Teaching the Ultimate About Writing (More Zen)

This Zen parable, often called “Teaching the Ultimate” has implications for life... and for the writing life.

Teaching the Ultimate

In early times in Japan, bamboo-and-paper lanterns were used with candles inside. A blind man, visiting a friend one night, was offered a lantern to carry home with him.

"I do not need a lantern," he said. "Darkness or light is all the same to me."

"I know you do not need a lantern to find your way," his friend replied, "but if you don't have one, someone else may run into you. So you must take it."

The blind man started off with the lantern and before he had walked very far someone ran squarely into him.

"Look out where you are going!" he exclaimed to the stranger. "Can't you see this lantern?"

"Your candle has burned out, brother," replied the stranger.

For life, the implications of this parable are that we must find and trust our own way through the world. We must be wary of voices—even those good-intentioned—that would tell us what we “must” do. In a way, we are all born blind and must find a way through the world that works for us. And finding that way ultimately falls on us, for only we truly know ourselves—our strengths and our limitations.

The friend in this parable is good-intentioned. But, presumably, the blind man has found his way home many times through the darkness. He probably relied on his other senses. His ears told him when someone was approaching as did vibrations in the ground. Odors on the air could tell him if someone was close by.

He knew his way! But, the friend (this voice of authority) tried to convince him otherwise. Taking the lantern, he was filled with false confidence. He stopped relying on his old ways that had seldom failed him. When the stranger tells him his candle has burned out, he means not only the actual candle, but the candle of his true self.

This isn’t just about walking home in the dark. It’s about finding our way through the mystery of life and trusting approaches that we find true to our own understanding of ourselves. But in life, there are voices from outside of us that will try to tell us that we must do things differently. This isn’t to say that all guidance is bad but, in the end, only we can decide for ourselves what is our best approach to life. Who knows us better than we know ourselves?

The same goes for writing. There are so many choices to make, and there are plenty who will tell you what those choices should be. You might consider genre. Your passion might be for fantasy. And yet someone could say, “Fantasy? That’s played out. Right now, it’s young adult dystopian. Write that!”

You might even be tempted to listen. But then what are you doing, but starting a book that’s really not in your wheelhouse. You might end up writing a mediocre or even bad YA dystopian when you could have been writing (and enjoying the writing of) a fantastic fantasy.

Trying to write to the market is silly. On average, a book (once accepted) takes anywhere from a year to three years to be released. How can anyone know what people will be interested in reading at that time? Nobody can tell you what will be “hot” in three years.

Or, someone might tell you that you have to get an MFA (Master in Fine Arts) to be a writer. That's an expensive choice, and the degree certainly doesn't guarantee that you'll be a successful writer. And, I feel, the upshot of an MFA can be a bunch of professors telling you how you "must" write, which could be counter productive to your personal journey.

Don't get me wrong, I teach creative writing, but only at the introductory level. I feel I give my students enough that they can continue their journey on their own. I teach them the basics of fiction. I teach them how to read like fiction writers, so they can learn technique from what they are reading. When the course ends, many want to know, "What class next? What class next?" To which I often say, "You may not need anymore classes. Read a lot and write a lot. That might be enough."

If an MFA is necessary to write successfully, how did all of that writing happen in the world before an MFA was even an option?

But, don't listen to me. An MFA might be right for you. Or it may not. That's your journey to take.

Other choices? Traditional publish or self-publish. Sure, ask questions and get the lay of the land, but don’t let anyone tell you that you simply can’t self-publish. The choice is yours and falls on you. It has to feel right to you. Now, if you self-publish because no publishers (large or small) are interested in your work, well you might be taking the sour grapes approach to self-publishing. It might be that the book isn’t very good. But many, after weighing all of the pros and cons, have done well for themselves with self-publishing.

Your goal as a writer is to find out what kind of writer you want to be. You choose your genre. You choose what time of day you write. You choose what level of exposure on social media works for you. (You can go crazy trying to mimic all of the approaches you see on Twitter alone. And, in my opinion, most are ineffective and just look desperate). You decide for yourself if writing every day is a must… or is that someone else’s “must”.

Probably the worst are the people in your life who dismiss the act of writing altogether. They call what you do a “hobby” or they say it’s impossible to make it as a writer. Looking at it this way, it goes back to how the parable is really about life choices. If you know in your heart that you must write and try to make it as a writer, then that’s what you have to do. If you don’t, your candle will truly burn out and you might come to the end of your life and find, to quote Thoreau, “that you had not lived.”