I believe from the bottom of my heart that what we call religion is the very most important matter for human beings. I cannot stress enough that the ultimate goal of religion, whether we call it satori or peace of mind, is for each individual to live in peace and tranquility, to live a full and satisfying life.
Every year I travel to Hokkaido to give talks, and it was after one lecture at a UNESCO assembly in Sapporo that the chairperson came to me with these remarks: “You have honored us with a lengthy and very instructive lecture, but I am an old man, and I cannot recall a long speech. Moreover, I am already a Buddhist; every morning when I leave for the office and every evening when I return home, I light incense before the altar and chant a sutra.
“The problem, though, is that I have been forced to liquidate, one by one, a number of large companies that I managed, and this disturbs me greatly. So, Roshi,” he said bluntly, “I don’t want to hear a long talk. I want you to tell me in a word how I can settle my disturbed mind.”
Elderly people can be quite caustic sometimes, can’t they? I had thoroughly lectured on the subject, and now he wants it in a word!
I responded by first asking for whom it is that he lights the incense and chants the sutras before the altar.
“Well, naturally, it is thanks to my ancestors that I am here now,” he replied. “So I light a stick of incense to show gratitude to my ancestors and to Buddha.”
“In that case,” I told him, “from tonight on, offer two sticks of incense. One is to show gratitude to your ancestors, as you have been doing. Offer the other stick of incense to your own corpse.”
We take our own “being alive” for granted, and thus get lost in matters of circumstance, thereby effectively blinding our own good judgment. When we look at someone else’s death, on the other hand, we may be quick to reflect on the transience of worldly matters.
If we turn to our own dead bodies with these same sentiments each day, perhaps we will not be so inclined to let ourselves get snagged along the way by the branches and leaves. We can free ourselves to take decisive steps with regard to more basic problems, the roots. This is what I meant when I told the gentleman to light a stick of incense to his own corpse, morning and night.
When I end a lecture, I often ask everyone to please forget everything I have just said. This is because we tend to collect talk as mere data, carry it home with us, and use scraps of it as fuel for criticism of our surroundings. That which becomes the seed of criticism is not wisdom; it is nothing more than the seed of grumbling and dissatisfaction. It is so often the case that the more we feel we know about something, the more dissatisfied and plaintive we can feel.
Information collected on the subject of religion is worthless. Religion is, to the very end, something you must verify for yourself through actual practice.
Many people are willing to learn techniques that help them live their lives. But the person who seeks to confirm their life at its roots by reaching beyond technique to the fundamentals—to true religion—is exceedingly rare. I find this state of affairs most regrettable. That is why I can’t help but urge you to refrain from evaluating your daily life on the basis of what you think you know, on the basis of collected data. I want you to awaken to everything and to seek the true way of living. But make no mistake: Whether you remain in the category of a dissatisfied person or become an awakened buddha is solely up to you, dependent solely upon your own actual doing.
god is right here
IN THE SUMMERS, I often travel to England to give talks at the annual summer school sponsored by the Buddhist Society. After the talks, young mothers holding babies in their arms sometimes approach me with questions. Invariably they ask me how to go about instructing their children in the ways of Buddhism. (Unfortunately, in all my years of counseling countless people here in Japan, I have never once been asked this question.)
These women, members of societies characterized by individualism, know deep in their flesh and bones that true freedom means not relying on others. People often regard freedom as being able to have one’s own way, but those from countries that have a tradition of liberalism are acutely aware that the essence of freedom is in not getting help from others. Because they understand freedom in this sense, they take one week of their enjoyable vacation time and plunge into a new way of life, disciplining themselves through often-painful zazen and listening to Dharma talks with great sincerity. At the same time, they pray that the deeply felt blessings of the Buddhism they themselves practice will also touch their children, helping them to lead noble lives.
One of these mothers came to me once with a story about her five-year-old daughter. As she and her husband were drinking tea on the veranda of their home one morning, their daughter played in the garden with a friend. It seems that the friend turned to the daughter and said, “My grandfather just died. He’s with God now, up in Heaven.”
As the parents listened without really paying much attention, they heard their five-year-old daughter disagree with her friend. “No, no,” she said confidently. “If your grandfather died and went to God, he’s not in Heaven. God is right here inside me and you, and here in this flower, too. So your grandfather didn’t go up anywhere,” the little girl persisted. “My mother knows about this. She does zazen.”
I told the young mother that this was a wonderful story.
When a parent cautions a child not to be wasteful, the child may respond by calling the parents stingy and pointing out that more of anything can always be bought. Rare is the parent who has laid the ground to be able to persist in correcting their child. While growing up, inevitably, there will be times when a child abandons himself or herself to despair. Encouraged by parents to treat themselves more gently, children often counter, “That’s my business! You’re not me; you don’t understand me. Leave me alone! I didn’t ask to be born.” The parent who is rebuffed by their son or daughter in this way can say nothing.
“Compare the situation of that parent with your own situation,” I told the mother in England. “Your child knows that God is within herself and within all things. Thanks to that knowledge, when your daughter is wasteful of something, you can ask her if she isn’t being a bit hard on the God within that thing. With this reminder, the child can begin to see the error of her actions for herself.
“When she gets discouraged, you can ask her if treating herself unkindly doesn’t sadden Buddha within, and then let her go to her room and think it out for herself. Simply reminded of what she already knows, can’t the child pick herself up? It should be very easy to educate your child in this way.”
This couple gets the chance to ask such questions and to receive guidance from me only once a year, for one week, but they discuss their experiences, between themselves, again and again, 365 days a year. Because it is part of their daily conversation, their five-year-old child can declare with assurance that God is inside me, and inside you, too; God is inside flowers and rocks and everything.
Words like these penetrate my mind as naturally as water penetrates the sandy soil.
is death something we cannot know?
WHILE RELIGION is certainly concerned with things other than death, let us, for the sake of this discussion, concede a hundred steps and suppose that this is not the case, that death does, in fact, have a monopoly over religion. Is there any way we can possibly think about life without considering death? Our society is very youth-oriented, and as we age, we often tend to view life as being somewhat like a tumble down a steep hill, a lonely dispatch of human life.
But this is not the only problem. Is it possible to really live our lives fully without ever looking hard at death? I do not believe it is. Without staring death in the eye, as the perpetual reverse side of life, we cannot live life fully and completely. Of this I am quite convinced.
Regarding death as separate and apart from life, we dislike death. Thinking about how they will lose all they have accumulated, those who have made really grand efforts in life will regard death with specia
l animosity and may not even want to consider the subject. Moreover, the general consensus among those who have thought about death is that it is something people simply do not understand. The contention is that death cannot be known because one cannot experience it while alive, and no one in this world has died and come back to talk about it. While there are people who have returned from moments of clinical death, not a soul has ever actually died and returned, some years later, to tell us about the afterworld. Some people say, then, that to think about death is a waste of time.
Steeped in this attitude, we are bound to oversimplify Confucius’s famous dictum: “We don’t know yet about life, so how can we know about death?” We assume that it is possible to concentrate on living life to its fullest without looking hard at death. Thus we tend to fix a low price on the matter of death so that we can simply ignore it.
But is death really something we cannot know?
The one thing all of us are certain to encounter within our daily lives is, in fact, death. People are dying everywhere. What is more, there are the deaths of your dog, your cat, your pet canary. And what about the potted plant you bought at the nursery, wilting into demise? Or the fresh flowers you bought at the florist, withering away inside the arrangement? Then there is that special cup that you use every day and treat with such care: one day it slips from your hand and crashes to pieces. And there is always the “death” that is separation from those we love.
With death so prominent a part of our daily existence, how can we ignore it? Why is it that we insist on the impossibility of knowing death when death is such a routine part of our lives? How is it that we are able to so casually dismiss the subject?
The root cause for our dismissal of death is, to use Buddhist terminology, the dualistic view of self and other— “That is someone else; this is I.” We tend to be indifferent to anything that we can pass off as not directly affecting our lives in the present—“What has that got to do with me?”
Although death is all around us, we regard it as something or somebody else’s death. But just how justifiable is this viewpoint?
Does the sharp distinction that we make between self and other accurately characterize our situation? Is there nothing that runs between, that connects us all?
we are like water
WHENEVER I go abroad to lecture, I always go with an interpreter. On one occasion, before a talk in England, the interpreter had this to say: “Roshi, you often use the word we even when you are talking about yourself. But here in this individualistic English society, if I were to translate that we as it stands, you would lose some of your appeal. Therefore, even if you say we, when I am sure you really mean I, I would like to translate it as I. I hope you will give me your permission to do so.”
I was amazed when I heard this. Upon reflection, I could recognize that the Japanese, as a group, do use the fuzzy term we when speaking, arbitrarily clumping ourselves together without the prior consent of those with whom we are identifying. And in so doing, we thereby dodge individual responsibility. Delving more deeply into the problem, however, I could not say that I really feel it is a mistake to use the word we.
You may assume that many entities called I come together to form a group called we. But this may not be the nature of reality.
Consider this: Suppose that a person is in a very sincere and tranquil mood, with no anxieties, in a clear, healthy psychological frame of mind. (When one’s mind is distorted and hung up, that is another story!) Suppose that person is making dinner in the kitchen for her family, and she hears the familiar sound of her husband’s footsteps as he comes home. Wiping her hands on her apron, she goes to the door to greet him. In this instant this person is— with the face of a wife, the voice of a wife, the body and movements of a wife—a wife greeting her husband.
Then, just as she reaches to take his coat, a voice from behind calls, “Mama!” She turns around and responds, “What is it?” And just in that instant this person no longer has the face of a wife, but of a mother. She looks back with the face of a mother, the voice of a mother, the gestures of a mother. Then, if a friend from the neighborhood comes to call, she receives her guest not with the face of a wife or of a mother, but with the face of a next-door neighbor.
Perhaps as you read this, you imagine me in one form, as a monk. But tomorrow morning I will visit the grave of my parents. Standing before that grave, I am nothing more than a child. One appears before one’s parents as a child, before one’s child as a parent, before one’s husband as a wife, before one’s wife as a husband. At work, the face and form one takes on depend upon the position one occupies. This is our true form.
There is no clump called “I” moving from this spot to that spot, instant by instant. Rather, through particular encounters with particular people, within each encounter, within each transition, something called “I” makes its appearance. Thus it is that what seems to be an object outside yourself is, in reality, your complement, that which gives this instant of your life its glow.
If you understand this, you understand why the Zen school sets up its practice so that you can attain enlightenment by looking intently into your own heart. If that heart were really yours alone, no matter how intently you continued to gaze at it, you could never awaken to universal truth. But the heart is not an individual possession; it is not yours alone.
The heart, the life that is within you, is born in companionship with the environment. Your heart is the life of the great universe. Our own hearts are the womb from which everything originates, and just as I am a manifestation of Buddha, so are you a manifestation of Buddha. Therefore, the Zen school teaches that we should not set out to know “everything”; we should investigate that which is closest at hand, our own bodies and hearts. So it is that just by looking into your own tiny mind, you can be receptive to others—not to mention that you can realize the truth of the entire boundless universe!
We are not like blocks of ice, conducting ourselves as solid individuals as we move from place to place. We are like water flowing freely, now into a four-sided container, now into a three-sided container, realizing a new birth each and every instant. Such, I believe, is the reality of our existence, and it is this sort of human existence, this sort of existence of all things in the universe, that Buddhism expounds.
It follows, then, that we are not individual “I’s” gathering to form a “we,” but that within the existence of “we,” something called “I” arises. This, I believe, is reality.
When we are in accordance with this original form, it is possible for us to understand the death, the pain, the sadness, the happiness of another as our own.
the death of my grandfather
THE YEAR BEFORE I was to enter grammar school, on a hot day with the sun beating down, my grandfather took me to see a local wrestling match. My grandfather always treated me most affectionately. We left in the morning, and he probably planned to be home by around noon, but, as I was very persuasive with him, we stayed out all day and did not return home until evening. As a result of staying out in the sun too long, Grandfather had a heat stroke. Even as a child just over the age of six, I could realize that my own coaxing was the cause of my grandfather’s abnormal condition.
My father, who was a doctor, did not move Grandfather to a hospital, but rather examined and nursed him at home. As this was the beginning of the Showa Period, back in the 1930s, medical treatment was comparatively simple. A block of ice was placed in a tin plate, and as the ice melted, the cold water was used to cool his brow.
The whole house was turned upside down in confusion, and messengers were sent to call in relatives. It was not as easy in those days as it is now, when the family can jump into the car and drive over in response to a telephone call. After receiving the announcement, relatives had to cross the mountains on foot in their straw sandals.
I was left quite neglected as everyone gathered and, moment by moment, alternately rejoiced and lamented, according to Grandfather’s condition. Seeing my r
elatives like this and feeling the disturbed atmosphere of the house, I was frightened. I ran away to the second floor and, lying on my belly over the stairwell, watched the scene below. As I gazed down at the hushed tumult below, I realized that Grandfather was going to die. I remember puzzling over whether or not that meant that I would not see him again.
For me, as a child, the idea that Grandfather could suddenly disappear was not an idea I could readily absorb. He had always been so present, so affectionate. While I was mulling over this matter, my mother climbed to the second floor to find me and explain that Grandfather was going to die.
“When people are dying,” she said, “they get very thirsty, and so we need to give them water. Since Grandfather has pampered you more than any of his other grandchildren, you must go now and give him some water.” I was half-dragged back downstairs.
I was given a wad of cotton soaked with water to wipe Grandfather’s lips. I could see for myself that while his forehead was damp, his lips, which were locked tightly together, were dry and chapped, and I felt that he must be very thirsty. When I started softly wiping, drops of water settled into the seam of his lips and they became moist, but not a drop passed through and into his mouth. Figuring that I was not using enough water, I squeezed the wad of wet cotton over his mouth. The water trickled down his face, and still not so much as a drop entered his mouth.
My grandfather, who had always so enjoyed drinking his tea, and who was now so thirsty, could not open his mouth to swallow even a sip of water. The feeling that a big change had taken place penetrated deep into this child’s heart and flesh and bones. Not long after, Grandfather took his last breath and we washed his body for cremation.
People once thought it would be a pity for the deceased, bound for Amida’s beautiful Pure Land, to have to go carrying the dust of this world. It was with this artless feeling that the dead were given their last bath. The survivors filled a washtub with cool water to which hot water was then added.
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