Koan of a caricature

Tom Eton Johns was an admirable person. He had an excellent credit score. He gave frequently to charity. He was a kind and loving father and husband, supportive of the needs of his loved ones. He had a “white collar” job with excellent benefits. He went on runs with his dog, did HIITs in the morning, and visited a yoga studio in the evening. He did not get squeamish easily and could do dirty jobs, although he did not have to. This turned out to be of great help to him as he took care of his dying grandmother, taking on more than half of the nursing work along with his mother. Little did Tom know that his strong stomach would be a great liability in one particular, very mundane situation.

This happened during a rainy and flu-filled week as March rolled into April. Tom, feeling semi-sick, was traveling via the subway to his office. He had forgotten his headphones and could not listen to an audiobook. He had a softcover in his backpack, but felt that the train was too crowded to open a book. He decided to go on his phone, but not to social media or news apps. No, he opened ChatGPT and prompted it to provide a Zen koan, an insoluble problem to engage with during the long ride to the office.    

Two hands clap, and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand?

This was the koan that the app gave to Tom. “Oh, come on!” he thought, “Everybody knows that one.” Then he asked the chat for another koan and received the following:

Gutei’s Finger

Whenever he was asked about Zen, Master Gutei raised one finger.

One day, a boy in the temple began imitating him. When Gutei heard about this, he called the boy over and cut off his finger.

As the boy cried out in pain, Gutei called to him. When the boy turned his head, Gutei raised one finger.

At that moment, the boy was enlightened.

Tom made a face of contempt at the new koan. These Zen masters, with their tranquil cruelty, accepting a chopped-off hand as an offering[1], cutting cats in two,[2] and breaking people’s legs with doors[3]. From the vantage point of his casual dress, expensive phone in hand, and nice life, it seemed barbaric. Then Tom started thinking about the koan, skewing the question to “Could the boy somehow avoid having his finger chopped off, but still attain enlightenment?” Or, another question, could he have played the situation differently? After some intellectual probing, he concluded that he probably couldn’t and that the incident with the finger was unavoidable. His thoughts were lazy, his emotions still sleepy and slippery as the train darted through its dark tunnel, carrying so many people to work.

* * *

The men’s room in the office had three solitary seats and no urinals. There was a large shared sink with a mirror and one of those electric hand dryers that did not dry much with its loud gushing airflow. Tom came out of the booth and saw that the sink was taken. He did not want to linger in the small corridor, so he moved along to wash his hands in the adjacent kitchen. Even more efficient, he first went to his desk, took a dirty coffee cup to clean that as well, then entered the kitchen. At the door, he almost bumped into the man, who just a second ago was washing his hands in the restroom. 

“Did you wash your hands?” asked the man at the kitchen door.

Well, Tom Eton Johns, the man of high repute, the industrious worker, the loving and supportive father and husband, simply left the room, the building, even. And a child caught in the act was left to answer the question.

“I was just going to,” answered Tom guiltily.

“Touching all the door knobs with your pissed hands. That’s a bit disgusting, wouldn’t you say?”

“Look, if I did anything to upset you, I am sorry…”

“Touching all the door knobs with your pissed hands.” The man reiterated with a somewhat louder voice, “That’s a bit disgusting, wouldn’t you say?”

A short silence fell; nobody else was in the room or corridor. The kitchen had two opposite doors, and the man took a few steps back towards one of them while Tom was still standing at the other door with his coffee cup in hand.

“Wash your hands,” said the man.

“Alright, I will,” Tom answered.

Shortly after, he was all alone in the small kitchen. He mechanically washed his cup and hands, filled himself a glass of water, and returned to the desk he had booked for the day. Tom did not know the man who had called him out; they had never talked or even greeted each other; this was their first interaction. The company had about a thousand workers; one could not know everyone. Most of them worked from home. People occasionally came to the office for conferences, stakeholder meetings, or to interact socially.

Tom had seen that man a few times. He always looked bitter and closed, or so it seemed. It is common for a perception to be actually a reflection. Tom probably looked just as grumpy and detached as the other guy he was gauging as grumpy and detached. It was a chicken-or-egg problem. The man who had just confronted Tom was medium to high, with messy, wavy yellow hair and blue eyes. He was neither fat nor thin, with a somewhat strong build. His arms were not large, but their muscles looked highlighted, as if always tense. He resembled an actor Tom had watched in a comedy YouTube channel. The actor’s role was named Ben, so Tom, in his mind, called this unknown colleague of his Ben.

As he sat at his desk, staring at the two computer screens with a stupid and empty gaze, Tom felt shocked and violated. He still felt like a child, a child bullied by someone and shamed publicly (even though it was just the two of them in the kitchen). The guy, whom Tom referred to as Ben, looked aggressive. His hands were tense, fists clenched, and his blue eyes stared right at Tom ‒ this disgusting, ill-mannered creature that had just besmirched the office. “Ben probably wanted to punch me,” he thought to himself.

Then, the first of many realizations came to Tom’s mind. His work-related tasks were far off in the fringe outback of his consciousness, hiding behind prickly shrubs. He could only think about what had just happened in the kitchen. First realization – his whole being, as far as Ben was concerned (or so Tom thought at least) was compressed and boiled down to the “toilet-hands guy”. This was the birth and solidification of the first impressions they had of each other, and they were both caricatures. Ben was an aggressive bully, and Tom was a disgusting grub. And it felt like, although both impressions were simple and skewed, they seemed highly resistant to any change.

As Ben’s words hissed at the back of Tom’s mind, the later started to calculate how many door nobs did he touch with his “pissed hands”. He had left the main restroom, so that’s one, made a semi-circle to his desk, which was in an open space, then went to the kitchen, so that’s two. Then another nuance came to mind: Ben, set on a desk at the opposite wing of the office. Between his wing and the wing where Tom sat, there was a quick connection via the kitchen with two doors. Ben had encountered him while going towards Tom’s desk just after he had left the bathroom. The former seemed to be searching for Tom, going towards him at a fast pace. This deduction might have been a bit paranoid, but it was pretty congruent with the facts. Otherwise, what was Ben doing there? He was not making coffee or drawing from the water dispenser in the kitchen; there were no meeting rooms in the vicinity where Ben was headed. Tom could not shake the feeling that his disgruntled and disgusted colleague was looking for him to call him out. If Tom hadn’t gone to the kitchen to wash his cup, Ben might have had the conversation right there at Tom’s desk, where more people might have overheard what the men were talking about.    

The company’s atmosphere was introverted. Most people kept to their own business. “What on earth possessed this man to seek me out in the office and call out my poor hygiene? Was it his disgust or self-righteousness, or did he respond to my assumption that I didn’t like him without knowing him?” Tom thought to himself. When considering human relationships and connections, you have your loved ones, family, friends, acquaintances, and a network of people you are willing to help. The connection between all these is positive, benevolent, and humane. It spreads out like a network of mutual support. Yet, there is a polar network to this one, a shadow, if you will, where the connections are marked by prejudice, irritation, ignorance, and hatred of the lowest kind, misinformed, self-defined, and malevolent. Tom had prejudged Ben from the start; he had noticed him before and was stirring a pot of random contempt for this man, and now this incident had shut the pot’s lid for both of them.

They had drawn caricatures of each other, both exaggerated and flat; they could not help doing so. They held false notions of each other. Tom thought of a poem he had written about a year ago:

A distance too vast to converse or even wave at each other, we let the

Tectonic plates silently pull us apart, further away until the only thing left

Was a bias and faulty remembrance that we had of each other.

The poem was about a toxic relationship he had with his former manager. Then it struck him that, just before the incident, Tom had thought of him – a micromanaging, bullying brute, who made Tom numb and in a constant state of shallow stress. He was so fortunate that he had no such experiences here; he really loved his current company and position and the people, too. Now, out of the blue came another bully, an incidental one and maybe even in his right in being disgruntled (whether Tom liked this or not).

Tom sighed. It seemed that he had conjured the whole affair. Feeling contempt towards Ben without reason, remembering his manager, and being somewhat proud that he had risen above his former circumstances. All of this orchestrated what followed. He had himself manifested it, through and through.

* * *

Not much else occupied Tom’s mind apart from his short and sharp conversation with Ben. Through the booking system, Tom could see the office’s floor plan, with each desk and the names of the people who occupied them. It was very convenient for spying on colleagues and remembering names, as long as you knew who sat at what desk. Ben’s real name was Craig Ericson. Nevertheless, with a stubborn attitude, Tom refused to think of the man’s actual name; he still called him Ben, as if this unnaming somehow punished his coworker.

How could Tom now introduce himself? Would Ben even be willing to shake his hand? What if they had to meet and collaborate in the future? There was an upcoming workshop, what if Tom and Ben shared a group there? Tom thought he would have to avoid Ben until one of them left the company, which was not so hard, considering they mainly worked from home these days, and the office was just for holding events. Tom came to the office once or twice a week, more or less.

Different questions vexed Tom; they came and went like ambassadors in some foreign mission. One stood out: “I am now a caricature in the mind of Ben, a reduced human being. If this is the case, then most of the opinions and impressions held for me by others are also reductions and caricatures. I, in turn, hold all my acquaintances in my mind in false images and sketches. Nobody knows me, and I know no one!” Tom remembered the book he read by Jiddu Krishnamurti the 20^th century Indian philosopher and orator. He also said something to the effect that no one knows anyone. All we know is stained by us and by our impressions and prejudgments. This tormented Tom silently and numbly because he felt like he was no one. He was hanging in the air, and all he touched, did, and left behind was irrevocably unreal and skewed. His being was broken up to be scattered in the world.

He got out of the subway around 7:50 in the evening. The sky was tuning down in grey-blue with blazing bruised clouds of painful purple. It was peaceful. Tom recalled how he wanted a koan in the morning and was not really engaged by the Zen koan of old, produced by Chat GPT. But this mundane, awkward, unimportant, dismissible incident clung to him like a sessile sea creature. He could not think of anything else, and all his feelings and fancies followed his thoughts in dance, like the rats and children followed the Pied Piper. As he watched the bruised eve sky, Tom thought that he had gotten his koan alright, and was engaged in it with his whole being, as any devotee should be. For a moment, this gave a certain rapture to his condition; he was happy that he was engulfed and engaged by something.   

As he watched the sunset and dusk before him, rainy clouds crept from behind and started to drizzle in a mild rain. Such rain had small drops and gave little moisture, but it had a piercing sound, like the shuffling of shifting sands, like the rustling of flax. Still afflicted, still insulted, ashamed and confused, Tom watched the rain as his bus was running late. He held many mixed feelings, yet all of them hushed down and watched the soothing rain, mesmerized by its innate rustle. Pools and puddles started to form on the ground as fallen drops echoed in perfect circles. The water was accumulating and leaving the streets, flowing into the gutters. Tom thought of the rain and how long it stood there in recess as rising vapor, gathering clouds until it fell to the earth, only to disappear again, slipping away into its never-ending cycle.

If all that Ben had was a caricature of Tom, and all Tom had was a caricature of Ben, how could anyone know anybody? Like the rain that came drizzling, the question could scarcely be defined, and its answer was even more obscure. It would move and slip like water; the event was plain and visible. It was immediate. Yet any examination lagged behind, and its lag and inapplicability increased with each drop of rain. All the passing water would move underground and leave no trace until it came again as rain.

Tom felt a gush of understanding inside him, a confidence that even if he could not answer his koan, he could still live with it.

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[1] The list refers to different stories from Zen Buddhism, where a monk becomes enlightened after some act of seeming cruelty. The first reference is of Huike, who, after being rejected by the first Zen patriarch, Bodhidharma, offered his chopped-off hand as a sign of his devotion.

[2] This refers to the “Nanquan Cuts the Cat” koan.

[3] This refers to the master Linji Yixuan (better known as Rinzai Gigen in Japanese) who shut out the monk Uman and broke his leg with the flung door.