For many years while practicing Zen, I thought I was a failure. But as more years went by, I began to realize that failure is the heart of Zen. Failure is what Zen is about. Perhaps it’s what life is about. Successes never seem to last. Death, after all, comes in the end to take all successes away. If you want something abiding, something for the long run, look to failure.

When I say failure, I don’t mean giving up, turning around, and walking away. I mean the failure that we work hard for, failure that we put everything into — bitter failure. Real failure requires real effort, and is its own reward.

In “The Four Ages of Man,” William Butler Yeats speaks of failure as the essence of spiritual life:

He with body waged a fight
But body won: it walks upright.
Then he struggled with the heart;
Innocence and peace depart.
Then he struggled with the mind;
His proud heart he left behind.
Now his wars on God begin;
At stroke of midnight, God shall win.

There it is: Failure. The defeat of all one’s hopes, fears, stratagems, efforts. The thing we fear the most.

In Yeats’s poem there is also some glimmer that failure may not be as bad as we think. Is it so bad that God wins? And through the little doorway opened by that doubt, we come to Zen.

But failure is a two-edged sword. There’s the failure that prevents us from living fully, the failure built of fears and expectations, patterns to which mind and body have long been habituated. There’s the failure to hear the birds singing, failure to use the intricate senses with which we’ve all been so lavishly endowed. Then there’s the failure to get what we want — perhaps that’s the one we know best.

And then there’s the failure that’s open and pure — the failure that Zen is all about. What could be more ridiculous, after all, than working hard, in retreat after retreat, facing fear after fear, letting go of desire after desire, hope after hope, only to find out that we have to fail completely in the end? We work so hard in this life — only to die. We must give up everything! And this discovery is exactly where “success” in Zen, in life, can begin.

During this last winter and early spring my wife’s mother and my own mother died. With their deaths has come the heartfelt recognition that all efforts come to naught. Each of us will die, and everything we have gained, everything we have worked hard for, will be taken from us: thoughts, feelings, the singing of birds, the cool wind on our skin on a hot day, the sunrise and the sunset, the people we love — all gone. Our children will be gone, the children we worry about, whom we hover over in our minds day and night. They’re going to die, no matter how hard we work protecting them, no matter how well they do growing up. And our grandchildren will die, and our great-grandchildren. So underneath all our success, even after a lifetime of successes, we still have to come face to face with this insurmountable failure.

Each of us starts off in life complete and whole. But after a while, trained by the world around us, we discover that we want more. We want to be handsome or beautiful, to be loved and respected. We want to be independent and strong, perhaps wise, and, certainly, eternal. But somehow few of these things work out. The failure becomes so bitter that we have to do something. Perhaps we begin practicing Zen. And for many years it’s failure after failure, as if we’re shooting at a target but keep missing. One day we find that failures are a kind of success.

I came to Zen through a number of failures, the pain of which was bitter enough to drive me onto a completely different path, the path of practice. And then, since I began practicing, there was the glorious failure of the bookshop I started. It took much effort to engineer that one. It all fell apart and then — great surprise! — something new emerged, something truly better.

After the closing of the bookshop I had an idea for a book. Much earlier, I’d lost a lot, and my wife and I were living in backwoods Pennsylvania. There had been an old quarry there, and I thought I might take a wish from my childhood and combine it with some of the feelings I’d had while walking through that quarry and make something new — as well as heal some old wounds. For three years I worked on the story of a boy and his imagination. For three years I was turned down by my editor. A hundred rewrites on this one little story: turned down each time. Then suddenly, as I was about to drop the project, I saw how the whole thing could work. After three years of failure, it was essentially written in thirty seconds. And the book became a great success. That period of loss and pain from many years ago gave me the basis to create something new, something that pleased me greatly. How do we explain it? Can failure be a good thing?

One day when I was young, my father looked into my room, saw me drawing, and said, “Don’t become an artist.” I worried about what he’d said for a long time. Ultimately, I failed to follow his advice.

I had a talk with my father a couple of years ago as he was driving me to a storytelling performance I was giving. I said to him, “You know, the people I respected most when I was younger were not really successes. Van Gogh never sold a painting and died in poverty and madness. William Blake died in poverty, too, but at least in joy. And then there’s Herman Melville: after writing perhaps the greatest American novel, he got terrible reviews and lived his life in obscurity and despair. During their lives, these people seemed to be failures.

“Then there are people who are successes. Perhaps they earn a lot of money, take lavish vacations, and wear expensive clothes. Maybe they make some product that pollutes the environment a bit. The legacy they leave doesn’t last long, and if it does it’s often something we don’t want in the long run anyway. But Van Gogh, Blake, Melville: their works just get stronger and stronger. How do you explain this? Which is success, which failure?”

There’s an old story from China called “The Green Pillow Dream”: Once there was a farmer who was very dissatisfied with his life. He set out to seek his fortune. He walked for a day and came to an inn nestled in the foothills of some mountains. He was hungry, so he went inside. Because he didn’t have much money, he ordered only a bowl of rice and some tea. He was very tired and was going to lie down until his meal was served. An old man who was staying at the inn said, “If you’re going to lie down, why don’t you take my pillow?” (Pillows in ancient China weren’t soft cushions; they were ceramic, and shaped to your neck and shoulders.) The old man offered the farmer a beautiful, glazed green pillow.

The farmer had a conversation with the old man, who mentioned that it must be nice to be young and healthy. The farmer said that, although he was, indeed, young and healthy, he wasn’t very happy. He worked all day in the fields and had nothing to show for it. Finally, the farmer put his head down and fell asleep. The next thing he knew he was walking through a tunnel, from which he emerged into an open field with mountains in the distance, waterfalls flowing like silver threads, horses and deer running, and tigers stalking. He walked down the road that ran through the field and came to a village. A beautiful young woman ran out of the biggest house and called him by name. She’d been waiting for him. They got married, and before long he was overseeing the estate of his father-in-law. He and his wife had children. In time, he became governor. When barbarians invaded, he was called to lead the armies. Just like that, he achieved a great victory, driving the invaders before him like dust before the wind. He was made prime minister. The land flourished as it never had before.

But some of the other ministers became jealous and set up a plot against him, producing forged letters to show that he’d been working with the barbarians to overthrow the empire. So he was banished and lost everything. He and his wife and children went to live in a hovel, where guards watched them day and night. He had no privacy, no peace of mind. He had nothing. He would have been happier, he realized, being an unknown farmer.

Eight years went by, then a rider arrived with a message from the emperor, who had discovered the plot and asked now for forgiveness. All the man’s lands were restored. His sons became great generals and ministers, and again the land flourished. He became a very old man, and at last was lying in his deathbed. The emperor sent the best doctor in the world, but it was hopeless. Tears flowed — his sons and daughters, his grandsons and granddaughters, his daughters-in-law, and his old wife were crying and crying as he left this world. He found himself back in the tunnel, walked through, and opened his eyes: he was lying in the inn with his head on the pillow; the rice and tea were just being put down on the table. He had lived a whole life, yet hardly a moment had passed.

There’s a line in Zen that goes: “The failure is wonderful indeed.” We all come to know failure intimately, don’t we? Is it wonderful? Another Zen line says: “When your bow is broken and your last arrow spent, then shoot, shoot with your whole heart.” Failure comes as we try to succeed. It happens naturally; no special efforts are needed. So, my advice is, just forget all of this. In fact, don’t fail to do so.

Rafe Martin is an author and storyteller. This essay is adapted from a talk he gave. It was first published in Zen Bow, a publication of the Rochester Zen Center.

— Ed.