Three Cups of the Finest Wine
Nirvana is right here before our eyes.
How often have you heard the term “first-world problem”? We use it to refer to something we’re unhappy with and find ourselves complaining about, but in the grand scheme of things it’s hardly more than a minor inconvenience. We humans do this all the time – find something we don’t like, feel sorry for ourselves that we have to put up with it, and let it actually lower our mood and darken our day. All for nothing.
It turns out that the human mind is programmed to find what's wrong in our life. There's actually good research on this. We pay more attention to what's wrong, and we remember what's wrong longer than we remember anything else. We pay more attention to what we dislike than to what we like and to what’s going well in our lives. For example, if you get 9 pieces of positive feedback from your boss in a job evaluation and one piece of negative feedback, you’re more likely to dwell on the negative and minimize what’s positive. From the point of view of human evolution, this is an advantage, because if we can spot and anticipate threats, we're more likely to survive. The point of evolution is to pass on our genes, and being vigilant makes us more careful and more likely to stay alive long enough to reproduce.
So what’s the problem with having that negativity bias? In survival terms, nothing. But when it comes to keeping us happy, this habit of distortion makes the world look gloomier than it really is. Most of our assessments of what’s right or wrong are just our judgments, and our minds are busy churning out judgments all day long. This mind that’s so good at seeing what’s wrong – and less good at seeing what’s right – creates darker expectations of life that take us away from appreciating the totality of life – all the good as well as the bad.
Sometimes I do a little exercise where I pay attention to the requirements I impose on my life in order for me to feel like nothing is wrong. When I really look closely, I realize that most of my requirements are all made up. They're completely without substance. For example, I woke up this morning an hour earlier than I wanted to. And I found myself annoyed, thinking, I woke up too early and now the day is going to go badly because I didn’t get enough sleep. But where is it written that I'm supposed to wake up at the specific time I want to? That’s just one of a huge collection of requirements I put on life, and when a requirement isn’t met, I feel a slight moment of pain or annoyance or worry.
I looked at my smart watch at the end of the day yesterday, and in fact, I didn't achieve the number of steps I wanted to achieve. I only took 9,000 steps instead of 10,000. Of course, these are minor concerns compared to the real suffering in the world, but I do this all day long. And the little moments of unhappiness that this generates can build up over time.
How much of our mental and emotional life is filled with those requirements – requirements that I be included in this group, that I be recognized by that person, that I receive this acknowledgement or this gift? These are complete fabrications – all made up, and all making us feel ever so slightly beleaguered.
Most Zen koans are stories of encounters between a young student and a wise teacher. There’s one that resonates with me these days when I start feeling very forlorn and gloomy about life. It’s from a collection of koans called the Gateless Gate (a typically paradoxical Zen title). It goes something like this:
A monk said to his teacher, “I am solitary and destitute. Please help me.” The teacher said, “Venerable sir”, and the monk answered, “Yes!” The teacher said, “You have already drunk three cups of the finest wine in the land, and still you say that you have not moistened your lips.”
What a strange encounter between a teacher and a student in the ninth century in China! And this koan has very personal meaning for me. Several years ago I served as the head monk in charge of a three-week meditation retreat, where we meditated from 6 AM to 9 PM every day. At the end of this marathon there's traditionally a ceremony where the head monk gets elevated to being a senior priest. This ceremony was one of the scariest experiences of my life.
It was a big gathering of the Zen community, along with some of my family and friends. I sat up in front of everyone, and the teacher handed me a slip , of paper on which was written a koan. My task at that moment was to give a talk about this koan, even though I’d never seen it before. Right then, with no preparation. And the koan that my teacher handed me that evening was the one about the monk who was solitary and destitute. Somehow I managed to talk about what the story meant to me, and when I was done, we had what was called dharma combat, where people came to the front and asked me questions about Zen. Of course, I knew this ceremony was coming, and for three weeks I lived in dread.
I was feeling solitary and destitute. Solitary because nobody else had to do this, it was just me. And destitute because I was sure everybody would realize how little I knew. The ceremony proceeded. I opened my mouth, and something came out. And then the question-and-answer “combat” was as loving and supportive as it could possibly have been.
Scared out of my wits, I couldn’t’ see that the ceremony was my equivalent of drinking three cups of the finest wine in the land. Here I was with friends and family, all of whom were wishing me well and enjoying being together.
How often have you found yourself in this kind of situation, where nothing is wrong, but you find yourself complaining that life is not meeting your exact requirements: I'm stressed. I’m uncomfortable. Life is so bad. I'm so bad. Somebody help me, please.
Those magnificent cups of wine are this life, warts and all. We just need to really look at it – at a tree or a cloud or a friend’s smile to be reminded that life is astonishingly rich.
The task is to see beyond our first-world complaints to what’s right here in front of us. We can remind ourselves and each other of the richness that's with us all the time. Yes, my knee aches right now, but there’s so much more happening at this very moment: the room is warm and cozy, the clock is ticking, the light is playing on the wooden floor, and there's snow coating the world outside my window.
As the Zen teaching goes, “Nirvana is right here before our eyes.”
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