Mazu Daoyi was a famous Chan master who lived from 709 to 788 in Tang dynasty China. It’s foolish to try to summarize his deep teachings, but I am nothing if not a certified fool. Reading the anecdotes and dialogues that have come down through the ages (most recently in translations by David Hinton), what leaps out at me is an emphasis on nonjudgment. We need to drop the mind of “yes this” and “no that,” the mind embroiled in notions of good and bad, correct and incorrect, success and failure. If you stick with your frantically ping-ponging mind—your mind addicted to zipping at high speed from griping to celebrating to griping, from dammit to booyah to dammit—you’re in big trouble.
Furthermore, I would add, you’re bound to have a truly horrible flight.
That’s when and where I think of Mazu: waiting on a rainy runway with the weather deteriorating and a dozen infants screaming bloody murder over my left shoulder; negotiating turbulence at thirty thousand feet, orange juice mixed with seltzer (so delicious!) soaking into the crotch of my jeans; sprinting like a deranged cheetah for the better part of a mile in order to miss, by 6.437 seconds, a tight connection at Gate B97; queuing up at the Angry Grump, er, I mean the Customer Service Desk; “sleeping” on pleather benches that boast armrests and weird greasy stains in all the wrong places; et cetera.
It goes without saying that winging from Colorado to Vermont, as I do each summer to visit my parents and beloved childhood landscape, is crazy-making and then some. Many of us have witnessed people—presumably very nice, balanced, mature people—freaking out, sweating and moaning and flailing with the stress of imploding plans. I myself have been such a person more than once, though not for a while, thanks to Mazu. He’s always a great companion, well worth reading in the bathtub on a random Tuesday evening, but I find him particularly helpful when struggling to endure (with a modicum of composure, if not perfect equanimity and grace) the trials and tribulations of 21st-century air travel.
Specifically, he helps me enter a unique headspace: call it radically passive; call it expansively accepting. In normal daily life, my default setting is to function as an active player with both hands on the controls, the pilot of my own metaphorical jumbo jet. I steer clear of dark clouds and aim for sunny skies. I will stuff to happen. But on a red-eye out of Denver? With hurried, harried layovers in Houston and Newark? And, um, not to be paranoid, just wondering if anybody has checked the bolts on the door lately?
Mazu encourages us to “keep free of contamination,” which you might assume means the recycled fart-air of a filled-to-capacity Boeing or the sweet creamy gut-poison of seven consecutive Frappuccinos. In fact, what he’s actually referring to is the “mind fabricating its little certainties.” Certainties? Plural? Ha! If there’s certainty involved in flying, it’s that absolutely everything is uncertain, a total crapshoot. Attachment to outcomes is absurd. Future tripping won’t smooth the trip’s inevitable wrinkles. Resistance is futile. The practice, says Mazu, is “exactly this here right now.”
Hence the unique headspace I enter, that of a guy who is profoundly a passenger, merely along for the ride: The flight will depart on schedule or it will be delayed. The connection will be made or it will be missed. Tomorrow will be spent with my family, barbecuing and swimming in the lake, or it will be spent curled in the fetal position, mini-pretzel crumbs clinging to my beard. I have zero power, zero influence. I’m at the mercy of large and inscrutable forces. Rather than fuss and fret, rant and rave, I’m going to walk circles—silently, calmly—as long as necessary.
If there’s certainty involved in flying, it’s that absolutely everything is uncertain, a total crapshoot.
I mean that literally: I walk laps, a kind of kinhin through the maze of hectic glass-and-tile terminals, the busy, echoing labyrinth of neon food courts and sticky restrooms. Breath, step, Panda Express. Breath, step, Hudson News. Breath, step, cute grubby kid licking a water fountain. Breath, step, cute therapy dog licking a cute grubby kid. Breath, step, back at Panda Express already? Instead of retreating into the soothing (yet soul-deadening) diversion of smartphone memes and laptop movies—instead of fleeing from the reality of my situation—I stroll straight into it. This is what allows a decidedly miserable experience to become a meditation. Undistracted, trapped in the zendo, as it were, I observe my mind, how initially it insists on “yes this” and “no that,” spinning and churning and thrashing; how finally, by the time they announce Group 6 and invite me to cram into the belly of the claustrophobic metal bird, it almost sort of quiets.
Again, this is a practice, easier on some trips than others—a practice of watching the usual comforting myth of agency get stripped away and replaced by a different type of agency: consciousness, self-awareness, the ability to choose nonjudgment and go with the flow of “exactly this here right now.” Mazu continues: “Walking or standing, sitting or sleeping—simply move in accord with whatever moment the loom-of-origins unfurls, integral to the ten thousand things in their vast transformations.”
That’s lofty talk, but you get the idea. One needs more than a ticket and an official ID and a drool-encrusted, horseshoe-shaped pink ragamuffin of a neck pillow to cross these sprawling United States in the year 2024. Indeed, one needs a technique for dealing with the frustration, the chaos, the certainty of uncertainty, the luggage of the mind. I’ll take Mazu as my pilot any day.
And maybe he could check the bolts on the door too?