"Are You Still Carrying Her?" (Or, Letting Go!)

With exams on the horizon (tomorrow, actually) I figured now would be a good time to get this out of my system. Letting go is a key element of Zen, and it’s something that I’ve found really, really hard to do. As practitioners of this millenia-old philosophy like to say, the Western mind is obsessed with goals, cause and effect, sequential reasoning, and other ethereal concepts irrelevant to the task at hand. Another key component of Zen, which is intertwined with this idea of letting go, is the koan. Koans are parables or phrases that often make zero sense unless you’ve spent a considerable amount of time, well, letting go. The wikipedia article on the subject has some good examples, I’ll copy one down here to save a click or two:

A monk asked Dongshan Shouchu, “What is Buddha?” Dongshan replied, “Three pounds of flax.”

…what? It really makes no sense to me, either, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. One of the koans that I do think I’ve mastered, however, is the story of the two monks in the rain:

Tanzan and Ekido were once traveling together down a muddy road. A heavy rain was still falling.
Coming around a bend, they met a lovely girl in a silk kimono and sash, unable to cross the intersection.
“Come on, girl,” said Tanzan at once. Lifting her in his arms, he carried her over the mud.
Ekido did not speak again until that night when they reached a lodging temple. Then he no longer could restrain himself. “We monks don’t go near females,” he told Tanzan, “especially not young and lovely ones. It is dangerous. Why did you do that?”
“I left the girl there,” said Tanzan. “Are you still carrying her?”

I really like this one not only because it’s one of the few that I can actually understand, but because it illustrates letting go in a really understandable way. Now, mere enthusiast that I am, I may have violated some sacred rule about never explaining koans, so let the powers that be forgive me. In any case, even if I do tell you, it’s best if you discover this on your own without thinking about it — thinking is, after all, a criminal act in the art of Letting Go.

This koan is about Letting Go of rules. It is about Letting Go of feelings, of inhibitions, of dogma, and of materialism. Tanzan sees a girl stuck in the rain and picks her up to help her across a muddy road, while Ekido sits there and broods over how he would rather not do anything. He then spends the rest of the walk stewing over the fact that, apparently, Tanzan has violated a crucial rule, and how Ekido, put in Tanzan’s place, would rather not do anything at all. Once they get to the lodge, Ekido spills the beans:

We monks don’t go near females, especially not the young and lovely ones.

And adds that it’s dangerous. Tanzan then says that he left her where he put her down… Ekido, are you still carrying her? Is she still imprinted in your conscience? Tanzan has mastered Zen, has perfected the art of letting go of the temptation that comes along with a pretty young thang, has let go of the rules that bind him from doing such things, because not only are they irrelevant, but they produce feelings in oneself against doing the right thing. Are you still carrying her? Are you still allowing the imprints of an unhappy memory, a previous mistake, or whatever it may be, to linger in your mind? Put her down. Put it all down.. Putting down should also be put down in and of itself.

Stop carrying her along with you, because after a while, she can get really heavy. If you let it all go, you’ll find yourself focused on the present, and good things will eventually come to you — but you mustn’t carry that, either.

Edit: some people have kindly pointed out that the story that I referenced is not, in fact, a koan, but instead a prominent Zen parable. My apologies if I made anybody stew in their seats while reading this; I think it still carries a great message nonetheless!