Almost Everyone Is an Expert
On the Challenge of Remaining a Student
When I read the old Zen masters now, I don’t hear philosophers, spiritual authorities, or refined teachers explaining reality to those who have not yet understood. I hear human beings who had reached the end of pretending that thought could hold life. That is very different.
Deshan burning his commentaries no longer sounds to me like a dramatic religious gesture. It sounds more like exhaustion. Not despair, not theatre, not rebellion for the sake of rebellion, but the simple recognition that years of analysing, refining, quoting, interpreting, and explaining had not brought him one step closer to what he had been trying to secure. The fire was not a rejection of words. It was the end of worshipping them.
Linji’s image of students chewing on old bones has the same taste. We keep turning phrases over in the mouth, hoping they will still nourish us, even when the life has already been sucked dry. We repeat what was once alive in someone else’s mouth, and because the words are sharp, ancient, and impressive, we mistake repetition for seeing. But an old bone is still an old bone. However long we chew it, it does not become meat again.
Huang-Po said that seeking Mind with the mind is the greatest mistake. Foyan said that the moment you say you understand, you are already mistaken. Bankei warned that the instant we begin trying to manage the mind, we have already left the Unborn. These are not clever teachings. They are warnings. Not warnings against words, study, practice, or inquiry, but warnings against the quiet birth of someone who now knows.
That may be the most subtle trap of all.
When I read these voices now, I do not feel instructed or corrected. I feel gently disarmed. Something in their words refuses to let the mind settle into ownership. They do not seem interested in giving us a better position from which to speak. They seem to be removing the position itself.
And then I look at how widely Zen circulates today, how easily available it has become, how beautifully packaged, how confidently quoted, how smoothly it appears in books, retreats, podcasts, social media posts, lifestyle design, therapy language, productivity culture, and spiritual identity, and something curious appears. Zen is everywhere, yet the honesty those old teachers embodied still seems rare.
This is not a complaint. It is simply worth noticing.
Zen can now be used to relax, to focus, to cope, to regulate emotions, to increase efficiency, to cultivate presence, to decorate a room, to soften an image, to signal depth, to build a more el self. None of this is necessarily wrong. Life is difficult, and people use whatever helps them breathe a little more easily. But the old masters were not primarily interested in making life smoother. They were pointing toward something that cannot be improved, stabilised, managed, possessed, or turned into a personal achievement.
That is where things become uncomfortable.
Because almost without noticing, we move from being beginners into becoming people who know something about Zen. We learn the language. We recognise the themes. We understand the paradoxes. We become familiar with emptiness, awareness, presence, no-self, non-duality, suchness, original mind, beginner’s mind, ordinary mind. We know what not to say. We know which phrases sound too dualistic, too conceptual, too devotional, too intellectual, too naive. We become fluent.
And fluency is dangerous when it begins to feel like seeing.
A beginner stands differently. A beginner has no secure footing. A beginner does not speak from a polished position. A beginner does not know where he stands, and that not-knowing is not a pose. It is exposure. It is awkward. It does not photograph well. It does not impress. It gives no rank, no identity, no authority, no spiritual scent. It leaves one unable to hide behind understanding.
Perhaps that is why almost everyone becomes an expert so quickly, and why so few remain students for very long.
To remain a student is not to know less. It is to stop leaning on what one knows. It is to let the teaching keep working, not as something possessed, but as something that keeps removing the possessor. That is a very different matter. The mind can tolerate learning. It can tolerate discipline. It can tolerate years of practice. It can even tolerate the idea of no-self, as long as someone is allowed to understand it.
But Zen does not leave even that someone untouched.
Something else happens almost invisibly. Zen becomes something we understand rather than something that unsettles us. It becomes something we can speak about rather than something that quietly removes the ground beneath speaking itself. Even the language begins to show the shift. When we say, “I am observing my thoughts,” or “I am aware of awareness,” or “I am witnessing the mind,” the sentences may sound refined, even sincere, but they quietly rebuild a centre. A more subtle one, perhaps. A more spiritual one. A cleaner one. But still a centre.
Nothing dramatic has happened. No loud arrogance is required. Just the almost invisible feeling: I understand this now.
Something has already rebuilt itself.
The old self does not always return wearing its old clothes. Sometimes it comes back barefoot, calm, spacious, non-dual, softly spoken, quoting Huang-Po. Sometimes it no longer says, “I am important.” It says, “There is no I.” But the tone gives it away. The ownership gives it away. The certainty gives it away. The small hidden pleasure of being the one who sees through illusion gives it away.
This is not a problem belonging only to others. I know this movement too well. The mind can turn anything into shelter. It can turn failure into humility, humility into identity, insight into property, practice into biography, and not-knowing into a new kind of wisdom badge. It can even use Zen to protect itself from Zen.
That is why the old masters were often so blunt. Not because they were harsh personalities or enjoyed tearing people down, but because they had seen how endlessly the mind rebuilds its ground, even after glimpsing that no ground can finally hold. A soft explanation can easily become another cushion. A beautiful teaching can become another possession. A subtle doctrine can become another hiding place.
So they shouted. They laughed. They struck the floor. They held up a flower. They burned commentaries. They answered with silence, or nonsense, or a word that gave the mind nothing to eat. Not because they were trying to be mysterious, but because they were refusing to feed the expert.
Modern attention does not like this. We live in a tempo that wants quick absorption, quick clarity, quick usefulness, quick recognition. A phrase must land quickly. A teaching must be shareable. A quote must glow on the screen. Anything that does not resolve soon feels heavy. Anything that leaves us uncertain feels inconvenient. But the old masters often left people exactly there, in uncertainty, without a neat conclusion, without a comforting bridge, without a sentence that allowed the mind to walk away satisfied.
That kind of encounter does not move quickly. It does not adapt easily to a culture addicted to motion.
Sometimes it seems that many of us, myself included, spend years thinking about chopping firewood instead of actually chopping it. We examine the nature of effort, analyse the symbolism of the axe, compare traditions of woodcutting, debate whether the chopper exists, discuss whether firewood has Buddha-nature, quote Dōgen on firewood and ash, and refine our understanding of labour until the whole thing sounds profound. Meanwhile the wood remains uncut, the room remains cold, and the simple activity itself never quite begins.
This is not stupidity. It is hesitation. It is the human reluctance to meet directly what may not leave our familiar orientation intact.
Watching this unfold, in others and in myself, gradually becomes part of practice. Not as accusation. Not as superiority. More as a simple seeing. This is what mind does. It organises, stabilises, names, explains, compares, remembers, repeats, and then quietly hides inside what it has built. It wants continuity. It wants to remain someone. Even when it speaks about no-self, it wants to be the one who understands no-self.
Perhaps this is why Zen remains difficult, no matter how widely it is known, quoted, practised, and explained. The difficulty is not that Zen is obscure. The difficulty is that it gives the one who wants to understand it nowhere to stand.
Most of us are willing to understand something about Zen.
Far fewer are willing to lose the one who understands.
So perhaps the writing continues for that reason alone. Not to clarify Zen once and for all, not to offer another explanation, not to stand above anyone as someone who has seen through the trap, but to keep noticing how easily the expert returns, how softly the self rebuilds, how quickly the student disappears.
And sometimes, when seen clearly enough, it loosens.
-Notes from the Edge of the Path
janainaart
jacobvanloon
origamiaround
jbbartram-illu
