Accumulating knowledge versus attaining true wisdom. June 22, 1986

Zen Roshi, Lola McDowell Lee, Lola discusses the distinction between accumulating knowledge and attaining true wisdom.

Lola shares the koan about a monk who asked his teacher, “Is there a teaching no master ever preached before?” And the teacher said, yes, there is. What is it, asked the monk. And the teacher replied, it is not mind, it is not Buddha, it is not things..

We require a different kind of perception—what Lola calls "listening with your eyes". She draws a sharp contrast between linear, "horizontal" learning—where teachers and students simply build upon accumulated information—and "vertical" spiritual growth. Vertical growth is an ascent of transcending conditioning, memorization, and ego to simply achieve a state of pure being.

Many of us treat happiness like a math problem, mistakenly believing that putting two and two together through specific activities will consistently yield joy. True bliss, ananda, is an unpredictable consequence that arrives "like a thief in the night" only when the mind is unoccupied by expectation and anticipation.

Lola recalls the famous story of the Buddha holding up a single flower before his congregation, speaking not a word, and transmitting the highest teaching only to Mahakasyapa, who simply smiled in understanding. A flower does not articulate beauty; it simply is beauty, blooming into the void without caring who notices.

If the eye or the ear were not functionally empty, they would be incapable of receiving new images or sounds. We must empty the mind of preconceived notions.

This necessity of an empty mind is brought to life through two pivotal Zen narratives. The first involves Huineng, the Sixth Patriarch, who achieved enlightenment and inherited the robe of transmission through the simple, mindful act of pounding rice in the monastery kitchen.

The well known encounter between the master and a frantic, truth-seeking professor. He invites the professor to have some tea. Then he proceeds to pour tea into the professor's cup until it overflows and burns him.

The ego-driven trap of making differences and establishing oneself as higher than others based on wealth, education, or even religious devotion.

Lola explains the need to awaken from three specific slumbers:

Sleeping in things, which is the materialistic obsession with possessions and bank balances.

Sleeping in the mind, a trap for intellectuals.

And sleeping in the ego, where even those who renounce the world become stubbornly attached to the concept of the self.

By disidentifying with objects, the mind, and the ego, one does not destroy the world, but rather cleanses it of projected hopes and frustrations. In this state of true mindfulness—where the self disappears—an individual truly exists in the awake world. June 22, 1986