Achievement, metrics and make it count are the buzzwords of our world.
Sometime back, as a Six sigma lead black belt, when I had put in a quote which said “Everything that can be measured is of not value and everything that is of value cannot be measured”, I was met with ridicule and scorn across the room. That was a long time back.. 20 years or so. Now as a Zen practitioner when I think about it I feel it was kind of prescient. May be I was into Zen in. my previous births too.
The Japanese art of doing nothing is best represented by concepts like Tayutau and Ma.
It is the concept of less is more. and more is less.
These distinct concepts represent the "ways of doing nothing" in Japanese culture in general and in Zen in particular.
Tayutau (たゆたう). This term describes the act of drifting, swaying, or trembling like a boat on water or clouds in the sky. It is much subtler than the Zen meditation of Shikantaza.
But, unlike traditional meditation or mindfulness, which involves focusing your breath or controlling your thoughts, tayutau is about letting go completely. You simply gaze at something with an ever-changing flow (like light reflecting on a river or leaves blowing in the wind) without trying to fix, solve, or judge your thoughts. It allows thoughts to surface and drift away without anchoring your brain to them, enabling your mind to process and sort itself naturally. [
Ma (間) is the space between.
It's one of the most beautiful and untranslatable words in Japanese aesthetics . One can roughly translate it as "the space between," this concept applies to physical gaps, pauses in conversation, or moments of stillness in a day
The character itself shows it: a gate (門) with the sun (日) shining through the opening. Light coming through a gap. That's the image at its root — not the gate, but the space the gate frames.
Ma is the pause between two notes that lets the music breathe. The silence after a teacher speaks, in which understanding arises. The empty space in a sumi-e painting that the viewer's own awareness completes. The gap between two pillars that gives a room its character. The unhurried moment between exhalation and the next in-breath. It isn't emptiness as lack — it's emptiness as the condition for meaning. Remove the ma and the music becomes noise, the painting suffocates, the room loses its proportion.
When Dogen writing his texts with deliberate lacunae — that was ma. When the teacher who fills every silence robbing the student of the space where understanding can land — ma. The breath directed to the hara, the pause before the next koan, the gap between the voice that says "skip zazen" and the rising — all ma.
The Tao Te Ching points at the same truth from another direction: the wheel is made useful by the empty hub, the vessel by its hollow, the room by the space within its walls.
The thing has value, but the emptiness makes it usable.
I work with people on a long drawn programs and not short high energy ones , which leaves high and dry.. In nature too everything has its own rhythms.. and takes its own time… 2 minutes noodles and 30 sec insta reels may be the fashion of the day. But I doubt whether it leaves any lasting change leave alone a transformation in the viewer and reader. They are like sugar spikes for the dopamine system. But they miss out the universal principle. The Highter the initial energy , the faster it dissipates in this world of entropy.
Some time back, I was asked to design a short and sweet program on what else spirituality. I did give it a long thought , as I was in dire need of Money… $, INR , Euro.. or even Crypto. The advice was in this world, no one has the time and energy ( and focus) for a long drawn out program. And if one is in the business of transformation, one should cater to the needs of customers.
After due consideration, I realised, as a connoisseur of good beer — and I say this with full sincerity — am in the business of fermentation—which takes time, darkness, and stillness. Fermentation cannot be rushed; it relies on the Ma between the stirrings to let the cultures grow. Kokoro-Zen-Do in Action, which is an year long long program are the koji spores of real transformation. They are invisible, untraceable by standard dashboards, yet they fundamentally change the flavour of the entire personhood.
In this society of spectacle and current modern digital culture, everything is an "Event"—a launch, a reel, a metric spike. But Zen knows that the event is merely the crest of the wave; the process is the entire ocean.
Those immortal Tao Te Ching lines we invoked before talks about the empty hub making the wheel useful—is the ultimate rebuttal to the metric-obsessed world. Metrics measure the hub (the tangible output). They cannot measure the emptiness (the clarity, the psychological flexibility and the trust) that makes the Cart move.
The Six Sigma room wanted to measure everything. It had no real ma, though they try to sneak it at the very end. May be in the form of a token mindfulness app or a five-minute breathing exercise tacked onto an agenda—a commodified, hollowed-out version of the real thing. Twenty years later, I am still in that room — but now I bring the emptiness with me.
There is an old Zen saying: Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. To paraphrase that
Before Zen, measure, optimize, present. After Zen, measure, optimize, present—but with the gate open, and the sunlight coming through.
