Douglas Edison Harding - On Having No Head

ON HAVING NO HEAD

Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious

By Douglas E. Harding

The Shollond Trust

To Virginia Parsell, Barbara Hopkinson and Gene Thursby.

Published by The Shollond Trust

87B Cazenove Road

London N16 6BB

England

headexchange@gn.apc.org

www.headless.org

The Shollond Trust is a UK charity, reg. no 1059551

First published by The Buddhist Society, 1961.

Copyright The Shollond Trust 2012

Design and conversion to ebook by rangsgraphics.com

Thanks to Danielle Bol De Greve for typing the text.

Cover illustration by Victor Lunn-Rockliffe

ISBN 978-0-9568877-7-1

CONTENTS

Suppose a man were all of a sudden to make his appearance here and cut your head off with a sword! HUI-CHUNG

Behead yourself! ... Dissolve your whole body into Vision: become seeing, seeing, seeing! RUMI

My soul has been carried away, and usually my head as well, without my being able to prevent it. ST. TERESA

Cover your breast with nothingness, and draw over your head the robe of non-existence. ATTAR

Give yourself utterly ... Even though the head itself must be given, why should you weep over it? KABIR

Seeing into Nothingness - this is the true seeing, the eternal seeing. SHEN-HUI

1 THE TRUE SEEING

The best day of my life - my rebirthday, so to speak - was when I found I had no head. This is not a literary gambit, a witticism designed to arouse interest at any cost. I mean it in all seriousness: I have no head.

It was when I was thirty-three that I made the discovery. Though it certainly came out of the blue, it did so in response to an urgent inquiry; I had for several months been absorbed in the question: what am I? The fact that I happened to be walking in the Himalayas at the time probably had little to do with it; though in that country unusual states of mind are said to come more easily. However that may be, a very still, clear day, and a view from the ridge where I stood over misty blue valleys to the highest mountain range in the world, made a setting worthy of the grandest vision.

What actually happened was something absurdly simple and unspectacular: just for the moment I stopped thinking. Reason and imagination and all mental chatter died down. For once, words really failed me. I forgot my name, my humanness, my thingness, all that could be called me or mine. Past and future dropped away. It was as if I had been born that instant, brand new, mindless, innocent of all memories. There existed only the Now, that present moment and what was clearly given in it. To look was enough. And what I found was khaki trouserlegs terminating downwards in a pair of brown shoes, khaki sleeves terminating sideways in a pair of pink hands, and a khaki shirtfront terminating upwards in - absolutely nothing whatever! Certainly not in a head.

It took me no time at all to notice that this nothing, this hole where a head should have been was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary, it was very much occupied. It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything - room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far above them snow-peaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world.

It was all, quite literally, breathtaking. I seemed to stop breathing altogether, absorbed in the Given. Here it was, this superb scene, brightly shining in the clear air, alone and unsupported, mysteriously suspended in the void, and (and this was the real miracle, the wonder and delight) utterly free of "me", unstained by any observer. Its total presence was my total absence, body and soul. Lighter than air, clearer than glass, altogether released from myself, I was nowhere around.

Yet in spite of the magical and uncanny quality of this vision, it was no dream, no esoteric revelation. Quite the reverse: it felt like a sudden waking from the sleep of ordinary life, an end to dreaming. It was self-luminous reality for once swept clean of all obscuring mind. It was the revelation, at long last, of the perfectly obvious. It was a lucid moment in a confused life-history. It was a ceasing to ignore something which (since early childhood at any rate) I had always been too busy or too clever or too scared to see. It was naked, uncritical attention to what had all along been staring me in the face - my utter facelessness. In short, it was all perfectly simple and plain and straightforward, beyond argument, thought, and words. There arose no questions, no reference beyond the experience itself, but only peace and a quiet joy, and the sensation of having dropped an intolerable burden.

The notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do by ... melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid. BLAKE

I think Ill go and meet her, said Alice ... You cant possibly do that, said the Rose. I should advise you to walk the other way. This sounded nonsense to Alice, so she said nothing but set off at once towards the Red Queen. To her surprise, she lost sight of her in a moment. THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

As a beauty I am not a star;

There are others more handsome by far,

But my face - I dont mind it

For I am behind it;

Its the people in front get the jar.

Attributed to WOODROW WILSON

2 MAKING SENSE OF THE SEEING

As the first wonder of my Himalayan discovery began to wear off, I started describing it to myself in some such words as the following.

Somehow or other I had vaguely thought of myself as inhabiting this house which is my body, and looking out through its two little round windows at the world. Now I find it isnt like that at all. As I gaze into the distance, what is there at this moment to tell me how many eyes I have here - two, or three, or hundreds, or none? In fact, only one window appears on this side of my facade, and that one is wide open and frameless and immense, with nobody looking out of it. It is always the other fellow who has eyes and a face to frame them; never this one.

There exist, then, two sorts - two widely different species - of human being. The first, of which I note countless specimens, evidently carries a head on its shoulders (and by head I mean an opaque and coloured and hairy eight-inch ball with various holes in it) while the second, of which I note only one specimen, evidently carries no such thing on its shoulders. And until now I had overlooked this considerable difference! Victim of a prolonged fit of madness, of a lifelong hallucination (and by hallucination I mean what my dictionary says: apparent perception of an object not actually present), I had invariably seen myself as pretty much like other people, and certainly never as a decapitated but still living biped. I had been blind to the one thing that is always present, and without which I am blind indeed - to this marvelous substitute-for-a-head, this unbounded clarity, this luminous and absolutely pure void, which nevertheless is - rather than contains - all thats on offer. For, however carefully I attend, I fail to find here even so much as a blank screen on which these mountains and sun and sky are projected, or a clear mirror in which they are reflected, or a transparent lens or aperture through which they are viewed - still less a person to whom they are presented, or a viewer (however shadowy) who is distinguishable from the view. Nothing whatever intervenes, not even that baffling and elusive obstacle called distance: the visibly boundless blue sky, the pink-edged whiteness of the snows, the sparkling green of the grass - how can these be remote, when theres nothing to be remote from? The headless void here refuses all definition and location: it is not round, or small, or big, or even here as distinct from there. (And even if there were a head here to measure outwards from, the measuring-rod stretching from it to that mountain peak would, when read end-on - and theres no other way for me to read it - reduce to a point, to nothing.) In fact, these coloured shapes present themselves in all simplicity, without any such complications as near or far, this or that, mine or not-mine, seen-by-me or merely given. All twoness - all duality of subject and object - has vanished: it is no longer read into a situation which has no room for it.