Image: Steven van Loy
Joko Beck said this about teaching and learning:
We don’t see that we are all teachers. Everything we do from morning to night is a teaching: the way we speak to someone at lunch, the way we transact our business at the bank, our reaction when the paper we submit is accepted or rejected—everything we do and everything we say reflects our practice.
I attended Catholic primary school, public secondary, and four state universities. While I had teachers who were authoritative on their subject matter and from whom I learned about things, I only had one or two who taught me how to think. Not what to think, but how to use thinking critically and objectively. That provided me an important lesson, and that it came when I was sixteen, I count as a gift in my life. It took five more years before I encountered being taught how not to encounter the world by thinking about it.
In fifty years of Zen practice, I’ve had five teachers, including Joko. They gave me the most influential and most intimate teachings in my life. But, if I were asked, “What did they teach you?”, I could not answer. Nothing to think, nothing to believe, nothing to know. Yes, perhaps some things to do. Shishin Wick once said, “It’s like getting damp in the fog, little by little.” We watch our teachers like infants watch their parents, modeling them. We don’t hear, “There is a right and a wrong way to put your shoes on the rack.” No. But we see them do so with great care, and we learn, these Nikes are precious. These relations are below thought, under the skin, between before and after.
As parents, we are Zen teachers, whether we are aware of it or not. All day, every day, we teach both what we intend and what we’d prefer to avoid passing along. We are teaching about the world, and how to confront it emotionally. Also, even with toddlers, we’re teaching them how to be parents, how to be future teachers of those yet to come. I see it in my kids and how they are with theirs. It’s a daunting and terrifying reality, but this is how we go along as humans. This knowledge could be paralyzing, but we cannot avoid mistakes. So, we just carefully put our sneakers on the shoe rack.
In 1983, Gary Snyder ended his poem Axe Handles with:
And I see: Pound was an axe,
Chen was an axe, I am an axe
And my son a handle, soon
To be shaping again, model
And tool, craft of culture,
How we go on.
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