Every Moment is Just So

By Alison Lyke

One of my favorite Zen stories is called “Is that so?”. It’s the tale of a Buddhist monk who lived in a hut on a hill, overlooking a small village. One of the young, unmarried women of the village became pregnant. When asked who impregnated her, she named the monk on the hill. When she gave birth, the irate grandparents took the baby boy up the hill and left him with the monk.

“This child is yours,” the grandparents told him.
“Is that so?” the monk replied, taking the child.

The monk raised and tenderly cared for the child for about a year. Eventually, the young village maiden became overcome with guilt and she revealed to her parents that the child’s father was actually a young man who worked on a farm on the outskirts of town. The two were hastily wed and the child’s grandparents trekked up the hill to apologetically retrieve the baby.

“This child is not yours,” They told the monk.
“Is that so?” He stated as he gave the child back to them. *

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Imagine if the monk had refused to raise the child, or had mistreated him because of the false accusation. The child may have been wounded, or even perished. Instead, when told he was the child’s father, he accepted that he was the child’s father and continued on until he was asked not to parent the child anymore.

Imagine that the monk became attached to the child and refused to return him to his family. The monk could have easily argued that the grandparents had given the baby to him. Instead, he both received and relinquished the child with the exact same sentiment.

“Is that so?”, like most Zen stories, has many layers. For one, it discusses our relationship with our own children, the people in our care and our loved ones. No one can ever be owned, no one belongs to anybody else, but every relationship must be taken with a sense of duty to care. Ideally, we accept and resign this duty with an even amount of love and understanding.

On a deeper level, “Is that so?” describes the nature of life itself. We are given life without asking for it, expected to care for our life throughout it, and then we give it up at some undetermined point. We don’t truly know why life has been given to us, and it’s in question if our lives are really our own to spend as we please. Perhaps our lives belong to some unknown entity, perhaps they only belong to us for a short while, perhaps our lives belong to everyone but ourselves.

The point is; it doesn't actually matter who the child belongs to, who the people we love belong to, or who our lives belong to. Life needs care, people need care, no matter who created them.

Take a page from the book of the monk on the hill, answer every person and every moment with, “Is that so?”

* The original Zen story "Is That So?" can be found in the set of ancient translations called Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, compiled by Paul Reps, translated by Nyogen Senzaki, and printed by Doubleday (NY) in 1961.