Who Can Untangle This Tangle? A Zen Teaching on Virtue

Good morning, and welcome to Beginner's Mind Temple. It is a Saturday in September 2026, the room is full, and San Francisco Zen Center priest Myoju Erin Merk, who spends her weekdays teaching high school, opens with a greeting and a confession: this week she has been turning over what it means to be a human being. What is special about us, what is troubling about us, and how do we sit with all of it while the news pours past like a roaring stream? Her answer is to go back to a very old conversation, one preserved in the Samyutta Nikaya, one of the earliest collections of the Buddha's discourses. In it, a student named Jata asks a question that has not aged a day: who can untangle this tangle? The Buddha's reply is not a doctrine to be memorized so much as a set of practices to be started, beginning with virtue and ending with one's own body and karma. What follows is a close look at that teaching and at why Merk believes it still speaks to the present.

Why does a teaching this old still sound like today's news?

Merk does not begin with the sutta. She begins with the people who carried it. Her point is that the teachings reached her at all only because human beings held them in memory for centuries before anyone wrote them down. She described them as memorized, carried, contemplated, and passed along "from warm hand to warm hand." It is a small phrase that does a lot of work. It makes the transmission physical and personal, and it recasts the dharma as something people kept alive with their bodies and their attention.

That matters for how she reads the story. The Buddha's discourses, she notes, usually center on a real or supposedly real encounter between the Buddha and one of his students. "It's a teaching story, but it's also a story of people meeting each other face to face," she says, people "listening to each other's kind of inmost concern and responding." The setting is not an abstraction. It is a conversation between people who know each other well.

— Myoju Erin Merk, Dharma talk at Beginner's Mind Temple (around 4:31)

What is the tangle, and why does Jata's question land so hard?

Merk points out that Jata is a name that means tangle. The question he brings to the Buddha folds the word back on itself, a tangle within and a tangle without, with people entangled in it. The question is blunt in its own way: "Gotama, I ask you this. Who can untangle this tangle?"

A tangle within, a tangle without, people are entangled in a tangle. Gotama, I ask you this. Who can untangle this tangle?

— Jata, as rendered in the Samyutta Nikaya and read aloud by Myoju Erin Merk (around 7:02)

Merk says she first heard this teaching in the Buddha Hall within her first year of practicing at the Zen Center, roughly 25 years ago. What struck her then was a "resonant surprise" at how close the question felt to what had brought her to the practice in the first place: a sense of confusion, and a sense that she needed to ask what else she could do with her human life, and what she should do with it. Hearing it again this week, she says the language of "tangledness" feels "so accurate right now." That is the hinge of the talk. The question is ancient, but the feeling it names is not.

There is a reason the question hits harder than a philosophical puzzle. Jata is not asking about the nature of tangles in the abstract. He is asking how a person moves through a knotted world without making it worse. Merk hears in it an orientation: a way of pointing one's human life away from confusion and speed, and toward what helps oneself and others move toward justice and liberation.

What does the Buddha actually answer?

The Buddha does not offer a diagram of the knots. He answers with a description of a person. In the translation Merk reads, the answer runs like this:

A person established in virtue, discerning, developing discernment and mind, a practitioner, ardent, astute, she can untangle this tangle. Those whose passion, aversion, and ignorance have faded away, devoted practitioners, their affluence ended, for them the tangles untangled. Where name and form, along with perception of impingement and form, totally stop without trace, that's where the tangle is cut.

— The Buddha, in the Samyutta Nikaya passage Myoju Erin Merk reads aloud (around 11:28)

Merk's reading of this is that it is "grounding and also reassuring" precisely because it is calm and matter-of-fact. The question feels overwhelming, almost a demand that someone find the one loose end and pull. The Buddha does not take the bait. He turns the question back toward Jata and toward practice. Instead of "here is how the whole knot comes apart," the answer is "here is what a person who can work on the knot looks like, and here is where that person begins."

Read this way, the answer is a kind of inventory of the practitioner's qualities: established in virtue, discerning, developing discernment and mind, ardent, astute. Passion, aversion, and ignorance are named as the forces that do the tangling, and their fading is what loosens it. The phrase "that's where the tangle is cut" is less a promise of total resolution than a description of where the cutting happens, in the mind of a person who has stopped feeding the knot.

Why does untangling start with virtue and the precepts?

Merk identifies two practices in the Buddha's response. The first is virtue. She hears in "those established in virtue" a template: precepts as a set of guidelines for where to aim our actions. The questions she puts to the room are practical ones. Where do we point our actions? How do we at least try to make an effort toward wholeness, uprightness, and skill? Her words are careful: "even if it's not perfect, we have a template of precepts."

That qualification is important, and it is easy to miss. Merk is not describing virtue as a finished state that must be achieved before anything else can happen. She describes it as a direction, something you lean into when you cannot yet see the way out. In a tangle, this is the difference between freezing and making a small, honest move. The precepts give that move a shape.

Why start with your own body and your own karma?

The second practice, for Merk, is starting with oneself: "starting with our own bodies and minds, starting with our own karmic experience, our karmic conditions. That's really the only place that we can start." The sutta is explicit that untangling is done by working at the edges of the tangle, the pieces we can actually contact. The talk's wider implication is that we are not in a position to work on the whole world's knots at once. We can work on the pieces that are in our hands.

This is where the talk turns practical and, at times, quietly personal. Merk speaks about the students she teaches and about how the culture around them is changing. She is struck by how much pressure young people feel to fit in, to keep up, to be everywhere at once. In response, she describes the value of reminders to be embodied and to attend to the breathing body, and she offers a set of simple questions to bring to the body: where you are, what is happening, how does it feel for you?

— Myoju Erin Merk, Dharma talk at Beginner's Mind Temple (around 18:38)

She is careful to keep the invitation open. "If you're not so into it, it's okay," she says of the body-based practice she is describing. It is not a test. It is a way of coming back to yourself without having to be in as many places doing as many things as the news cycle demands. The point she keeps returning to is that untangling begins with noticing what is actually here, rather than with a more ambitious plan to fix everything out there.

Can the tangle be untangled together?

The opening of the talk frames the story as a model for community. Merk speaks of "creating communities where we can ask [these questions] together, where we can turn them together." The Buddha's conversation with Jata is an example of that: two people who know each other, listening closely, responding honestly. For Merk, the aim of practice is not only personal calm. It is the capacity to collaborate toward justice, toward upright humanity, toward a different vision of what human beings can be.

This is the part of the talk that will feel most urgent to people who are watching the world and feeling helpless. Merk does not argue that the tangle is small or that one person's sitting will resolve it. She argues that the questions are better held in company, and that the practice of virtue, attention, and mutual listening is what makes shared action possible without burning out or turning cruel.

The closing section turns back to Jata himself. In the passage Merk reads, Jata asks the Buddha and the community of monks to be allowed to leave home for homelessness, which is to say, to take up the life of practice fully. The transcript available here ends before that passage is complete, so it is worth hearing the full talk for how Merk brings it home.

Where to go from here

The talk is roughly 42 minutes long, and this article draws on its opening and the transcript that is available. If the Tangle teaching has landed for you, a few practical next steps follow naturally from Merk's own emphasis:

• Read the Jata passage in the Samyutta Nikaya itself, and notice how short and direct the Buddha's answer is.
• Pick one precept as a template for the next week, not as a finished ideal but as a direction to lean into.
• Spend a few minutes a day checking in with the breathing body, asking how it feels right now, without needing to fix anything.
• Find one or two people with whom you can turn your hardest questions over, the way Jata and the Buddha did.
• Watch the full Dharma talk on the San Francisco Zen Center channel, and see the practice calendar at sfzc.org/calendar for ways to sit with others.

Merk ends where the teaching begins: with the recognition that we are human, that the tangle is real, and that the work of untangling is something people do together, one warm hand at a time.