By Laura J. Pratola
There is an ancient Chinese story of a small group of monks travelling through the Chinese countryside who decide to rest at a zen teacher’s temple in the mountains. They begin to talk about the philosophy of subjectivity and objectivity.
The zen teacher asks them if they ‘consider a big stone to be inside or outside their minds’. One of the monks replies that the Buddhist belief is that ‘everything is an objectification of the mind; therefore the stone is inside their minds’. The zen teacher then comments that their ‘heads must be heavy carrying around a large stone in their mind’. An accurate assumption of modern day life is that we are all carrying large rocks with us that don’t serve us.