We live in an era defined by the anxious accumulation of metrics. We count our daily steps, track our sleep cycles, monitor our resting heart rates, and log our caloric intake with the diligence of medieval scribes. Every action, no matter how mundane, has been folded into a grand ledger of self-optimization. It was only a matter of time before this relentless accounting colonized our inner lives as well. Today, millions of us sit on cushions, close our eyes, and listen to the soothing voices of meditation apps, entirely aware that a digital counter is quietly tallying our "mindful minutes." We maintain meditation streaks. We measure our serenity. We have turned peace into a performance metric.
Beneath this gamification lies a deeply ingrained cultural assumption: that everything we do must yield a return on investment. We rarely meditate simply to sit; we meditate to become more focused at work, more patient with our spouses, more resilient in the face of political doom. We approach mindfulness as a psychological upgrade, a software patch for the human operating system. We want our spiritual practice to make us better, more effective, more successful. We want, in short, to be compensated for our efforts. We want merit.
This is not a uniquely modern affliction. Fifteen hundred years ago, in the early sixth century, Emperor Wu of Liang harbored the exact same expectation. Emperor Wu was a devout man, a prolific builder of temples, a patron of sutra translations, and a financial backer of thousands of Buddhist monks. He was, by all conventional standards, the ultimate philanthropist—the ancient equivalent of a tech billionaire funding global health initiatives. When he heard that a formidable Indian monk named Bodhidharma had arrived in China, the Emperor summoned him to the palace. He wanted an audience with the master. More accurately, he wanted an audit.
One can imagine the scene: the Emperor, draped in silk, seated in the splendor of his court, facing this foreign monk with piercing eyes and an unyielding posture. Emperor Wu laid out his spiritual portfolio. "I have built temples, copied sutras, and ordained countless monks," he reportedly said. "What is my merit?" He was asking for his score. He was asking for confirmation that his investments had paid off, that his spiritual ledger was in the black, that he had secured his status as a holy man.
Bodhidharma’s reply remains one of the most bracing moments in Zen literature. He did not offer praise. He did not offer a polite diplomatic concession or a nuanced theological caveat. He looked at the Emperor and said, "No merit whatsoever."
It is a devastating answer. With three words, Bodhidharma incinerated the Emperor’s entire system of spiritual economics. He refused to participate in the transactional game. You cannot buy enlightenment, he was saying, and you cannot earn it like a boy scout badge. True practice is not an acquisition; it is a shedding. To ask for merit is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the endeavor, because it places the ego—the very thing that is supposed to be getting out of the way—right back at the center of the project, frantically tallying up its winnings.
Emperor Wu, understandably thrown, tried to pivot to theological ground. If all his good deeds meant nothing, if conventional religious piety was worthless, then what was the core of the teaching? "What, then, is the highest holy truth?" he asked. He was looking for a concept, a doctrine, a sacred principle he could grasp and hold onto. Something to validate the immense structure of his belief.
Bodhidharma replied, "Vast emptiness, nothing holy."
This was the second blow, an answer of terrifying scope. Bodhidharma was stripping away the comforting scaffolding of religious hierarchy, the reassuring distinction between the sacred and the profane. There is no holy truth hidden away in a mountaintop temple. There is no special, elevated state of grace reserved for the pious. There is only this immediate, unvarnished reality—vast, open, and profoundly indifferent to our human need for specialness. By calling it "nothing holy," Bodhidharma was not being a nihilist; he was being a radical egalitarian. If nothing is specially holy, then everything is equally sacred. The mud and the lotus, the golden altar and the dirty boots, the silent retreat and the noisy commute—all of it is just this.
The Emperor, entirely unmoored by this absolute refusal to play by the rules of conventional religion, asked one final, desperate question. If there is no merit, and if there is nothing holy, then who exactly is this impudent monk standing before him? "Who is facing me?" Wu demanded.
Bodhidharma said, "I don't know." And with that, he turned and left, eventually crossing the Yangtze River to sit facing a wall in a cave for nine years, leaving the Emperor with a fistful of empty air.
We read this story today and we naturally want to align ourselves with Bodhidharma—the rebel, the iconoclast, the man who speaks truth to power. But the uncomfortable truth is that almost all of us are Emperor Wu. We come to our meditation cushions, our therapists, our yoga mats, carrying our heavy, invisible ledgers. We want to know our merit. We want to know that our ten minutes of deep breathing will yield a quantifiable reduction in our cortisol levels. We want to know that our suffering has earned us some profound insight. We want the holy truth, packaged neatly as an actionable takeaway we can apply to our daily lives.
What Bodhidharma offers us, across the centuries, is the radical, terrifying gift of uselessness. Zen is, at its core, entirely useless. It will not make you richer. It will not make you more productive. It will not make you a more optimized cog in the machinery of late capitalism. If you are doing it to get something, to achieve a state, to become a better version of yourself, you are, as the old teachers would say, scratching your itchy foot through your shoe. You are missing the bare contact with life.
To truly sit in vast emptiness is to drop the ledger entirely. It is to surrender the exhausting project of self-improvement and to encounter yourself exactly as you are, without the comforting narrative of progress. This is not a defeat; it is a profound, breathtaking relief. We do not have to earn our place in the world. We do not have to optimize our breathing. We can step off the treadmill of spiritual acquisition, leave the counting to the machines, and simply be here—empty, unmeasured, and entirely alive.