Do We Really See What We See?

Long time ago, a young man paid a visit to a Zen master, asking for truth. The master welcomed young man by some tea: he poured tea from tea pot into tea cup. When the cup was full, he continued pouring, so tea overflowed. The young man asked: "The cup is full, why are you still pouring?" Answered the master: "You are right. If the cup is full, I would not be able to pour fresh tea in. Same as our heads, if they are full, now new ideas could be put in. So, do you have an empty head?"

This is a legendary tale in Zen history. In life I realized, so often our existing beliefs or knowledge would not only prevent us from learning new knowledge, as this Zen story implies, they also distort our observation. Some time we think we saw "fact", but we barely saw what we wanted to see. How I took this photo of gas light lamp is a perfect example:

One day I drove past an apartment gate I saw two gas light lamps hanging on each side of the stone gate wall. I decided to go back to take some pictures of them. In my memory, the frames of lamps were all black, and I was glad because the contrast between black lamp frames and stone gray background would make a perfect image. So I went back the second day with camera. To my disappointment, the lamp frames were not black, but steel gray, and they didn't make good contrast against background as I anticipated. I wonder if the dust on lamp surface make lamps looked gray, but after I checked I found that's not true, because it was rained earlier, the surface of lamps were perfectly clean. But why I remembered they were black? Then in a flash of moment I realized why: because all gas light lamps in my memory were black! That's why! That's how my "knowledge" distorted my observation: I "knew" gas light lamps were dark colored so I "saw" dark colored gas light lamps.

So this experience reminded me the Zen story of tea cup. I think the inspiration of this story is invaluable to human intelligence, that is, only when we empty our mind, put what we think we already knew aside, can we have fresh minds and eyes for truth.

A brief about Buddhism

China is not a very religious country by the strict view of monotheism. Buddhism might be the most "religious" religion in China. And even this religion is not domestic, it was imported from India longtime ago (around the first century). The original Buddhism was very much of "Indian style" which was ascetic and abstinent. Later, especially at Tang dynasty, Buddhism had adapted some Taoist concepts and became more "Chinese style", which was more "down to the earth", much less formidable.
Generally speaking , in China anything can be divided into northern and southern, same as ideologies. Buddhism, just like art or life styles, also divided in to this 2 different styles: Northern sect focused more on stringent practice and southern sect enjoyed more on suddern enlightment. Zen, as an huge influencial Buddhist sect, was famous on its' artistic "practices" --- reach the truth by following natural path of life itself. Zen went to Japan after Tang dynasty and later came to western world in earlier of last century, through the efforts made by artists, philosophers and psychologists.
I dont' think Buddhism to Chinese people has same impact as Christianity to western world. Especially during culture revolution, Buddhism was limited in a very small community. Now, as more Chinese people started to pick up some ancient religions to fit their spiritual needs, Buddhism seems more popular than decades ago, but still within very limited population.