Third of Twenty-one Zen Stories from the book “A Cup of Zen” by Kai Tsukimi
The reading involved two Observers and the Observing Reader The third story I have paused over from Kai Tsukimi’s A Cup of Zen is The Quiet Fisherman.
It is a very simple story. A young boy watches a fisherman going about his daily work. The fisherman casts his net into the sea, waits, and then pulls it back with whatever the tide has chosen to give him. Sometimes there are fish. Sometimes there aren’t.
The boy, naturally, is curious.
“How do you know you will find fish here?”
The fisherman doesn’t answer.
He simply casts his net again.
There is something about that silence that stayed with me.
The boy is watching the fisherman. But the fisherman is watching something else.
The sea.
The tide.
The movement of the water.
The rhythm of his work.
And perhaps that is where the story first begins to open itself.
The Boy Watches
The boy sees uncertainty everywhere. How can the fisherman know there are fish here? What if there are no fish? What if there is a better way of doing this?
These are perfectly reasonable questions. In fact, they are the kind of questions curiosity naturally produces.
But the boy seems to want an answer before the action takes place.
He wants to know whether the net will bring back fish before the net is cast.
And isn’t that rather like us?
We ask whether something will work before beginning it. We look for the better method before trying the method we have in front of us. We worry about the outcome before we have taken the first step.
The questions are not necessarily wrong.
But at some point, the net has to leave our hands.
The constant questioning is not going to produce a fish.
The Fisherman Watches
The fisherman seems to have a very different relationship with uncertainty.
He does not appear to know that every cast will bring fish. He doesn’t demand that the sea give him a guarantee. He casts the net, waits, pulls it back, observes what he has caught, and prepares to cast again.
Perhaps he has learned enough about the sea to know where and when to place the net. He watches the tides and the movement of the water. He pays attention to the conditions around him.
He isn’t controlling the sea.
He is working with it.
That distinction caught me.
We often think of success as finding the perfect method that guarantees the result we want. The fisherman seems to suggest something quieter: perhaps the better way is not always a different way. Sometimes it is simply paying closer attention to the way we are already doing something.
He isn’t directing the fish into his net. He is learning where to place the net so that he has a chance of finding them.
There is humility in that.
What the Boy Sees Next
The fisherman casts again.
This time the net comes back filled with fish.
The boy has his answer, perhaps—or at least he has evidence that the fisherman knows what he is doing.
But the fisherman doesn’t stop to explain himself.
He doesn’t turn to the boy and say, “See? This is why I told you.”
He simply prepares to cast the net again.
And something has changed.
The boy doesn’t ask another question.
He watches.
That small change in the boy feels important to me.
Perhaps curiosity has now begun to turn into observation.
At first he wanted the fisherman to explain how he knew. Now he is beginning to watch how the fisherman knows.
The fisherman hasn’t given him a lecture.
He has given him something to observe.
Two Observers
And now I find myself thinking about the two of them.
Both are observers, but they observe differently.
The boy observes the fisherman and keeps asking what might happen.
The fisherman observes the sea and responds to what is actually happening.
The boy’s attention is pulled towards the future:
What if there are no fish?
What if there is a better way?
The fisherman’s attention seems to remain with the present:
What is the sea doing now?
When is it time to cast?
When is it time to pull?
Perhaps this is one of the quiet differences between worrying about an outcome and paying attention to a process.
One keeps asking for certainty.
The other works with possibility.
The Question of a Better Way
The boy’s question—“What if there is a better way?”—made me smile.
It is such a human question.
We are constantly searching for the better way.
The quicker way.
The cleverer way.
The more efficient way.
Sometimes that search is exactly what helps us improve.
But sometimes we become so busy looking for a better way that we never become attentive enough to the way we are already doing something.
Perhaps the fisherman has something to teach us here.
He isn’t necessarily claiming that his way is the best way.
He simply knows his work well enough to keep observing, keep adjusting and keep trying.
The sea remains unpredictable.
The fisherman remains attentive.
And the net goes out again.
When the Questions Become Quiet
There is another thing I find beautiful in the story.
The fisherman never tells the boy to be quiet.
He doesn’t scold him.
He doesn’t dismiss his questions.
He simply continues doing his work.
Eventually, the boy becomes quiet on his own.
Perhaps that is the real beginning of his learning.
Not that he has stopped being curious.
Rather, he has discovered that some things are better understood by watching than by asking another question.
There is knowledge we acquire from books.
There is knowledge someone explains to us.
And there is knowledge that comes from doing something attentively enough that the doing itself becomes a form of understanding.
The fisherman doesn’t explain fishing.
He fishes.
And Then There Is the Reader
At some point, I realised that I had become the third observer.
I began by watching the boy watching the fisherman.
Then I watched the fisherman watching the sea.
And gradually I found myself watching my own reactions to both of them.
How often do I ask, Will this work?
How often do I wonder whether there is a better way before I have even tried the way in front of me?
How often do I keep questioning because questioning feels safer than actually casting the net?
Perhaps that is why this little story stayed with me.
The fisherman cannot control whether there will be fish.
He cannot control the tide.
He cannot control the sea.
He can only bring his attention to the work.
And then do it again.
Perhaps fishing for opportunities is not about knowing exactly where the fish are.
Perhaps it is about watching the sea closely enough to know where to place the net—and then having the patience to wait.
The Net Goes Out Again
The story ends much as it began.
The fisherman casts his net into the dark waters.
The shores are washed by the tide.
The moon silently watches.
The fisherman does not know what the next cast will bring.
And yet he casts again.
By now, the boy has stopped asking.
Perhaps he has begun to understand that the absence of certainty does not have to prevent action.
Perhaps he has also begun to understand that observation is not passive. To watch carefully is itself a way of learning.
And perhaps that is the little golden nugget I take away from The Quiet Fisherman:
We don’t always need certainty before taking the next step. Sometimes we need enough attention to take the step, observe what happens, and be willing to cast the net again.
The sea remains dark.
The moon remains silent.
The tide continues its rhythm.
The fisherman keeps fishing.
And somewhere between the boy’s questions and the fisherman’s silence, I find myself wondering:
Am I watching the sea—or am I merely asking whether there will be fish?
Perhaps that is worth pausing over.
Before the next cast.
Before the next question.
Before the next step.
