Open your hand

“To receive everything, one must open one’s hands and give.” –Taisen Deshimaru

“If my hands are fully occupied in holding on to something, I can neither give nor receive.”  –Dorothee Solle

One of the wisest people I know is a man named Eliav Zakay from Israel, CEO of a national youth leadership program there and formerly with the Israel Defense Force Leadership Development School.

I met Eliav in 1995, having gone to the Israeli resort town of Eilat to speak at a conference on international organization development issues which he and many of his Defense Force team attended. Serendipity brought us together—we were both part of a small, fictional country during a global simulation that occurred at the start of the conference. Neither of us being particularly fond of fake games that pit imaginary parts of the world against each other, we endured the global wrangling and as soon as was politely possible escaped for a coffee, a tour of the underwater aquarium, and a rather interesting kayak ride that ended with the former tank commander in the brink. He has been a source of wisdom and humor ever since.

Eliav once told me a story that has stuck with me. Now, ten years later as we enter middle age, he swears it was not he who told me this story, but I will believe until my dying day that it was. It was an important story for me, so I think he should just take credit for it and stop denying it.

While still in the Israel Defense Force, his commander took him to the beach one day. “Eliav,” he said, “pick up two handfuls of sand.” Eliav did as he was told. “Now,” said the commander, “keep one hand open and clench the other into as tight a fist as you can.”

Again, Eliav did as he was told.

“Now,” said the commander, “open the clenched fist and compare how much sand you have in each hand—the hand you clenched and the one you left open.”

“Which one,” he asked, “has the most sand in it?”

“The open hand,” said Eliav. “It is the open hand.”

In trying to hold onto the sand, we squeeze it out.

There are people in life who hold their hand open, and there are those whose hands are shut. Which am I, I wonder? Which are you? What does it take to have a generous nature, to hold your hand open, to live a life in which you give when you don’t have, when you give rather than hold? What is a sacrifice and a true gift—when you have the money or time to give, or when you don’t?

Years ago, I studied Chinese at Johns Hopkins University. I found my notebooks from those classes recently, full of Chinese characters whose meaning I must have known then, but don’t now.   

Hieroglyphics of meaning and tone and visual beauty, stories within strokes, a unity of form, sound, meaning. They are gorgeous artifacts of passion and interest and intense focus, mementos of a dedicated, clear mind that sometimes feels lost in the bill-paying, tempera paint-mixing, lunch-making moments of life.

I was attracted to the rhythm of creating those characters, strokes always done in a particular order without exception, each space between the characters a consistent size, the strokes themselves revealing a meaning unseparatable from the context in which those picture-words find themselves. There was a steadiness to my life when I studied Chinese, a simple rhythm that was so satisfying, stroke after stroke after stroke after stroke after stroke. There was a predictability to it, a pattern.

Within the notebooks, I found my exams, lucid and fast translations from English into Chinese, from Chinese into English, from character into word to sound and back again—amazing pieces of knowledge I had then, but don’t now, like knowing all the words to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” once, and now being left only with “Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky, like a patient etherized upon a table. Let us go through muttering retreats…sumpin-sumpin….” voice falls off, words are lost, mumble, mumble, cough.

That’s okay—it really never came in very handy at cocktail parties anyway, that poem. I take it that T.S. Eliot wasn’t much of a party man.

But Chinese. It was an interest borne of a class in graduate school on poetry and the visual arts. The brilliant Paul Barolsky taught it, having compiled a large notebook of poems that captured in words the experience of looking at a piece of visual art. What a luxurious semester of learning—reading poetry and seeing slides of painting in a small conference room, hearing and experiencing Dr. Barolsky’s passion for the words and images in the process. I was enamored of the idea that spatial images could (or could not?) be captured and evoked through linear and temporal words on a page.

Studying Chinese, that perfect combination of the spatial and the temporal, seemed a natural. I was long past graduate school at the time I figured this out, so had to make it applicable to my job. It was an exercise in chicken and egg technology. Having studied Chinese, opportunities to use it found me—first accompanying the remarkable Xie Xide, president of Shanghai’s Fudan University around the U.S. for a month as she gave lectures as a Fulbright Distinguished Fellow and later, accompanying 15 college presidents from remote provinces of China around the U.S. for four weeks as they visited U.S. state colleges and universities as guests of the Fulbright program.

It is this second group that provides the story of the Buddha beyond language.

We traveled to a different state college almost every day for 30 days. None of these men and women had been in the U.S. before, most had no travel experience at all, and many had no English. I spent our airline flights standing in the aisle like a renegade flight attendant demonstrating with sign language and broken Chinese how to open their cereal boxes (this was way back in the happy days of airline meals).  The English speakers on board those flights always seemed to enjoy the show.

One young participant was Ye Gongxian, president of Yunnan Arts Institute in Kunming, and a famous artist in his own right. He was a small sprite of a man, dressed always in a small black suit and looking the tiniest bit disheveled, his glasses slightly crooked, a wise, sweet smile on his face like a Cheshire cat. He spoke no English so our communication was done without language, which—paradoxically—didn’t keep us from developing a friendship, a recognition of connection and likeness and humanity beyond words. He was shy and funny at the same time, a man with an eye for beauty and art, with a big heart and a big laugh.

When he realized we were traveling on my birthday, he didn’t sleep the night before, but stayed up to carve me a gorgeous chop or seal, an original piece of art by him with my Chinese name on it. As the others told me when he couldn’t hear them, this was a very valuable gift because he was well respected as an artist in China. It was valuable to me for another reason—because of the heart he put into it. He didn’t sleep at all that night, but stayed up to create this piece of art, choosing the perfect Chinese name for me, carving an image that represented me in his mind. 

One afternoon near the end of our trip, I admired a small, simple pin Ye Gongxian was wearing—a gorgeous black and gold emblem of Buddha, tiny and precise and lovely. Not knowing that my compliment was full of cultural meaning, I watched him reach up to his lapel and take the pin off, pressing it in my hand and smiling his sweet knowing smile.

“Oh, no,” I said as I held my hand back out to him. “I can’t take this—no, it’s yours, I was just saying how nice it was.” The rest of the group explained the cultural meaning of my compliment—that his was a usual response, to give what was admired. It brought into sharp contrast how many times I had complimented someone just to make conversation or put myself at ease or, or, or. What deeper significance there was in this small interchange we had, where words actually had meaning—imagine!

That beautiful little Buddha lives in my jewelry box, reminding me these 20 years later of wise Eliav on the beach, and of Ye Gongxian’s nighttime carving, of cultural difference, of depth of meaning rather than superficiality, of gestures that are a perfect union of sound, meaning, and form, and of generosity of spirit.

~*~ 37 Days: Do it Now Challenge ~*~

Give the Buddha, where the Buddha is not only what you have, but what you are.

Carve the chop. Extend yourself for someone else. Give what you want to keep.

[Don’t rely too much on words.]

Open your hand.