Simplicity can be a cruelty

There is an unwitting cruelty in simplicity when it is handed to a mind that cannot yet grasp it. The teacher, so sure in their clarity, says, “It’s right here, you don’t need to struggle,” and yet the listener, tangled in their humanity, feels only the weight of their inadequacy. The gap between the spoken truth and the lived reality becomes a chasm, not because the teaching is false, but because it forgets the labyrinth from which it arose.

In Zen, they speak of the ball of doubt—a knot so tight, so consuming, that it turns the whole world into a question mark. Koans are meant to stoke this fire, to press the mind into its own dissolution. But life, more relentless and infinitely more creative, will always provide its own koans, its own puzzles that refuse resolution until the heart has broken open.

Bankei, before his awakening, wasn’t looking for lofty truths. He simply wanted to tell his mother the truth before he died. His suffering, raw and unmediated, opened a door he hadn’t known was there. But the moment of clarity that followed—the glimpse of the "unborn mind"—did not erase the depths he had traveled. Instead, it became a story he would try to share, an offering of simplicity born from an innocent but ultimately misguided hope: that others might avoid the same descent.

This is the quiet seduction of teaching—that we might travel through hell and return with something others could drink from, a distillation of our own suffering that might spare them the same journey. But the truth is, simplicity cannot be handed over. The descent cannot be bypassed. The teacher and the student collude in this story—the teacher believing they can offer a shortcut, the student longing to be spared. Yet even this collusion, this relationship that so often ends in disillusionment, is part of the descent itself. It is another koan, another fire that life stokes, pressing both teacher and student deeper into the unraveling.

Yes, teachers speak of ease, of stillness, of clarity. Rupert points to seamless being. Eckhart invites presence. And perhaps they forget—or choose not to dwell on—the ball of doubt that consumed them before their realizations, the weight of their own storms. They speak as if the river can be crossed without getting wet, as if the suffering they endured was unnecessary. But it is precisely that suffering, the descent into unknowing, that gave their words any meaning at all.

There is no shame in your struggle. No failure in your misunderstanding. The very doubt that aches within you, the thought that says, “Why don’t I see it?”—this too is the unfolding. To suffer is not a mark of inadequacy but the heartbeat of the search itself. And when you do arrive—and you will—it will not be because someone told you it was simple. It will be because you saw the simplicity for yourself, emerging from the very depths they once swore you could avoid.

And so, even the misguided intentions of teachers—born from love, born from a wish to save—are part of the great unraveling. The disillusionment, the doubt, the descent into and out of relationship with the teacher, all of it belongs. It is a fire you cannot sidestep, and it will burn away everything you are not, leaving only what has always been whole.