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.”
Insightful and compelling as the anecdote may sound we rarely empty our cup. Rather the cup becomes our point of reference, our way of looking at life. The things that match with our preconceived notions somehow fit into our cup. At least they get squeezed into.
The real challenge arises when new knowledge arises. Something that requires us to challenge our assumptions or evaluate new possibilities. But alas as they say, to the mind of naive the possibilities are many but for an expert few. Few because the cup is full.
We forget what we learn is only the amount of sand we can hold in our fist, what we don’t know is everything outside that fist. For that to happen we need to open our fists, we need to empty our cup.
This does not mean literally discarding all the knowledge and experience that we have. What it means and conveys is we need to be open enough to see things in a new light, replace (or upgrade) our old knowledge with the new, be able to challenge our assumptions in wake of new knowledge and new possibilities which had not been considered earlier.
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