I vow to take the truth of the Tathagatagarbha's words. Good morning everyone. Thank you for coming this morning. So on this beautiful spring morning I want to raise a grim subject that I actually don't know anything about. And the comforting thing is I don't think you do either. So I hope to raise a few points and questions and comments and then maybe we can explore it later together. So the subject is death. And it's on my mind.

[01:02]

It comes up repeatedly for various reasons. One is my mother's death just about a month ago. She is a little short of 90 years old. We did not have a close relationship. And I chose not to go to her interment. And it still comes up in my mind, certainly. And then another reason is that there is a Sangha member, a Dharma brother, who is going through the dying process pretty much right in front of us, which brings up a lot for me. I've known him for quite a while and I'm very confused at my own fear

[02:08]

and my own thoughts and actions. So it comes up. And then also my brother, my oldest brother, has cancer at terminal. And that's probably the most charged one for me. It comes up my karmic emotional relationship with my brother is much stronger than I thought. And that's going to be a very big deal. And Buddhism teaches us that death is a very big deal. Maybe it's the biggest deal. It's inscribed on the Han that I was just looking at. You know, the Han is the wooden block that is hit, is the verse. Great is the matter of birth and death, quickly passing, gone, gone, awake, each one, awake. Don't waste this life. So the great matter. This is referred to frequently in Zen literature, Buddhist literature.

[03:12]

So what is it? I've heard it suggested recently that it's great, it's a big question, birth and death for us, mainly because we don't know anything about it. We're essentially... We don't know anything about either event, in our own personal case. Like my birth, I certainly have no knowledge of my own birth. It's hearsay as far as I'm concerned. I mean, they tell me I was born on May 29th, 1947, in Columbus, Georgia, but I have to just take it as an article of faith that these people that I find myself with are related to me somehow, and so on. So it's kind of a mystery. Where did I come from? It's unknowable. And I think the other end is too, in essence. Even with other people.

[04:12]

I mean, we can be with other people, although I personally have not. I have never been with anyone who's at the very end of the process. But even so... I've heard somebody say, somebody who's done a lot of hospice work, well, it's actually very simple. The person just breathes out, and then they don't breathe back in. Oh, I don't know. Is it really... Maybe. But even so, that's just as far as our perception can reach. And then we don't go any further. You know, it's kind of like the horizon. The horizon is the limit of my sight perception. I can't see beyond that, no matter what, or with sound. There's just a definite limit of what I can experience.

[05:12]

And so I think maybe you could be with someone, but then once that in-breath doesn't happen, and the fire, the mysterious fire of life is no longer there, it's a mystery nobody knows that I know of. And then that's with somebody else. So then with our own demise, I think the psychologists tell us that it's actually inconceivable that our egos cannot conceive of its own absence. It's beyond our conception. And I think even in the case of a person who's suicidal, and I've certainly been there, it isn't so much of wanting to be not existing, it's just to end the pain, to have some final, it's the end of the pain, the end of the suffering I think is the real wish.

[06:14]

It's not annihilation. It makes me think of a similar thing in Buddhist meditation. In some of the Abhidharma it says maybe the one thing that our consciousness, our awareness cannot focus on is itself, itself. It wants to go everywhere else, but it's impossible to come back. And it's kind of an interesting meditative practice to try to do that, to try to meditate on my own consciousness, my own ability to think, the thinking thing, to see what happens. Sometimes I think maybe that's what Dogen's talking about, of non-thinking, because in my experience if I try to do that, I can't do it, and it's interesting what happens, it's nothing, non-thinking, interesting kind of thing. But again, it's the limitation I think of our awareness there,

[07:18]

with death. So then our culture, the prevailing message of our culture about death is pretty strange I think, and partially it's what I get, is to avoid death at all possible costs. Literally. You know the thing, the valiant fight, he fought a valiant fight until the very end, but death wins out every time, right? But we avoid it at all costs, with the emphasis I think these days, at that it doesn't matter what the cost is. And I read in the paper things like a new treatment for lung cancer, something like that, and you read down and in the 12th paragraph it says that it extends the suffering for two more months, and costs $75,000 a dose.

[08:22]

It's very confusing to me, although I certainly have it, that avoidance and denial of death. But there are exceptions in our culture. I remember back when I was in college there was a book of Elon Walsh called The Loved One, I think. Has anybody ever heard of that book? Which was a satire on death and dying in our culture, but placing it in the future. And one of the interesting parts that I remember was, there were two characters called Fiora and Fiona, I think they were two beautiful twins, and they operated a suicide parlor. And people were encouraged to shuffle off this moral coil in an expeditious fashion by coming to these parlors and you would get rewards of some kind to get on with it. This was very entertaining

[09:28]

to college students in the 60s. More intellectually, I suppose, we can have recourse to Shakespeare, the great source of wisdom, and his wonderful play Macbeth, among many other wonderful things. He has the notion, the comment, that I'm sure you've heard before, nothing in his life, nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it. But he goes further, he says, he died as one that had been studied in his death to throw away the dearest thing he owned as were a careless trifle. So that changes the complexion, I think. It actually sounds quite Buddhist to me. Let's hear it again. He's talking about the protagonist there, Macbeth. Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it. He died as one that had been studied in his death

[10:31]

to throw away the dearest thing he owned as were a careless trifle. So I think Buddhism proposes to us to study death, to study our death, the whole notion. So another favorite source of quotes is this little tome. And at the very beginning, actually the very first chapter, in the second paragraph, Suzuki Roshi raises this idea of the subject, the fascicle on posture, and for some reason in the second paragraph he goes, after some years we'll die. If we just think that it's the end of our life, this will be the wrong understanding. But, on the other hand, if we think that we don't die,

[11:32]

this is also wrong. We die and we don't die. This is the right understanding. So I think Suzuki Roshi didn't know either. He is just trying to loosen up our habitual patterns of thinking about things in general, and this in particular. So the unhappy message of Buddhism is really that we lose in the end. We lose everything. We lose everything that we treasure through dissolution,

[12:34]

either the dissolution of the object or of ourselves. We'll gradually, everything, all of our relationships that we began will end. Everything that we accumulate will leave, either along the way or certainly by our own demise. We'll lose everything. So our culture doesn't like that. But our Buddhist practice is extremely demanding and asking us to not avoid this, to not ignore it, but to look at it, to resolve essentially the unresolvable, to drop body and mind, to cut across the grain, to go upstream of what we usually want. I think of the Row, row, row your boat

[13:36]

Gently down the stream Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily Life is but a dream This was in the 60s and 70s to hippies and new agers, this was very deep philosophy, you know, here's this little childhood jingle and it has meaning, how wonderful, it has meaning. And I think it does to an extent and Buddhism is asking us to say, well, that's not all, you know, there's more, there's more. So to go actually, not just merrily down the stream, but to go towards what you don't like, to move towards what you want to avoid, to try to accept the unacceptable and to let go of ourselves. So how to do all of this? This is the problem. I mean, you know, you can talk about it and it's so how to deal with the avoidance and denial.

[14:39]

And one of the ways, a way that has intrigued me over the years came up actually in my very first practice period out at Green Gulch. Mel Weisman was leading this practice period and it was started in January and he got sick during the practice period, he got quite sick, very bad cold. But he came anyway and he was giving a talk one night and he was sick and he said, he made the remark, it wasn't the topic of the lecture, but he said he was practicing dying, being sick. And that really intrigued me and I thought about it over the years of what it possibly meant with that. And it usually comes up when I get sick. I don't get sick very often, but when I do, this usually comes up and I try to practice with it somehow. And this came up recently, when I was recently on a trip in April, I got sick in New York.

[15:42]

I got a cold, a really bad cold, and then I went to Pittsburgh and I was pretty sick by then. But how to practice with it. So the main way that I find now is just trying to let go of wanting things to be different. Pretty basic Buddhist approach to just be sick. To let go of wanting to be not sick, of trying to be okay with less. Trying to admit the unreliability of my body, my own body. I call it my body,

[16:43]

but it's not my body, it does what it wants to. It gets sick, it has a snotty nose, it coughs, and there's nothing I can do. I can try to deny it with drugs, the common way. But to try not to do that, to try to basically accept the unacceptable. So that's a fairly easy thing to practice with, just accept being sick as trying to somehow edge up on the bigger question of accepting death. Essentially it seems to be a control issue, the whole thing, of our minds, our consciousness just simply wants to control basically everything that it focuses on.

[17:44]

So of course it cannot, and this causes the suffering, this is the source of suffering. So it's a patience practice, just being sick, just be there, just be sick. To not take the drugs, of course I'm not advocating not taking drugs that actually treat an illness, but of things, cold medicine, cough medicine, stuff like that that just mask what's going on. Maybe it's worthwhile to experiment with not indulging that and seeing just what is it like to just be sick? What's going on? What's going on with my body? What is the experience actually like? What are coughs like? So I had a terrible cough, chest cough, kind of like two coughs, you know, there's this very heavy chest thing and then there's this thing that goes on up here

[18:46]

which they call tickling, tickling in your throat except it's not funny at all, it's more like stabbing pain in here. And sneezing, sneezing is kind of interesting thing I noticed seems to me to be a sexual element to sneezing or maybe that's not the right word, but the, you know, the, [...] and then this nice repose, sense of satisfaction you know. So what's going on? Just to, just to try to observe what it's like to try to drop the description of the judgment and just see what's,

[19:48]

what is it like just to be sick? And another thing I noticed is in myself that it's not unchanging monolithic block of misery. I can actually feel better for five minutes even just short. Whatever's hurting stops hurting for some unknown reason if I just, if I happen to be paying attention and notice it, you know it's not just sheer misery and so on. But the main practice I think is just not taking time out, just not taking time out of my life. Say well I don't feel good now so this doesn't count. We're just about waiting until it's more like I want it to be. And I can anesthetize myself in various ways with television or whatever drugs until that time arrives when it's more better, more like I want it to be.

[20:48]

So just try not to do that, to try not to avoid what I happen to think is unpleasant at the time and basically include that in my life of the sickness as part of the life. Implication of course is way down the line is that my death is also a part of my life and to not, to try to start to practice and approach that delicately, that idea. So those are some examples of that and another way I think of practicing dying maybe is breath. Breath is just so useful in so many ways and the breath work of, yeah. Suzuki Roshi I think said that the important part of breath for us is our out breath and just to see,

[21:49]

for me to see my breath, how really attached I am to that coming. So that I'm not, most of the time it's hard to trust enough that it's actually going to come. So just to practice with that and practice breathing out, of dying into the out breath, just trying to breathe out completely, and see what comes after that. it's doable particularly in sitting and I find it's very useful to try to let my out breath go as far down in my body as possible and just practice with that instead of holding up here, of holding up here. And of course the reality is

[22:49]

that my lungs are up here, they're not down here, but I don't know, there's something there, I mean I can actually, you can actually feel it, of just letting the breath go amazingly low, all the way to the bottom, all the way. It was below the diaphragm, all the way to the bottom, to my sitting bones. You can, it's possible. And then even to abide there, and then the end breath, to try to just let the end breath happen. It happens, it just happens. Where does it come from? Where's the beginning? Where's the end and the beginning? The soft belly, keeping your belly soft. But the, and then of course that brings all with it my obsession or compulsion with in,

[23:50]

in breathing, just examining that. Sometimes I get this thing, I don't know what, to call it kind of a compulsion to take in a lot of air. I guess, what do you call it, sighing or something? It's almost like an addiction like a cigarette or something else of this. It comes up in my mind this feeling of I need more air or it's very non-verbal though and it doesn't go away. And at some point of feeling compelled to do that, to take in more air and somehow get a sense of resolution Sorry, it's very difficult

[24:51]

to be articulate about does this have any resonance with anyone? And I don't actually know what that's about but it's interesting to try to pay attention to it and deal with it with dying into the out-breath. So this fairly subtle work is dealing with the breath but even more subtle you can go to thoughts in Zazen in particular of letting go of the control of thoughts of being willing to let whatever thoughts are there happen and not seek for particular things particular states of mind. There, I just did it, right?

[25:51]

I also notice that often in preparing to go on to something else the habitual pattern is not to breathe out to empty myself to be ready for the next thing but to breathe in to kind of fortify myself or something. I don't know. I think our basic problem here with all of it but with death in particular is that I think that there's something to lose and the problem is my ego that I'm a prisoner of my own ego. So the request is to drop my separate self the idea to drop the body and mind and Zazen is a very good place to practice this, I think. It's a safe place

[26:55]

to experiment with accepting the unacceptable the very scary notion of dropping all this stuff. We don't have to actually do anything it's just open open to our lives all of it, all of our lives that we possibly can including the end of it open to the good and the bad all of it. We don't have to do anything just open. Buddhism teaches us that everything is there everything is everywhere all the time around everyone all we have to do is open there isn't something else there isn't an other there isn't you and me there isn't over here there isn't time there isn't then or now or later all of those the teaching is our illusions constructions of our mind

[27:55]

that everything is right here now. No birth and no death just to try to approach those ideas by examining what's right in front of us and accepting it if we can accept it that's the end of suffering and that's enlightenment liberation.

[28:27]

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