Kosho Uchiyama (1912-1998) was the abbot of Antai-ji Sōtō Zen Temple near Kyoto, Japan. This story is from Uchiyama Rōshi’s book Approach to Zen, published in 1973, and it was also retold in his best known book Opening the Hand of Thought, first published in English in 1993. Uchiyama Rōshi introduces the story as being from the Edo period in Japan (1603-1867).

Quarrelling Squashes
Behind a temple there was a field where a lot of squashes were ripening. One day a fight started. The squashes split up into two groups and made a big racket shouting at each other. The head priest heard the uproar, and when he went to see what had happened, he found the squashes quarreling. The priest yelled and scolded them saying, “Hey, you squashes! The idea of fighting among yourselves! Everyone do zazen!”

The priest taught them how to do zazen. “Fold your legs like this, sit up, and straighten your back and neck.” While the squashes were sitting zazen just as the priest had taught them, their anger subsided and they settled down. Then the priest quietly said, “Everyone put your hand on top of your head.” When the squashes felt the top of their own heads with their hand, they found some weird thing on their heads. It turned out to be one vine which connected them altogether. “This is really strange. Actually we’re all tied together and living just one life. In spite of that we’ve been arguing. What a mistake! It’s just as the priest said.”

After that, the squashes got along with each other very well.

***

It’s a nice image of teaching squashes to practise meditation. Teaching them how to fold their legs, and sit up and straighten their back and their neck. And then the idea of them having hands which they would put on their heads, and even having heads!

It’s a charming little story, but of course there is a point to it. Obviously when we hear the story we are meant to think of ourselves. It’s a metaphor for us humans and how we see the world, and for how we behave. We are the squashes, and just like the squashes, when we are all caught up in our own anger and fear, our own delusions and our own views of the world, then there are lots of things about how the world actually is which we just don’t notice. We are just unaware of them. Some of these things might be aspects of the outside world, but perhaps more importantly there are things about our ‘inside’ world, our own minds and our own thoughts, which we don’t notice. These include what you might call our own world-view: the ways that we see the world; the way that we think of other people; the way that we think of all the other things around us, including animals, plants and inanimate objects.

When we’re caught up in our own fears and desires, our minds are disturbed and we are not at peace with ourselves, and this is a state of suffering. If we are lucky we come to notice and acknowledge that we are suffering, but one of the difficult things about being in this state is that, although it hurts, we are often only dimly aware of what is going on. Because of this we’re not in a very good position to do anything about it. One way of describing what causes this suffering is that we are unaware of the true nature of reality. There are so many things about us and our mind, and the world around us, that we just haven’t paid attention to. When we’re not aware of them, there’s no way that we can try and live in harmony with them, because we don’t know what they are. When we don’t know how to live in harmony with reality, we often end up acting in ways that are not in harmony with it. When we act in a way that’s not in harmony with how reality is, we suffer; we feel disturbed and our minds are not at ease.

That’s the position the squashes find themselves in; they’re all fighting amongst each other. We too can be fighting amongst ourselves, either literally or metaphorically. We might be trying to get one up on someone else, or doing things which make things better for us at the expense of others; these are just different kinds of fighting. Without some kind of introspective practice like meditation, it’s very hard to get beyond that. We’re lucky if we have a sense of ‘the mind that seeks the way’, and realize that there’s something unsatisfactory in our life as it is. If we’re fortunate we might come across meditation. It might be someone coming out and scolding us and saying, “Hey, you squashes! Stop fighting! Everyone do zazen!”, but as we are not just squashes in a story we usually have to go and look for meditation and Buddhist teaching ourselves. You may come across it in a book, on a video, on YouTube, online, or anywhere, but it probably won’t be in the form of someone giving you a direct instruction and saying “Hey, everybody do zazen!”. However, when we do connect with the Buddha’s teaching it can feel just as though it is someone saying, “Hey, everybody do zazen!”. That’s what the practice is calling us to do.

We feel that call, and when we have a growing sense that meditation is important, even if we don’t really know what it is, then that can draw us to Buddhist practice. We might not know why we are drawn to it, just that there is something about it which we know we have to explore. If we’re lucky we find someone who can teach us how to meditate ‘properly’ and the priest or the monk does that for the squashes. It’s a really brief meditation instruction: “Fold your legs like this, sit up, and straighten your back and neck.”, but that’s actually a pretty good description of the meditation posture. Our practice is sometimes described as ‘just sitting’ (Shikantaza in Japanese), so in a way just getting them to sit in that posture is the whole of meditation instruction. Of course it’s helpful to say something about what goes in our mind as well, but we’re not actually trying to do anything in our mind, or with our mind.

The squashes only get this very brief introduction to zazen, but it’s enough. It gets them to sit still and to sit upright. When we do this we are embodying the Buddha, and just by being willing to sit still and sit upright, that helps the squashes to become a bit more calm.

At our temple we have a snow globe, which someone kindly donated, which has a nice picture of a Buddha in it. When the water is clear you can see the Buddha clearly. In just the same way, when our minds are clear we can see the Buddha in ourselves and in others. When our minds are disturbed, however, it’s like the snow globe after it has been shaken up; the water is full of the ‘snow’ of our own fears, angers and desires, and all the other thoughts and emotions that race through our minds. Although the Buddha is still there, it is very much harder to see, and most of the time we are just focussed on all of the ‘snow’ of our own thoughts, and don’t even notice the Buddha. If we try to do anything to force the snow to fall to the bottom, it just agitates it all the more. We can’t make the snow settle down, but we can allow it to settle down, just by sitting still. When we are willing to sit still, the water gradually clears, and as the water clears, we are once again able to see the Buddha more clearly.

When the monk gets the squashes to sit still, it allows their anger to subside. Just like a shaken-up snow globe, they started off with a mind full of anger, and that’s all they could see. Whilst they only see their anger they just keep fighting each other. When they sit in meditation, in zazen, all the turbulence in their minds is allowed to settle. There’s nothing they’re trying to do to get rid of it; they probably don’t even think about getting rid of it. They’re just sitting in zazen, sitting still. Because our mind and body aren’t two separate things, how we sit with our body has a profound effect on how our mind is. Being willing to sit physically still helps our mind to be still as well.

As the minds of the squashes gradually settle down, they become more receptive to noticing things about themselves, and about the world around them, which they wouldn’t have noticed before. They wouldn’t have been able to. If when they were all busy fighting each other, the monk had come out and said, “Hey, everyone put your hands on your head and feel what’s there”, they wouldn’t have done it. They were too busy fighting, and were too busy engaged in their own dramas. When they sat still they were willing to let go of all that drama. They just allowed it to fall away and became like the smooth surface of a pond reflecting the sky as the ripples disappear. And when they had settled down the monk was then able to give them some further instruction, to help them question how they see the world.

***

If only for us it was as simple as putting our hand on our head and feeling a vine that we’re all connected to! It is actually kind of like that, but not in quite that literal way. When the monk instructs the squashes to put their hands on their heads, and when they feel there the vine that connects them all, that connection between them all is part of the nature of reality. That connection with others is something that we can all come to get a sense of, and to notice. For us there isn’t a simple instruction of putting our hand on our head and feeling it, but just by sitting still in meditation, by carrying on practising, we come to realize that we’re not the isolated beings that we once believed we were. We’re not a whole bunch of individual squashes unconnected to each other having a fight. We come to see that, just like the squashes, we are part of something bigger. We might describe that ‘something bigger’ as ‘all existence’ or ‘the Buddha that is the whole universe’, but however we describe it, there is a deepening sense of fellowship with other beings. This isn’t just an intellectual understanding, but something much more visceral. We could describe it as being an emotional connection, but it isn’t just emotional either. We feel this connection with our fellow Sangha members, with our relatives and friends, and with all people, but also with animals and plants, and everything that makes up this world that we live in.

If we’re practising meditation and there are flies buzzing around the room, we feel a connection with them too. There is a story about some people who were sitting in meditation with a fly buzzing around. They were getting quite annoyed by it, and then at some point the monk who was leading the meditation period got up and opened the window to let the fly out. Later on the others said to each other, “You see, even the monk got really annoyed by that fly and had to let it out.” This is to completely misunderstand the monk’s actions; the monk just wanted to liberate the poor fly, which would have died if it had stayed trapped in the hot room. When we realise that it isn’t about only considering ourselves, we realise that it’s not us against the other squashes, it’s not us against the flies. We’re all just doing our best to live and exist in this world.

As we carry on sitting in meditation we get a deeper and deeper sense of this connection. Even though it is never as simple as feeling the vine with our hand, as we go on in our practice we see that it’s just as real and direct as that. And when we see that, when we have seen it just once, we can’t unsee it. As the sense of it deepens and strengthens within us, we realize that if we want to be at peace, if we want to remain with an undisturbed mind, then we have to act in accord with that understanding that we have. We have to act in accord with the reality that all beings are Buddha, and that we don’t want to harm any beings, because to do so is like harming ourselves. It’s harming part of the body of the Buddha that we are all part of. Yes, there are still differences; flies are different to human beings, and one human being is identifiably different to another human being. At the same time there is something that we hold in common; that we’re all part of this one universe. There is the ‘all is one’ and the ‘all is different’ together.

We’re all breathing in and out the same air; we’re all drinking the same water. Our body uses the water for a while, and then it joins all the rest of the water again, and on it goes, circling through each of our bodies. The same is true of food and energy and all sorts of things. We’re just so deeply connected. We couldn’t exist in this world without all the other things that are in it. We rely on all that this planet, this environment, provides; that the temperature is a temperature we can live in, that there is air pressure so our bodies don’t just fly apart or all the water in them vaporise. We are interdependent, and when we come to see this deep connection, just as the squashes did, then we find that we just can’t fight any more. Certainly not in the ways that we did to begin with; and as that sense of connection continues to deepen, we’re less and less able to be quarrelling squashes at all.

We find we have to get along with others, because it just hurts not to. We find we have to treat people well, because it hurts not to. We find we have to be open-hearted and generous with all beings, because it hurts not to. If we don’t live in this way, then we suffer. We suffer because our minds become disturbed as a consequence of acting in ways that cause harm. When we follow this teaching we find that the sense of connection just keeps going deeper and deeper. As the squashes say, “This is really strange. Actually we’re all tied together and living just one life. In spite of that we’ve been arguing. What a mistake!”

What the squashes say might sound very naïve, but it’s also very true.

***

Sources:

The story of the Quarrelling Squashes is told in:

Uchiyama, Kosho (1973). Approach to Zen: The Reality of Zazen/Modern Civilization and Zen. Japan Publications. ISBN 0-87040-252-8

It is also in:

Uchiyama, Kosho; Thomas Wright; Jishō Cary Warner; Shohaku Okumura (2004). Opening the Hand of Thought: Foundations of Zen Buddhist Practice. Wisdom Publications. ISBN 0-86171-357-5. OCLC 54670173