Wash Your Bowl Zen Story
- Dec 11, 2025
- 2 min read
Today we enter… Wash Your Bowl. A story so small you could miss it, yet sharp enough to empty a lifetime of seeking.
It doesn’t glow. It doesn’t warn you. It just slices clean.
Let’s step inside — slowly, bravely.
Let the Story Unfold
A monk went to Master Joshu and said:
“I have just entered the monastery. Please teach me.”
Joshu asked:
“Have you eaten your rice porridge?”
“Yes,” the monk replied.
Joshu said:
“Then go wash your bowl.”
In that moment, the monk awakened.
Sit With the Meaning
Joshu doesn’t give teachings. He removes the place where teachings stick.
The monk expected: a sermona methoda pointera secreta step into enlightenment
Joshu pointed to the bowl.
To the ordinary. To the immediate. To the task already in the monk’s hands.
This was the cut:
Awakening is not elsewhere. It is exactly here, in the thing you are already doing.
When the mind longs for a spiritual life, but refuses to inhabit the life it already lives,
Joshu says: Wash your bowl.
Not because washing is holy, but because looking for something else is the only thing that hides the truth.
There is no mystical doorway. There is no next step. There is only this moment, unresisted.
When nothing is avoided, nothing is missing.
Turn Inward With Your Parts
•Is there a part of you that believes awakening lives “somewhere else”?
What happens inside when the teaching points back to ordinary life?
Can you sense the part that wants complexity, methods, and maps?
Which protector feels uncomfortable with simplicity?
Is there a younger part that learned everything must be hard to be valuable?
Let Expression Rise
IFS Journaling
Write from the part that searches for the “real practice.” Ask it what it fears in simple presence.
IFS Parts Art
Draw your “bowl.”What does it look like inside? What needs washing, emptying, or simply seeing?
Somatic IFS
Take a slow breath.
Place a hand on your chest or belly.Imagine washing a bowl — warm water, slow circles.
Feel what softens as you do.
If none of these feel right…rest with the story.
Let its simplicity uncoil inside you.
Stay here with your parts as long as you like, and we’ll meet again in the next story.
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