Self-Compassion Is Not Soft
Why are you still holding her? A Zen parable for everyone who gets angry at themselves while learning.
Yesterday I read a note here on Substack where someone was publicly complaining about herself: even though learning is enjoyable, she wrote, it can be such a frustrating process. She tries to be easy on herself, but whenever she makes a mistake, she gets angry. A quiet disappointment, like giving herself the silent treatment.
And I responded with this: “If you genuinely want to learn, you must show yourself compassion and patience. Your ego ignores your soul and pushes hard to achieve results, but this is unnatural. As you already know, if you have a wound, you need days to heal. Love yourself even when you fail.”
My response is neither comforting nor superficial empathy. I believe in what I wrote. Learning something involves love. Love for what you have decided to study, but also love for yourself. This essay is about the second kind of love and why it is a discipline rather than a consolation prize.
A few years back, I chose to learn Japanese mainly because my ego craved a feeling of uniqueness, fueled by insecurities. While others collected pens, I wanted to demonstrate to myself that I was special. It was an attempt to heal that insecurity through an adventure, a game. A wonderful game.
But Japanese, or any other thing you have decided to learn, is not responsible for your frustrations and sadness. Your ego is what turns difficulty into frustration.
(A quick note before we go on: I’m quietly building something around this idea — daily Japanese practice as a dō*, not a hobby to abandon by March. More on that at the end, if you’re curious.)*
Two wrong answers to the same pain
Today, I watched a video of a young man claiming he learned Japanese in just a few weeks. I recognized him instantly — not by his face, but by his hunger. It reminded me of my own motivation, though his was more intense.
He seems to view the language as a trophy or a goal to showcase. I understand that drive and its roots.
In his video, he simply listed some basic daily tasks. That’s all. He didn’t mention the difficulties of learning.
He suggested, among other things, watching two hours of anime every day. All his methods seem simple and even fun. His promise, and the promise of everything sold to us as “fast” or “fun” learning, is one answer to the pain of struggling: make the struggle disappear.
We live inside an economy that treats effort as a defect, manufactures our anxiety, and then sells us toys to soothe it. As long as we keep buying relief, we remain customers forever — and students never.
I recently read Javier Santana’s essay on Kognitivo. As he puts it, “fun is not what produces learning.” What produces it, he explains, is overcoming the right kind of cognitive struggle, pitched at the right level. When enjoyment is added on top of a lesson rather than woven into it, our limited attention goes to the entertaining details, and the actual material loses out. And he warns of something deeper: if you condition yourself to need fun in order to learn, you never build the tolerance for productive discomfort that real learning, sooner or later, will demand of you.
But there is a second wrong answer, and it is the one the woman in the Substack note had chosen, the one I chose for years. If the struggle cannot be removed, then punish yourself for feeling it. Get angry at every mistake. Give yourself the silent treatment. Treat your own slowness as a moral failure.
The first answer flees the river. The second drowns in it while cursing itself for getting wet. Neither one crosses.
The two monks and the river
The story appears in the old Zen collections — in the best-known version, the two monks even have names, Tanzan and Ekido, and the river is a muddy road in Meiji-era Japan. 1 But it travels well in every form, so I will tell it the way it reached me.
Two monks, one older and one younger, were traveling together when they reached a wide, fast-flowing river. There, they saw a young woman afraid to cross alone and seeking help.
Both monks belonged to an order whose strict rule forbade physical contact with women. The younger monk hesitated and looked away. Without saying a word, the older monk picked up the woman, carried her across the rushing water, and gently set her down on the other side. He then returned, and the two monks continued their journey in complete silence.
Hours went by, and the younger monk grew more restless and irate. At last, he couldn’t hold back and exclaimed, “We vowed not to touch women! How could you carry that woman across the river?”
The senior monk looked at him serenely and said, “Brother, I put her down hours ago. Why are you still holding her?”
Like all Zen stories, this one refuses to explain itself. The text ends with Tanzan’s question and offers no moral: the reading is left to whoever hears it. Here is mine. The parable is not about women or vows — it never was. The younger monk’s mistake is that he sees an “impure object,” whereas the older monk simply sees a person who needs to cross. The story is about weight: what we pick up and what we refuse to put down.
The third answer
Read the parable again, but this time notice what each monk does with difficulty.
The older monk neither avoids the river nor makes the crossing pleasant. He does what his rule forbids, because a person needs help: he picks up what is heavy, crosses fully, sets her down, and walks on. His action is spontaneous, centered only on the present moment, not on what lay two hours later or minutes before.
The younger monk touches nothing and carries everything. For hours, he holds the event in his mind, turning it over, judging. He is the perfect image of the learner who makes a mistake at nine in the morning and is still scolding himself at dinner.
The parable gave you the diagnosis. What follows in this essay is the practice.
Now imagine that the river is the difficulty in front of you: a very hard grammar rule, a sentence to pronounce, some notes to play on a violin. The older monk shows you how to cross it — fully, spontaneously, with your whole attention in this one crossing. And every thought that disturbs your focus while you study is not the weight of this river. It is a woman from a past crossing that you never set down: this morning’s mistake, or yesterday’s doubt about your own intelligence. You carry her up and down every riverbank — and then wonder why today’s crossing feels so heavy.
And when you cross badly — because you will, again and again — the practice is the older monk’s: set her down. Self-compassion is not the alternative to the struggle. It is what makes the struggle sustainable for a lifetime. The kindness is not in sparing yourself the river; it is in refusing to carry every failed crossing on your back to the next one. And it is worth being precise about where that kindness is aimed: not toward the ego that demands perfection, but toward the mind that suffers under it.
This is where Zen and cognitive science agree. Santana is right that the effort is not the obstacle to learning — it is the learning. What compassion adds is something the laboratories cannot measure: it is what allows you to return to the river tomorrow, and the day after, without the younger monk’s voice in your head listing all the times you crossed it badly.
Elsewhere I write about Japanese grammar and literature as structures of thought — the technical side of the same practice. Free.
The way, not the trophy
In my previous article, I explained the Japanese concept of dō and the distinction that runs beneath this whole essay: jutsu, the technique you use, versus dō, the way that changes who you are. The boy in the video wanted a jutsu, a technique to possess, a skill to exhibit. But Japanese, for me, is a dō. I taught myself to consider Japanese as Judo.
Learning Japanese is no longer just about learning the language for me. It has become a discipline that helps me concentrate and bend my ego like a steel wire that is difficult to bend.
A Zen monastery is a system of chosen difficulties. Zazen is hours of stillness while your legs burn, and the instruction is not to escape the pain but to sit with it. The kōan is given precisely because it cannot be solved by ordinary intellect: a difficulty designed to exhaust the ego, not entertain it. No master has ever thought of making any of this fun.
And yet the difficulty is never suffering for its own sake. The Buddha himself rejected that path. The difficulty is calibrated: hard enough to wake you, not so hard as to crush you. And the monk who fails at zazen today, whose mind wanders a hundred times, is not expelled or shamed. He is told: begin again. That instruction, begin again, without commentary, without the trial, is self-compassion in its most disciplined form. A monastery has no softness in it — and no cruelty.
What cognitive science now calls desirable difficulty, the monasteries have practiced for a thousand years, but with one difference. The laboratories measure the effects of the struggle on your memory. The monks know what it does to who you are.
Set her down
We live in a world where distraction is constant, and everyone competes for our attention. We can no longer follow a video longer than three minutes; we can no longer read an entire book. The answer is not to make learning more entertaining — that is just more distraction, sold as teaching. But neither is the answer to whip yourself across the river.
The answer is the older monk’s, and it has two movements. Pick up what is heavy and cross — that is the discipline. Then set it down and keep walking — that is compassion. Most of us have been taught only the first movement, and we wonder why we keep abandoning the path.
Love yourself even when you fail. I wrote that to a stranger, and I meant it — but by now you know it is not soft. In practice, it means this: put the mistake down where it happened, and do not carry it across the next river. Your ego wants the trophy by Friday. Your soul wants to still be walking in ten years.
Set her down. The river will be there tomorrow. So will you.
I’m building something for people who want to practice Japanese as a dō, not a hobby to abandon in March. If that’s you, reply — I’d like to hear what you’re looking for.
The best-known English version is 'Muddy Road,' collected in Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki's Zen Flesh, Zen Bones (1957).