An Empty Room Fills with Light

Reading it step by step

Over the last two days we read the fasting of the heart and sitting-and-forgetting: one about emptiness, one about forgetting. Today's passage closes that fasting-of-the-heart conversation. Confucius paints a picture for Yan Hui of what happens once the heart is empty.

Let's take it in three steps.

First: an empty room is a bright room. Old houses had small windows, and a room crammed with things was dark. Clear it out, let the sun in, and the whole room turns white with light. The heart is the same. Packed with opinions, worries and plans, it has nowhere for light to land. Emptiness doesn't mean nothing is there. It means leaving space for the light.

Second: galloping while sitting. These two characters could have been written about us. You sit on the sofa, your thumb slides across a screen, and your mind has already been to ten places: someone's holiday, tomorrow's meeting, a remark from yesterday. The body hasn't moved; the mind is out of breath. Zhuangzi calls this failing to stop. Good fortune rests only where things are still. If you keep running, it can't find you.

Third: even spirits come, let alone people. It sounds like an exaggeration, but it's very practical. People want to be near someone whose mind is quiet and who isn't scheming; they want to tell that person what they really think. Yan Hui set out to reform the ruler of Wei. After a long way round, Confucius's answer is: first, clear out your own room.

So today's work is simple. Take five minutes and do nothing. See whether you can clear one corner of that inner room.

Where there's space, the light comes in by itself.