Diagnosis, and the Buddhist art of not-knowing

‘I rarely draw what I see – I draw what I feel in my body.’ (Barbara Hepworth: Drawings from a Sculptors Landscape)

Michael Gove is a British politician with an uncanny party trick of being able to match any date to the day of the week on which it falls. If you want to know, say, what you’ll be doing on May 15 2025, he can tell you, ‘Well as it’s a Sunday you’ll probably have your feet up’. His advisors have warned him against ever exposing this freakish mental wiring to the British public, who are suspicious of people knowing more than they should. 

In this country we are very much with the great Shunryu Suzuki, when he said, ‘In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few’.  So when Michael Gove said in the run-up to the referendum that people ‘have had enough of experts’ he was cannily contacting his inner Zen master.  In the US, too, Donald Trump has made the Zen art of not-knowing work for him pretty well. You feel that with him, coming to high office with ‘beginner’s mind’, there are very many possibilities indeed (most of them pretty catastrophic). And if you want to know about where a culture is going, well, look what adverts ‘hook’ you with. I see that the latest advert for a Ford motor-car invites us to ‘unlearn’. People like the sound of this. They don’t actually think about it; I mean, unlearn what? – French irregular verbs? How to drive?’ Well, no – the idea is something like removing the dead hand of rigid old ideas that hold back your natural creativity.

However, if there is one thing to take away from Buddhism, it is, ‘Don’t take anything too literally’. So bear with me while I talk about Donald Rumsfeld. Back in the days of President George ‘Dubya’ Bush, when he (Dubya) bestrode the world like a colossus in cowboy boots, the US secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, tried to communicate to the American people an important epistemological principle.  I know, it was an altogether more innocent age. Mr Trump no doubt relaxes by re-reading the best bits from the works of Descartes and Frege, but if he does, he is not such an ass as to share the more subtle aspects of his inner life with the US public. Rumsfeld, though, made the colossal blunder of blowing the gaffe on the fact that politicians can never really know what’s going on. What he said was this: ‘as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns’. And these, he said, are what you need to look out for.

So by way of illustration, before my recent diagnosis of cancer, the tumour in my parotid gland was an unknown unknown; I didn’t know what I did not know. Now, the prognosis, how bad it is, is a known unknown; I know what I don’t know. Tomorrow, it becomes a known known. I am now in that in-between state or bardo, of uncertainty. Will I be sentenced to die slowly and disagreeably over a few months? Will my sentence be commuted? We shall see. The mind prepares itself by imagining the worst, whilst slyly hoping to be pleasantly surprised. You really get a sense of the mind’s self-deluding optimism.

Not knowing is a Zen idea. It derives from an exchange between two Chinese Zen (in Chinese, Chan) masters:

Attention! Master Dizang asked Fayan, “Where have you come from?”

“I pilgrimage aimlessly,” replied Fayan.

“What is your pilgrimage for?” asked Dizang.

“I don't know'” replied Fayan.

“Not knowing is most intimate,” remarked Dizang.

At that, Fayan experienced great enlightenment.

The idea of intimacy is another Zen idea. It is their way of talking about Enlightenment, the goal of Buddhism. It suggests that the goal is to keep coming closer to one’s experience, even to make friends with it, however objectionable or uncomfortable it may appear to be. In my case it is to be at home with the hopes and fears with which I try to evade not knowing, seeing them for what they are, but not letting them take over my mind.

There is a story of a Zen master, in a public meeting not all that long ago with a high Tibetan lama. He offered the Tibetan lama an orange with the words ‘What is this?’ The lama replied, ‘Don’t you know? It’s an orange, a fruit’. The Tibetan didn’t realize that he was being invited to engage in the kind of gnomic exchange around not knowing, which is central to Zen Buddhism, but which does not feature in Tibetan Buddhism. One should always bear in mind that different Buddhist traditions play the Buddhist game by often very different rules.

Not-knowing may seem like an absence. In fact as a Zen Buddhist concept, it is an awareness of something that is not available to cognition. Rumsfeld was derided for what seemed like mystical nonsense. This is because not knowing is not an accepted part of our world. Our thinking processes do not really deal in not-knowing. Even when we tell ourselves, well, there’s nothing you can do; you just have to wait and see, we insist on setting out the possibilities, as if persuading ourselves we can somehow get a grasp on the unknown outcome. Not-knowing is not a cognition – and yet one’s cognition insists on trying to crack it open.  Like water, it can’t be grasped. I think you have to just give yourself to it with a certain confidence that it will hold you, like the deep waters of a lake will hold the swimmer.