The encounter is brief enough to write on a napkin. A monk named Fayan Wenyi was wandering — on pilgrimage, as the tradition called it — when he stopped at the hermitage of the Chan master Dizang Guichen. Dizang asked him where he was going. Fayan said he was on pilgrimage, wandering. Dizang pressed: what is the purpose of pilgrimage? Fayan answered, honestly: I don't know. Dizang looked at him and said: "Not knowing is most intimate."
Three questions. Three answers. An entire philosophy of practice in the space between.
The modern mind does not know what to make of this. Not knowing sounds like a failure state, a gap in the itinerary. We are people who have goals and metrics, who optimize journeys and measure outcomes, who carry GPS coordinates for our spiritual development and update the route when the traffic changes. The very phrase "I don't know where I'm going" is something we say apologetically, with a faint embarrassment, before quickly pivoting to a plan. We have been taught, systematically, that certainty is competence and not-knowing is a problem to be solved.
Dizang was not asking Fayan a navigational question. He was asking something far more precise: where is the mind that is doing this wandering? What is it oriented toward? What does it expect to find at the end of the road that it does not have now? These are not questions about geography. They are questions about the fundamental posture of a practitioner: are you chasing something, or are you here?
The purposive mind and its invisible cost
We have a particular relationship to purpose in this era. Purpose is considered a virtue, almost a moral requirement. To be without purpose is to be adrift, unserious, a dilettante. Every endeavor, even leisure, should serve some larger goal. We meditate to reduce cortisol. We sit in silence to improve focus. We read about Zen to become calmer, wiser, more resilient people. There is nothing wrong with any of these hopes, exactly, but they carry a structural problem that Dizang's question exposes: when we arrive somewhere in this posture, we cannot truly arrive, because our attention is always downstream, checking whether this experience is producing the intended result.
The meditator who sits in order to become calmer cannot be fully in the sitting, because a part of them is stationed at the exit, taking a reading. The pilgrim who wanders in order to find wisdom cannot be fully in contact with the road, because a part of them is already at the destination, comparing what was expected with what arrived. This is the invisible tax on purposive experience: the very desire to get something from an encounter prevents you from meeting it completely.
What Fayan did — perhaps without meaning to — was drop this tax. He did not know what he was looking for. He did not know where he was going. The wandering was just wandering. And in that unknowing, Dizang saw something worth naming: intimacy. Not the warm intimacy of shared feeling, but something more fundamental — the direct, unmediated contact between a person and their actual experience, without the screen of expectation between them.
What intimacy means here
The Chinese character Dizang likely used is 親 (qīn), which encompasses closeness, nearness, kinship. The intimacy of not knowing is the closeness you have with something when you are not already interpreting it through a framework of what it should be. A musician who plays a piece they know perfectly may produce a technically correct performance, but the musician who plays a piece they are still learning — not incompetently, but with genuine uncertainty — is often more present in it. The uncertainty keeps them there.
We speak of certain conversations as intimate not because they were warm or confessional but because they were genuinely open — neither party knew exactly where they were going, and so they could not pretend to be heading somewhere better. The intimacy came from the not-knowing. When we are certain of where we are going in a conversation, we stop listening. We start waiting.
The tradition understood this long before it had the vocabulary of attachment theory or cognitive science. A practitioner who knows what awakening will look like, who has built a detailed interior map of the spiritual path and is tracking their coordinates on it, has replaced the actual territory with a model. They are navigating beautifully, but they are navigating their own projection of the path, not the path. Not knowing is intimate because it is the condition that allows genuine contact — with the sitting, with the teacher, with the moment that is happening right now rather than the moment that was supposed to happen.
The problem with having a destination
There is a version of the spiritual path that is indistinguishable from project management. You identify your deficiencies — scattered mind, reactive emotions, insufficient compassion — and you apply the appropriate practices over a timeline you have loosely estimated, tracking your progress at intervals. This is not entirely misguided. Structure is useful. A beginning practitioner benefits from instruction, sequence, and a teacher who can point out when they are confused. But there is a moment — and you cannot schedule it — when the framework becomes the obstruction. When you are so fluent in the map that you can no longer see the territory.
Fayan, by his own later account, had been a rigorous student. He had read the texts, studied the teachings, practiced the forms. He knew the vocabulary of awakening. He knew what he was supposed to be looking for. And none of it had cracked him open. The knowing had become a kind of armor.
What cracked him open, eventually, was the phrase Dizang offered: not knowing is most intimate. He sat with it. He didn't agree with it or analyze it or file it under a category. He sat with the not-knowing itself — the genuine uncertainty about where he was going and what it meant — and found that this was not a wound but a door. A door that had been papered over, for years, by the accumulated certainties of a diligent student.
Not ignorance, not emptiness
It is important to say what not-knowing is not. Dizang was not praising ignorance. He was not suggesting that study is useless, that understanding is suspect, or that the careful cultivation of a practice is somehow inauthentic. He was pointing at something more precise: the quality of attention in a mind that has not already decided what it will find.
This is the distinction Shunryu Suzuki gestured at when he said that in the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few. He did not mean that the expert is wrong. He meant that the expert's knowing forecloses a certain kind of openness. The expert has, quite legitimately, developed a dense network of categories and expectations. That network is genuinely useful. But it also catches everything that arrives and sorts it before the person has had a chance to meet it directly.
The not-knowing Dizang praised is not the absence of understanding. It is understanding that has been so thoroughly digested it no longer needs to announce itself — which means the practitioner is free to be present to what is actually occurring, rather than what their training predicts should occur. It is the musician who no longer thinks about the fingering. It is, in an older idiom, the swordsman who has forgotten the sword. The form is inside them; they do not have to carry it consciously. And so their hands are free.
Pilgrimage as a practice of contact
There is a reason the tradition used pilgrimage as the frame for this encounter, rather than, say, a monastery courtyard or a meditation hall. Pilgrimage implies movement without a fixed outcome. The pilgrim goes toward something — a sacred site, a teacher, an understanding — but the travel itself changes what they are going toward. You cannot plan the encounter with the road. You can only be on it.
This is what Fayan's wandering was doing before Dizang named it. The wandering itself was the practice: not accumulating experiences toward a predetermined enlightenment, but being genuinely in contact with what each day brought. His "I don't know" was not a confession of failure. It was an accurate description of his relationship to his own pilgrimage. He was on it without knowing where it was taking him. And that, Dizang saw, was the correct relationship to have.
Most of us are not pilgrims in any literal sense. But we are in motion — toward better versions of ourselves, toward more clarified lives, toward some future state we have been quietly constructing for years. The question Dizang's three lines press on us is the same one he pressed on Fayan: when you get there, wherever there is, will you recognize it? Or will you be so busy checking whether you have arrived according to your original plan that you will walk right through it?
Not knowing is most intimate. Not as a technique. Not as an instruction. Just as an observation about where genuine contact actually lives — in the moment before the mind has decided what the moment means.