The best day of my life – my rebirthday, so to speak – was when I found that I have no head. This is not a literary gambit, a witticism designed to arouse interest at any cost. I mean it in all seriousness: I have no head.
– Douglas Harding, On Having No Head.
Eccentric as this statement may be, is it so fantastic when compared to the Heart Sutra? From the point of view of the absence of any ultimate, separate selfhood in anything, the Heart Sutra proclaims that in emptiness there is: ‘no eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind.’ Obviously, from this angle, there is no head.
So why is this claim treated with scorn? In effect, Douglas’ practice is a form of vipassana; one that focuses on this one dharma-door, the door of sight; and goes deeply, non-verbally, through that door into the intuitive apprehension of the miracle of the nature of consciousness.
The Ch’an master, Lin Chi, said:
Your physical body made up of the four great elements doesn’t know how to preach the Dharma or listen to the Dharma. Your spleen and stomach, you liver and gall don’t know how to preach the Dharma or listen to the Dharma. The empty spaces don’t know how to preach the Dharma or listen to the Dharma. What is it, then, that knows how to preach the Dharma or listen to the Dharma?
What is it, then, that sees? Everything depend on ‘This.’
The sense of sight is, of course, our dominant sense – and one of the six ‘doors’ that play a powerful role in the creation of our mistaken notions of personal identity, our sense of ourselves as separate, absolutely independent beings. We understand the part played by body image in the making of who we are, and, although the occurrence in Western literature of the theme of the mirror as an agent of self-creation has more involved women as the creators and self-enquirers, men too, obviously, have their investment in how they look as objects to the sight of others, and themselves.
But try as you may, you will never see yourself as an object. If you think you can, just ask: Who then would be seeing the ‘you’ which you take yourself to be, at that moment?
Treat yourself as an object, define yourself as an object, but you can never find that object. After all, what you see in the mirror is the mirror – or, if you like, a reflection on the mirror surface – not yourself. Douglas’ activity is to inspire us to come home – to this side of the mirror.
This very common belief, that I am identifiable with things seeable, is, in the Buddhist view, ‘ignorance.’ Zen writer sensei D.T. Suzuki says in Essays in Zen Buddhism:
Ignorance is not merely not knowing or not being acquainted with a theory, system or law; it is not directly grasping the ultimate facts of life as expressive of the will. In Ignorance knowing is separated from acting, and the knower from that which is to be known; in Ignorance the world is asserted as distinct from the self; that is, there are always two elements standing in opposition.
In On Having No Head Douglas invites us to come home to our senses, and so to the wholeness of the essence of mind – to return via by the door of seeing to our ultimate Unseeability. He said:
This is not a matter of argument, or of philosophical acumen, or of working oneself up into a state, but of simple sight – of LOOK-WHO’S-HERE instead of THINK-WHO’S-HERE.
The Ch’an master, Lin Chi (d.866), frequently told his listeners of the truth of ‘no form’:
If you want to be free to be born or die, to go or stay as one would put on or take off a garment, then you must understand right now that the person here listening to the Dharma has no form, no characteristics, no root, no beginning, no place he abides, yet he is vibrantly alive.
Douglas Harding came to this discovery after directing his will for several months into the enquiry: ‘What am I?’ As a result, while walking in the Himalayas, he suddenly stopped thinking, and like Bāhiya, the ‘mind road’ fell away:
There existed only the Now, that present moment and what was clearly given to it. To look was enough. And what was found was khaki trouser-legs terminating downwards in a pair of brown shoes, khaki sleeves terminating upwards in – absolutely nothing whatever! Certainly not a head.
Douglas didn’t experience this as a nihilistic or deficient emptiness. For him, the experience of ‘no-head’ was a fullness:
It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything – room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far above them, snow peaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world.
Of course, what one gains, also, is the experiences of the tensions, squiggles and vibrations, which light up the space of awareness in a precise way; to which we can apply the designation ‘head.’ That’s intelligent, but it doesn’t establish a) a separate entity corresponding absolutely to that word.
Neither does it establish b) a source of the knowingness quality of all that experience, either, as a separate, findable entity. The knowingness that appears to allow everything to momentarily appear – that is not conceivable. Yet, experiencing the actuality of experiencing (the luminous squiggles of experience), this is luminously open and inseparable from the knowingness. The 6th Ch’an Patriarch Hui Neng rejoices; locking eyebrows with Douglas in the twentieth century Hui he says:
Learned Audience, the illimitable Void of the universe is capable of holding myriads of things of various shapes and form, such as the sun, the moon, stars, mountains, rivers, worlds, springs, rivulets, bushes, woods, good men, bad men… We say that the Essence of Mind is great because it embraces all things, since all things are within our nature.