NYUTO: Putting In the Head

NYU put in, poke in, enter
TO head

In the original version of Fukan-zazengi these two characters appear in the 6-character phrase read in Japanese as NYUTO NO RYO ARI TO IEDOMO “even if there is the capacity to put in the head," i.e. -- even if we have intellectual ability.

The corresponding phrase in the revised version has 9 characters read as NYUTO NO HENRYO NI SHOYO SU TO IEDOMO, “even if we ramble in remote spheres of putting in the head,” i.e. -- even if we go off at intellectual tangents.

"Being taught how to change our habitual thinking patterns takes time and effort and can be difficult, for change is what most people dislike, and what they tend to shy away from rather than welcome or seek out. Education about how to learn and not just what to learn may lead to increased knowledge. Excessive trust in thinking and reasoning might be an impediment on the path to truth and, in my experience, teaching intellectuals is not necessarily easier; they assume they know how to learn but often they do not, as they find it difficult to stop their reasoning to allow instead for a completely new and unknown experience to take place."

Patrick J. Macdonald, London, December 1986

The tendency, which I know well, to pursue the the truth intellectually is an offshoot of a more general tendency which I also know well -- but often, it turns out, not as well as I thought I did.

To pursue the truth with the head is end-gaining. To pursue the truth with the heart is end-gaining. To pursue the truth with the hands is end-gaining. Even to pursue the truth from the hara is a bit of end-gaining. Even to pursue the truth with self-consciousness of the whole body is a bit of end-gaining.

Whatever bit of my end-gaining self I pursue the truth with, it is always not that. And intellectual honesty in regard to my own end-gaining is not it either.

What is required on the path to truth, as Master Dogen saw it and as Patrick Macdonald also saw it, is not excessive reliance on intellectual faculties, and not any other kind of grimly determined end-gaining either, but a different kind of awareness altogether.

How to cultivate this different awareness, Marjory Barlow taught me with amazing clarity and simplicity.

She taught me, on receiving her command to move a leg, to totally relinquish my desire to do anything, in order to allow my neck to release, in order to allow every joint in my body to open up, in order to allow myself, in that state of greater freedom, to allow for a completely new and unknown experience of not moving a leg, or moving a leg, to take place.

Marjory taught me how, by performing the simplest of actions, to open myself up to the birdsong. What Marjory taught me was too bloody simple for words.

Hence FM Alexander’s protestation that “A child of three can understand this work. But give me a man who has been educated, and God help me!”

Master Dogen's ultimate teaching is, as I understand it, by means of accepting and using the whole self in the simple act of sitting, and by means of wholly forgetting the self in the simple act of sitting, to realize the complicated as the complicated.

We human beings, with our highly developed top 2-inches, are uniquely able to simplify the complicated -- hence, for example, Einstein's e = mc2.

And we human beings, with our highly developed top 2-inches, are uniquely able to complicate the simple.

That has been the primary thrust of my life. Top of the class at primary school, I passed an exam to receive an elitist secondary education that, it was emphasized to us, was a great privilege. Even at Oxford and Cambridge, I remember being told, King Edwards old boys had a reputation for being thinkers.

Go FORWARD, the school song, exhorted us, FORWARD for the school's renown. FORWARD where the knocks are hardest.

FORWARD is generally the direction in which the intellect leads us -- FORWARD, complicating the simple by putting in the head.