A Good Hard Look in the Mirror - The Dewdrop (2025)

Back in the 17th century, samurai Yagyu Munenori wrote: “The reflection of things in the human mind is like the reflection of the moon in the water, reflecting instantaneously.” This use of mirrors and reflections for metaphors of awareness is a popular and recurring image in Zen teaching that goes back as far as early Buddhist times. In his new book, Storehouse of Treasures, author Nelson Foster takes a look at mirrors in Zen as well as a number of other aspects of dharma teachings through China and Japan over dozens of generations. In this excerpt, Foster recalls the ways in which polishing a mirror was upheld as an analogy for perfecting awareness, and how it was also superseded by an evolving philosophy of emptiness.

MIRRORS WERE HIGHLY PRIZED in days of old. Until the production of flat glass was perfected in the nineteenth century, mirrors were rare and expensive, almost always made of metal, and frequently ornate. In Asia and elsewhere, they were owned mainly by elites. This made them objects of interest, if not awe, and surely objects of desire. In premodern societies, mirrors became favorite subjects for painters and seemingly irresistible metaphors for poets, philosophers, storytellers, and others all around the world. Masters of our tradition were definitely among the enthusiasts.

Medieval Chan and Zen teachers and writers gathered such a large and varied collection of mirror metaphors, in fact, that they could be seen as proprietors of a veritable hall of mirrors. Their holdings included the mirror of heaven, taking in everything that happens from its vantage point on high, and the mirror of karma, hanging in the court of Yama, the lord of death, where it reflected a person’s lifetime of misdeeds. They also possessed a pair of imperial mirrors—those of the Qin emperor, with x-ray-like powers, and of the Yellow Emperor, which would subdue the mightiest adversary the instant he held it up. Add another four mirrors to these, the ones that our masters spoke about most often: ancient, round, bright, and broken. I’d be remiss not to mention as well the jeweled (or precious or treasure) mirror, mentioned less often but featured in a poem highly esteemed in our tradition.

Of course, there really aren’t any mirrors; the metaphors are no more than that. Yet each of them represents the ancestors’ attempt to reveal an important attribute of the phenomenon that they thought of as 心鏡 xinjing (or hsin-ching; J., shinkyō), the heartmind mirror or the mirror of heartmind. The underlying concept, of awareness as a form of mirroring, has deep roots in both Indian Buddhism and Daoist thought, and the metaphor continues to find application of this sort even today, in neuroscience. Evidence of neuronal firing that occurs whether a research subject performs an activity or merely observes that same activity being performed has led to identification of “mirror neurons” in the brains of humans, other primates, and members of nonprimate species. Intriguing as these discoveries are, and remarkable as it seems that neuroscientists have chosen the same metaphor to describe their findings, it would be a mistake to suppose that Buddhist and Daoist sages “knew all about” brain function thousands of years ago. The convergence in wording does demonstrate, however, the continuing power of the mirror as a metaphor of how our minds work.

“Medieval Chan and Zen teachers and writers gathered such a large and varied collection of mirror metaphors, in fact, that they could be seen as proprietors of a veritable hall of mirrors.”

I haven’t attempted to trace the genesis or evolution of mirror imagery in Buddhism—a very complicated problem that needn’t concern us here—but one element in the mix was the doctrine that, with profound awakening, a buddha comes into five kinds of wisdom, among them a Great Perfect Mirror Wisdom. Such wisdom, it was said, enables a buddha to survey the whole world with absolute clarity. A text from Chan’s formative period makes a point of characterizing Great Perfect Mirror Wisdom as nondual besides displaying other qualities that came to be associated with xinjing, the mirror of heartmind:

It is like a clear mirror hung in space. All the myriad images appear in it, but this bright mirror never thinks, “I can make images appear,” nor do the images say, “We are born from the mirror.” Since there is neither subject nor object, we call this wisdom the Great Mirror Wisdom.

The metaphor of the heartmind mirror naturally gave rise to the secondary metaphor of cleaning the mirror. In one of the first Buddhist texts circulated in Chinese, Śākyamuni Buddha teaches a monk that he’ll have to work at buffing the mirror if he wants to know “the truth of the Way” and the course of his prior births: “One must maintain the aspiration to practice. It is like polishing a mirror. When the tarnish is gone, the mirror shines, and one sees one’s own form.” In the sūtra, heartmind loses its innate luminosity due to intrusive elements known as “adventitious afflictions.” In Chinese translation, these became “visiting dust irritants,” and early Chan put that image into heavy rotation as it addressed the operation of xinjing in life and practice.

“In one of the first Buddhist texts circulated in Chinese, Śākyamuni Buddha teaches a monk that he’ll have to work at buffing the mirror if he wants to know ‘the truth of the Way’.”

The mirror-cleaning metaphor’s assimilation into Chan instruction is apparent from the “Song of Realizing the Way,” the foundational poem attributed to Yongjia that I quoted earlier, which unreservedly stresses the necessity of wiping the mirror. Near its beginning comes the exhortation:

Dust gathers on a mirror that’s not cleaned.
Right now, you must make it completely clear!

Returning to the metaphor later, the poem leaves no doubt that the mirror under discussion is that of Great Perfect Mirror Wisdom:

The mirror of heartmind shines brilliantly, without obstruction,
its light limitlessly pervading worlds countless as sands of the
Ganges.
The dense weave of the ten-thousand phenomena is reflected
therein,
each of them fully illumined, no inside, no outside.

When the metaphor turns up a third time, it’s to reaffirm both the necessity of cleaning the mirror and the absence from its face of any subject-object dichotomy.

Heartmind as perceiver, things as perceived—
Both are like smudges on a mirror.
Once they’re completely removed, the light begins to show.

It didn’t take long, however, for Chan to launch a critique of mirror-cleansing rhetoric. In the vast literature of our tradition, undoubtedly the best-known story concerning mirrors is one in which Huineng, supposedly an illiterate layman, advances this critique in the context of a sort of Dharma poetry contest set up by Chan’s Fifth Ancestor. The monastery’s head monk, considered the hands-down favorite to win the competition and thus to succeed the Fifth Ancestor, posts this poem:

The body is the bodhi tree,
the heartmind like a bright mirror on a stand.
Time after time, diligently wipe it clean,
never allowing dust to alight.

“The story (of Huineng’s poem) marks a turning point in the tradition, aligning it with awakening to the emptiness of body and mind while denigrating devotion to the project of sustaining spotless mental clarity.”

In the dead of night, Huineng dictates a poem using the same terms but demolishing the rationale for clearing dust from the xinjing:

From the start, bodhi has no tree,
the bright mirror likewise no stand.
With buddha-nature always utterly clear,
where could any dust alight?

Though the Fifth Ancestor publicly praises the head monk’s practical approach to the topic, he secretly recognizes Huineng as his rightful successor—a momentous decision outrageous to his community, occasioning Huineng’s later dialogue with senior monk Ming.

Doubts about the historicity of these events abound, but the story starkly, unquestionably marks a turning point in the tradition, emphatically aligning it with awakening to the emptiness of body and mind while denigrating devotion to the project of sustaining spotless mental clarity. Later versions of the story strengthen the accent on emptiness, amending Huineng’s third line to read, “Fundamentally, there’s not a single thing.” From this perspective, the universe is dust-free by nature. Even in Huineng’s poem, however, the mirror remains intact, and its metaphorical use continued in Chan and Zen writings, growing in frequency and nuance. What effectively came to an end was uncritical reference to cleaning the mirror. A master three centuries after Huineng put the point succinctly: “One only streaks the mirror by polishing it.”

FromStorehouse of Treasures: Recovering the Riches of Chan and Zenby Nelson Foster © 2024 by Nelson Foster. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO.

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