The cup was already full
A professor comes to ask about Zen. The tea goes over the rim and keeps going.
By Sovandarapor (James) Kong · · Nondual
Chapter 03 of 12 in The masters were funny
A professor visits a Japanese master called Nan-in to ask about Zen. Nan-in serves tea. He fills the visitor's cup to the brim and then keeps pouring, and the tea goes over the rim, across the table, onto the mats. The professor watches as long as he can stand it. It's full, he says. No more will go in.
Like this cup, says Nan-in, you are full of your own opinions. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup.
The version everybody knows comes from a book of Zen stories put together in the twentieth century, so treat the history loosely. As a piece of comic timing it is close to perfect, because the master says nothing until the guest complains. He lets the joke run on the floor for a while.
The part I like is that the professor is not a fool in the story. He is a professor. Being full is what he is good at. He has done the reading, he has the vocabulary, he came with questions that are probably quite sharp. What he cannot do is receive an answer, because every answer arrives into a container that is already at the brim and immediately becomes another thing he knows about.
I do this with everything I read on this subject. A piece lands, I feel the click, and within a day the click has been filed as a position I hold, which I can then defend at dinner. The filing is the leak. Nothing came in. The cup got a new label.
Where I hesitate is the phrase everybody quotes it for. Empty your cup. Said out loud it becomes another instruction to perform, and now I am the man sitting there trying to look empty, which is a full cup with a new decoration. You cannot empty it by wanting to.
What you can do is notice the tea on the floor. The story does not ask you to be humble. It asks you to look down.