"Empty your cup"

The Zen Buddhist tradition has contributed a number of things to the world, but perhaps one of the most interesting can be found its stories. I encountered the following story some years ago, but forgot about it until recently. It reads something like this:


"A university professor went to visit a famous Zen master. While the master quietly served tea, the professor talked about Zen. The master poured the visitor's cup to the brim, and then kept pouring. The professor watched the overflowing cup until he could no longer restrain himself. 'It's overfull, no more will go in!' the professor blurted. 'You are like this cup' the master replied, "How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?"  
(Source)

Recognize the tale? It's not long (less than 100 words in this telling), yet in its brevity the story also seems to capture an interesting facet of human psychology.

As discussed in an earlier post, positive psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi contends that the human brain is only capable of processing about 110 bits of information per second. Accordingly, a person's ability to focus and take in new information is based upon a fairly finite sum (about the amount of attention it takes to follow two spoken conversations at once).

Since a person's attentive powers are finite, they share a property with tea-cups, which have a finite volume. As the story above (and perhaps your own experience) suggests, you can only pour so much tea into a cup before it overflows. Similarly, when a person's attention becomes overwhelmed, their appraisal of an experience tends to revert toward sub-optimal mental states for learning and happiness(consider the graphic from earlier post).

In light of this fact, the Zen metaphor of a tea-cup for the mind makes sense. Like a tea-cup, you can't put anything more into a mind that is already preoccupied (and for all intents and purposes, full); a listener trying to follow two simultaneous conversations cannot equally attend to a third, given the finite capacity of human attention.

At the conclusion of the story, the Zen master asks rhetorically, "How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?" Similarly, how can a person learn anything--or do anything challenging--without first emptying their mind?

n the words of the Tao-Te-Ching:


"We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole that makes the wagon move.


We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.


We hammer wood for a house,
but it's the inner space that makes it livable.


We work with being,
but non-being is what we use."
(Source)

Something to consider.

Happy Tuesday, friends :)