We’re lucky. Here in Taiwan, we live in a mountain neighborhood with hiking trails just minutes from our door. Every morning, as the designated family dog walker, I’m charged with taking our dog (or dogs, over the years) for a stroll along those scenic trails.

As a good neighbor and responsible pet owner, I carry at least one poop bag with me in case nature calls before we reach the mountains. Once we’re on the trails, all bets are off, but if my dog leaves a calling card in the middle of the path, I grab a stick and push it into the heavy brush.

But not all my neighbors are so considerate. On the way to the trails, I nearly always encounter a large pile of dogshit, often deposited right in the middle of the road. I have never witnessed its creation, but several neighbors have clued me in to the likely culprit. There’s a guy with an aging dog that looks like a husky. He allows the dog to wander off leash while he follows on a bicycle. According to my neighbors, they have seen him let his dog shit in the middle of the road and then ride away without cleaning it up.

I was tempted to confront him, but without catching them in the act, it never felt justified. Instead, I silently huffed and fussed over the near-daily desecration of our neighborhood streets. Sometimes I would pass the pair heading in the opposite direction, only to encounter the evidence a few minutes later. Cars would run over the offending pile, flatten it and leave a trail of smaller, flattened piles down the road.

“How can this continue? Where is the justice in this world?” I would ask myself.

Convinced that my anger was righteous, I swore that someday I would confront the two- and four-legged culprits and bring them to justice if only I could catch them in the act.

Funnily enough, my recent meditation practice has focused on the Zen koan known as Mu. A central teaching of Mahayana Buddhism is that all beings possess Buddha-nature. Yet when a monk asked Jōshū, a great Chinese Zen master, “Does a dog have Buddha-nature?” Jōshū replied, “Mu.”

Mu can be translated as “no,” “not” or “without.” But how could the answer be no? If all beings possess Buddha-nature, how could the dog in the monk’s question be excluded?

Zen practitioners are encouraged to sit with this puzzling koan until its truth is realized directly. Koans are not riddles that can be solved through ordinary logic. They are intended to short-circuit the discriminating mind that declares this is this and that is that; the mind of schedules and tasks, judgments and regrets, memories of the past and plans for the future. Mu is often the first koan assigned to a student.

I’ve been meditating on Mu for a few months now. I’m not claiming to have solved it—if “solving” is even the right word—but my reading and practice have led me toward questions about the boundaries we create: between yes and no, self and other, and ourselves and the rest of the universe.

That doesn’t mean there is no ethical difference between cleaning up after your dog and leaving its shit in the road. Nor does it absolve the dog’s owner of responsibility. But it does challenge the comfortable division between me, the righteous and responsible pet owner, and him, the inconsiderate shit-leaver.

We are not as separate as I would like to believe. Taken to its furthest conclusion, I am the dogshit, and the dogshit is me.

That realization doesn’t make the piles disappear, but it changes what I do about them.

I began to see each pile of dogshit as an opportunity to practice the bodhisattva way. A bodhisattva is often defined as a being who acts with wisdom and compassion to help free others from suffering. Rather than pursue the personal satisfaction of bringing the shitters to justice and ending their stinky reign of terror, I could practice generosity, ethical conduct and patience.

In other words, I could stop being angry about other people’s shit, recognize that it was my shit too—and pick it up.

I certainly had the tools. I had bought them at the pet supply store.

So now, when I stumble upon an offending pile, I try to be grateful for the opportunity to practice as a dogshit bodhisattva. And if anyone questions the proof of my status, it’s easy to show them.

It’s in the bag.