My mind is a distant drifting cloud—
I know it won’t return.
It lives with clouds
in the space
between existing and the Void.
—Li Ye (c. 734–784, more in Yin Mountain)
There’s something brutally honest about this poem. Li Ye, a woman Daoist poet from Tang Dynasty China, isn’t describing some transcendent moment of enlightenment. She’s describing what actually happens when you sit down to meditate: your mind just leaves.
No dramatic exit. No goodbye note. It drifts off like a cloud that’s decided it has somewhere better to be—somewhere between here and nowhere, between form and formlessness, between being something and being nothing at all.
And here’s the kicker: she knows it won’t return. She’s not even trying to bring it back.
Two Ways of Watching the Mind Leave
If you’ve ever tried to meditate, you know this moment. You sit down with good intentions. You close your eyes. And within seconds, your mind is thinking about what you need to pick up at the grocery store, or replaying that conversation from three days ago, or wondering if you remembered to send that email.
But what you do next—that’s where things get interesting. That’s where Daoist and Buddhist meditation split into different paths.
In Buddhist mindfulness and concentration, when your mind wanders off, you bring it back. Again and again and again. You return to your breath, return to the present moment, return to the cushion beneath you. The whole practice is built on this return. The wandering isn’t the failure—noticing you’ve wandered and gently guiding yourself back is the cultivation.
Zen Buddhism is an exercise in coming home. Each time your mind drifts and you bring it back, you’re strengthening your ability to stay present, to observe your thoughts without getting swept away by them. You’re looking inwardly, excavating the wisdom that’s been there all along, buried under layers of distraction and delusion.
The Zen masters have a saying: “When walking, just walk. When sitting, just sit.” The goal is to be completely here, completely now, completely present with what is.
The Daoist Alternative: Don’t Come Back
But Li Ye’s poem suggests something completely different. Something that might sound like bad meditation advice if you’re coming from a Buddhist perspective.
She lets her mind go. And she doesn’t chase it.
That is the Daoist approach: the veneration of Unity with nature. Let go so completely that you dissolve into the natural world around you. Your mind becomes the cloud. Your breath becomes the wind. The boundary between you and not-you gets fuzzy, then disappears altogether.
Daoists work to weaken the very notion of a separate “you”. The goal isn’t to discover inner wisdom—it’s to become an effortless conduit of the Dao, with the natural flow of things, that the distinction between inner and outer becomes meaningless.
Think about it: when Li Ye’s mind drifts away to “live with clouds,” she’s not losing something. She’s joining something. She’s becoming part of the vast, flowing, ever-changing nature of reality itself. Her mind isn’t trapped in her skull anymore—it’s out there, in that space “between existing and the Void.”
That space between the existing and the Void? That’s the Dao. That’s the realm of pure potential, where things haven’t solidified into fixed forms yet. Where you’re not quite something but not quite nothing. Where you can be both cloud and person, both here and everywhere, both yourself and everything else.
Why This Matters
Here’s what strikes me about these two approaches: they’re both trying to solve the same problem—the suffering that comes from being trapped in your own head—but they’re taking opposite routes.
Buddhism says: strengthen your ability to stay. Get so good at being present that you can always come back to your innate Buddha Nature. Find the wisdom that’s already inside you.
Daoism says: weaken your need to stay. Get so good at letting go that there’s nothing left to be pulled away from. Find the wisdom that’s everywhere, in everything, including you, but not limited to you.
One is centripetal, pulling everything inward to a single point of awareness. The other is centrifugal, letting everything spin outward until you’re everywhere and nowhere at once.
And honestly? I think Li Ye’s poem captures something that both traditions understand, even if they approach it differently: your mind is going to wander. That’s not a bug. That might be the whole point.
The question isn’t whether your mind will drift away. The question is whether you’re going to spend your life chasing it back, or let it go and see what it’s like to live as a cloud for a while.
Either way, the most profound thing you can do is sit down and watch your mind. Let it live in that space between existing and the Void. Not because you’ve failed at meditation, but because you’ve succeeded at something else entirely: the art of not being trapped in your ego-driven thoughts.
What’s your experience with this? Do you bring your mind back, or do you let it drift? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.