 In the Daoist tradition we also find an idea of nothingness used in the context of radically emptying the mind in order to attune the finite self to the  in-finite[9]  rhythm of the Way. The Zhuangzi speaks in this regard of the practice of “sitting down and forgetting everything” and of “being empty like a mirror” (see Watson 1968, 90 and 97). When Zen talks of returning to one’s “original face before one’s parents were born,” we find the Daoist ideas of “forgetting the ego” and “returning to the root” linked together with the Mahāyāna Buddhist notion of the “original purity of the mind.” The original brightness and purity of the mind, which lies hidden beneath the clouds of defiling passion, is also frequently expressed in Mahāyāna texts with the analogy of a mirror that is able to spontaneously reflect the world without egoistic discriminations.