishes.”

The irony is that it is precisely from this moment forward that the student is actually most ready for anything. They have let go of all past attacks. They have given up on predicting the future. The mental and physical resources that would have been drained now remain at their behest.

Unclouded by past or future, the student’s mind is now “mirror-like” — directly reflecting the current reality, with no traces of the past and no predictions of the future. Like the reflection of geese flying over a pond, there is no preview and no trace. In Japanese, they call this mirror-like mind mushin.

When the mind is freed from the obscurations, grasping to thought or afflictive emotion, it more accurately reflects the actual reality of the situation. The qualities of the mirror arise naturally.

Practicing mindfulness meditation is like practicing the perspective of the mirror-like mind. Rather than getting caught up in any given reflection occurring in the mirror, we remain holding the perspective of the mirror itself: awareness.

This doesn’t mean that it never helps to think about past events or to plan for the future. We watch when the mind gets too far ahead or in the past in a way that’s causing trouble, and we bring it back.

We can practice this during formal practice and, like the Zen sword fighter, when we wash the dishes. We can just wash the dishes.