We have all heard the saying that, ‘if life gives you lemons, make lemonade’. It’s cute, but in the middle of a crisis it can be a stretch to see where the sweetness might lie?

Recently, someone came for an interview. He told me that he didn’t know why he came but thought he would come along anyway. This is not as odd as it might sound and I’ve experienced this on a number of occasions; that the heart may prompt us unknowingly to act for reasons which later get revealed.

We sat in silence for a few moments, and then he said he was disappointed in himself because of something that had happened at a family gathering six months before. That’s a long time to be holding onto something and suggests that this relates to something deeper. Basically, he had lost his temper, he was triggered by something someone said and couldn’t help himself and been carried away by his temper. I replied by asking if he realised that this is the Bull? This refers to the wild heart-energy we encounter in the Zen analogy, the Bull Herding pictures. These show the relationship that is forged between a herdsman and a Bull and is used to plot the course of the spiritual transformation of the heart-energy. He nodded.

One of the gifts of the teachings of the Buddha is that it gives us an impersonal way of framing our experiences. This framing is different from the perspective of ‘I’. There is a saying used in Zen - the single eye of the Dharma. This single eye is contrasted with the duality created by the split between ‘I’ and ‘other’. When we look at the six realms on the Wheel of Life, we can see that at the top we have the Heavenly realms and below the Hell realms. This juxtaposition reveals a dynamic, an oscillation from one extreme to another. A few years ago, I was talking to someone who is involved in creative writing. He was saying that one of the really difficult things for him to do is to critique his own writing. He told me that when he wrote something he could read it one time and think it was the best bit of writing he had ever done. However, twenty-four hours later, he could re-read the same piece and think it was total trash! We know why this happens - because I am too close to it and therefore can’t read it without feeling that ‘I’ succeed or fail by it. This is why in the preface to the first of the Bull Herding pictures it talks about ‘notions of right and wrong arising like spears on a battlefield’.

It is important to understand that ‘I’ cannot help this thinking; this is exactly what we mean by ‘I’ - just these thoughts of high/low, right/wrong, succeed/fail. Just this is the dual thinking characteristic of ‘I’, who sees and thinks in this dualistic way. The ‘Single Eye’ seeks to collapse this dualism and re-frame events by accepting and reducing the ‘I’ judgements we make.

For example, in the above conversation, reframing the judgement about losing one’s temper as being the Bull energy, we can embed the incident within an understanding that, as Zen students, we are engaged in a lifelong transformation process of humanising the passions. For example, what happens if I say to him that he was wrong to lose his temper? Naturally, he will defend himself; after all he had a point to be made perhaps? This is a valid objection. Quite often, when we lose our temper, there is a reason for it. However, the Single Dharma Eye reminds us that according to the Buddha it is only from the human realm that liberation is possible. On the Wheel, the human realm is the state of humanity that is the best of being human (in the West we tend to think of being human as mainly fallible and not up to scratch). So, accepting the point that the anger has a point to it, we ask what is the way a rounded human being would act? In this way, we do not deny the anger’s intention but only the ‘inhuman’ or ‘a-human’ form by which it was expressed. This can give a more satisfactory feeling that will accept that ‘I’ did behave in error without squashing the intention. A classic middle way from the ‘Single Eye’.

However, such is my clinging attachment that letting go of the dualistic seeing is difficult to bring off. Hence why good friends in the Dharma are useful to provide the sounding boards we need for reflection. Even regular immersion in the teachings can often allow the heart to ‘find the words’ to speak on an inner level to us in a moment of quiet. The Buddha-Dharma gives us perspectives and vocabulary to carry out this re-framing. What is more, the ‘Single Eye’ sees incidents, which to ‘I’ can feel excruciating and traumatic, as part of our ongoing quest to fulfil our Bodhisattva vows along the Great Way.