Writing Slowly

A Zen Buddhist master hands his successor a formal certificate of mastery. The successor burns it. Why?

No, it’s not a Zen koan but it almost could be.

The name for such a certificate in Japanese is inka. This word might be translated as a ‘seal of approval’, but it’s hardly that straightforward.

In the original transcripts of Shunryu Suzuki’s teachings, the foundation for his influential book “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind”, he describes the inka as both profound and vacuous at the same time.

The inka, this formal paper, might represent decades of practice, but it also subtly indicates the need to abandon the very idea of mastery. If you’re an intellectual hunting for a hidden formula, the paper might appear to you as a riddle to be solved. But to the practitioner who inhabits “beginner’s mind” (shoshin), there’s no clever secret to be interpreted, it’s just a transparent occasion for a sincere “Thank you.”

Westerners might be tempted or conditioned to treat the inka like a diploma. Is it proof you’ve arrived? Is it a trophy? Or is it a kind of finish line? In fact, the moment you view the paper as a “result” like this, you’ve fallen into the expert’s trap.

##Expertise Closes the Mind

The expert’s trap is where you start thinking of yourself as having gone beyond the need to learn anything new.

Imagine a master chef in a restaurant with a once-great reputation that’s now on the slide. They’ve cooked that signature dish a thousand times. The knife work is flawless. Their timing is impeccable. But somewhere along the way, they stopped tasting. These days they plate up by means of muscle memory, not joie d’esprit. They season by formula. The dish is technically perfect but spiritually dead. This sense that it’s all been done before? That’s the expert trap.

Or consider a concert pianist. They play Chopin and Bach with a technical precision that sets critics agog, yet to the audience the performance feels mechanical and airless. Though they hit every note and these notes reach the ears, they just don’t make it as far as the heart. This is what happens when expertise goes rigid and calcifies – and this is the expert trap.

Suzuki warned: “In the expert’s mind there are few possibilities.” As we solidify our knowledge, the mind loses its inherent fluidity. We stop seeing what’s in front of us because we’re too busy recognizing patterns we’ve seen before. Conventional expertise becomes empty in the worst sense: not the fertile emptiness of Zen, but the closed system of someone who thinks they already know what there is to know. That’s the expert’s trap, right there.

Mastery Means Returning to Innocence

Skill in itself isn’t the problem. In Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters I introduced a time-honoured map of the learning journey: first you follow rules (Shu), then you break them (Ha), and finally you transcend them (Ri). You never abandon the rules, though. Instead, you internalise them. That’s why improvisation is bewildering. To a beginner, improv can seem like an impossible freedom from all convention. But a jazz musician must master scales deeply before they can improvise freely. Improvisation may sound like the free–expression of a beginner, but paradoxically only an expert can do it justice.

True expertise is the Ri stage. Technique becomes so ingrained that it disappears. And the expert returns to the spontaneous state of the beginner. They’ve travelled full circle. Their beginner’s mind is now informed by ten thousand hours of practice, but it remains open, curious and alive.

The master and the beginner see with the same freshness.

The master simply climbed a mountain to return to the valley.

That’s the journey out of the expert’s trap.

Why did Ikkyū Burn the Certificate ?

The ultimate expression of this came from the iconoclastic Zen master Ikkyū Sōjun. Last year, I visited Lake Biwa, the legendary location where Ikkyū heard the cry of a crow, which jogged him to attain enlightenment. Despite plenty of modern development on the lakeshore, the lake itself remains a vast, still place. And in many places it still looks much as it might have in Ikkyū’s day. It’s still a fitting backdrop for a mind stripping away illusions.

When his teacher presented him with the inka, Ikkyū famously trampled on it. Then, as though that wasn’t enough, he tore it to pieces and threw it in the fire. By burning the ‘proof’ of his mastery, he demonstrated the secret that true realization can’t be commodified or archived. It exists only in the living moment, in the quality of attention you bring right now. Despite how it might look to us, the burning wasn’t an insult to his teacher. Rather, it showed he understood at a deeper level.

I took this photo of Lake Biwa from the Eastern slopes of Mount Heiai. On this lake the maverick monk Ikkyū attained enlightenment - in legend at least.

Try This Today

OK, so what practical difference does this make? Today, choose one skill where you consider yourself proficient. Your profession. A hobby. Even something simple like how you make your morning coffee. Approach it as if you know nothing. Try performing it with your non-dominant hand. Or ask a child to show you their approach. Or read an introductory tutorial as if for the first time.

Notice what you’ve stopped seeing because you ‘already know.’ Does your expert ego resist? Does it feel foolish, a waste of time? Or do you catch a glimpse of the strange wonder of not knowing? The possibilities that only appear when you release your grip on certainty?

You might well be an expert. You might well posses certificates to prove it (that you haven’t burned), or you might have many hours of experience under your belt. Or maybe the evidence of your expertise lies all around, in the things you’ve built. But today remember this: The inka is just paper. The wisdom lies in burning it. Because expertise is just an opinion. Part of being able to do something really well is knowing how much better still you could become. The mastery is in the continual learning.

Further Reading

Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki – A guide to the attitude of shoshin and the foundation for the ideas in this post.

Extraordinary Zen Masters: A Maverick, a Master of Masters, and a Wandering Poet by John Stevens – Includes the definitive biographical account in English of Ikkyū Sōjun’s wild, iconoclastic life.

Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters by Richard Griffiths – An exploration of the stages of mastery and how to move from rigid rules to spontaneous freedom.

Crow with No Mouth (translated by Stephen Berg) – A collection of Ikkyū’s own “crazy cloud” poetry that captures his visceral, non-institutional approach to Zen.

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And you can also buy my book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters.