The Beautiful Gaze

  We sometimes imagine that people see "right through us". I wonder if you have ever experienced that idea where a person was able to pierce deeply into the darkest part of you and reveal something you never realized before. In fact, such kind of ideas are often projections that we imagine on others. When someone scowls at us, such as when they are cut off in traffic or rush past us, we might bring our minds back to the memory of when, as small children, a look was more than just a look. Those were the days when our survival often seemed to depend on being able to discern whether a face is loving or threatening; life sustaining or life-terminating!

   What I tried to say is: there is a reason why the human gaze is often studied and becomes a token of power. An authority figure can overpower us simply through a look (which can provoke anxiety), because looking so deeply comes to represent knowledge. A parental figure can punish a child simply through an unloving look, which can in turn remain with that child even well into adulthood. It's sometimes our task in adulthood to understand that the gaze is often only a display, and has nothing to do with who we are fundamentally. If we aren't able to understand the gaze in this way, it will paralyze and overpower us, and we can be gripped with a sense of claustrophobia and paranoia.

   Human gaze can serve the evolutionary function of a warning, but many people naturally have a sad or somber gaze, perhaps from many years of suffering. This is where the gaze has outworn its purpose, and what started out as a single expression soon becomes deep and hard grooves in the forehead, cheeks and mouth. This is where even a look from a stranger becomes confusing. We can never tell whether those hard lines are from exhaustion, disapproval, or simply neutrality. There is often a tendency to over-read these things.

   From a Buddhist perspective, everyone has a beautiful gaze. It's only because I dislike certain faces that I label them, judge them or want to reject them. I confuse the surface with the reality which is infinite. But because mind beholds all faces and can create an infinite range of expressions, no single expression ever scars the surface of the mind or creates a single wrinkle in the mind's surface. The mind is so infinitely pliable that it never requires a single moment of cosmetic surgery. It is like the softest rubber imaginable. A person's face, no matter how angry or resentful, cannot scar my Buddha nature. There is no gaze so powerful that it can pierce or break the mind. All gazes are phenomena precisely of mind, lacking in the nature of I and You. But we need to practice this, and not wait for a rainy day to do it. Practice in front of the mirror. Then in front of strangers. What is this gaze? Who is the seer? Who is the seen?