The Awkward Fact & Anatta

Douglas Edison Harding: The Man with No Head

One of the biggest influences on my Buddhist practice was not a Buddhist, but he knew a lot about Buddhism, especially the Zen variety. His name was Douglas Harding, and I had the pleasure of meeting him quite a few times during the 1990s. Douglas was a warm, humorous, intelligent, articulate, generous, open man - the last quality of which is most immediately relevant here. You see, Douglas was, by his own admission, headless. Furthermore, this condition resulted in him being blown wide open to the world, not separated off from it by being encased in a head.

Now, you may protest that if the photograph above is indeed of the said Mr. Harding, then he most certainly did posses a head. And, Douglas would not have argued with you, as long as it was understood that it was from your perspective he had a pinkish meatball plonked atop his body, but he claimed that from his own experience, he did not. Douglas was so passionate about his decapitated state that he not only wrote a dozen major works on the subject but also travelled the world sharing his vision with anyone that cared to listen (or look).

In the extract below, Douglas does not discuss being headless, but rather focuses on the Nothingness that is seen where a head would be expected to be found. He refers it as "our Absence, our Void Nature or Emptiness," as well by other names, all of which he admits fall well short of the mark in describing exactly what this condition is like. And, as he spent decades emphasizing, it is to be experienced rather than believed in or philosophized about. This experience can pointed at with words, as well as a finger, and Douglas was extremely adept at ! this, as shown below.

"Three words cover itseeing our Nothingness. It's that simple. Or, to drive the point home, turning our attention round 180 and looking into What we are looking out of, into our Absence, our Void Nature or Emptiness or Speckless Clarity, into our lack of characteristics, distinguishing marks, attainments, you-name-it. It is notemphatically notknowing all about Natureless Nature, or understanding it profoundly, or believing in it sincerely, or even feeling it acutely, but seeing it with such finality and such intimacy that we see this Absence which we are and are this Absence which we see. But alas, how liable even the most apt words are to complicate what is, after all, simplicity itself!

The awkward fact is that this Experience, which is none other than the substratum of all experience, is impossible to describe. It's as ineffable and incommunicable as the redness of red or the sweetness of honey or the smell of wild violets. Try telling a man colour-blind from birth what purple is. Well, telling him about his Empty Core is even more futile. Somehow you must get him to look in for himself at himself by himself instead of just out at you. Then and only then nothing could be easier or plainer, more blazingly self-evident to him, than his Nothingness, his disappearance in your favour.

However, three things can be said, and need to be said here, about this essential in-seeing.

First, precisely because it's void of all qualities of its own, because there's Nothing to it, it is for all beings of all grades and of all worlds one and the same. There are no angles or perspectives on This, no variations. There are no preliminary or private views or privileged showings, no more enlightened or less enlightened versions of This, no heights to mount to or fall away from, and certainly no religious or spiritual or aesthetic qualities to cultivate.

Second, (and for the same reason) one's "first fleeting glimpse" of one's Nature d! oesn't d iffer at all from one's "latest and clearest and most sustained seeing" of that Nature. No matter how brief or how sustained it may be, this Experience is unique among all experiences in that it has no degrees of clarity or intensity or familiarity. It's as if every time it happens happens to be the first time. Like it or not, there's no encouraging upturn, never any progress to plot on one's spiritual progress chart. Either you see This or you don't. Here's the one skill you can't get better at, but only exercise more frequently and for longer periods.

Third, it follows that, whoever and wherever and whenever you may be, your Inside Story is the plainest of all plain tales, and identical with the Inside Story of all creatures. So that to see What you really are is not only to see What they really are but to be What they really are. Beyond all doubt you are me and him and her and it, and all the rest. And at once you have hit on the answer to all the loneliness and alienation in the world. You rest on the Ground of Being and of all loving and caring. Secretly you are healing, along with your own wounds, the wounds of this wounded world."

(Douglas Harding, 'The Experience and the Meaning.')

Now, this Absence can be experienced, it is at the very core of our being, and it reveals the complete interconnectedness of life. Is this not, in Buddhist parlance, anatta, or 'no-self?' Moreover, just as many great Zen masters have claimed, such as two of my favourites, Huang Po & Bankei, it is immediately realizable if only we dare to look within with honesty & awareness.

The full article can be read on the Headless Way website here: The Experience and the Meaning.