Show me your original face, the one you had before your parents were born

“Show me your original face, the one you had before your parents were born” is a Zen koan that recurs at Tranquillum House as a question about identity before inherited categories and bodily appearance. Its two appearances place the same prompt in sharply different settings: Masha offers it for contemplation beneath the stars, while Carmel encounters it inside a vivid fantasy of existing without a body and then selecting a replacement.

Meditation at Tranquillum House

Masha introduces the koan during an explanation of the form: a paradox or puzzle used in Zen Buddhist meditation to aid the quest toward enlightenment. Along with “Out of nowhere the mind comes forth,” it is one of two prompts she asks the guests to reflect on while looking at the stars that night. She cautions them not to struggle for answers or solutions, emphasizing that the koans are not a quiz. The question is offered as an invitation to reflection, not a riddle with a stated solution.

The delivery unsettles Lars, who had expected a luxury wellness retreat and already worried about embarrassing cultural appropriation. His reaction places the koan in a tension between the retreat’s polished promise and its borrowing of religious practice. At the same time, Masha’s instruction to sit with the question rather than solve it makes its uncertainty part of the exercise.

Carmel’s Imagined Original Face

The phrase returns in Carmel’s imagined scene, where she experiences herself as no longer wearing a body. Her relief is expressed through an accumulating list of bodily features and maintenance she can leave behind: thighs, stomach, cellulite, lines, scars, hair, and the need to wax, colour, conceal, or disguise. The koan appears as the pivot between that inventory and the declaration that she is simply Carmel without her body.

The scene then complicates the apparent escape from appearance. Carmel’s daughters sit beside her on a couch, waiting for her to choose a new body; they are quietly reading chapter books and eating freshly cut fruit, with no devices, sugary snacks, or arguing. In the fantasy, Carmel calls herself the best mother in the history of mothering. Masha, now dressed as a Disney princess and managing a shop, offers to find her a divine new body for a divine new life. The original-face prompt thus opens onto a wish to be free of bodily scrutiny, but the imagined resolution still takes the form of choosing another body.

Recurrence and Meaning

The koan’s two uses connect spiritual inquiry to a concrete pressure in Carmel’s life: the work of managing and judging a body. In Masha’s meditation, the question points toward an identity that cannot be reached by solving a puzzle. In Carmel’s vision, it momentarily separates the self from the body’s perceived flaws and routines, before the scene returns to bodily choice through the promise of a new form.

That shift gives the recurring phrase its force. It does not supply an answer about what Carmel is apart from her body; instead, it makes the question resonate differently in each setting. The koan’s open-endedness sits beside a retreat culture that promises transformation, while Carmel’s fantasy reveals how difficult it is to imagine freedom from appearance without imagining a replacement for it.