“just of pockmarked faces.” Next, he suddenly laid the mirror, glass upward, flat on the desk and began contracting his facial muscles so that his brows, his eyebrows, even his very eyes, all seemed drawn in one wild whorl of wrinkles around the crease where his nose springs out from his skull. How hideous, I thought. My master, too, seemed shaken by the sight, for he muttered, “That won’t do,” and ceased his vile contractions. “I wonder,” he went on, lifting the mirror up to a point but three short inches from his pot-holed skin, “why my face is so extraordinarily repulsive.” He sounded as though honestly perplexed. With his right index finger he begins to stroke the wings of his nose. Breaking off, he presses his fingertip hard down on his blotting pad. The grease appeared as a round blob on the blotter. He has indeed some charming little ways. Next he raises his nose-greased fingertip and hauls down on his right lower eyelid daringly to produce a red-fleshed goblin look, an ugly trick which, very understandably, is commonly described as making a hare’s face. It is not entirely clear whether he is studying his pockmarks or merely trying to stare his mirror down.
Let us, however, be generous. He is a quirky man, but at least it seems that in his case such staring at a bathroom mirror does induce original ideas, even original actions. Nor is that all. Such quaint behavior could be seen, by well-disposed and drolly natured persons, as the means by which my master moves, madly gesticulating and with a mirror for companion, toward a revelation of his inmost nature—toward, in Zen terms, his Original Face. All studies undertaken by human beings are always studies of themselves. The proper study of mankind is self.
The heavens, earth, the mountains and the rivers, sun and moon and stars—they are all no more than other names for the self. There is nothing a man can study which is not, in the end, the study of the self. If a man could jump out of his self that self would disappear at the moment of his jumping. Nor is that all. Only oneself can study one’s self It is totally impossible for anyone else to do it. Totally impossible, no matter how earnestly one may wish either to study another or to be studied by another. Which explains why all great men invariably achieve greatness solely by their own efforts. If it were true that you could learn to understand yourself by virtue of someone else’s helping effort, then you could, for instance, declare whether some hunk of meat were tough or tender by getting someone else to eat it for you. But hearing truths preached in the morning, listening all evening to learned expositions of the Way, reading scholarly tomes the night long in your study—all these worthy activities are nothing but disciplines designed to facilitate your perception of your own true self. Yet that true self of yours cannot conceivably exist in the truth preached at you by some other person, or in the Way some other man expounds, or in ancient books however heaped upon you. If your own self exists, it is your personal phantom, a kind of doppelganger. Indeed, it’s often the case that a phantom has more substance than a soulless person. For if you dog a shadow, one fine day you may well find its substance. Indeed, as a general rule, shadows adhere to their substances. If it is as a reflection of such concepts that my master’s toying with the bathroom mirror should be seen, then he may be someone to be reckoned with. For surely those who seek the truth in themselves are wiser, better men than such fool scholars whose only claim to wisdom is that they have gulped down all that Epictetus scribbled on that subject.
A mirror is a vat for brewing self-conceit, yet, at the same time, a means to neutralize all vanity. Nothing shows up the absurd pretensions of a show-off more incitingly than a mirror. Since time began, the pretentious and the vainglorious have gone about the world inflicting damage both upon themselves and upon others, and the first cause of at least two-thirds of that injury undoubtedly lay in mirrors. Like that wretched Dr. Guillotin, who unintentionally caused himself, quite apart from many others, so much painful inconvenience during the French Revolution by inventing an improved method of decapitation, the man who invented the mirror must almost certainly have lived to regret it. On the other hand, for persons beginning to sicken into self-disgust and for persons already feeling spiritually shriveled, there’s nothing quite so tonic as a good long look in a mirror. For any such observer cannot fail to realize as a staggering fact the effrontery of his having dared to go about for years with such an appalling face. The moment of that realization is the most precious moment in any man’s life, and none looks more exaltedly transfigured than a fool grown self-enlightened to his own intrinsic folly.
Before this self-enlightened fool all the world’s vainglorious ninnies should, in the deepest awe, abase themselves. Such ninnies may indeed sneer in contempt at the enlightened one, but in reality their triumphing contempt is an expression, however unwitting, of an awed submission. I doubt whether my master has the depth to realize his foolishness by staring into a mirror, but he is at least capable of acknowledging the ugly truth pox-graven on his phiz. Recognition of the loathliness of one’s face often proves a first step forward toward realizing the depravity of one’s soul. My master shows promise. But this glint of wisdom may, of course, be nothing more than a fleeting consequence of his having been put down in his recent encounter with that Zen-bent chum of his.
Musing idly along these lines, I went on watching my master.
Unaware of my surveillance, he continued happily tugging at his eyelids to produce a series of increasingly horrible caricatures of his naturally nasty features. “They seem,” he suddenly said, “distinctly bloodshot.