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Nanquan then added, “The Way does not belong to knowing or not-knowing. Knowing is delusion; not-knowing is dullness.
“When we really have reached the true Way beyond all doubt, we find it as vast and boundless as outer space.
“How can it be talked about on a level of right and wrong?”

The ineffability of outer space, of Sol, Luna, stellae, and beyond: star systems upon star systems, galaxy upon galaxy stretching to the furthest corners of the universe. And what is all that vastness?

Zhaozhou leads off the koan by asking his teacher Naquan:
“What is the Way?”
Nanquan responds simply:
“Ordinary mind is the Way.”

Nanquan is telling us our lives, which we often see as small and narrow, are larger than we can possibly imagine. That our ordinary, everyday mind is actually vast and boundless; it is the universe itself. We somehow know this to be true and seek a kind of intimacy with the ineffable by seeking to name it: Venus, Jupiter, Crab Nebula, and other star systems which make up the mages of heroes and serpents moving across the dark night fabric. We dream of going out to meet the unknowable.

My own ordinary thoughts have been saturated with stories of space travel in recent weeks. NASA’s Artemis program, with its fresh pictures of the dark side of the moon, took me back to the summer of 1969. My father had just bought us a new color set (“Don’t sit too close! The radiation is bad for you!”) and the whole family, including us six kids, two parents, and our terrier Daisy, crammed into our small T.V. room to watch Neil Armstrong step off the lander’s ladder (in B&W, of course). How exciting it was!

I have also been recently inthralled by a grand tale of humans, aliens, and microbes venturing into the outer Dao in Project Hail Mary. In the movie, a fantastical Hollywood blockbuster, Ryan Gosling is sent twelve light-years away to the Tau Ceti system to find out why the microbe Astrophage (“star eater”), which is happily supping on our Sun’s life, is not destroying that distant star. Gosling portrays Dr. Ryland Grace, a brilliant molecular biologist who flames out of academia, becomes an ordinary middle-school science teacher, and then saves all of humanity.

As good as the movie was, I’ve finished the audio version of the Project Hail Mary novel by the sci-fi master Ron Weir, and enjoyed it even more. The audio book is read by actor Ray Porter, whose voice has an uncanny resemblance to Robert Downey, Jr.

But if inside and outside are not two—ordinary mind and space are one single body–what about the mind of the inner Dao? So often in practice—at least it has been my experience—we look outside for purity, solutions, salvation, when we can only really find it inside our own hearts and minds.

Two friends, Yantou and Xuefeng were stuck in a small hut during a snow storm on Tortoise Mountain. Yantou sleeps while Xuefeng meditates. Xuefeng tells Yantou he should be meditating, and Yantou replies his friend is sitting like a “clay buddha” and should get some food and rest. Xuefeng admits that his heart is not yet at rest. Yantou responds, “Haven’t you heard it said that ‘what comes in through the gate [from outside yourself] is not the family treasure?’…You must let it flow from your own breast, and in the future your teaching will cover heaven and earth.” Yantou’s words changed his friend’s life.

Perhaps the most valuable lesson from the Artemis program and Project Hail Mary is that we need not catapult into outer space to try and find decency and wholeness. In a world beset with digital poisons and social cruelties, these space tales provide messages of friendship over isolation, sacrifice over personal gain, knowledge over ignorance. We need to tell ourselves and each other again and again that these things matter. Hail Mary is a prayer whispered for our salvation; one perhaps worth listening to.

—Jon Joseph

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Jon Joseph Roshi, Director of San Mateo Zen Community