Miss Okamoto rose every morning at 4:15 and, although she had made no formal commitment to do so, cleaned the temple gardens surrounding her rented room. She cultivated vacant land and planted vegetables, which she would pickle and offer to the novice monks in training under me, to share with visitors, and to offer at the Buddha altar.
When she was already well into her seventies, feeling that she wanted to improve herself in whatever way she could, Miss Okamoto began to come inside after a day of sweeping, pulling weeds, and gardening to hear a talk and study classical Chinese literature. At other times, remembering the lectures she had heard Roshi give on various Zen works, she would open koan collections like the Blue Cliff Record and The Gateless Gate. Such was the life Miss Okamoto led.
She was a little old lady, short with a round boyish face, but her exceptionally strict, upright lifestyle had given rise to something forbidding in Miss Okamoto, and the young novice monks were never pleased when they were sent to her place on an errand.
I visited Miss Okamoto monthly, and she always seemed eager for these visits. But one day, she sent a message to the effect that she wanted me to call on her right away as she had something urgent to talk to me about.
“Here for the past half year, I’ve been suffering intense physical weariness,” she began when I visited her. “Thinking that I had reached the age when I was growing dull, I tried to whip myself along, to keep going, but I just wasn’t getting any better.
“Finally,” she explained, “there seemed to be nothing to do but ask someone to take me to see a doctor. Although the doctor didn’t say it in so many words, it seems that I have cancer. Since I found this out, I have been afraid of dying.”
Her words were an echo of those of my old schoolteacher. But not only was Miss Okamoto afraid of dying, she was also ashamed of that fear. She felt it disgraceful to fear death after having been allowed to train for so long under her teacher. She felt tremendous gratitude toward the Zen sect and toward the roshi, and it was unbearable for her to think that those around her might feel Zen practice is useless since it apparently does not even help one to overcome apprehension in the face of death.
“What in the world is the problem with the way I have practiced up until now—that death could be this frightening? Please tell me how I have been wrong in my practice,” she beseeched, opening up to me as if I were her own son.
Although Miss Okamoto was twenty-four years my elder, her earnest confession prompted me, despite her years, to bluntly call to her attention something in her manner that had already been weighing on my mind.
This woman had led a flawless, commendable life, but she had always stoically gritted her teeth in an effort “to do good, to avoid doing evil.” Sharply distinguishing between “good” and “bad,” forever sizing up and passing judgment on the situation, she went about her endeavors to “do better,” but always with her teeth clenched fast. Let me be very clear about this: The kind of effort in which one bisects good and bad, and then chooses one over the other with the intent to stack up causes for positive results does not in itself produce peace of mind.
As I explained to Miss Okamoto, you come from your mother’s womb and leave in your coffin. That time in between you call life, and perhaps you think of going into your coffin as death. But true existence is birth and death, repeating itself, instant by instant. If you look at a flame, it seems to burn continuously and give off constant light. In actuality, the wax is burning down bit by bit, and the wick that blazes in this instant exhausts itself, passing the flame farther along.
Our lives appear to be unbroken blocks of seventy or eighty continuous years, but, actually, they are just as the example we saw earlier: you are a wife or a husband when you look this way; you are a neighbor next door when you look that way. When you maintain the straight-forward frankness of your own mind as it comes to life each instant, even without effort, even without training, you are beautifully born with each instant. You die with each instant, and go on to be born again, instant by instant.
As I told Miss Okamoto, when you go to the kitchen to prepare dinner, be born in the kitchen. When you finish there, die. Then be born at the dining table as you eat your dinner and, when you finish eating, die there. Be born in the garden, and sweep with your broom. When you get into bed at night, die there. And when you awaken at daylight, be born anew. If you have cancer, be born with cancer.
Always now—just now—come into being. Always now—just now—give yourself to death. Practicing this is Zen practice.
buddha life
I HAVE SEEN many people practice. But I do not know of anyone who so splendidly, so thoroughly, put my instructions into practice as did Miss Okamoto. She complied as docilely as a lamb. It wasn’t even ten days before her rigid countenance had softened into a baby face, into the face of a sweet old lady. She had left behind the lifestyle in which she had to grit her teeth and try to live “right.”
Miss Okamoto’s disease grew progressively worse, and she finally had to be hospitalized. I remember that when I called on her, the doctors and nurses all remarked that though they had worked in the hospital for many years, they had never encountered a patient like this one. By the time Miss Okamoto entered the hospital, she was greeting everybody, everything, every scene in the spirit of “one chance, one encounter.”
You may imagine this “one chance, one encounter” as applying to some very special occurrence, a once-in-alifetime magnificent encounter. The phrase calls to mind, for example, a tea ceremony, which happens as it happens only one time. It is generally reasoned that something that happens only once in a lifetime, a once-in-a-lifetime encounter, has to be an exceedingly special occasion, and the expression is commonly limited to this usage.
In its true sense, however, “one chance, one encounter” may occur when one encounters a stone, when one comes upon a weed, when one is cleaning the toilet or cooking rice. It refers to a state of mind in which one makes absolutely no projections of favorability or adversity, in which there is absolutely no notion of escape. To practice “one chance, one encounter” is to wholly melt within each one occurrence, and this is just the way Miss Okamoto saw her life out.
Unfortunately, I had agreed to journey to England and the United States again at that particular time, and I left feeling uneasy. I instructed my disciples to care for Miss Okamoto during my absence, but she passed away without waiting for my return. When I came back, I heard from my oldest disciple, the monk who had last attended her, about the final moments before her death. Although this was a man who seldom allowed any expression to cross his face, tears streamed from his eyes as he told the story.
Before Miss Okamoto died, she said to him, “Looking back, I have led a pretty stuffy life all these years. So I think I’ll just take a ball and go out and play in the woods now.” These were her last words.
We placed a pretty ball, made of colored threads, inside her grave.
I hope that you will not merely take Miss Okamoto’s final words for their emotional or their literary appeal. When I heard what she had said at the last, I felt joy from the bottom of my heart. Joy, because I was confident that in her living and in her dying, Miss Okamoto had literally reached a state we can call the “samadhi of play.”
If a person is working for wages, shoveling sand onto the bed of a truck with a shovel, they may get tired. Should someone happen along and offer to help out, they will most likely be glad to hand over their shovel. But suppose a child is playing in a sand pile, scooping sand into a bucket. Should someone walk up and offer to take over for a while, that child would balk at such foolishness, “Why should I want you to take over when I’m having so much fun?”
Even the most fleeting of activities, such as the business of preparing a meal, can be the samadhi of play. When you throw your heart into preparing a fine meal, which you artistically arrange on the plates and serve up, that food is swiftly devoured and you are left with dirty dishes. To carry on in the samadhi of play does not only ref
er to creating a work of art that might grace a museum for a few hundred years, but to the most mundane of the everyday affairs one performs. The duties of housekeeping serve as a good example. In a never-ending cycle, we clean, and the house gets dirty again. We sweep, and the dust comes back. We wash dishes, and they get dirty again.
This is not only the case with housekeeping. Look closely and you see that these are the circumstances of every activity by every human being on earth.
The samadhi of play is the state of mind in which one performs an activity without appraising its relative value, just as the child who plays in the sand would never dream of letting someone else take her place. It was with this mind that Miss Okamoto went out to the woods to play ball.
The samadhi of play is a state in which the heart transcends both the exhaustible dharmas and the inexhaustible dharmas. This is the dharma gate of liberation, the state of mind that is liberation from both the exhaustible and the inexhaustible.
There is within you yourself eternal Buddha life. That Buddha life appears in form, being born and dying, instant by instant, emerging in constant succession in the samadhi of play. We can clearly say that the practice of this mind state is the satori state of Zen.
Within you there is eternal life. This life arises as form and continues, instant by instant, appearing and disappearing. Moreover, this flickering, appearing and disappearing, is not the flickering of a solidified individual self; it is the sparkling appearance and disappearance of a fusion of the self and its surroundings, in union.
This is what the founder of the Soto Zen school, Eihei Dogen Zenji, meant when he said that birth and death is the life of Buddha. Birth and death is the pulse of Buddha life.
Where there are one thousand human beings, within one thousand ways of living, one thousand buddhas are revealed. Buddha is revealed through mountains, valleys, trees, and grasses, through the multitude of phenomena. The heart that can be revered in whatever form we see, in whatever direction we look, this is the true heart of Buddhism. This is Buddha life.
Personally, I understand the words birth and death as Great Life, dynamic and dancing lively. Throughout this book I have talked to you about this big, lively dancing life and about the process by which I have come to see my life in this way.
And as I’ve mentioned, when I end a lecture, I often ask everyone to please forget everything I have just said. But nonetheless, it is my earnest desire that this clumsy narrative be a stimulus that may, in some way, help you to lead your own life—living each and every instant with great care, aware that just this is the great, dynamic, lively dancing life.
about the author
Soko Morinaga Roshi was born in 1925. After graduating from high school, he entered Zen practice. He was ordained as a monk by Zuigan Goto in 1948. From 1949 through 1963, he trained in the monastery at Daitokuji and received the seal of Dharma transmission from Sesso Ota Roshi. While actively working in the lay community, delivering talks and writing books and articles, he served as the head of Hanazono University, the primary training university of the Rinzai sect, in Kyoto. He had a long-standing connection with the Buddhist Society of London and traveled there every year to participate in the summer school jointly sponsored by various Buddhist sects. Morinaga Roshi died in 1995.
about the translator
Belenda Attaway Yamakawa is a longtime student of Zen. She lives in a temple near the Sea of Japan with her husband and two children.
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