2026-02-28 | I saw you fall so I'm helping | Trudy Johnston

Описание: Practice Day in Sheffield:

Nothing Special Practice Day in Sheffield:

On Saturday we had a beautiful practice day in Sheffield generously hosted by Nothing Special Sangha. There were long time Sheffield based members of Nothing Special, others who had travelled from further afield and we welcomed three new people. Trudy offered a talk based on a koan:



Lingzhao’s Helping

Layman Pang and his daughter Lingzhao were traveling along the road, selling bamboo

baskets. Coming down off a bridge, the Layman stumbled and fell. Lingzhao

immediately ran to her father and threw herself down on the ground beside him.

"What in the world are you doing!" cried the Layman.

“I'm helping," replied Lingzhao.

"Luckily no one was looking," the Layman said with a laugh.



This koan is explored in The Hidden Lamp: Stories from Twenty-five Centuries of Awakened Women, a collection of 100 koans and teaching stories about women from Buddha’s time to the present by Florence Caplow and Susan Moon.



This story, is a famous Zen koan illustrating the concepts of non-duality and immediate compassion. Instead of simply helping him up, Lingzhao drops to the ground to join him in his fall, demonstrating a direct, unmediated engagement with the present moment and her father's experience. The exchange highlights a playful, non-conceptual understanding of reality, where the distinction between "helper" and "one being helped" is erased



Trudy linked this with this writing from Rachel Naomi Remen, “Helping, Fixing or Serving?”

“Helping, fixing and serving represent three different ways of seeing life. When you help, you see life as weak. When you fix, you see life as broken. When you serve, you see life as whole. Fixing and helping may be the work of the ego, and service the work of the soul.

Service rests on the premise that the nature of life is sacred, that life is a holy mystery which has an unknown purpose. When we serve, we know that we belong to life and to that purpose. From the perspective of service, we are all connected: All suffering is like my suffering and all joy is like my joy. The impulse to serve emerges naturally and inevitably from this way of

seeing. Serving is different from helping. Helping is not a relationship between equals. A helper may see others as weaker than they are, needier than they are, and people often feel this inequality. The danger in helping is that we may inadvertently take away from people more than we could ever give them; we may diminish their self-esteem, their sense of worth, integrity or even wholeness. When we help, we become aware of our own strength. But when we serve, we don’t serve with our strength; we serve with ourselves, and we draw from all of our experiences. Our limitations serve; our wounds serve; even our darkness can serve. My pain is the source of my compassion; my woundedness is the key to my empathy. Serving makes us aware of our wholeness and its power. The wholeness in us serves the wholeness in others and the wholeness in life. The wholeness in you is the same as the wholeness in me. Service is a relationship between equals: our service strengthens us as well as others. Fixing and helping are draining, and over time we may burn out, but service is renewing. When we serve, our work itself will renew us. In helping we may find a sense of satisfaction; in serving we find a sense of gratitude….”