Attention

The importance of single-mindedness, of bare attention, is illustrated in the following anecdote:

One day a man of the people said to Zen Master Ikkyu:

“Master, will you please write for me some maxims of the highest wisdom?”

Ikkyu immediately took his brush and wrote the word: “Attention.”

“Is that all?” asked the man. “Will you not add something more?”

Ikkyu then wrote: “Attention. Attention.”

“Well,” remarked the man rather irritably, “I really don’t see much depth or subtlety in what you have just written.”

Then Ikkyu wrote the same word three times running: “Attention. Attention. Attention.”

Half-angered, the man demanded: “What does that word ‘Attention’ mean anyway?”

And Ikkyu answered gently: “Attention means Attention.”

For the ordinary person, whose mind is a checkerboard of crisscrossing reflections, opinions, and prejudices, bare attention is virtually impossible; his life is thus centered not in reality itself, but in his ideas of it. By focusing the mind whollyon each object and every action, zazen strips it of extraneous thoughts and allows us to enter into a full rapport with life.

 

-from The Tree Pillars of Zen