Zen and Letting Go: Can You Stop Trying to Control Everything?

1. Find a wider view of a changing life

The chapter begins with the small self repeatedly giving way. Its language of dying and growing points to the loosening of a fixed sense of self as life changes. Things move out of balance; new forms emerge. The source sees beauty within that movement, with a deeper harmony as its background.

It names that background Buddha-nature, a Buddhist understanding of the nature of existence. Seen only at the level of separate, changing forms, life appears full of suffering. Seen against this wider background, difficulty can become part of an expanded experience of living.

This is a spiritual interpretation of change. Reading it as an invitation to meet uncertainty leaves room for care and action; it need not become a demand to seek suffering or approve of harm. The chapter’s positive account of imbalance asks us to consider whether life must look perfectly settled before we can participate in it.

2. Give room, and keep paying attention

The next passage turns to painting. It contrasts the vitality of earlier painters with work that has become overly formal. Even apparently scattered marks contain relationships. Trying to arrange dots without any order at all reveals how difficult it is to stand outside those relationships and command them.

The same tension appears when we try to manage other people. The chapter offers the image of cattle or sheep in a wide meadow: space itself becomes part of caring for them. It extends that image to people, suggesting that we allow room for their activity while remaining attentive.

Its distinction matters. Abandoning people receives the strongest criticism. Trying to control them fares little better. The preferred stance is watchful attention without a possessive wish to direct everything.

In everyday terms, this can be read as making room for another person’s way of doing things while continuing to listen and care. That is an editorial application of the passage, rather than a set of management instructions or permission to overlook harmful behavior.

3. Let thoughts come and go

The chapter then applies the same principle to our own minds. During seated meditation, thoughts may appear even when we wish for complete quiet. We do not have to treat their arrival as a disturbance that must be defeated. The instruction is to allow them to arrive and pass.

The source also acknowledges that this sounds easier than it is. When something is troubling us, demanding immediate stillness adds another effort. Forceful suppression is described as the wrong direction of practice.

Counting breaths or attending to each inhalation and exhalation is offered as a support. These pages do not specify a counting sequence, a target rate, or a breath-holding interval. Their emphasis is on where attention rests.

Even concentration is not presented as the entire purpose of Zen. It supports seeing things as they are and allowing experience to move. The chapter describes practice as opening the “small mind” toward a “big mind” that includes everything. Focus serves that openness; it is not a contest to exclude every thought.

4. Notice how the past enters the present

The discussion becomes more paradoxical when it turns to time. The chapter attributes to Dogen the idea that time moves from the present toward the past. It acknowledges the familiar account of past, present, and future, then asks what time is like within lived experience.

Its example is a poem connected with the warrior Minamoto no Yoshitsune. As the source tells it, a woman mourning him wishes that earlier days could become present again. In the act of remembering, the past becomes vivid in her present experience.

The story illustrates the teaching’s experiential meaning. It does not establish that chronological events reverse. Memory is being encountered now, even when its subject belongs to another time. Here the poem and its historical framing are being reported as they appear in the supplied chapter, rather than independently verified history.

The chapter also uses a paradox about walking east and west to evoke freedom beyond habitual divisions. These images invite contemplation. They do not function as literal directions or a scientific account of time and space.

5. Let freedom have a form

The final point prevents the teaching from becoming a vague instruction to do whatever we want. The chapter insists that freedom requires rules and forms of practice. It connects that structure with the earlier discussion of an appropriate seated posture and attention to breathing.

Those forms ask for increasingly careful participation. In the source’s account, understanding and following them opens the possibility of freedom. Simply dismissing every rule misses the practice that the word “freedom” is meant to describe.

Taken together, the pages offer a demanding balance: give thoughts room without drifting away, give people space without abandoning care, and follow a practice without trying to force experience into a perfect shape.

A question to carry into the day might be: where can I loosen my grip while continuing to pay attention? That question is an application of the reading, not a promise that all difficulty will disappear. It leaves us with something modest and concrete to notice.

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