Mumonkan – Case 46
Zen master Sekiso asked: “How can you proceed further from the top of a hundred-foot pole?” Another eminent teacher said: “You, who sit on the top of a hundred-foot pole—although you have entered the Way, you are not yet genuine. Proceed on from the top of the pole, and you will show your whole body in the ten directions.”
One thing I’ve noticed in Zen practice is that a teacher often meets you at the very edge of your comfort zone. They meet you where you feel safe—but they don’t necessarily want you to stay there.
They invite you to take another step.
And sometimes there doesn’t seem to be anywhere to step.
That is the extraordinary image we are given in this koan. You are standing at the top of a hundred-foot pole. You have climbed all the way up. There is nowhere higher to go.
And then the teacher says: proceed further.
What do you do?
Through practice, we may have moments when something becomes clear. Perhaps we see ourselves or our lives differently. Perhaps something that we have struggled with suddenly loosens. These moments can be important and precious.
But then comes the danger of stopping.
Now I understand.
Now I know.
Now I’ve got it.
And before we know it, something that was alive has become another place to stand.
Life doesn’t cooperate with that very well. One day is never quite like the next. The person in front of me today is not exactly the person I met yesterday. I’m not exactly the same person either.
And yet I constantly enter situations carrying what I think I already know.
I know what this person is like.
I know what they are going to say.
I know how this meeting will go.
I know how I will react.
Sometimes I’m right. But even then, perhaps I haven’t really met what was happening. I’ve met my expectation of it.
That is one place where I recognise the hundred-foot pole in my own life.
I’ve worked for the same company for many years. There is comfort in familiarity. More generally, I know that I have a tendency to play things safe. I like to know where the ground is before I put my foot down.
But what happens when there is no ground?
Zen practice has increasingly brought me into that question. Not by encouraging recklessness or telling me to throw away everything familiar, but by showing me how often I try to secure life before I actually live it.
We plan, predict, remember and prepare. All of that has its place. But none of it changes the simple fact that we do not know what the next moment will bring.
The top of the pole is an uncomfortable place.
You have climbed a hundred feet. Perhaps it has taken years. Why would you let go now?
And yet Sekiso asks:
How can you proceed further?
The koan gives us another remarkable image: if we proceed from the top of the pole, we will “show our whole body in the ten directions.”
I don’t want to explain that image away too quickly.
What would it be to show our whole body?
At work.
With our family.
With friends.
When things are going well.
When things fall apart.
When we know what to do.
And when we haven’t got a clue.
For me, this is where koans become more than something to think about during formal practice. I carry them around. Sometimes they disappear completely, and then something happens and there they are again.
Suddenly I notice the pole.
I notice myself holding on.
I notice how certain I am about what is going to happen next.
And perhaps, for just a moment, I don’t know.
There is something vulnerable about that. Not vulnerability as weakness, but the vulnerability of meeting something before we have decided what it is.
Perhaps that is why the teacher does not allow us to remain comfortably at the top.
Even there, after all that climbing, the practice is not finished.
There is still another step.
But if there is nowhere left to put your foot—
how do you take it?
Riccardo 