“Once upon a time, there was a wise Zen master. People traveled from far away to seek his help. In return, he would teach them and show them the way to enlightenment.
On this particular day, a scholar came to visit the master for advice. “I have come to ask you to teach me about Zen,” the scholar said.
Soon, it became obvious that the scholar was full of his own opinions and knowledge. He interrupted the master repeatedly with his own stories and failed to listen to what the master had to say.
The master calmly suggested that they should have tea.
So the master poured his guest a cup. The cup was filled, yet he kept pouring until the cup overflowed onto the table, onto the floor, and finally onto the scholar’s robes. The scholar cried, “Stop! The cup is full already. Can’t you see?”
“Exactly,” the Zen master replied with a smile. “You are like this cup — so full of ideas that nothing more will fit in. Come back to me with an empty cup.”1
I don’t imagine anyone can spend more than a passing bit of time in the martial arts world without coming across that parable. Or it’s more common refrain “Empty your cup!”. Yet like many good pieces of advice it has become so passe in the community as to have lost it’s meaning. Any time spent on social media spaces dedicated to martial arts sees discussions and demonstrations turned into digital penile measuring contests and simian excrement throwing2. So many people are convinced their cup is empty and yet…..
The minute you believe that you are the sole arbiter of truth is the minute your cup begins to overflow. Your mind has closed and nothing anyone ever does will ever convince you again that you could be wrong, or that you need to grow. I have seen this time after time after time in my own journey. Hells, I will freely admit that I have come really close to having my cup overflow too! Thankfully I have good friends and students to remind me to check my ego and expectations.
Because that’s really what the above parable is saying – don’t let your ego get in the way of learning.
So how can you help keep your cup empty enough that you never become one of those excrement flinging simians? Simple – learn new things.
I’ll use myself as an example: I have been crocheting for seven years now and I would say that I am pretty good. Not great, but pretty good. Instead of making the same projects over and over (making thousands of hats or baby blankets for instance) I try new patterns, new stitches, etc. Honestly, most of the time it doesn’t work out well. There is a LOT of frogging3 involved. Sometimes I will try a new stitch not to make a project but just to make a small swatch to practice that particular stitch. And while these new projects may not work out, the knowledge I learn from them has had a positive impact on my ability to adapt and improvise when crocheting.
In a similar vein, I recently began a weekly qigong class. I wanted something that would have me moving, and was martial arts adjacent, without being a martial art – because if it was a martial art my brain would immediately begin doing it’s thing of creating connections and finding universals. Instead, I just wanted to focus on moving my body in a mindful way4. In this mindset, I did not let myself do any research on this particular branch of qigong for several weeks – I wanted to just LEARN.
AND I HAVE BEEN LOVING IT!!!
This isn’t to say the instructor and I haven’t chatted about martial arts, traditional Chinese medicine, et al. But when class begins I take a moment and bring my ego in check with my surroundings – I am NOT the teacher here, I am a student – and remembering where I am in this journey – I have been doing qigong for about two months now. If anything pops up during class that I want to explore, etc. I wait until class is over, when the instructor and I become equals again, in terms of social footing.
Another place to practice emptying your cup is when you are teaching – actually listen to your students, actually observe what they are doing. Not just going through the motions, but actively paying attention. I cannot count the number of times I have been teaching a class and in the scope of answering a question or correcting an error I’m seeing I’ve had an AHA moment that changed my practice.
So to bring this rambling to a merciful end, emptying your cup means that no matter how much you know about a subject, there is always the opportunity to learn more.
Footnotes
1 – https://www.medonegroup.com/medonetoone/63/the-lesson-of-the-empty-cup
2 – recent examples include speculative classes on the katar being dragged because they weren’t “real”; of course without any demonstrations of what “real” looks like.
3 – “Frogging” in crochet means to unravel your work. It could be a couple stitches to a row to the entire project.
4 – That being said I still find my brain making the connections at times – noticing how easily a movement could be made “martially”