Attention Is Devotion — ล้างจาน ก็แค่ล้างจานAttention Is Devotion — Mary Oliver, Thích Nhất Hạnh, and Buddhadasa on Presence

A quarter past ten at night. The condo kitchen has gone quiet except for the tap: four plates, a bowl, two glasses, and the pan the omelette stuck to. You prop your phone against the rice cooker, start some clip playing so there are human voices in the room, and begin.

Your hands know the work. Sponge, soap, rinse, rack. Four minutes later the dishes are drying, the tap is off, the clip ends on cue — and you notice that for those four minutes you were not in the kitchen at all. You were in tomorrow morning's meeting. You were in the group chat you haven't answered. You were in the sentence you should have said to someone this afternoon. The dishes got washed. The person washing them was somewhere else.

By the standard of a certain Vietnamese monk, I do not know how to wash dishes — and you may not either. I am not telling you this to make you feel guilty. Four minutes at a sink are probably not the most important four minutes of a life, and nobody will be judged on them. But there is a number, which I will hold back until later in this essay, suggesting that those four minutes are not the exception. They are nearly half of our waking hours.

Last time we talked about courage — about fear that lives mostly in imagination rather than in fact (Fear in the Face). Today opens the second arc of this series, on knowing your own mind, with something much smaller than fear and much more frequent: a mind that is not home. The essay will hold one question to the last line. While your hands are doing one thing, where is your mind — and does it really matter where?

Attention is the beginning of devotion

“Attention is the beginning of devotion.”

Mary Oliver, “Upstream”, in Upstream: Selected Essays (Penguin Press, 2016)

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) was one of the best-selling American poets of her lifetime, and a poet some critics preferred not to count, because her poems were too easy to read. She wrote about swans, grasshoppers, ponds, the pine woods behind her house in Provincetown — over and over, until people called her a nature poet, a label she never much liked, because her real subject was not nature. It was looking.

The sentence above is the last sentence of the essay “Upstream”, which opens one of her final books, and its context is not a meditation room, not a yoga mat, not an app. The paragraph before it is about children. Teach the children, she writes — we don't matter so much, but the children do. Show them daisies and the pale hepatica. Let them taste sassafras and wintergreen. Teach them the flowers name by name. Put peppermint in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods, and the possibility of a world salvaged from the lords of profit. And then the single closing line: attention is the beginning of devotion.

The word devotion carries the smell of religion. It is a word for what people give to God, to a beloved, to a life's work. And Oliver's sentence states an order of operations most of us have backwards. We assume love comes first and attention follows: you care about a thing, therefore you look at it. She says no. Attention comes first. You look at something long enough to learn its name, and the love arrives on its own. A child who knows ten flowers by name will never walk across a meadow the way a child walks who knows only the word “grass”.

The line has been pasted over enough sunset photographs and productivity slides to obscure how sad it also is. The book came out when she was eighty-one, and in the very few interviews she ever gave, she said the woods behind the house were where she escaped an unhappy childhood — the woods were where she learned to survive, and looking was how she did it. Attention, for Oliver, was never a wellness technique. It was a survival method that, decades later, matured into a way of loving the world.

She had already answered the how-question twenty-six years earlier, in “The Summer Day” (1990) — a poem that spends nearly all its length on one grasshopper eating sugar out of her hand, moving her jaws back and forth, washing her face with her forelegs, and flying away. Then the poet turns to the reader and asks, in the two closing lines: Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life? Those two lines have captioned more resignation letters than anyone can count. But read the whole poem and the poet's own answer to her own question is unmistakable: she planned nothing. She spent the day watching a grasshopper. “Precious” in this poem does not mean your life must be spent on something grand; it means it would be a shame not to be present for it. Eighteen years later she compressed everything into three sentences, in a poem called “Sometimes”: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

Washing the dishes to wash the dishes

“While washing the dishes one should only be washing the dishes, which means that while washing the dishes one should be completely aware of the fact that one is washing the dishes.”

Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness, “Washing the dishes to wash the dishes” (tr. Mobi Ho, Beacon Press, 1975; rev. ed. 1987, p. 3)

The sentence was written in 1974, in a long letter from Paris. Its author was a Vietnamese monk barred from returning to his country. Its recipient was Brother Quang, a main staff member of the School of Youth for Social Service in South Vietnam — young people who went out to rebuild bombed villages, set up medical stations, teach children, and refused to take either side in the war, which made both sides distrust them. Several were kidnapped; some were killed. The letter was written for people so exhausted and embittered they could barely continue — not for people who wanted to unwind after work. That is the first thing worth knowing before reading anything about dishes.

The letter became The Miracle of Mindfulness in 1975. When it appeared, the word mindfulness barely existed in English. Fifty years later, mindfulness is an industry — there are apps, eight-week curricula, meditation rooms off office lobbies — and the dishwashing sentence has been dragged into all of it, even though in the book it sits beside a memory that is not romantic in the least. Thirty years earlier, as a novice at Tu Hieu Pagoda in Hue, during the retreat season when more than a hundred monks returned to the monastery, two novices had to do all the cooking and wash every bowl. There was no soap — only ashes, rice husks, and coconut husks — and in winter the water was so cold you had to heat a great pot of it before you could scrub anything.

He goes on: nowadays there is liquid soap, there are scrub pads, there is hot running water, and washing up is far more agreeable. Anyone can hurry through the dishes and then sit down to a cup of tea. (He adds, with a monk's dry humour, that he can accept the washing machine, but a dishwashing machine is going a little too far.) And then comes the sentence quoted above. His point is not slowness, and it is not the sacredness of crockery. His point hangs on the word “alive”. If, while washing the dishes, we think only of the tea that awaits us, hurrying the dishes out of the way as if they were a nuisance, then — he says — we are not alive during the time we wash them. And, more cutting still: if we cannot wash the dishes, the chances are we cannot drink our tea either. Holding the cup, our mind will already be off in the next thing.

People tend to read this as a technique — single-task, you'll focus better, you'll feel calmer — which is not wrong, only much smaller than what he meant. In the next chapter of the same book he writes that people usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle, but the real miracle is to walk on earth. What the dishwashing sentence asks of us is not to wash serenely; it is to stop believing that life has commercial breaks — that some minutes are merely corridors on the way to the real minutes. Presence, in his sense, is not a mood of calm. It is the admission that four plates at ten at night are exactly as much your life as tomorrow's meeting — and, if we follow him strictly, rather more so, since the plates are here and the meeting does not yet exist.

Do every kind of work with an empty mind

“Do every kind of work with an empty mind.
Yield all the fruits of work to emptiness.
Eat the food of emptiness the way a monk eats.
Be dead to yourself, completely, from the very start.”

Buddhadasa Bhikkhu, verse summary of the chit wang (“empty mind”) teaching, in Dhamma Topics in Verse; reprinted by the Buddhadasa Indapanno Archives — author's translation

If Oliver says attention begins with looking at one thing until you love it, and Thich Nhat Hanh says stay with the dishes, Buddhadasa Bhikkhu (1906–1993) asks the harder question hiding underneath both: what exactly is it that keeps us from staying with the dishes? His answer takes two words in the deliberately raw idiom he chose for it — tua ku, khong ku: the “me” and the “mine”.

The four-line verse above is a summary he composed to be memorised, and it became one of his most-quoted. In the teaching series “Ordained at Home”, which the Buddhadasa Indapanno Archives has republished, the verse sits under the fifth principle: use wisdom to guard the mind against thoughts of me-and-mine — work without thinking “I am doing this for me”, and do not collect the results as yours. He called the state chit wang, the empty mind: empty of self, not empty of thought. The Archives' gloss is brief: an empty mind is not a blank inactivity. On the contrary, he taught, in the mind that is empty, everything is already complete.

The teaching did not pass quietly. In July 1963, and again in February 1964, at the Teachers' Council auditorium in Bangkok, Buddhadasa held public dhamma discussions with M.R. Kukrit Pramoj — later prime minister, then Thailand's most formidable public intellectual — and the exchange became a controversy people still discuss sixty years on. Kukrit did not argue that the empty mind was unreal. He argued that it belonged to monks: one who has left the world can empty the mind that way, but an ordinary person surely cannot — and, more pointedly, “the work of the world runs against the empty mind”. People who earn a living must want results, must compete, must keep a self on hand to push the work. Buddhadasa's reply conceded almost nothing and demanded almost nothing: try, he said, to bring everything you do a little closer to emptiness — even your work.

My own view is that their debate is unfinished, and should stay unfinished, because Kukrit was speaking for most of us — people with deadlines, performance reviews, names attached to deliverables. But watch closely what actually pulled your mind off the plates last night. It is almost never “the work of the world”. It is the narration about yourself: why is it me washing these, when will this be done, what will they think of me tomorrow. Work does not conflict with the empty mind; the “me” does. And I believe this is all Buddhadasa was asking — not that you stop wanting results, but that you try, once, working without your name attached, to feel how much lighter the work becomes. “Eat the food of emptiness the way a monk eats” means eating without an eater; washing without a washer. Three voices from three continents converge exactly here. What steals our attention, most of the time, is not the phone. It is the person holding the phone.

Jim's tangerine

In the same book, one page past the dishes, there is an American named Jim. The monk calls him a close friend and says they had known each other eight years, since Jim's days working with the Catholic Peace Fellowship. Jim was real. He was Jim Forest (1941–2022), co-founder of the Catholic Peace Fellowship, a Catholic peace activist who first met Thich Nhat Hanh in 1966, when the monk was still an unknown Vietnamese cleric touring the United States to speak about the war in his homeland. Forest travelled with him on a Fellowship of Reconciliation tour in 1968 — meetings with senators, journalists, students, and (Forest wrote, “blessed relief”) a few poets. He told the story of the friendship in an afterword to the book as early as 1976, and again at full length in 2021 in Eyes of Compassion, the year before he died.

The first story happens under a tree. Travelling together in the United States in their early days, the two sat and shared a tangerine. Jim began to talk about what they would do next — projects, campaigns, work worth being excited about — and each time a project seemed inspiring enough, Jim sank so far into it that he forgot what he was doing. He popped a section of tangerine into his mouth and, before he had begun chewing, had the next slice ready. The monk said one sentence: “You ought to eat the tangerine section you've already taken.” Jim was startled. It was, the monk wrote, as if Jim had not been eating the tangerine at all. If he was eating anything, he was eating his future plans.

What I love about this story is that Jim was not being pulled away by anything trivial. He was not scrolling a phone. He was being pulled away by peace work — something inarguably better, more important, and more urgent than one slice of tangerine. This is the truth most sermons on focus skip past: the most skilled thief of our present is not entertainment but our own good intentions. The monk goes on: a tangerine has sections. If you can eat one section, you can probably eat the whole tangerine. If you cannot eat a single section, you cannot eat the tangerine. Jim understood. He put his hand down, stayed with the slice in his mouth, chewed it thoughtfully, and only then reached for the next.

The second story happens in a kitchen in Paris, the winter before the letter was written. Jim came to visit. The monk's habit was to wash the dishes after the evening meal before sitting down to tea with everyone. One night Jim asked to do them. The monk answered: go ahead — but if you wash the dishes you must know the way to wash them. Jim laughed: come on, you think I don't know how to wash dishes? So the monk told him there are two ways to wash the dishes. The first is to wash the dishes in order to have clean dishes. The second is to wash the dishes in order to wash the dishes. Jim was delighted, chose the second way — and the monk records, with that same dry humour, that from then on Jim knew how to wash the dishes, and so was given the “responsibility” for an entire week.

The tangerine followed Jim all the way to prison. When he was jailed for his activities against the war, the monk worried whether he could bear four walls, and sent him a very short letter: do you remember the tangerine we shared? Your being there is like the tangerine. Eat it and be one with it. Tomorrow it will be no more. I do not know how much that letter actually helped. But I notice it did not tell him to escape the cell into the future. It told him to enter the cell completely — which is a strange piece of advice, and precisely the same advice as the dishes.

What the research says — and doesn't

The number I owed you from the opening is 46.9 percent. In 2010, Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert at Harvard built an iPhone app that pinged 2,250 volunteers, aged 18 to 88, at random moments through the day: how do you feel right now, what are you doing, and are you thinking about what you're doing or about something else? The result, published in Science: our minds are off somewhere other than the task at hand almost half the time — 46.9 percent of samples, and no less than 30 percent of the time in every activity except one, making love. More important than the number: people reported being less happy when their minds were wandering, whatever they were doing, and wandering to pleasant topics made them no happier than being present. The authors' summary became the paper's title — a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.^[6]

But here is the part that has to be said plainly. This is an observational study, not an experiment. It shows two things travelling together; it cannot show which causes which. The authors ran time-lag analyses and proposed that wandering was “generally the cause, not the consequence” of unhappiness — a proposal a 2013 study declined to accept. Poerio, Totterdell and Miles measured mood both before and after mind-wandering episodes over seven days of smartphone sampling and found that sadness tended to come first, while wandering itself did not predict later mood unless its content was negative. Their conclusion: mind-wandering is “not inherently detrimental to well-being”.^[7] In other words, the arrow may point the other way — we may not be unhappy because our minds wander; our minds may wander because we are unhappy. And both studies sampled volunteers who chose to answer an app, who are not quite everyone.

Does training help, then? In 2014 Madhav Goyal's team at Johns Hopkins gathered 47 randomised trials with active control groups — 3,515 participants in all — for JAMA Internal Medicine. Mindfulness programs showed moderate evidence of reducing anxiety (effect size 0.38 at eight weeks, 0.22 at three to six months), depression (0.30 and 0.23) and pain (0.33) — which in a statistician's vocabulary is “small to moderate”. For positive mood, attention, sleep, weight and substance use, the evidence was low or showed no effect. And the sentence worth reading twice: they found no evidence that meditation programs were better than any active treatment — drugs, exercise, or other behavioural therapies.^[8] The reviewers also noted that many trials reported their designs incompletely, failed to blind their assessors, and lost many participants along the way.

So what the research says is this: our minds are away nearly half the time; that absence keeps company with unhappiness, though which causes which is still contested; and structured mindfulness training genuinely helps, at moderate size — not miraculously, and not demonstrably better than a run or an hour with a therapist. What the research does not say matters just as much. It does not say a wandering mind is a defective mind — planning, remembering distant people, and stitching together new ideas all happen while the mind is away; Jim was planning peace work when he lost the tangerine. It does not say an eight-week app will change your life. It does not even say you must meditate. What it can say, modestly, is that returning to the thing in front of you is cheap, its effects are real at a size you can feel — and it is what one Vietnamese monk recommended years before there were iPhones to prove it.

Try it this week

This week's experiment needs no cushion, no app, and no announcement. It needs a sink.

Ask yourself again on Sunday

Back to the kitchen at a quarter past ten. Four plates, a bowl, two glasses, the pan with the stuck egg. Everything the same — except the phone is not propped against the rice cooker, and the person at the sink is actually there. The hands know the moment the water warms; the ears know the pan rings differently from the plates; and the mind that keeps trying to leave for tomorrow's meeting gets walked home a dozen times without anyone being angry at it. Nothing magical happens. The dishes come out exactly as clean, in exactly the same time. But those four minutes have you in them — and if Oliver is right, that one wild and precious life is assembled out of nothing more than four-minute stretches like this one, laid end to end.

I do not believe washing dishes will make you happy. The research doesn't quite believe it either. But I believe Oliver's order of operations — attention first, devotion after — and I believe it holds for plates, for children, for work, and for the person asleep on the far side of the bed, in exactly the same way. You do not have to love washing dishes. You only have to be there while you wash them. The rest arrives on its own. Or doesn't — which is also fine, because the dishes are clean either way.

Next time we go looking for something harder than a plate that won't sit still: a life that won't go according to plan. Marcus Aurelius and Viktor Frankl on the thing that blocks the path — and a caution about Nietzsche's famous line, which is not always true: The Obstacle Is the Way.