One afternoon not long ago, as I was walking in a local gym, I watched a student shooting hoops in an unusual way. On the fingertips of his right hand, he held a basketball. In the palm of his left, he held a cell phone. After taking a single-handed shot, and before the ball had even hit the backboard, he turned his attention to his cell phone. Repeated over and over, his toggling had a rhythm of its own. But it also divided his attention, which could not have been good for his game. And, unwittingly, he was repeatedly flouting a cardinal principle of Zen practice.
In Japanese Zen, that principle is known as ichigyo zammai, which means “doing one thing at a time.” As Zen masters ancient and modern have often reminded us, by giving full attention to whatever we might be doing we not only develop our powers of concentration. We also cultivate the grounded, peaceful state of samadhi: an equanimous, non-reactive, and natural alignment with the flow of reality. “Combust yourself entirely,” a familiar Zen saying, encapsulates this root tenet of the practice.
In classical Japanese poetry, the practice of ichigyo zammai undergirds that most familiar of Japanese poetic forms, the haiku:
A solitary
crow on a bare branch—
autumn evening.
— Basho
In this miniature word-painting, the duality of subject and object dissolves in the meeting of poet and crow. Rather than utilize the crow as a metaphor or symbol, Basho amplifies the bird’s singular presence. What might have been an act of ego-centered observation becomes a moment of life-centered, selfless contemplation.
In Western poetry, which tends to regard encounters with the natural world as occasions for moral, metaphysical, or psychological reflection (“I wandered lonely as a cloud”), there is no exact equivalent of the Japanese haiku. But a parallel may be seen in a sub-genre of lyric poetry known in German as the dinggedicht and in English as the “thing-poem.” As those labels suggest, poems of this kind concentrate on a single thing. And often the poet establishes, in Martin Buber’s famous formulation, an “I-Thou” rather than an “I-It” relationship with the object at hand.
In Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The Panther,” for example, the narrator’s consciousness merges with that of a panther confined to its cage. In Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Fish,” the narrator’s sporting, anthrocentric frame of mind morphs into one of reverence and awe. And in the poems of such Zen-trained American poets as Gary Snyder, W.S. Merwin, and Jane Hirshfield, the narrators typically treat their objects of attention with deep respect and disinterested regard.
Such is the case in Hirshfield’s poem “A Chair in Snow,” where the narrator contemplates a snow-covered chair, focusing on the quiddity, or “whatness,” of her subject. After observing that a chair covered with snow ought to be like any other object “whited / & rounded,” she distinguishes it from all other snow-covered objects primarily by virtue of its function:
more than a bed
more than a hat or house
a chair is shaped for just one thing
to hold
a soul its quick and few bendable
hours
perhaps a king
not to hold snow
not to hold flowers
For Hirshfield, there is something melancholy in this scene. “[A] chair in snow,” she notes, “is always sad.” Presumably, this sadness stems from the chair being isolated and out of place in an alien environment. But the chair’s stark displacement is also an essential component of its singularity.
As a young woman, Jane Hirshfield spent eight years in Zen training, first at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in California’s Ventana Wilderness and subsequently at the San Francisco Zen Center and Green Gulch Farm. In 1979 she received lay ordination in Soto Zen. Reflecting on those early, intensive experiences, Hirshfield, now in her seventies, has remarked that they have influenced her life and work ever since. In its concentration, its intimacy with its subject, and its spirit of inquiry, “A Chair in Snow” vividly confirms that claim.
Beyond that, Hirshfield’s poem represents a quality of sustained, one-pointed attention that is growing increasingly rare in our culture, where millions of people experience their smart phones as vital appendages and frequent scrolling-and-swiping as a necessary, if not obsessive, activity. As Chris Hayes, in his book The Siren’s Call (Penguin, 2025), has noted, attention has become a commodity, which the titans of social media compete to manipulate and otherwise control. And the fragmentation of attention is fast becoming the norm.
To those pernicious social trends, the daily practice of ichigyo zammai offers a potent antidote. By their very nature, the twin disciplines of doing one thing and concentrating on one object at a time settle the restless mind and calm the anxious heart. And for those young people I have observed jaywalking across busy streets, their heads bowed and their eyes fixed on their cell phones, this venerable practice might prove as life-preserving as it is timely.
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To read the full text of “A Chair in Snow,” see
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/56174/a-chair-in-snow.