No Dust
Stop Grading Yourself
You already work two jobs. The second one doesn't pay, and you can't quit.
You corrected the mistake. Then you spent the evening deciding what it said about you.
You took a day off. Then you wondered whether you had rested properly.
You read the books, tried the app, sat the course, and somewhere in the trying it became an exam.
No Dust draws on the teaching of Hui-neng, the Chan Buddhist teacher remembered in the story of the mirror and the dust. It explores how the help we seek can acquire an extra demand: prove that we have finally become the right person.
With gratitude to the traditions that have tried to relieve suffering, from the Buddha's monks to the machine that answers at one in the morning, the book brings that question into ordinary life, and returns us to the care, the conversation, or the practical task still waiting.
Thirteen centuries ago, the story says, a monk wrote on a monastery wall that the mind is a mirror to be polished, and that no dust must settle. Hui-neng, who worked in the rice shed and could not read, had the reply written beside it. The book brings it down to two words.
No dust.
Then the first job: the thing in front of you. It is usually small, and it usually has a person in it.
The red light
You snapped at your child in the car. That is the first arrow, and it has already landed: a small face in the mirror, looking out of the window. Then the second arrow, on schedule: what kind of parent does that. Then, because you have read the books, the third: I know about the second arrow and here I am firing it.
Stop at the light and ask where the third arrow is going to land. It needs a picture of the parent who has read the books and no longer snaps. Where is that picture? Not in the car. There is a person in the back seat and a person in the front, and a sentence that has not been said yet.
The sentence is the first job. It is four words long: I'm sorry I shouted. It can be said at the next light. Then comes the listening, which is the rest of it: what the child says back, or does not, and the quiet after.
The third arrow will come back tomorrow. It has nowhere to land tomorrow either.
Every chapter ends like this: Hui-neng in an ordinary place. The bedtime review. The promotion email. The pharmacy. The streak at zero. The cursor blinking at 1:17.
Read a chapter
The machine that never needs to go home. The AI assistant that was rolled back for flattering its users, the people who tell it the worst thing in their lives at night, and what a mirror tuned toward yes does to the person holding it. With sources.
The book
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No Dust: Stop Grading Yourself, by Pocorabanne. First edition, 2026. This page loads no scripts, fonts or images from any other server. Impressum ยท Privacy notice