‘Watching over water and over grain, shouldn’t everyone maintain the affection and kindness of nourishing children?’

Dogen Zenji, in his ‘Instructions to the Cook’

Last month we looked at joyful mind, the first of the ‘three minds’ which were recommended by the famous Zen master Dogen Zenji for the monks in his monastery. The second mind he called ‘nurturing mind’, or parental mind. I think of it as the mind of ‘taking good care’. Dogen was the leader of a community, and he wanted to encourage a culture where people took care of each other rather than expected to be taken care of. The monks in his monastery would have been very serious about their meditation practice – after all, to become a monk requires a significant amount of sacrifice. It’s easy then to be focused on ‘my meditation’, ‘my gains’ and ‘my progress’. Yet Zen has a strong focus on community – for everyone to take good care of each other and of the buildings, grounds and belongings. Dogen was asking the cook to watch over the rice not as a task to be completed so that dinner could be served, but with the ‘affection and kindness of nourishing children’. The same would have been true of the many other daily chores around the monastery – washing clothes, sweeping the hall, raking leaves, cleaning the toilets.

How would it feel to bring this nurturing mind into the everyday aspects of our lives? To bring affectionate attention to folding the laundry, paying a bill online, filling up the car with petrol? We can bring into our day either an underlying attitude of slight impatience, or else of kindly presence. This sounds simple, but in fact reveals a lot about our basic approach to life – whether we’re holding back a little, or are really prepared to commit ourselves to being fully present.

‘The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath.’

This famous speech by Portia from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice is about mercy, but we could also apply it to nurturing mind. At its best, nurturing mind is quiet and gentle, nurturing the soil of our lives with little moments of affectionate presence. While it requires a certain amount of intentionality, it’s not about trying too hard (straining) to be nurturing. Next month we will look at what Dogen called the ‘magnanimous’ mind, which is like a container providing a context for joyful and nurturing minds.

Mindful practice idea:

Pick an everyday physical task such as tidying, cleaning and so on, and for a week, experiment doing this task with either slight impatience, or affectionate presence. Do you notice a difference, and how does it feel?

Anja Tanhane