7.
QUESTION
“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the answer, I would spend the first 55 minutes figuring out the proper questions to ask. For if I knew the proper questions, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”
Steven: I remember a meeting with a Zen master in North London. Master Ja An (or Bogumila Malinowska, her Polish name) is a slight woman with brown mousy hair. She opened the door to the Zen Centre, which is also where she lives, greeting me with a warm welcome. In the corridor I almost tripped over a bike and there seemed to be lots of shoes. “My son’s,” she explained, catching the bike and preventing it from falling on me. “Even Zen masters who live with teenagers can have clutter,” I thought with some form of relief. It all seemed so ordinary. Before I knocked I was anticipating how a Zen master would act. I was not expecting her to be out of breath, just having returned from another errand. “Please make yourself welcome,” as she showed me to the Dharma room. It looked like a living room that had a clear wooden floor and two rows of cushions, leading to one end of a statue of the Buddha. One side of the room was a window with a panoramic view over North London. Above the kitchen door I noticed a picture of the lineage of Zen masters to the Kwan Um school of Zen. To the right was Zen master Seung Sahn who had brought Zen to the West.
“What is the essence of Zen?” I asked. She answered: “Letting myself experience….Don’t Know. Being myself and not pretending to be anyone else. You need to understand that this is a process, a never-ending process. Moment by moment we have to learn anew, we have to be very aware and present, without any opinion or judgment about ourselves or others.”
I liked the idea of teaching not being words but essentially the way of being. Yet I knew that in Zen, the way to reach this state was often by using words to go beyond words, through a koan. Koans are literally statements that the student chews over. I knew of the famous koan ‘what is the sound of one hand clapping?’ So I asked Master Ja An “Do you remember your first koan?” She looked deep in thought, trying to recall. Probably because she had so many throughout the years. In the Zen tradition there are meant to be more than 1,300 koans.
“Why is the sky blue? was my first koan, given in an interview with other students and Zen Master Seung Sahn. With koans you can always go deeper. They are not about finding an answer, but rather coming to explore how this koan is working in your life. Some people due to the Western way of learning find it very difficult to accept that it is not about the answer. People want to achieve something, get a certificate or get recognition. They always ask ‘how much practice should I do to become enlightened?’, ‘how long will it take me to become a master?’ The shift from an intellectual inquiry to an intuitive inquiry is very difficult for them. I remember before I got my first koan my master said ‘you must hit the floor’. I didn’t know why he was asking me this but I hit the floor. Now, people need to know ‘why’ they do things. People want to achieve, to have an answer. Normally the way we get answers in life is like a collector. Zen is more about digestion of the answer.” She asked me if I would like to try a koan.
I put my notebook down. Suddenly I became very self-conscious. I was no longer the scribe, the observer, but would be the student. Master Ja An picked up a small wooden stick, and looked me in the eye. “Zen means understanding yourself. What is your name?” Suddenly I felt anxious and my breathing became shallow, with a mild panic. I was taken back to an interview scene where I had to get the right answer. Normally the questions in that case were intellectual and I could give a similarly intellectual answer in response.
The simplicity of this question “What is your name?” disarmed me. I sat in silence for a few seconds, not knowing how to respond. “Well, my name is Steven” I replied. “I did not ask for your given name,” Master Ja An responded firmly. “What is your name?” she asked again. My anxiety was increasing now. Master Ja An repeated the question, this time gently. “What is your name?” Time seemed to stop. I felt totally stupid, not being able to tell her my name. I said: “Well, I could say it is nothing or I could say it is something.” And she replied: “If you say it is nothing I will hit you 30 times symbolically with this stick. If you say it is something I will still hit you with the stick 30 times.”
I got the impression that if I had not been in London in 2012 she would have used the stick rather than talk about it symbolically. Seeing I was struggling, she gave me a passage to read. It described how the clouds come and go and they do not exist. Again she asked “What is your name?” “I honestly don’t know how to answer,” I replied.
Suddenly she slapped her hand on the ground, making a sharp noise. It was wordless. Asking the question “What is your name?” was not an attempt to help me find an answer, but to experience that moment of Not Knowing. I heard her hand slap the ground. There was a break from my thinking. Instead, a wordless space. Any word I used to describe it, even ‘emptiness’, would be a lie, putting something into the wordless. At this point, I realized I had drunk none of the tea. Suddenly we looked at the time and it was time for Master Ja An’s driving lesson. I gave my thanks to the master and saw myself out while the Zen master quickly transformed into the driving lesson student.
Martine Batchelor, a Zen teacher who spent 10 years as a Zen nun in Korea, encourages us to become at one with the question. Developing a practice of questioning, rather than answering, means focusing on the question mark, not the meaning of the words. This allows us to create an openness to the present moment, letting go of our need for knowledge and security.85
Asking questions we already know the answer to only reinforces what we know – it provides instant gratification. And if we don’t already know the answer, we have the tendency to accept the first one that is generated. Keeping the questions going rather than settling on the first answer disturbs the equilibrium, is uncomfortable, and is generally not rewarded in our workplaces. The higher the confusion and uncertainty, the more attractive the answers become. Staying with the questions develops our tolerance and increases our capacity to engage with the unknown. It also provides us with more information about what is going on and what our options may be.
Eurostar is the operator of the high-speed rail line that runs under the English Channel between France and Britain. It is a complex business with many unknowns, such as the comparative cost of airline seats (key competitors to Eurostar), staff and operational costs, future unknown competitors, and the rise of substitutes for travel such as videoconferencing. Steven had worked with the CEO Nicolas Petrovic and his management team, and Nicolas describes the challenge of fostering a culture that values questions as much as answers.
“When you go down the line from the top, most senior managers and middle managers are experts. They have credibility in knowing their stuff. Sometimes I find they put too much emphasis on the detail, buzzwords, spreadsheets. Part of creating a culture of Not Knowing is encouraging them to step back out of the detail and instead to sense check themselves and their decisions. For example, to ask ‘Would I do this with my own money?’, ‘If I was the customer, would I like it?’”
We can foster an orientation towards questioning in ourselves and our workplaces by approaching, with curiosity, other views and opinions, being open to differences and multiple possibilities, and creating the arena for sharing dilemmas and doubts. We can choose to reward curiosity and questioning rather than reinforce dependency on answers.