Finding Zen by Accepting Impermanence

In preparation for my conversation with crossword puzzle creator Myles Mellor, I spent days working on some of his crossword puzzles. His essay in the July/August issue of Spirituality+Health magazine is entitled “The Zen of Crossword Puzzles,” and I was eager to see if I could find the zen in these things. Spoiler alert: I couldn’t.

Not that it isn’t there; it might be, but I couldn’t find it. The puzzles were fun, and hitting on the right word—especially when it didn’t come to me right away—came with a slight dopamine rush, so it was a pleasant experience, but no zen. The problem is that “zen” is somewhat of an empty term, which, come to think of it, is very zen since Zen is all about sunya, the fundamental emptiness of all existence. But zen isn’t Zen. Or Zen isn’t zen.

And if that makes sense to you, you are probably in no need of either.

When I was studying Zen, I was taught this teaching by the Zen master Dogen, “To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by the myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of enlightenment remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly.” If you understand Dogen’s teachings, stop reading now. If you don’t, you may read on and learn what I think it means (which is probably wrong).

Dogen is saying that when you practice Zen, you peer into the nature of self and find it empty of permanence. Since there is no permanent self, you forget about the self. When you stop focusing on yourself you realize you are part of everything, but when you look into this everything it too is impermanent and drops away. Since there is nothing permanent there is no enlightenment. Free from the illusion of permanence and the quest for enlightenment you can get on with being a mensch. My Zen teacher was a Jew.

Let’s apply this to the Zen of Crosswords. Draw a square on a sheet of paper. Divide the square into 169 smaller squares: thirteen squares across and thirteen squares down. Randomly blackout fifty squares. Now recite this teaching aloud: “To study the Crossword Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by the myriad squares. When actualized by myriad squares, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of enlightenment remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly. Now go do something kind for someone.”

Listen to the podcast that inspired this essay here.