Let The Botton Fall Out Of The Bucket

By: Rev. Jim Kearse, OEB

There is an old story that goes something like this: 

Chiyono was a worker in a convent. She wanted to gain enlightenment so she struggled hard, night and day, with her mind set only on the sight of liberation. All she practised, all she thought about, was to reach the source of mind before all thought. She struggled hard.

One night under a full moon, she went to get a bucket of water. On her way back she was watching the reflection of the moon on the water in the bucket. Suddenly the bottom of the bucket broke open. All of the water spilled out onto the ground and disappeared. The reflection of the moon was gone.

 Chiyono was suddenly enlightened. She wrote a poem to describe her experience:

This way and that way
I tried to keep the pail together
Hoping the weak bamboo
Would never break.
Suddenly the bottom fell out:
No more water:
No more moon in the water:
Emptiness in my hand!

The story of Chiyono and her bucket is a good example of what we do frequently in daily life. The bucket is a representation of our mind and the reflection of the moon is a representation of what we imagine things to be like and what we imagine is the reflection in a bucket that we carry back and forth along the path of our life. When the bucket broke, this was Chiyono’s mind letting go of her pre-conceived ideas. Chiyono suddenly understood; we don’t need to hold on to our ideas, we simply need to observe what is actually around us in real life.

Just like Chiyono, when we strive to get something, we imagine what it must be like and we strive to achieve it. We make up the criteria and struggle to meet it. But since we’ve invented the end goal and made up what we think it should look like, we can never reach the goal because reality seldom matches our imagination! We spend our time looking at the reflection of the moon in the bucket rather than looking up at the real moon in the sky!

So we need to allow our bucket to break open, to allow our minds to simply let go of the ideas we are holding onto. We hold onto our ideas so tightly that we are blinded to anything else except our fabricated views of reality. Take a deep breath, calm down. Allow life to be what it is rather than what we want it to be.

©️ OEB 2019