Cup full of Tea !!!

Zen story Courtesy : reemus.blogspot.com

Here we are going to have a ZEN story which I happen to come across from reemus' blog.

The story goes as under,


Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1868-1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen.


Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor's cup full, and then kept on pouring.


The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. "It is overfull. No more will go in!"


"Like this cup," Nan-in said, "you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?"


I had come across different version of the same story a decade ago. Despite that when I went through this Zen story again, It again opened many doors and also brought back fresh memories of my first encounter with Zen (Mahayana Buddhism).

As a student of philosophy in early 90's, I was asked to read "Ancient Greek philosophy" , "Modern philosophy" and "Indian philosophy". Under Buddhism, I was introduced to Zen.

Initially, Zen for me like an untamed horse and becoming a ring master was nevertheless an easy task. But in due course, I happen to understand that "We are programmed to think...." as J.Krishnamurthy writes in one of his book "Network of thoughts",which actually means "our thought process is very much controlled" but Zen on the other hand promotes free and intuitive thinking,which is entirely different perspective from what we are programmed to perceive.

And Coming back to this story, It helped me to change my perception and approach towards anything that I come across. "Clean Slate approach" we may call it. It helped me to be Non-Judgemental [Judge not, thy shall be judged - Bible] and free from prejudice . It helped me to look at things "as-is" without taking a note of my "pre-conceived" ideas.

Moreover, my understanding is that anything that we see,look,sense and hear are just DATA and this collection of DATA when collated and correlated forms to be an Information, if this information processed, you know what follows from there. One must have understood [I take the liberty of presuming this] that unless and until received information processed with odds in our mind [should we call it a Database as well], our action/reaction w.r.t that data/information not initiated.

I would simply say "Its all in our MIND" so be mindful of your mind, it is just an simplistic view of what we are discussing so far.

Esse Est percipi - To be is to be perceived.we shall discuss more on this "Perception factor" in detail later as well.

your comments and views are always welcome !