“Let me see your bowl of stew,” my I Ching teacher would tell me, motioning for me to cup my hands into a bowl.
This was how he would start every class with me.
He would make a show of looking into my “bowl” and naming each of the ingredients he saw there. “Carrot. Celery. Onion. Potato.” And so on, until he would suddenly instruct me to turn the “bowl” upside-down. He would take my hands in his and shake them vigorously, “emptying out the bowl” and, once satisfied, pull a handkerchief from a pocket and fastidiously wipe out the inside of the “bowl.”
At last, beaming proudly, he would hand me back my hands and announce, “There! Now you have a clean bowl!”
This is how people used to teach.
He was saying that my mind was like the bowl—and that I could either see that it was right and natural all by itself, or I could think that it was important because of the thoughts and emotions and memories it held.
Who was I really—my teacher was demanding of me—my unchanging bowl or its changing contents?
