12 May 2026
Spring 2026
Keith Snyder
Resident Priest and Managing Director
The Willow is Green, the Flower is Red
When spring comes with its blossoms and new leaves on the trees, a scroll with a four-character phrase is often seen hanging in the alcoves of traditional Japanese rooms. It reads “the willow is green, the flower is red” 柳緑花紅 (or “willows green, flowers red” –the distinction of singular vs. plural is often not clear in Chinese and Japanese).
The simple, easy to grasp, image depicted in these words is considered to be extremely profound, and, as with any Zen phrase we encounter, people will ask “what does it mean?” However, Zen tradition generally despises the interpreting or explaining of the lines taken from its literature and displayed like this in calligraphic writings. Some background to the phrase is helpful – such as who said it and when – but these expressions often function in the way the punchline of a joke does. If you have to explain it, the gut level reaction is lost.
Zen values above all else direct experience. The way we normally experience the world as deluded non-enlightened beings is as a representation created mentally through the distortion of input from our five sense organs: eye, ear nose, tongue, body. When we think of the corresponding consciousnesses produced (i.e. eye-consciousness, ear consciousness, etc.) a sixth sense (mind) is considered, and we have the so-called six consciousnesses 六識. “Mind” is what forms ideas about the objects we perceive, and because mind, or consciousness, is the storehouse for all past experiences and interactions with the people and things around us, and because each individual is unique in his or her history of contact with the world, no two people will see things exactly the same. The mind is involved in thinking and ideas. Imagination is a product of mind.
The enlightened mind is compared to a mirror which simply reflects what is in front of it. It is non judgmental. It does not calculate or discriminate in any way. The world simply “is what it is.” But is it really possible to perceive the world without interference from our usual way of mentally altering what is before us? It is a fundamental belief of Buddhism that a fully enlightened being such as the Buddha Shakyamuni does see the world free from the distortion of mental interference.
A word we often encounter in Japanese Buddhism is mushin 無心, which literally means “no mind,” though perhaps a more accurate translation would be “nothing in mind.” It refers to the state described above of not calculating or discriminating in dealing with the world and the people around us. I believe it is something we all experience from time to time, as young children of course but also as adults in certain situations where we are completely at rest and yet alert. This is what happens when we practice zazen, or meditation, but it could happen anytime, anywhere, when we take a break from the business of life and sit down in a garden, at the edge of a lake, or wherever we might be, and do nothing. Often it happens after a period of great exertion. We find ourselves gazing at the world in front of us, hearing the sounds of birds, feeling the wind brushing our skin, and not thinking about anything in particular. Or it could happen in less natural settings, such as when listening to music, reading literature or attending a religious service.
On a day-to-day basis we cannot live in a state of total mushin. We have families and jobs and numerous responsibilities. We have a variety of relationships to deal with. Food-shelter-clothing alone demand all sorts of planning, calculating and effort. However, it is important to take time to drop all of that from time to time and simply experience things “as they are.” This is “mindfulness,” a concept which has now become mainstream in North America; and the more we do that, the less judgmental we may become, and hopefully the less entangled in misunderstandings in our interactions with others.
The willow is green, the flower is red. What more is there to say?