Juggling to Enlightenment, Summer 2001

By ZACH WARREN
For Hundred Mountain

SUMMER 2001 | AN OLD CELTIC PROVERB READS: “What fills the eye fills the heart.” While I was in high school, my sister learned to juggle three cloth pouches filled with dried legumes. I watched her manipulate those pouches into a pattern that resembled the infinity symbol. My eyes were bedazzled, my rational mind thrown into disequilibrium, and my heart smitten. Since then, I have vigorously pursued mastery in the exotic art of juggling. It has become a form of disciplined procrastination in my life. More recently, I have found it to bear rich resemblance to Zen Buddhist philosophies. In order to explain the philosophical connection, I will first describe some of the history behind juggling.

Fu Qifeng, the leading Chinese scholar of acrobatics in China, speculates that juggling evolved in China during the Stone Age as a sporting variation of boomerang throwing. This makes sense considering that the motor skill development associated with juggling would have had survival value in hunting and fighting. Other accounts hold that juggling evolved around 2000 BCE in Egypt (as evidenced by hieroglyphic art) in an effort to entertain the presiding pharaoh.

Either way, juggling has had a longer lifeline than both Hinduism and Buddhism. Historically, juggling has been associated with the stigmas of deceit and dishonesty, especially with regard to money. While it had its heyday during the Han Dynasty in China as part of an entertainment extravaganza called “The Hundred Entertainments,” juggling fell out of favor in the middle of the 14th century at the advent of the Ming Dynasty. The aristocrats considered juggling – along with equestrianism, acrobatics, fire eating and other circus-related performances – to be too vulgar for their refined tastes, and thus jugglers were excluded from their private courts.

JUGGLERS HAVE NEVER BEEN favored in Europe. According to the edicts of the Sixth Council of Paris during the Middle Ages: “The duties of the king are to prevent theft, to punish adultery, and to refuse to maintain jongleurs.” (It should be noted that “jongleurs” does not refer to jugglers exclusively but also includes street comedians and circus-related performers). There is some evidence of Western appreciation in William Hazlitt's classic essay, "The Indian Jugglers” (c. 1821). Hazlitt is astonished when he sees an Indian master “maintain four airborne balls at the same time” and remarks, “Man, thou art a wonderful animal, and thy ways past finding out!”

There has not, however, ever been any substantial transcendent value attached to juggling. Even Hazlitt was quick to add, “Thou canst do strange things, but thou turnest them to little account.”

I would argue otherwise.

IF YOU HAVE EVER WATCHED a juggler— a business colleague, street performer, or someone’s grandpa— attempting a 3-ball cascade pattern, you may have noticed some parallels with Zazen. According to Master Dogen, “To study the Buddha Way is to study the self, to study the self is to forget the self, and to forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things.” Just as many students of Zen attend monasteries with the selfish expectation of immediate relief from suffering, a selfish desire for attention may initiate one’s practice of the art of juggling. What is interesting, here, is that juggling requires heavy exercise of the cerebellum, which functions in coordinating voluntary movement; juggling is not a cerebral exercise, and by extension, neither is it emotional. By this right, consistent practice fosters a “state of mind,” if you will, which neither affirms nor negates— a state of “without thinking.” Without thought, the self dissolves into the vastness of experience.

Another parallel involves the bystander's or the novice's perception of juggling. In the same essay, Hazlitt describes juggling as “skill surmounting difficulty, and beauty triumphing over skill. It seems as if the difficulty once mastered naturally resolved itself into ease and grace, and as if to be overcome at all, it must be overcome without an effort.” Zen Buddhists know that despite its illusion of lightness, meditation involves grave challenges and persistent discipline. I've heard the practice of meditation described as a million pilgrimages to find the breath. A million may be an understatement.

Meanwhile, professional jugglers drop their balls (and pins, rings, torches and machetes) a million times, too. As with music and dance, the most graceful movement — or the experience of "flow", as Mihaly Csikszentmihal might call it —only arrives after the investment of arduous practice. The intensity of concentration demanded in numbers juggling (juggling five or more balls) is similar to that in Zen meditation, and I believe that it can foster development toward samadhi, or single-pointedness of mind.

ALONG WITH THIS CONCENTRATION, jugglers may find their relationship to goals beginning to transform. One who at first wishes to juggle for external acclaim may discover that the enduring drive emanates from within. Over a period of years, the intention behind the juggling — or meditation — becomes an internalized form of personal progress and pleasure; the joy of the struggle towards mastery of juggling can supercede the selfish goals of perfection, magic, or money.

We know from history that juggling is performed neither for prestige nor religious approval, and probably not even for sex appeal. Many jugglers have used their talents to eke out a living, but like wandering ascetics or gypsies they are generally confined to a frugal vagrant’s lifestyle. The superior juggler, so to speak, is not concerned with an audience — culture, formal religion, peers, etc. — but derives satisfaction from the very menial and tedious action of juggling.

I am not suggesting that juggling can replace Zazen, but rather I have the liberal belief that juggling — within a context of concentration and discipline — is one form of Zen meditation. Perhaps its most significant contribution is its metaphoric value. Each time the juggler picks up her devices (her senses to a new world) and begins to juggle, she will drop at least one. Each drop represents death. If one could juggle forever, these drops would continue forever, and yet each time the juggler retrieves her devices again and performs a pattern — at first gracefully with youthful ease, then less so until the pattern dies. The cycle of samsara occurs in every pattern, but the juggler persists in striving toward perfection. In order not to be pained by the drops, the juggler must transcend them.

Just as we are to become like a mirror in Taoism and become “mu” in Zen, perhaps becoming “the juggle” could serve the same end: liberation from the cycle of birth and death.