Old age is a time of loss. We lose much of the strength and endurance of our body and our senses. We lose friends, family, acquaintances, colleagues. The world that had become so familiar becomes unfamiliar. We lose assurance in the reliability of our memory and our mental faculties. Thus we enter a realm of deep and pervasive uncertainty. Novel pains make even this body an unfamiliar dwelling place. There is no resolution to our progressive instability. Much that we have relied on comes apart, and we find ourselves in a terrain increasingly unknown.

Our minds, however, continue moving onward. We cannot say where we are going or what we are seeking, yet mind never stops. Perhaps we seek those things that meant so much to us in the past. But we also seek new ways of inhabiting our evolving circumstances. We know that we cannot go back. We are in a state of new isolation. So we look for something more fundamental, some kind of simpler, more settled awareness that stays with us. And some way of sharing this.

In 1689, the renowned poet and Buddhist practitioner Matsuo Basho journeyed on foot through northern Japan’s mountainous inner provinces. He was forty-five years old (quite old by the standards of the time) and not in good health. He and his friend Kawai Sora spent the spring and summer months wandering along arduous pathways as they visited remote villages and temples. This journey was the basis for Basho’s travel diary, a small volume that he worked on for the next five years and eventually published in the year of his death. It is one of the most famous books in Japanese literature, and it encompasses Basho’s outer journey and his inner reflections. It is very much a book of journeying in old age.

We cannot say where we are going or what we are seeking, yet mind never stops.

The Japanese title of the book is Oku-no-Hosomichi: Oku, meaning “inward,” “distant,” “most far-reaching intention”; no meaning “of”; and Hosomichi, meaning “narrow pathway” or “trail.” Sam Hamill’s superb translation cannot be recommended too highly. He titles Basho’s masterpiece Narrow Road to the Interior, pointing to the text’s inner and outer dimensions. Those of us in our old age who now share the travels of this man so distant from us in space and time may well discover a close companion. As Hamill has noted, Basho’s poems often suggest elemental loneliness: “wabi, an elegant simplicity tinged with sabi, an undertone of ‘aloneness.’” It is not so much that we should regard Basho as an advisor or guide in our losses and uncertainties; rather, in the loneliness that is unique to old age, we can find in Basho a companion with whom to share the innumerable moments of loss and discovery that aging brings.

Here are some excerpts and responses, selected and written not as wisdom or advice or method, but as observations of companionable wanderers chatting or writing letters to each other.

The Moon and Sun are eternal travelers. Even the years wander on. A lifetime adrift in a boat, or in old age leading a tired horse into the years, every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home. From the earliest times there have always been some who perished along the road. Still I have always been drawn by windblown clouds into dreams of a lifetime of wandering.

But this is not a world serving as the backdrop for an individual moving according to intention. Here is an unfixed being moving amid worlds of change. Existence, home, environment, past and future, life and death, all are continuously in flux. Perhaps we are more aware of this in old age because now we know that our control over our circumstances and our future is diminishing. We are being shaped and unraveled, carried here and there by forces we do not know. These unsought movements and changes will reveal unsuspected beauty and wonder. But they are groundless. It requires daring to look.

Those who remain behind watch the shadow of a traveler’s back disappear.

As we watch those who are becoming old, is it like this? Are we who watch them age simply left behind? Are we, the aging, disappearing from the sight of those who are still young?

My hair may turn white as frost before I return . . . or maybe I won’t return at all. . . . The pack made heavier by farewell gifts from friends. I couldn’t leave them behind. 

Here the wanderer is still thinking about how he will appear on his return, and he cannot abandon the kind offers of those he’s left behind, burdensome though these may be. Aging—it is the same.

Continuing on to the shrine at Muro-no-Yashima, my companion Sora said, “This deity, Ko-no-hana Sakuya Hime, is Goddess of Blossoming Trees and also has a shrine at Fuji. She locked herself inside a fire to prove her son’s divinity. Thus her son was called Prince Hohodemi—Born-of-Fire . . .”

Japanese deities, or kami, are not just spirits of sun or sea or oak or mountain stream. Kami in the broad sense can refer simply to that which is awe-inspiring, fiercely provocative, or strange and haunting. In this sense kami can be described as experiences—clear and distinct moments in which perception of a place or thing merges with a specific syllable sound or word and a specific feeling. A unique moment of living intensity. Such an intensity, like that of the blossoming tree, is not necessarily locked in place. The myth describes the pregnant Ko-no-hana Sakuya Hime—a recently betrothed kami princess who had been accused of infidelity with a mortal—setting fire to her birthing hut. When she emerges with her newborn son unscathed by flames that would surely claim any mortal, the rumors are dispelled. Yet her moment of supreme conviction persists, crystallized in a new kami: “Born-of-Fire.”

This scene is the first moment where Basho and his friend are not concerned with leaving and loss. Their journey to the interior then brings them into an ever-unfolding landscape of moments that hover between past and present.

The last night of the third moon, an inn at the foot of Mount Nikko. The innkeeper is called Hotoke Gozaemon,
“Joe Buddha.” He says his honesty earned him the name and invites me to make myself at home. A merciful Buddha suddenly appearing like an ordinary man to help a pilgrim along his way, his simplicity’s a great gift, his sincerity unaffected. A model of Confucian rectitude, my host is a bodhisattva.  

Here, we and our companions find that the usual distinctions—between high and low, sacred and secular, who is to be revered and who is to be disdained—are melting away. And thus, through such humble and direct encounters in the next 45 sections, the two old travelers explore what the living world still gives them.

Sora, suffering from persistent stomach ailments, was forced to return to his relatives in Nagashima in Ise Province. His parting words:

Sick to the bone
if I should fall, I’ll lie
in fields of clover

He carries his pain as he goes, leaving me empty. Like paired geese parting in the clouds.

Now falling autumn dew
obliterates my hatband’s
“We are two”  

Hamill comments that the travelers had inscribed their hatbands to indicate that they were traveling “with the Buddha.” The final line—“We are two”—points at a depth of separation, both inward and outward, that was not expected. Here a sustaining friendship falls away as a deeper sense of hollowness, a deeper solitude, unfolds.

In the poems that follow, Basho is bereft of his friend’s companionship, and his compositions are focused more on natural landscapes and the act of writing about them. Images and occurrences have a great sharpness and clarity in the desolation where they hover.

On the fifteenth, just as the innkeeper predicted, it rained:

A harvest moon, but
true North Country weather—
nothing to view

. . .

Loneliness greater
than Genji’s Suma Beach:
the shores of autumn  

When he returns home, as he describes in the following and final poem of the narrative, Basho is welcomed by friends. Sora too, recovered from his illness, is there to greet him. And yet, as all of us must face our end alone, Basho enters a time that is more solitary than ever.

Still exhausted and weakened from my long journey, on the sixth day of the darkest month, I felt moved to visit Ise Shrine, where a twenty-one-year Rededication Ceremony was about to get underway. At the beach, in the boat, I wrote:

Clam ripped from its shell
I move on to Futami Bay:
passing autumn

How shall we receive this poem? Basho found his return to customary social life almost excruciating, as if the sensitivity and receptiveness that had opened during his solitary wandering had peeled something back, left something bare—something that was now being scratched, bruised, exposed to harsh winds. He made an excuse that allowed him to wander once again. But now he would also leave autumn behind. Only the icy stillness and life-end of snow and winter remained, as he sought a solitude transcending time, space, and separation.

Now, in Narrow Road to the Interior, Basho continues to offer us aged wanderers companionship on this journey.

Now I imagine I am sharing this reading and my passing observations with two friends whom I recently saw. One had suddenly gone blind, the other had suffered strokes, broken bones, the death of an only son. They lived, as they had all their lives, on farms quite far apart. But now their longstanding close friendship was hard to access, even as their courage, love, and integrity remain. I don’t know whether this reading would interest them very much. If not, I can imagine that they would, so kindly, change the subject. 

The post A Companion On the Shores of Autumn appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

This aging, it’s not something anyone seems to know that much about. Yes, there are the discussions of all the physical losses, increasing weakness, the increasing unreliability of mind and body, loss of sexual drive and capacity, unreliability of digestion, excretion. There are many discussions of how the young should manage the old, but there is not much discussion of how it feels for the old to find the same mind continuing, its clarity and curiosity. This going-on-being mind that feels so strangely unchanged. Unchanged in a body that we, the occupants, can barely recognize, and that, with the symptoms just mentioned, is making it clear that things are coming to an end. And this ending cannot really be imagined, even as we know it is so.

Buddhaghosa, the great 5th-century Theravada Buddhist investigator of mind, wrote:

Aging has the characteristic of maturing (ripening) material instances. Its function is to lead on to death.

Aging is the basis for the bodily and mental suffering that arises owing to many conditions such as leadenness in all the limbs, decline and warping of the faculties, vanishing of youth, undermining of strength, loss of memory and intelligence, contempt on the part of others, and so on.

Hence it is said:

With leadenness in every limb,
With every faculty declining,
With vanishing of youthfulness,
With memory and wit grown dim,
With strength now drained by undermining,
With growing unattractiveness to spouse and kin,
To [spouse] and family and then
With dotage coming on, what pain
Alike of body and of mind
A mortal must expect to find!
Since aging all of this will bring,
Aging is well named suffering.

—The Path of Purification, trans. Bikkhu Nanamoli

If you are reading this, your chances of ending up in a nursing home are just short of 50/50. That is to say, 4 out of 10 of Tricycle’s readers are likely to end their lives in institutional care. And if you began reading this at all, you may decide to stop now. Later, maybe, it will be time to consider such things. But as Meg Federico wrote, people have to make the most difficult decisions, plans concerning the last years of their lives, at a time they are least capable of doing so. Nonetheless, we will age, and something will happen to us. Atul Gawande, a distinguished surgeon and commentator on the care of the aged, describes the likely situation in which we who live in the Western post-industrial world will find ourselves:

The waning days of our lives are given over to treatments that addle our brains and sap our bodies of a sliver’s chance of benefit. They are spent in institutions—nursing homes and intensive care units—where regimens, anonymous routines cut us off from all the things that matter to us in life. Our reluctance to honestly examine the experience of aging and dying has increased the harm we inflict on people and denied them the comforts they most need. Lacking a coherent view of how people might live successfully all the way to their very end, we have allowed our fates to be controlled by the imperatives of medicine, technology, and strangers.

—Being Mortal

It is important to understand that even if we are fortunate enough to be able to afford a relatively agreeable old age home or assisted living facility, once we have been moved into such a place we will no longer be considered full members of the living world. We will find ourselves in a kind of bardo where friends, family, doctors, and caregivers will no longer think of us as exactly alive. We will wield no influence whatsoever in the outer world and will have few ways of influencing the specifics of our daily lives such as diet, whom we live with, times we wake, sleep, bathe, read, what we watch on TV, and so on. Such choices will no longer be left to us.

As Buddhist practitioners, we will frequently have heard that we should practice to prepare for death. Now it will be clear that, as Buddhaghosa indicates, the path that will prepare us for death is old age itself.

II.

In a Mahayana sutra from the Tibetan Buddhist canon, The Questions of the Householder Viradatta, the Buddha says:

“…[Those] who wish to fully awaken to unsurpassable complete and perfect awakening, should cultivate the spirit of great compassion for all sentient beings. They should be respectful, should stay close to them, should cultivate them.”

“[They] . . . should not be attached to the body. They should not be attached to life. Likewise, they should not be attached to wealth, grain, house, wife, sons, or daughters. They should not be attached to food, drink, clothing, vehicles, bedding, flowers, incense, perfumes, ointments, or garlands. They should not be attached to possessions.

“They should renounce extensively and fully, with total renunciation and without expectation for results.

. . .

“Where life is concerned, they relinquish all hankering for life, delighting in life, identifying with life as mine, craving for life, relying on life, and being attached to life. Likewise, they relinquish all hankering for, delighting in, taking as mine, craving for, relying on, and being attached to wealth, grain, house, spouse, sons, daughters, food, drink, clothing, vehicles, bedding, flowers, incense, perfumes, garlands, ointments, or any other possessions. . . .”

The householder Viradatta responds:

“The resolve to be awake is a great resolve.
It is the supreme happiness among all sentient beings.
It is the most excellent of all qualities.
It pacifies all illness.

“… the resolve toward awakening… does not have a limit.”

“We who delight in this resolve

. . .

“We properly discover what is to be discovered.”

If the path that will prepare us for death is old age itself, then we can have confidence in our experience at this time, no matter how difficult, painful, and disorienting.

III.

An old monastic practitioner said to me, “Old age. It’s a secret, a kind of hidden magic. It’s right there, this practice, and no one sees it. We’re being shown, given. It is how our lives actually work. What we are told we should not cling to is actually naturally being stripped away. . . . Resistance is not possible or only creates more confusion, pain.”

There are many kinds of practice, and the end of life does not seem to be a good time to search for new methods. It is the time to do practices with which we are familiar, where we know our way. But regardless of what practice we do, it is crucial to keep our practice grounded in the awakened state.

In Tibetan, the word for awakening is changchub: chang (“self-purifying”) and chub (“self-expanding”). That is to say, the awakened state is the natural way for our mind to seek to leave obstacles and misunderstandings behind and to move continually outward.

Generally, however, when we look at our experience, we tend to see things better. We see our body as a noun, an entity with fixed properties and functions. And because we tend to look at ourselves this way, when various qualities of our body change during the aging process, this is unpleasant; when our body cannot function as it used to, we are distraught, lost. If, however, we see our body as a verb, a combination of properties and functions constantly in motion, then it’s very different.

Lying in a hospital bed, confined in a nursing home, surrounded by chaos and noise, lost in a world we do not recognize, can we do this?

Our experience of our body is an experience of constant change. There is the hunger in our stomach, the hunger in our mouth, the pleasure of chewing, the tastes and saliva in swallowing, the feeling of a substance reaching our stomach. These can be pleasant or unpleasant in varying ways. And then satiation. Then again perhaps discomfort. The array of sensations changing in, and in conjunction with, our body weave together: the seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling all intertwine in varying proportions and with varying intensities; depending on our attention, the senses filter in and out of our awareness as a body in its entirety. A body is an array of elements constantly changing.

Everything is changing constantly, but the awareness, the fact of being aware of sensations and change, does not change. There is always awareness. Awareness appears in the poles of subject and object. These polarities are inseparable and are, in fact, the natural display of awareness, which has never been divided.

Awareness has never moved or stopped moving, never been stable or composite, never been one thing or no thing.

The heart of Buddhist practice is to cease placing limits on the vast expanse of the awakened state. To let go of thinking that seeks to make the awakened state serve our anxious purposes, to let awareness, observation, attentiveness dissolve into the vast awakening as streams flow to the sea.

Lying in a hospital bed, confined in a nursing home, surrounded by chaos and noise, lost in a world we do not recognize, can we do this?

Dogen Zenji said: “When the world ends, and the fires blaze unobstructedly through everything, and all falls to ruin, we just follow circumstance.” (Trans. Kidder Smith)

Like light in air, we cannot stop,
Every instant dissolves.
Awakening is not something we make happen
Awakening happens without reference point
Without boundary.
Like light in air
Moments do not stop in one self or an other.
Dissolving
Reforming
Awakening breaks open in the experience of whatever and all.

Here’s Dogen again: “The master doesn’t say that greatly awakening is becoming buddha, nor that returning to confusion is becoming a being, nor that greatly awakening gets frayed, nor that it vanishes, nor that confusion somehow just shows up. Greatly awakening has no beginning or end, returning to confusion had no beginning or end. Why? It just goes off everywhere, while the worlds are being destroyed.” (Trans. Kidder Smith)

The post The Magic & Mystery of Aging appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.

—From The Buddha’s Five Remembrances, presented by Thich Nhat Hanh

Today’s hike begins as a detective caper. Can we, Patrick and Barbara—two long-married 75-year-olds—find and walk the zigzag trail we climbed thirty-five years ago in Oakland’s Redwood Park, where the younger Patrick, unbeknownst to the younger Barbara, planned to propose marriage—but didn’t?

The forest ranger we consult, the dog walkers to whom we explain our quest, respond with delight. Seeking advice on how to locate our trail, we describe what we remember—narrow, steep, heavily wooded, many switchbacks—and share our story: the two of us in the prime of life, charging up and down, pressing through tight passages between trees, hunting for a sunny nook for a picnic, Patrick hauling a heavy wicker basket where he had hidden a bottle of champagne.

On this day, with our pup Tony in tow, we head out on the soft needle duff beneath rising redwoods. While I’ve become an ardent daily walker, since those courting days it’s been hard to pry Patrick away from his books, writing, and cooking to get out on a trail. But here we are. The search feels fun to both of us, maybe a little more riveting for me. Primed with expectation, I feel particularly alive. I hurry ahead, glancing back every few minutes at Patrick carefully forging forward. I try to curb impatience but finally burst out, “Couldn’t you pick up the pace a bit?”

In my rush, I trip on a tree root, lose my balance, and hurtle to the ground, scraping my forearm and elbow. Patrick catches up, making sure I’m OK, and I hasten on.

The price of my “exuberance”! I’ve continued to defend this view of myself, even as evidence has mounted for contrary assessment. My lickety-split pace, in which I’ve taken pride, isn’t necessarily a wonderful choice. It is, I’ve come to suspect, a way of avoiding what is truly going on. Hurrying has consequences: not just injuring the body but also distracting the mind.

After the slip, I remind myself:

I am of the nature to grow old.

Recently I’ve been practicing the Buddha’s five remembrances, reciting them in early morning meditation and reflecting on them throughout the day.

I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.

I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape ill health.

I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.

All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.

My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.

These five verses from the Upajjhatthana Sutta (Anguttara Nikaya 5.57) are meant to be memorized and recited as constant reminders. By regularly repeating the truths of inconstancy, I hope to absorb them in the whistle of breath at my nostrils, the throb of my pulse and beat of my heart. But why does the practice of the remembrances feel so urgent for me? The specter of separation from all I love is especially charged. I know this. My dad left when I was 3, touching off years of yearning for stable connection. As life has gone on and as family and friends have disappeared through deaths and feuds, that yearning has continued—sometimes as a low hum in the background, but now with my advancing age it is much more often in the foreground. Fighting impermanence, I constantly feel betrayed by life. Maybe if I can accept the truths of change, this sense of ongoing betrayal will release.

The Soto Zen teacher Yvonne Rand introduced me to the remembrances long ago in a yearlong seminar on death. But it wasn’t until the pandemic that I began to take on the practice with discipline. Increasingly, the reminders repeat themselves back to me at unexpected moments during my waking hours, and at night in dreams.

Fighting impermanence, I constantly feel betrayed by life. Maybe if I can accept the truths of change, this sense of ongoing betrayal will release.

There is no way to escape old age, ill health, death, separation from all that we love. . . . No way to escape. Yet there are plenty of ways to escape believing that these apply to me. Despite a few falls—one off a ten-foot ladder and one down the back stairs—I’ve continued to trick myself as I’ve hurried along, particularly when it comes to old age: surely that is one thing I can put off. But Patrick, with three eye surgeries, digestive ills, and now arthritis, has often noted, drolly, “We’re falling apart.”  I’ve hotly disagreed. “We are not!” Well, maybe it’s true for him, but certainly not for me. Yet just a few days ago the dentist told me I’m soon to lose yet another tooth, while I still haven’t gotten the implant to hide a gaping hole from the last extraction.  In this same week, my bone density scan reveals bone loss and my eye exam, cataracts—both to alarming degrees even I can’t deny.

The vibrating hoot of a train far below echoes up through city streets and canyons, into this forest.  I hear it now as a warning toll:

No way to escape ill health, growing old, death.

So as Patrick and I go on our search, I am also tuning my senses to the fundamental truths of impermanence.

We hike along the Redwood Creek bed, dry in our time of draught. That summer long ago on the almost-proposal walk, it flowed with the wash and rustle of living water.

Interrupting my memories, today’s Patrick observes, “During the last thirty-five years, these trees probably grew 50 feet.” We crane our necks to view the tops of the trees, 100 feet above us. “They must have sprung from the roots of the giants felled by loggers in the 1850s.”

A political science professor before he took up law, Patrick draws on constant reading in history and politics. When we met in college on the East Coast, I thought of him as the nerdy roommate of a boyfriend. It took twenty years until, finally at 40, I paid attention. There Patrick was—brilliant, absolutely trustworthy, loving, and playful.

“I keep thinking about the original redwoods,” says Patrick. “They became Oakland, Berkeley, much of San Francisco.” He unpacks the moment by expanding it into broad history, seeing through the smallest event to the world, and how and why it turns. Maybe that’s his version of impermanence practice.

Prompted by his observations, my attention widens, and I ache for the trees that were felled, those great redwoods reaching up into the sky.

All of the nature to change.

“This couldn’t be the route we took, could it?”  I return us to our mini-story. “Too many rocks. Too much space between trees. Remember how we couldn’t find a cranny to sit and eat?”

“It was definitely steeper,” says Patrick, “Of course, I was hauling that basket!” He cocks his head, his version of a wink.

That day we had hiked for hours, looking for a place to sit. Finally we broke through dense forest into sunshine: the perfect picnic spot! But we found ourselves, hours after setting out, back in the parking lot where we had started. We both collapsed on a log and devoured our sandwiches. Patrick never did break out the champagne.

Today, hiking on now in silence, we arrive at a fork. One path is gentle, circling back the way we came, gradually going further up the hill. The other goes vertically up. The steep trail looks familiar to both of us. I say, “Let’s head up!” But then I remember my broken bones in recent years—both heels when I fell off the ladder and a shattered kneecap when I tumbled down the stairs. I think of the warning from the recent bone density test: high risk for fracture. I shake my head. “Can’t do.”

There is no way to escape growing old.

We take the easier slope to our car. As we complete this hike, I sense my humped shoulders—resistance to the way it is, resentment at what I can’t do.

Not to be daunted, a week later we enter Redwood Park through a different gate and set out on our second sleuthing adventure. Surely we were wrong. There must be a trail that calls to us but doesn’t look dangerous.

We loop around on a new path, breathe in the spicy smell. Light trembles through branches. My thoughts coast to raising Caitlin with Patrick. Each weekday evening when Caitlin was little, at some much-anticipated moment she and I would hear the key turning in the lock, the front door flying open, and Patrick’s voice booming from the landing: “Hello Hello.” Patrick would stride into the living room, handsome in his lawyer’s suit and tie, and Caitlin would race to him. “Daddy!” I would run up too for a welcome hug.

I don’t know when that stopped—the hello hello, with such energy and hope. But it lapsed and never resumed, and I keep wishing it were back. These days—three years into his retirement and a year into Covid—when Patrick comes in the door he’s quiet, his shoulders sloped.

But is it really his enthusiasm that I am wishing for? Or am I struggling with my own fear that nothing hopeful can be expected anymore, that some essential life energy is over?

All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change.

On the trail, recalling those happy hello hellos, an unarticulated longing becomes clear: if we can find that lost route through the redwoods and retrace our steps, we’ll miraculously turn back into the dreamy 40-year-old couple. Right here, my two quests collide. The first—a drive to magically reverse time, to recover our younger selves—clashes with the second—an intention to get real, to know that we are old, that we are of the nature to get ill, and that we are always dying.

As we hike farther, the forest turns increasingly dense, the path darkening. My thoughts grow somber.  That’s happened a lot lately, taking me over unexpectedly as I’ve grappled with the remembrances.

There is no way to escape being separated from all that is dear to me.

Each time this verse sounds in my head, I rush along the trail, just as, I’m guessing, the threat of separation has always kept me fleeing.

A few times lately I’ve been overtaken by fear; everything has suddenly turned hazy and my body has gone numb. I’ve leaped to my feet and run from lamp to lamp, from wall switch to wall switch, flipping on lights. Has the house dimmed? Or is it my eyes? Maybe all my systems are shutting down? This panicked feeling is familiar to me; it came up most intensely forty-five years ago when my father was dying, leaving once again.

Some nights now awake in bed, a chilling scenario returns to me.  Patrick dies, leaving me on my own. This feels unbearable. Before we were together, my moods swung up-and-down-crazy, and often I popped off, angry. Once he and I settled together, his anchor kept me more stable. I don’t know how well I could be grounded on my own.

Slowing down on the trail, I call back to Patrick, “Hey Babe, one of us is going to die first.”

He laughs, as he often does when something painful comes up.

I insist, “No, really. Do you ever wonder how that would be?”

“Well, aren’t I supposed to die first? Wasn’t that why we did all that will stuff …?”

“What if it was me who died first?”

Silence. Finally he says, “Our home would be very sad.” A pause. “And quiet.”

We both start walking again, me already picking up my pace. Then he calls toward me, “I guess I’d have to start walking Tony.”

I laugh, behind my cheekbones a prickling of tears.

Even as you keep teasing, Mr. P., I’ll keep practicing, teaching myself to take in what is true: old age, sickness, death. Just a few days ago, I sat in the dental chair facing a monitor. On the screen I saw a skull—teeth protruding,  hollow cheeks, empty cranium, nose hole, eye sockets. A  gap where there must have been a molar on the lower mandible. Disconnect, then recognition. Oh my God, that’s my skull.  I turn to the endodontist, raise a brow, “Wow. A memento mori moment.” And he, catching my dark humor, “Yes, that’s you in thirty years!” A generous estimate.

I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.

The skull is mine, yet it could be anyone’s. A shock of truth, like Dorian Gray staring at the image of his debauched nature revealed in his portrait; but this screen is everybody’s portrait. A precious opportunity in the dental chair: to look at an X-ray or mirror and recognize one’s impersonal nature. A moment of release. From what? From seeing my self at the center—that’s how it feels.

A harmonic chord hums through the forest—a train calling from across the city below. I imagine linked cars, clattering in a continuous series along tracks by the Bay. Vague images return to me from last night’s dream—rattling sound, skidding feel. In months of practicing the remembrances, dream visitors have insinuated themselves into my sleep. In an underworld descent, I’ve met my father, dead forty-five years, and an old friend, Allen, dead five years. These were men dear to me, each with a professorial air. Patrick is in their lineage.

Now, beneath these dense trees, the gloom feels unrelenting. Last night’s dream coalesces: I am alone in a runaway railroad car, unhooked from all others and careening off the tracks, hurtling backward in free fall. Sliding wildly back and forth between shuddering walls of the car, I am totally unmoored.

As I walk, I try to contact the dream’s tone. Panic? Not quite. There’s an element of exhilaration. How can that be? The feeling is terror, but not only terror. It’s terror along with amazement that I am conscious in the midst of it.

I take a deep inhalation. I ground my feet, as if I too have roots reaching into the soil. I have an inkling that if I can know the terror through and through, I can find a measure of peace within it.

As we begin another descent, I hear the faint sound of lilting water, the creek, still streaming  through one glade. I feel the sweetness of the memories from our early life together. I also feel the fear and pain of loss. But that’s not all. I know that I will never retrieve and hike the trail of many years ago. And much to my surprise, I’m OK with that.

I look far back toward Patrick, barely seeing him behind me, stepping carefully forward.  Steady. Even though Patrick suffers from weak ankles and aching knees, his calves are strong and muscled like his father’s, his brother’s, his sister’s—all now deceased. Patrick simply keeps going. He measures his steps to accommodate arthritic joints, uneven vision, aches of the heart.

So often I’ve jumped ahead, balked, or blurted out. Have I sabotaged my own longings for connection? Sadness seeps up from my chest, through my neck, behind my cheeks.

There is no way to escape being separated from all that is dear to me.

My actions are the ground on which I stand.

I stop on the trail and turn around, head back toward Patrick, then resume walking—for now—together. I cock my head and meet his eye. Foot to trail. That’s all we’ve got.

The post All of the Nature to Change appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The subtitle of writer and lay Zen teacher Susan Moon’s latest book may be “Notes on the Home Stretch,” but the wisdom on aging, and more to the point, death, in Alive Until You’re Dead is important for readers of any age. Weaving in personal stories, many about confronting the deaths of close friends, Moon turns her lived experience into tributes and guidance for facing mortality. She also brings a lightness to the subject that so many people fear above all else, but that Moon says actually brings meaning to our lives. Tricycle caught up with Moon to hear more about the intention and writing process of the book, and for further advice on facing death at any stage of life.

Why did you want to write Alive Until You’re Dead: Notes on the Home Stretch? I wanted to write about my ongoing concern with what it means to be mortal and the idea that our condition of mortality and impermanence, which we are constantly fighting against, actually gives us life. Death is very hard and painful but it’s also what gives meaning to our lives. I really wanted to talk about how we actually can be grateful for our mortality, and that the fact that we’re going to die gives us the opportunity to make our life meaningful.

You wrote this book during the pandemic. How did that unique time impact your work? I think of it as my pandemic book, in a sense, because the pandemic provided me time and space and simplicity of life to write. I’ve been on writing retreats, I’ve been to writers’ residencies, and weirdly, this horrible tragedy was also kind of a perfect writer’s retreat for me. But at the same time, I think all the tragedy and fear added to the relevance of my subject in a way. I have to add that I’m grateful to my sister and brother-in-law who live with me and who supported and encouraged me as this was going on.

Early in the book, in a story about a friend of yours who died in the hospital after suffering a stroke, you say that “the Grim Reaper metaphor is all wrong.” Can you explain what you mean by that? Death is not one separate thing that’s coming after us. In Buddhism, birth and death are kind of conceived as a hyphenated thing. Life is the realm of birth and death, and there’s a sense that before we were born into this body, and after we leave this body, there’s this other realm of the absolute, which is a mystery to us. People often worry about what will happen to them after they die, but we never think about where we came from before we were born. We don’t even think about that as a parallel thing. 

Though you don’t shy away from the hard parts of aging, you also describe the upsides. Referencing a dharma brother who gave a memorable talk at Berkeley Zen Center, you write, “In his old age, it came naturally to him to put himself aside and not think about what he needed all the time.” How have you experienced this? It’s about letting go of self clinging. I’m not building a life anymore so there’s some freedom there to attend to the needs of others, like my own children and grandchildren. How can I just be present with loved ones? I love the example in that essay when the man said when he was playing with his grandson, and they would build a tower, his grandson would knock it over again and again, and they would just laugh and build it again. You don’t have to worry about building a tower that stays up.

But letting go of self-clinging is appropriate for anyone at any stage of life. If you’re grasping for your own happiness at the expense of others, that’s not going to bring you happiness. I really feel that the path to joy is to let go of self-clinging in whatever way you can, and I think Buddhist practice has been helpful for me in that. But there’s many other routes, like being in community and continually remembering that we’re all in this together, we’re all interconnected, and your happiness isn’t separate from anybody else’s happiness.

“The fact that we’re going to die gives us the opportunity to make our life meaningful.”

Throughout the book you reference beautiful moments with your grandchildren, who you connected with frequently over Zoom during the pandemic. These stories speak for themselves, but you also talk about the term “grandmother mind.” Can you explain what that means? It’s connected to letting go of clinging. Dogen uses the phrase when he tells a young male monk, who is different from a grandmother in every possible respect, that he won’t be able to have a mind of compassion and be a true Buddist practitioner unless he can develop “grandmother mind.” Dogen is speaking, I believe, about what he calls “the mind of great compassion.” So it’s that spirit, but I think as I’m using it, it’s also about a certain kind of love. If you’re not one of the grandparents who are raising your own grandchildren—an amazing thing that a lot of people are doing—and you’re able to just be a grandparent and not be responsible for all the hard parts, the kind of love that you can have for your grandchildren is unencumbered, unconditional. I see “grandmother mind” as an obligation to apply that feeling to all children. All of us need to have “grandmother mind” about children. 

On the subject of death, you say, “When I deliberately consider my own death, I feel more alive,” and you offer some contemplations on death. Could you describe one of them? One that pops into my head—it’s not harder or easier, or more important or anything—is walking in cemeteries. To walk in a cemetery, and to actually look at the gravestones, read the names and think of all these people who have died, to look at the dates and think about the generations, gives me a sense of how there’s a flow of time and generations. For some reason I’m comforted by the thought that I am a leaf in the generations of leaves that keep turning over. I’m part of the turning over. There are many people who were born and died before me and hopefully there will be many who are born and die after me. I’m just one person and I’m not all that important. It’s just amazingly fortunate that I should be walking there, alive and looking at some bird singing in a tree, and life is going on. It’s the same feeling I get from looking at the stars in the sky and thinking of the vastness of the universe, or by reading about physics or cosmology. It’s the idea that there’s this vastness of time and that my life is just a little blink, and I don’t even know what part of the great cosmic consciousness my life is, but it’s a miracle that I have this consciousness in this one little tiny person on the planet. Here I am, and what a great miracle.

Do you think it’s wise or essential to prepare for death? What about preparing for the death of loved ones? When I think about it as a practice myself I resist it because it feels unnecessarily harsh. But should we prepare for the greatest moments of suffering? What I realized when I was writing this book—and I realized it before when thinking about my own loved ones, and particularly my children—is that accepting my own death is a hard job, but accepting that the people I love will die is even harder. Having people leave you is terrible, and then the worst possible fear of all would be to have your children die. I can’t imagine anything worse. I remember when I first became a mother, all of a sudden when I read the newspaper and the war in Vietnam was going on, I would see these pictures of children in the war and the whole thing took on a different meaning. It was much more personal to me, and it became unbearable. It’s the same even now, when I think about the war in Ukraine and the children there.

I think preparing for the death of loved ones is something that one can do. You can prepare for the death of somebody who is old, where the death won’t be such a tragedy. You can just try to appreciate the person and have so much gratitude for this person being in your life. You can try to help them see that their life has been full and rich and help them find some peace. And for children, take as much joy as possible in what’s going on. Don’t let fear rob you of your joy.

I also think that we can trust that sometimes people who are dying find a way to accept what’s happening. Maybe they’re in pain, maybe they want to be released, but it’s important to know that while your pain and your loss is so real and acute, you don’t have to take on their suffering, because you don’t really know what they’re suffering is.

A friend of mine, who I loved very dearly, died of cancer in 2018. I miss her terribly. She was a Buddhist, and she knew she was dying for quite a long time. At first she was still functioning well and then she needed to care, and I was one of the people who took turns to help her at home, making meals for her and things like that. Then she was in some pain and I said, “How do you do this? How do you tolerate this?” She said, “I just say to myself, ‘This is how it is right now.’” This is how it is right now. That became a kind of mantra for me that I bring into a lot of other situations in my life. It’s about being present in the moment, accepting things as they are and then moving from there. It’s not resigning yourself, but being present with things before you go on to the next thing. It’s knowing, thanks to impermanence, that things won’t stay this way, for better or worse. I think that is very helpful.

The post How Death Gives Meaning to Our Lives  appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

It’s an inescapable truth that we all grow old and die. I’m in my seventies now. (If you decided to click and read this article, you may also be well along in your years.) Even though I started studying Buddhism as a very young man, the profundity and depth of the teachings really began to hit home for me as an older person. I came to realize that aging is the essence of what the Buddha taught. He said that we need to live our lives in accordance with reality—not in accordance with opinions, speculations, or doctrines. Aging is reality. 

Not too long ago, I was at a lecture given by a Tibetan lama. In the middle of the talk, the lama said that one of the simplest and most important teachings he got from his teachers was that “dharma is reality.” Afterward, I asked him what he meant. 

“Well, I travel all around the world and people will come and sit at my feet and listen to everything I say. Sometimes they host big events for me and banquets,” he told me. “And none of that is dharma. That’s not reality. Reality is impermanence. Reality is change.” 

My own teacher, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, once said a very similar thing. After he gave a talk at Tassajara Zen monastery in California, a student raised his hand. “You know,” the student said with some distress, “you’ve been talking on and on about all these complicated Buddhist teachings, and really, I don’t understand anything that you’re saying. Is there something you can tell me that I can understand?”

Everybody glanced around the room, laughing nervously. It seemed like such an impertinent question—but Suzuki Roshi took it quite seriously. He waited for all the laughter to die down. And then he quietly said, “Everything changes.” 

The Tibetan lama and Suzuki Roshi were both stressing the truth of impermanence. I learned from these teachers that we need to live our life in accordance with how things actually are—and that you can, perhaps, see this reality most clearly reflected in your own aging body and mind.

I have a memory of another dharma talk with Suzuki Roshi in which a student asked, “Why do we meditate?” It seemed like such a throwaway question, but Suzuki Roshi didn’t take it that way and actually responded in a way I did not expect. He said, “We meditate so that we can enjoy our old age.” At the time, he was probably in his mid-sixties and recovering from a year-long bout of illness, yet he seemed to be enjoying himself and laughed a lot, as he always did. 

I’m not sure I understood what he meant back then, but I think I do now. In order to embrace and enjoy the stage of being an older person, of coming toward the end of life, we need to have a grounding and basis in what reality is. 

Teachings on the reality of “old age, sickness, and death” are core to the Buddhist tradition. On the surface, “aging is reality” it doesn’t sound all that nice—it may come off as possibly morbid or depressing. (In fact, when my son was younger, he would tell his friends, “My dad’s a Buddhist teacher,” and his friends would turn up their noses. “Oh, that Buddhist thing—I could never get down with that whole ‘life is suffering’ thing,” they’d say.) It’s funny—the point of stressing the reality of aging, illness, and mortality is not to make people depressed. It’s a way to remind people of the nature of reality: everything ages and eventually passes away. This is, of course, true for every human being who ever lived. It doesn’t matter whether you’re rich or poor, powerful or powerless.

For many of us today, the truth of mortality is harder to avoid than it’s ever been in our lifetimes. The global coronavirus pandemic is a reality we most definitely cannot deny or avoid. I find it useful to think about COVID-19 as a “lightning bolt” moment—a moment of realization not unlike the Buddha’s first encounters with old age, sickness, and death. 

The story of the young Siddhartha Gautama, before he became the Buddha, leaving his father’s palace and encountering an old man, a sick man, and a dead man, reads like a fairy tale. It almost certainly isn’t literally true, but it’s psychologically profound. When the Buddha was born, there had been a prophecy made that he would either grow up to be a great king or a great spiritual leader. His father, a ruler himself, did not want his son to go down the spiritual path, so he prohibited the young Gautama from ever leaving the palace so that he would never see anything that might distress him. But eventually the Buddha’s curiosity compelled him to sneak out from the palace grounds, along with his loyal servant, Chandra. 

The first thing he saw was a person who was sick. He asked, “Chandra, what, what’s the matter with the person?” And Chandra said, “Well, that person is ill. They’re ill, that’s illness.” The same thing happened when he saw an old person and corpse: two more moments of the Buddha encountering our inescapable reality. Yet the fourth person the Buddha saw was a monk with a serene countenance, which awakened him to the possibility that there is a way to see past these harsh truths of death, disease, and aging.  

With the coronavirus, we’ve partially returned to the same world that the Buddha lived in, which is a world of uncertainty, fear, and anxiety. It may seem like we’re in a miasma, a soup of reality we’re drowning in. But the thing is—whether we realize it or not—by tuning into this suffering, we are living out a form of the Buddha’s teaching. Confronting your aging, the possibility of sickness, and the inevitability of death, makes you a natural Buddhist. There’s wisdom to be had in delving into all aspects of your aging being—not just now, in a time when aging makes one even more prone to death by COVID-19—but always. 

I believe that when you come face-to-face with your mortality—whether you’re meditating or not, whether you’re calm or not—you’re actually practicing the Buddha’s core teaching. Now that we’re putting on masks and gloves and standing six feet apart, our fear of death is constantly activated. But these consistent reminders that we are subject to impermanence can serve as helpful reminders to practice Buddhism as the Buddha did—by facing our fears of old age, sickness, and death with courage and the desire to alleviate our suffering and the suffering of others.  

♦

This article was originally published on September 20, 2020

The post Aging Is Reality appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

1

It is said that we who live within the mists do not see the shapes of the clouds that are our dwelling place. We do not see the radiance of the sun, the moon, the stars, nor do we know the vastness of the sky.

There are many stories of children, young men and young women, princesses and princes, whose parents were determined to shield them from suffering and obstacle. They were raised behind high castle walls. There are many stories of men and women who never dared to leave the security of their palaces, but who could not silence the whispers of the high winds or avoid fugitive and nameless fears.

2

An old man in the elevator is shaking his head. In a bitter voice, he tells me how sick he has been, that aging “takes so much away from you. You lose so much.”

I am in the same situation, of course, and I feel resistant to his depression. I wonder, isn’t there more to it? Suddenly I want to know:

“But what does old age give?”

3

It is said that more than 2,000 years ago in the north of India, there was a prince, Siddhartha, who lived in a palace amid flower gardens filled with the sounds of bells, music, fountains, and song-birds. The king, his father, made sure he was surrounded by strong, lively young men and beautiful, sensitive women. The king determined that his son would grow up to succeed him, without ever knowing fear, suffering, or sadness. 

And yet the prince was curious. One day, he ordered his charioteer to take him in his golden chariot to explore the world outside the palace gates. They passed through the bustling crowds that filled the boulevards and marketplaces of his father’s capital. Lingering at the edges of a crowd was a couple, a woman and a man, both bent over, gaunt, tremulous, worn-out. Their veins stood out on their bodies, their teeth chattered, and their dried-out skin was a maze of cracks and wrinkles. They turned their heads anxiously in all directions, for they could not see well. People bumped into them, for they could not hear. Grey hairs hung from their scalps; their eyelids had no lashes and were crusty and red-rimmed. Their heads wobbled and their hands shook. They had the sour smell of decay. The prince asked his charioteer:

“What are these?  Has nature made them thus, or is it chance?”

The charioteer answered:

“Sire, these creatures are like all others who live into the twilight of their years. They are merely old. They were once children nursing at their mother’s breast; they grew, they were young, they had strength and beauty and they were brave, enterprising, lustful; they married, they raised their families, their lives were full. Now they are near the end of life. They suffer from the press of time that mars beauty, ruins vigor, kills pleasure, weakens memory, destroys the senses. Old age has seized these two and broken them. It has taken away all their friends and those they could rely on. They are like an abandoned house on an island pounded by a torrential flood. They are the ruin of what once they were.”

The prince asked:

“Will this also be my fate?”

The charioteer replied:

“My lord, no one who lives can escape this.”

The prince shuddered like a bull at the sound of thunder. He uttered a deep sigh and shook his head. His eyes wandered from the wretched couple to the happy crowds.

“And yet the world is not frantic with terror! How can they ignore our common fate?”

This was Prince Siddhartha’s first meeting with old age. For an instant, the prince saw through the surface of his existence as if seeing through a painted screen. Meeting old age, he encountered the first of the Divine Messengers. It was his first glimpse of the truth. Hope to escape, terror, sorrow, all are irrelevant.

4

Tinnitus, various incapacities, less energy, a slightly less reliable faculty of recall—these are signs of aging, but I do not feel the process of getting old. And in the mirror there is a man, almost a stranger, about to be 70. But my mind, my habits of mind, the ways in which I am accustomed to thinking and feeling, the ways I expected myself to be have not much changed. The feeling of being old comes in sudden flashes.

The doctor diagnoses a nodular melanoma. Excised, it leaves an interesting scar. Statistics indicate a truncated life expectancy. I feel the same as before and I do not. Information has changed me as much as any virus or germ. It tells me I am moving into terrains that are uncontrollable, unknowable.

A renowned specialist has nothing of use for me. “Is there any other way I can help?” he asks. I smile. “If you can tell me the two things I doubt you know.” He raises his eyebrows. “How long will I last and how bad will it hurt?” He gives a rueful shrug.

5

I feel the world moving away slightly. I am not different, really. Or the way in which I sense myself as different is difficult to grasp. But I do know that my body and world are changing in unexpected ways. I am being separated from a life I know. A new world presents itself, sharp, vivid, uncompromising. It is not what I expected.

I watch young women and men, full of certainty that the intensity of their desires, the anarchic power of appetites, the bright newness of their thoughts and insights will make the world bend before them. With the sheer force of their sexual desire, of wanting and longing; how could they think otherwise? 

Living on the edge of uncertainty is somehow stimulating. The world is opening beneath my feet.

6

It is said that the awakened state is the natural state.

It is said that the awakened state is all-pervasive as space.

It is said that there are more buddhas, buddha realms, kinds of teachings, realizations, assemblies of beings sharing those teachings than there are grains of sand in the Ganges and in all the beds of all the seas combined with all the universes of galaxies of stars.

It is said that every instant in the flow of illusion and suffering displays the full panoply of the unimpeded awakened state. There are no moments in which awake is not.

The core of the feeling that plagues us is that we are missing something.

I am changing in ways that are both visible and utterly unfamiliar. And I am as I somehow always was. I am missing something.

It is a time of sudden vast surprise.

7

My friend’s father was a big man even in his late 90s. His hands were huge and strong. He had been a warehouse foreman and spent most of his life in the Bronx. He loved New York, and finding himself now at the end of his life living with his son in a suburban house with a tree-filled backyard, he was occasionally disoriented. It didn’t really make sense that he would end up in such a place.

He often sat in the yard, amid the trees. “It’s amazing,” he said. “I had no idea that there were so many kinds of green.”

8

The world we know is aging and dying, falling beneath the hordes of the new.

What inspired us, what drew us on, the prospect of making something new in the world, some kind of new home, new love, new child, the prospect of living, all this is being worn out. The house is old, the lover has gotten sick, the children are adults and have their own concerns. And the sense of what was precious, important, necessary to promulgate, these are values no longer so widely shared. Perhaps in earlier times there were values that transcended generational limits; now they barely survive a single human life.

The world we have worked for is neither so fresh nor, to those younger than us, so desirable.

“You’re only as old as you think you are,” my son says.

“Oh, only young people think that,” I say.

9

The world is aging, dying.

We look at those we love. We look at those whose intimacy sustains us. Their bodies are betraying them. They are in decline. Their minds are in retreat. They look at us tenderly, but their glance moves inward to secret fears and losses of their own. Among these losses, they are looking at us, our bodies, our minds in retreat from a world that is losing us.

The younger ones, as they must and should, struggle to grasp and hold on. They look at us and turn away. The vector of our existence is not the same as theirs. It is the time of parting.

Unexpected perspectives appear, new light shines on enduring patterns and new intensities. More than ever before, we are faced with utter uncertainty. More even than when we were adolescents, we are moving into something completely unknown. It is frightening, and so very interesting, seductive, even.

Memory no longer chained to the pragmatics of seizing and holding. 

We are dazzled among patterns. We now enter a world and worlds transforming unimaginably. We are being changed without regard to pain or dignity or accomplishment or punishment or regret. Even the forms of consciousness we believe are valuable or true will not necessarily obtain. Uncertainty is unceasing. 

10

The past becomes vivid and slippery. 

I am looking across the front seat of the speeding car at my grandfather. He is looking intently through his pince-nez glasses at the blacktop rippling in the summer air. He looks over at me, and I look away. The cicadas are churning the air. I am 8 years old.

The spotlight reflected off the green-robed tenor’s naked sword flashes suddenly across the vast auditorium right into my eyes. I am 11 years old. He turns and begins to sing. Why do such moments come unbidden? Why are they now so clear?

Memories no longer quite provide the story of why things are the way they are. They arise as the framework that once linked them seems to fall out from underneath. I have far less to hide. I am suddenly and shamefully aware of specific moments when I have disappointed parents, teacher, friend, lover, stranger, son, my wife. I cringe, but there is nothing to be done. 

Moments as baby, child, adolescent, young man and then older loom vivid and clear. Moments, once markers of some effortful identity, each with different tonalities, thrusts, senses of containment. Now they display new patterns as former meanings drift. 

I am looking out the window of a train as day turns to night, as landscapes unfold, become briefly more intense, and the train hurtles toward a sunset I cannot see.

11

And I recall driving east over a ridge into Arizona at sunset. A great basin already in shadow opens as far as the eye can see. Far to the north, a mysterious array of mesas and buttes glow in the orange light while beyond, a dark red palisade blocks the horizon. These huge formations seem to flow across the tawny desert floor, like a secret epic now being enacted just beneath the threshold of thought and memory. 

12

Late in life, many artists have painted, written, composed work that is far different from what they had done earlier, and far different from work anyone else had done. The late works of Bach, Michelangelo, Titian, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Matisse, to mention a few, expand on what they did before but enter unexpected new terrains. This work often is a summit that neither illuminates the past nor provides a pathway to any known future. 

13

In the histories, it says that Hata came from Korea and created the beginnings of theater in Japan. He said:

Theater is the genius of the old.

The world draws way from them;

Their horizon widens.

The wide world is seen for what it is.

It draws away.

The future shortens 

And the past speaks with greater clarity.

The body is no longer the focus of the world.

Beings of light show themselves.

14

Driving on a gray dirt road, scraggly yellow sunflowers on either side. It’s late morning. The sun is pale and the dusty soil pale gray. I’m a little lost. The road occasionally runs through a stand of skinny leafless trees. It’s a cool day in mid-spring. I’m looking for a crossroad that will get me back to . . . that leads to another road that will take me wherever it is I’m going.

I am sleeping, dreaming. But is this a dream? As I dream, it seems slightly familiar, but I can’t remember anything like this in waking life. I wonder: perhaps this is a return in dream to a dream landscape that occasionally appears. It is not a particularly meaningful place. Pale gray, gritty soil and pale blue sky, bright yellow flowers, and being lost here, but not seriously so. I’m quite certain that I’ll find the way to wherever it was I was intending to go.

But I know I’m dreaming, and I want to remember this. I am wondering if this is just some landscape hovering in space to which I have inadvertently returned. A set of images through which a mind that is mine, for no reason, is just passing through.

I wake and work to remember. Yes, it is a real place, a place near Salida, Colorado. I was driving there with my wife. We were momentarily and pleasantly lost on the way home. It is ordinary and strange.

15

Mrs. T. was not like any of my mother’s friends. Witty, dark and sensuous, she held herself with mysterious reserve. Eyes wide open, smile amused, a bit aloof, she favored both the men who flirted and the women who whispered as she entered the room with ironic merriment. She was wickedly good at card games, too. Of course, she’d had a discreet face-lift. She’d been widowed twice before she was 28.

We wrote each other at Christmas. She was in her mid-90s, living in a nursing home. Her correspondence had become less and less detailed. I did not know whom to ask about her condition. Finally my card was returned, stamped deceased.

The year before she had written only: “You know, I’m very flattered that you think I’m still within reach of the U.S. Postal Service.”

Section 3 adapted from The Life of Buddha, by A. Ferdinand Herold, trans. Paul C. Blum [1922]: http://www.sacred-texts.com/bud/lob/lob11.htm.

Section 13 is verse from “Foot Extending Whispers on the Bridge of Transformation,” which appears in the author’s performance piece 10,000 Visions of Shotoku Tashi.

***

Excerpted from The Age of Waiting: Heart Traces and Song Lines in The Anthropocene by Douglas J. Penick © 2020 Arrowsmith Press. Reprinted in arrangement with Arrowsmith Press. Bristol, United Kingdom. 

The post The Divine Messenger appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Several months ago, as people across the United States were rallying against the first wave of COVID-19 lockdowns, one protestor held up a sign that read: “Sacrifice the Weak.” Some of the demonstrators were prepared, at least rhetorically, to put the economy above the lives of the elderly, who have been the most vulnerable to the novel coronavirus. 

While the protestors’ graceless ire may appall us, we are not entirely immune to the unspoken rationale built into their claim: that it is a tragedy for a child to die, sad for a 30-year-old to die, and merely unfortunate for an 80-year-old to die. 

Earlier this year, I attended an opera that brought this issue into high relief. Blood Moon, with an original libretto written by Ellen McLaughin (best known for her role as the angel in Angels in America), tells the story of a nephew’s return to the mountain where he once abandoned his aging aunt, the woman who had raised and cared for him. 

He’s engaging in a mythical Japanese practice called ubasute, in which an elderly relative is carried to a mountain and left there to die. There is no evidence that this was ever a common ritual—in fact, it’s quite clear that this is the stuff of legend. And still, references to ubasute have cropped up through the ages: in the 15th-century Noh play Ubasute, on which Blood Moon was based, in the Japanese mountain called Ubasute-yama, or in Shohei Imamura’s 1983 film The Ballad of Narayama, set in a village where senicide is routine. 

As the death toll from COVID-19 sloped upward, my memories of these encounters with ubasute resurfaced. I wanted to know more about this reputed practice: Where did the stories about it come from? Were there origins in Buddhism? Why has the legend persisted? 

I wrote to Professor Edward Drott, scholar of Japanese religions at Sophia University in Tokyo and author of Buddhism and the Transformation of Old Age in Medieval Japan, to find out more about ubasute and what this myth can tell us about our relationship with the elderly. 

***

What can you tell me about the Noh play Ubasute? Who wrote it, and why did they write it? The play has traditionally been attributed to the medieval Japanese playwright Zeami, who is regarded as Noh’s most influential playwright and theorist, although that attribution has come into question recently. Whoever wrote the play, the question of why they wrote it probably cannot be fully answered. However, there are a few things about Ubasute-yama and the legends associated with it that make it good raw material for a Noh play. First, there is a rich poetic tradition referring to the mountain and its legends. Noh plays are full of allusions to, and quotations from, elegant poetry of centuries past, which enhanced Noh’s prestige as an art form and added to its high-culture ambience. This was one of Zeami’s major contributions; he helped elevate Noh at a time when it was still regarded as lowbrow entertainment.

Second, Noh aesthetics borrow from the Mahayana concept of the ultimate nonduality of samsara and nirvana, suffering and liberation. Zeami and other Noh playwrights believed that the height of beauty was to be found in the depths of pathos or despair. For this reason, five plays featuring elderly female protagonists were regarded as possessing the highest dignity or rank (kurai), because, it seems, old women were seen to embody the miseries of samsaric existence more aptly than any other human form. 

I have not read the play in many years, but I remember that it involves the ghost of an abandoned old woman and ends with her dancing and reliving her memories under the full moon. The moon often symbolizes enlightenment in Noh. In this and the other four plays featuring old women, the ending is ambiguous—the women seem to remain lost in their dreams of the past. 

In his theoretical writings, Zeami argues that, at its best, Noh is able to give the audience an experience that transcends dualities, uniting ugliness and beauty, suffering and liberation, delusion and awakening. Again, very Mahayana; he was inspired, in part, by aesthetic treatises that tried to find esoteric Buddhist truths hidden away in classical Japanese poetry. 

Are we sure ubasute was never (or rarely) practiced? First of all, we should distinguish between a very narrow definition of ubasute as the practice of carrying your elderly mother up a particular mountain and leaving her there (paradigm 1), and a broader definition of ubasute that would involve less specific and less labor-intensive forms of abandonment (paradigm 2).

We cannot be absolutely sure that something like ubasute was never practiced. In fact, given that there continue to be cases of elder abuse, even patricide and matricide, or abandonment in the present day—not just in Japan, of course, but everywhere you find human beings—it stands to reason that there would have been instances of this in the past as well, especially in times of famine or extreme hardship. That said, it seems highly unlikely that someone would have made the effort to carry their elderly mother up a mountain to leave her there (paradigm 1). So whatever forms of abandonment that took place would almost certainly have been of the latter type (paradigm 2).

But let’s return to paradigm 1. There are probably many people in Japan, including, possibly, some scholars, who believe that because there were numerous legends describing ubasute it must have been a real practice. However, outside of legends, works of poetry, fiction, and drama, there are to my knowledge no reliable sources attesting to this practice.

Kamuriki-yama is the first mountain known to have acquired the name Ubasute-yama. It is featured in a poem in the Kokinwaka-shu, an early anthology of Japanese waka poetry. But the poem makes no mention of the practice of ubasute. It is just a place name. We might think that the existence of a place called Ubasute-yama suggests that there must have been a practice of ubasute, but that might not be the case. Place names often start out as one thing and then through a process akin to the game of telephone get transformed into some set of similar sounds with a different set of associations. For instance, there is a shrine in Osaka literally called Ha Jinja, or Tooth Shrine, and people go there to pray to prevent or cure problems with their teeth. But at the entrance is a plaque (no pun intended), which describes how the shrine originally venerated a giant stone, which stood as a divine barrier to curb (hadome suru) the Yodo river and prevent it from overflowing its banks. The rock was known as the hadome no kami, or the “god that curbs [floodwaters].” The “ha” in “hadome” actually means “tooth” in Japanese. So, at some point, people started calling the god (perhaps by mistake, perhaps as a joke) the “ha itami dome no kami”—the god that stops toothaches. Thus, today we have the Tooth Shrine.

All of this is to say that the explanations given today about the reason that mountain is called Ubasute-yama, based on legends, or its shape, or whatever, might be nothing more than attempts to retrospectively rationalize or make sense of a name that might have come about by accident.

Old women were seen to embody the miseries of samsaric existence more aptly than any other human form.

The first reference in Japan to the legend of ubasute comes in the 10^th century Yamato monogatari, or the Tales of Yamato. It tells of a man whose wife bullies him into abandoning his aged aunt on a mountaintop. Once he returns home, he feels remorse and heads back up the mountain to rescue her. There is a possibility that this story was inspired by the Kokinshu poem, which speaks of unease seeing the moon above mount Ubasute. But the bulk of the narrative actually bears resemblance to an Indian tale, found in the Storehouse of Sundry Treasures Sutra (Jpn: Zappozokyo or Zohozokyo Taisho Tripitaka no. 203), which had been in Japan since at least the Nara period (8th century). The fact that this and later legends bear a striking resemblance to the Indian story from the Zappozokyo makes it seem all the more likely that these are works of fiction or morality tales, not descriptions of real practices.

So, I conclude that there were most likely individual cases of abandonment, but there were no widespread, socially accepted or normalized practices of abandonment.

The first time I came across ubasute was in Imamura Shohei’s 1983 film The Ballad of Narayama. Although it’s most certainly dramaticized, can you acknowledge any accuracies in the depiction of the 19th century village? I saw it about 15 years ago, and I remember being impressed by the film’s seeming realism—its frank portrayal of the grittiness, precarity, and brutality of rural life during that period. Most Japanese films tend to romanticize the past.

On the other hand, the film gave the impression that ubasute was a common practice. When the protagonists reach the top of the mountain, it is littered with skeletons, presumably of other elders who had met the same fate. Here, I thought, the film seemed to stray from realism into the genre of horror.

My research focuses on early and medieval Japan (ca. 900-1600) so I am not really sure about how true to life the film was. But we have much better records from that period (late Tokugawa and early Meiji) than from earlier times. If ubasute was such a pronounced phenomenon, surely some provincial official would have left some record of it, especially given that Neo-Confucianism was the governing ideology of the day. We know, for instance, that Buddhist temples were encouraged by the central government to preach to local parishioners in an effort to end the practices of abortion and infanticide. I know of no similar efforts to stamp out the abandonment of elders. But again, I am not a Tokugawa or Meiji specialist, so I cannot say for certain.

As Japan confronts the problem of a rapidly aging society (koureikashakai) and lack of caregivers, have you seen the concept of ubasute resurface in any artistic or cultural context in Japan? I have come across a few instances in contemporary fiction and in ethnographies where elders refer to nursing homes as Ubasute-yama. People are certainly aware of the legend, and the trope has been pulled out repeatedly by the media as a way of talking about the dangers facing the elderly as we move deeper into this demographic crisis. I did a Google search and found that a TV drama was released in 2018 titled Ubasute about a young person who thinks elders have nothing to offer and should be gotten rid of. This person then strikes up a friendship with someone online named Diana. I have not seen the drama, but I am guessing the shocking reveal is that Diana is an old woman. 

Incidentally, in 2018 I wrote an article on representations of senile dementia in Japanese film. In Japan, symptoms of deterioration among the elderly are still commonly framed as boke—a folk-medical category associated more with a loss of social graces than with cognitive decline. Whereas senile dementia has most often been depicted in North America as a condition entailing a horrifying “loss of self,” or even a loss of humanity, responses in Japan point to a different range of concerns. I conclude that Buddhism might have had some influence on Japanese understandings of the condition.

In your research for your book Buddhism and the Transformation of Old Age in Medieval Japan, what did you discover about ubasute? Ironically, I found that although we have little evidence of people abandoning their parents, we have abundant historical evidence for another form of abandonment in premodern times: elders abandoning their families. In diaries, court histories, and other kinds of documents we see that, starting in the Nara period and then becoming ever more widespread in the Heian and medieval periods, it became customary for elders to live out their final years as Buddhist monks, nuns, or lay-recluses. This evolved out of the practice of rinju shukke—taking the tonsure on the death bed to gain merit in hopes of recovery or to aid one in attaining a positive rebirth. Gradually people started taking the tonsure earlier and earlier in order to prolong the period of merit-making prior to death.

Although we have little evidence of people abandoning their parents, we have abundant historical evidence for another form of abandonment in premodern times: elders abandoning their families.

This practice started out with aristocrats but gradually spread to all levels of society. Their degree of disengagement from their families or the rest of society varied from case to case. Some who could afford it would retire to a separate cloister located on their family’s estate or on the grounds of a temple. Some would leave home and spend their final years on pilgrimages or as wandering mendicants. Some would head out to wilderness areas and live in a hut. Those who could afford it would take formal vows, administered by an ordained member of the Buddhist clergy. Most, however, simply shaved their heads, donned black robes, and made their own vows. Today, we refer to these “self-ordained” types as “lay monks” or “lay nuns.”

These practices fit with the common view, especially in Nara and Heian periods (“early” or “classical” era Japan) that elders needed to remove themselves from social and political life and retreat to the periphery. In this way, the legends of ubasute are in keeping with the classical-era tendency to portray old age as a time of misery, alienation, and marginalization.

Elders seemed to have felt a great deal of ambivalence about this custom. Many sources show elders reluctant but resigned to take what they understood to be this necessary step. Even in cases in which the elder would continue to live with their loved ones, cutting their hair was a potent symbol of separation. Other sources, however, show elders eager to retire from the world, undertaking the ceremony joyfully, and speaking of it as the fulfillment of a long-cherished wish. Many seemed pleased to be able to finally focus all of their energies on Buddhist practices.

In the medieval period, representations of retirement shift toward these more positive valences. This is part of the “transformation” that I discuss in my book. To put it in the simplest possible terms: in the classical period, elders were portrayed as no longer fully part of the human realm—a miserable fate; in the medieval period, however, this liminal status could lend elders an air of the “otherworldly.” The figure of the old man, or okina, came to be regarded as a symbol of the beyond—the human form in which avatars of buddhas, bodhisattvas or kami were most likely to appear. Old women, for the most part, continued to be seen as samsaric beings. 

As discussed above, however, this made the figure of the marginalized elderly woman a particularly excellent protagonist in literary or dramatic works, such as Noh. The fact that old women could represent the extreme of human suffering and social isolation meant that their salvation could be all the more radical and dramatic.

The post Abandoning the Grandmother appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Bears swish when they walk. Their legs are chubby, with thick fur rubbing smoothly as they amble along. I didn’t know bears made this particular sound until one happened upon me at a meditation retreat as I sat on a bench atop a mountain knoll in North Carolina. My memory of this encounter is based almost entirely on sound alone. I saw the bear for only a moment when I turned my head at the noise, expecting to see a fellow retreat attendee emerging from the woods to join me. Instead I saw her (I am not sure, but I think of the bear as her), head heavy, sunlight flowing down the soft slope of her forehead to the bridge of her nose as she bowed towards the earth. 

*** 

Earlier that morning I lay with my back against the wood of the meditation hall, eyes closed as our instructor Cindy led us through a visualization meditation. She’s a spritely, slight woman, with a cheerful Southern accent and a ready smile. Cindy began in a familiar manner. We were discussing compassion that day, and I expected Cindy to follow the natural course of a metta, or lovingkindness, meditation. 

“Bring to mind someone you care deeply for,” she said.

I imagined my mother.

“As we follow this person, pay close attention to how you feel physically in your body,” she continued.

I looked forward to that warm feeling metta provides—the comfort in sending good thoughts towards others.

“Now, imagine you see this person surrounded by fire. Hot flames all around a hell realm, if you will.”

Not quite the comforting visualization I was expecting.

“Imagine they are burning and there’s nothing you can do,” she continued as I struggled to imagine my mother in hell, a concept foreign to me, having been raised in an agnostic household.

“This person who you care so much about is now in an ice realm. They are freezing to death…”

Jesus!, I thought.

The rounds of the visualization continued in this way, without relief. Hell realm, ice realm, my mom going blind and wandering close to a steep cliff-edge. Behind me I heard a woman begin to sob. Distracted, I wondered why I did not have tears as well. I love my mother, so why couldn’t I feel much while envisioning these horrible situations?

Cindy’s voice interrupted my thoughts.

“Now, imagine this person in the human realm. But they are weak, diseased, and dying. You must watch them suffer and know there is nothing you can do to help them.”

My mother has joked before that when she gets old, too old to stand or to be trusted on her own, that my sister and I just have to park her wheelchair in the woods and she’ll be happy the whole day long. Watching rabbits jump over one another, ruby-throated hummingbirds suspended in the air, feeling a warm breeze on her papery palms. Though I was meant to imagine her struggling, this peaceful scene came to mind instead. It’s what she wanted, what would happen. I felt calm. The woman behind me shook quietly.

***

Since childhood I have looked for bears on those rare occasions when I was in a place where they actually exist, and during the retreat, as I was in bear country, thoughts of these primal, shaggy creatures had crossed my mind several times already. So perhaps it was not a true premonition when I walked up to the bench on the grassy knoll that afternoon and thought, Wouldn’t it be cool to see a bear? I almost felt like, at 22 years of age, I should have seen one already. Memories of missed chances floated across my consciousness as I walked: hoisting a cloth bag of beef jerky and oats high into a tree in the Sierras while backpacking; gazing out the car window on annual trips to Maryland when I was a girl, searching between flashes of pine for a stubby snout. On the first day of the retreat the staff had gone over the local natural hazards, black widow spiders and cottonmouths and black bears. They advised us to write down where we were headed and at what time on a white sheet of paper pinned to the communal cork board, and before heading out I almost didn’t put my name down. The map indicated the knoll was only a 15 minute walk—what could happen? I unlaced my hiking boots outside the sala and went in at the last minute to scribble my name on the list.

I had thought about seeing a bear the same way anyone thinks of seeing something dangerous and awesome—abstractly, almost as fantasy. In my imagination I would perhaps be up on the crest of a snowy hill, peering down to a creek or river and see a bear approach the flowing water and bend down for a drink. Or maybe I would be on a wooded trail like ones I walked so often in Ohio, and spot a bear far down the path in front of me, both of us staring at one another for a moment before darting off. I tried to remember what I had read about what to do in a grizzly bear or black bear encounter—for which species did you back away, make yourself bigger, or curl into a ball? The only bear tip I was certain of was to make noise as you walk, but it would seem overly precautious for me to follow that rule on this silent retreat, as I walked past the quiet wooden cabins of the dharma community.

A clearing on the hill opened as I left the woods, like a painting being created all at once. The grass spread wide, the sky unpeeled overhead. In the center of the knoll a bench overlooked far away mountains that rippled, slate-blue, as if freshly risen from the Earth’s core. I sat almost giddy in the silence and hot sun. I was there for some time before I heard the footsteps approaching behind me, quite close. I turned with a smile, expecting a fellow retreatant, and then I was standing and I couldn’t tell you what emotion my face was showing. For a split second I thought the bear was a dog. It was less than ten feet away and walking through the tall grass straight towards me.

“No, no, no!” I heard myself saying, almost as if I was mistaken. It couldn’t be.

Without thinking I grabbed my backpack from the bench and ran across the field, diagonally opposite the bear, in a dash to get off the knoll and back to the trail. I glanced over my shoulder in pure prayer that I wouldn’t see her chasing me, and I saw in a moment that she had also run from me in the other direction, both of us rustling into the woods at the same time. My entire body felt like stone as I shakily sought to calm my breathing, without success. I remembered the tip to make noise to avoid startling bears, and though I knew it was a little too late for that I started to sing, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember a single song. I assigned a small melody to a strange yodel that popped into my head, too afraid, apparently, to recall lyrics. A “Yodel-lay-hoo-hoo!” emerged awkwardly as I hurried down the path and back to the retreat grounds. On the way I saw another retreatant heading up the path and broke the silence to warn her about the bear up ahead, and to my embarrassment I found it a struggle to hold back tears while issuing my warning.

For the rest of the afternoon and into the evening, I could not calm down. Even at the evening meditation I had to fight the urge to open my eyes and turn around. In my mind, she was still behind me. As I lay in my small bed at the end of the day, I noticed my shoulders and back ached from being clenched. I closed the cloth curtain to my room, finally finding the privacy to cry. I didn’t want anyone to see a reaction that I barely understood myself. I was ashamed. Black bears aren’t even particularly dangerous, and I was safe, so why did I still feel afraid hours later? All the times I had thought about seeing bears seemed to mock me. I had always envisioned myself feeling gracious, awe-inspired, invigorated by a bear sighting. I had never felt fear in my fantasies.

***

This retreat was new for me, a yoga retreat connecting movement and poses (asanas) to the Four Immeasurables, a Buddhist conceptual framework I knew nothing about before signing up. Cindy, our trusty guide, described the Four Immeasurables as boundless qualities that exist without end both within us and in the world around us. These qualities are equanimity, joy, love, and compassion.

At first, I doubted these qualities related in any real sense to yoga, which I had practiced mainly as a form of exercise. The connection became clear, however, as the days passed. Cindy led us to notice how it specifically felt, physically, to embody the Immeasurables through meditation and movement. Was there a similar buoyancy in your chest after a meditation on joy as when you arched your low-back in a crescent lunge? Did the same constriction in your throat you experienced during an unpleasant visualization also appear when you became frustrated by failing to force your body to fit an idealized yoga shape?

During the brief session at the end of the day for discussion and dharma talks, several of my fellow retreatants recalled how painful the visualizations of suffering had been. How, they asked, was envisioning loved ones in the hell realm or the ice realm connected to compassion?

In response Cindy referred us to the slips of paper she had handed out that listed the Four Immeasurables in a table form, with categories for “close” and “far” enemies of each Immeasurable. Compassion’s far enemy, which I interpreted as its opposite, was listed as “fear.” Cindy described how the far enemies of the Immeasurables act as blockages that prevent the flow of the immeasurable quality from being felt.

Cindy, perched before all of us on our cushions peering at her with eager eyes, explained that the fear blocking compassion could take many forms. You could fear that a person you love who is suffering could come to depend on you for care, or you might fear the attachment awakened in you by watching someone suffer—but generally, the fear comes from identifying yourself in their pain. Imagining yourself in their situation, fearing pain, prevents you from empathizing fully with the other person and feeling true compassion. The point of meditating on painful visualizations, Cindy explained, is to observe what the fear of suffering feels like in the body. 

I realized that all of what I was unable to feel during our meditations came pouring out of me after my encounter with the bear. Because of her, I recognized how much I fear suffering, and the possibility of suffering. Perhaps it was natural for me to shut my negative feelings off during the meditation. Who wants those sensations in their body? But my avoidance prevented me from reckoning with even the hypothetical possibility of my mother’s suffering. What would happen when direct physical suffering afflicted my mother? Would I be prepared?

*** 

This past Thanksgiving, months after the bear sighting, I stood on the front porch of my aunt Jenny’s house, my parents and I saying our goodbyes after dinner. My grandpa Mickey was leaving as well, escorted by my uncle Todd who lived just one house over. Frail but still chipper, even in his 90s, Mickey leaned onto Todd’s bent elbow as they slowly approached the stairs before pausing.

“Chris, help him down,” my aunt told my dad.

My dad tried to go to Mickey’s other side, but Jenny, whose career has been devoted to elderly care, stopped him.

“No, no, you have to go behind him and hold his belt up.”

As the words left her lips, I saw that what she meant related both to Mickey’s center of gravity and his dignity. Leaning tremblingly over the top stair onto my uncle’s arm, Mickey’s pants had sunk down a few inches, exposing the naked flesh of the top part of his rear end. I looked to my dad and saw, if only for a moment, something that resembled fear flash across his face before he stepped forward and looped his fingers through Mickey’s back belt-loop and the three of them carefully descended the stairs.

As my parents and I walked to the car, I felt ashamed that I had felt ashamed. My first instinct had not been compassion, but rather a recoiling, a burning embarrassment at what I perceived as pathetic. Though we didn’t discuss it, I wondered if my father had been embarrassed as well before stepping in to hoist up the pants. My dad does not work with the elderly as his sister does, and he will sometimes express relief that his more knowledgeable siblings live close to Mickey.  My dad will admit he does not feel prepared to care for an aging man.

I understood that my reaction on the porch stairs served a clear but obstructive purpose—my embarrassment masked my fear. My fear that eventually the elderly man would be my father, and I will be the one expected to not feel shame, but to step up and help him, even, or especially, in situations that our culture construes as demeaning. My fear that I wouldn’t know what to do, or how to help him. And the fear that eventually, I may be the one relying on someone else to lift my pants up and help me down the stairs.

I rarely imagined seeing my parents age, and when called to do so, I clung to the fantasy my mother gave me, of her happily parked in a wheelchair in the woods, reading a good book. With luck, maybe it will all be just like that. But now I remember the bear. Our encounter on the knoll was not at all what I had for years imagined. The reality was terrifying, my response confusing. 

Perhaps we can’t really be prepared for suffering, but we can approach fear of the suffering in a different way. Fear, with its shoulders of stone and pounding heart, deserves to be met with kindness. And, with kindness, it might yet show us a path toward unending love and compassion should we choose to look for it. There’s an awe in living with bears, an awe of sunlight cascading down the soft slope of her forehead and the bridge of her nose as this creature of such power bows, humbled, to the earth.

The post Living with Bears appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

About 15 years ago, the San Francisco Zen Center (SFZC) made an ambitious commitment: to give lifetime room and board to longtime teachers once they turned 70. It was the center’s version of a retirement plan, but securing affordable housing for dozens of people in one of the country’s least affordable zip codes would be no easy task.

Zesho Susan O’Connell, who was then SFZC’s president and today serves as Enso Village’s spiritual director, assembled a committee to look into making this promise a reality. “I had this flash of an idea: there must be a senior living developer out there who would appreciate being able to offer the world a community that was Zen-inspired, in which some of our retired teachers would live,” O’Connell said, adding that the project would also open up their way of living to the greater community.

SFZC eventually found a partner in Kendal, a network of senior living communities founded on Quaker principles. With ties to several universities, Kendal promotes lifelong learning. (O’Connell says the Zen concept of not-knowing pairs well with the Quaker idea of “continuous revelation.”) Enso Village, the result of the partnership, will offer 220 independent living apartments, 30 assisted-care units, and 24 memory-care units. Of the 220 apartments, 20 are set aside for Zen Center teachers. At press time, organizers had just received approval from the city council of Healdsburg, California, where the center will be located, for a development agreement. The project is expected to cost $170 million when completed in 2023. The 32-acre site will also include low-income housing and a hotel (fittingly, with 108 rooms, a propitious number in Buddhism).

Enso Village will not be a monastic setting. Meditation and dharma talks are optional, O’Connell said, and the community will offer swimming and bocce in addition to housekeeping and meals. One dining area will feature vegetarian meals inspired by the award-winning Greens Restaurant, which SFZC started in 1979. Located in Sonoma County, Enso Village will be surrounded by wineries, and O’Connell said that “actively engaging” with the precepts might be one aspect of life at Enso Village.

About community members’ approach to the aging process itself, O’Connell asks, “How do we sit with that? How do we meet each other in that?” She noted that SFZC’s longtime hospice work in supporting people as they approach death will inform Enso Village’s approach to aging.

Though Enso Village is years away from completion, O’Connell said there has been substantial interest from hopeful residents. Final costs are not yet set and will vary depending on amount of care needed; O’Connell said the “entrance fee” is “significant” and is on par with the cost of buying a home in California. The real estate website Zillow estimates the median California home price at $550,800, and the average price for assisted living communities in San Francisco is $5,500 per month, according to Seniorly, a company that compares senior housing options.

Several recent studies have found that the practice of mindfulness can have a positive impact on both cognitive abilities and emotional well-being in aging adults. And with more interest in mindfulness across the country, coupled with the increasing number of Americans over 65, O’Connell hopes that Enso Village is a model that can be built upon to meet these needs.

“This thing we’re doing isn’t just for the baby boomers who know about meditation. This is something that could be of interest to several more generations of aging people. If we do it right and can show how this way of practicing with aging is beneficial, it could become the norm,” O’Connell said.

Update 2023: Enso Village is set to open in late 2023. A new community called Enso Verde is being planned for Simi Valley outside of Los Angeles. The center is expected to open in 2027 with 300 residences; more information is available on Kendal’s website.

The post Aging Mindfully appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

They’ve been arguing all evening. Over how she ties the garbage bags, why his father is always cold to her, whether they should have bought that apartment in San Francisco instead of this house in Mill Valley. Finally they stop talking, exhausted. It’s been like this ever since she returned from India three weeks ago. Her husband goes downstairs to revise his conference paper on the 17th-century Japanese pilgrim-poet Basho; she sits at the kitchen laptop, stares unseeing at the keyboard for a few minutes—longer?—then checks her email. There’s a condolence note from a filmmaker who met her grandmother in Darjeeling while making a documentary on Tibetan lama dances, and some old family friends have sent a photo: she’s about three, sitting on a pony with the peaks of Kanchenjunga in the background, her grandmother standing by her side in the long Tibetan dress, black sunglasses, a headscarf.

The wind picks up and tree branches scratch against the window. Beyond the silhouettes of the houses, cars and trucks idle in a traffic jam down on the freeway as if awaiting admittance to a ferry that will convey them to an alien land. It starts to rain with apocalyptic force, the water coursing through the winter darkness, soon to send her house sliding down the hill, tumbling into the Bay and out to sea.

She climbs the narrow stairs to the third floor to check on their son in his room off the landing. Sleeping on his side with his hands clasped in front of his mouth, he’s a cherub blowing an invisible trumpet, aloft amidst the clouds painted on the walls. In the dim light, the glittery elephants, birds, and horses of the mobile she brought him from Darjeeling appear to be flying free, no longer tethered by their strings. The radio is on by the window, volume low. Tonight the seamless patter of the deejay on her usual jazz station sounds phony, like the false tones of a parent reassuring a child as the ship is sinking.

She stands and listens to the rain, her mind traveling back to the funeral high up in the Himalayas. Again she’s sitting in the altar room listening to the lamas chanting from the Tibetan Book of the Dead guide her grandmother through the journey between death and rebirth, a passage filled with hallucinations, the rushing of wind and water. What was it one lama had told her? That there are a number of journeys like this, such as between birth and death, or between when we go to sleep at night and when we wake. That the Tibetan Book of the Dead is for the living, too. By listening to the prayers, you can set yourself free. Yet since returning from the funeral, she’s felt anything but free. Like Gautama Buddha leaving his palace and discovering human suffering, she sees aging and death everywhere. In the grocery store, the post office, the bank, there are neck wattles, varicose veins, yellowing teeth, receding hairlines, sagging breasts. A neighbor in his late forties is showing signs of Alzheimer’s: getting lost on the way to the art school in Berkeley where he’s taught for years, asking her every day if it’s spring yet. Then last week, one of her colleagues at the magazine had a stroke and died on the BART train, the other passengers thinking he was taking a nap.

The sound of silverware clinking against china floats up from the kitchen. Her husband’s having his usual evening bowl of cereal. She hears his voice—he’s talking to the dog, giving him a treat. Though she knows she’s being unfair, she feels like screaming: he’s one of the children inside the burning house of the parable from the Lotus Sutra, unwilling to stop playing with his toys and flee. She strides over and closes the bedroom door, comes back and sits in the rocking chair by the window. The problem is that it all feels pointless: the once delightful round of work, coffee with friends, taking her son for playdates, shopping for dinner, jogs along the bike path. The last few days she’s called in sick and, in the morning after dropping her son at school, driven out to Point Reyes to watch old men fish at a lake during the short daylight hours. Wind-twisted cypresses edge the freezing gray water; crows perch on rocks and branches. She sits in her car and watches the men cast their lines into the dark world below. How patiently they wait, hunched on the shore like a strange species of winter fowl.

Sadao Watanabe’s Earth Step is playing on the radio, slow and dreamy. Her son shifts in his sleep and throws one arm out to the side, his mouth a tiny “o.” She should have taken him to India, let her grandmother spoil him with pony rides around the Mall and roller skating at the Gymkhana Club. But now it’s too late. She tilts her head back and gazes at the mobile, watches a horse caparisoned with shiny beads glide past. A few months ago, her son asked if he could have her horse-shaped sandalwood letter opener when she died. She and her husband had laughed: how innocent children were, so unaware of what death really meant! It sickens her to realize she’s been no different. In her tidy little palace she herself has been a child, with a little girl’s desires: a handsome scholar husband, her own house, a baby, a dog. The same girl who on school breaks used to fly to visit her mother’s parents at the farm in New Hampshire, her father’s parents in Darjeeling. Going down the dirt road to the farm, taking the train up into the Himalayas, she’d never doubted that her grandparents would be there waiting for her. Absurdly, her grandmother’s funeral has caught her unawares, the body laid out in the altar room, butter lamps and incense burning, bringing home for the first time the inevitability—and finality—of death. Her husband doesn’t understand because no one he’s close to has died. She has tried to explain to him, but it’s like trying to explain what it feels like to make love.

Hours later, she’s startled awake by the radio broadcasting a flood warning, the controlled voice at odds with the threat of disaster. How long has she been sleeping? Her stomach lurches at the sight of her hands, wrinkled claws, on her lap. She is alone, an ancient woman in a rocking chair. But here’s her son slumbering in his bed, and her husband is asleep on the floor next to her, glasses pushed up on his forehead, Basho manuscript on his chest, the dog curled at his feet. They are all together in this tiny room, sheltering in a hermit’s hut as the rain beats down.

Outside in the dark night, a figure holding a black umbrella emerges from the house next door. It’s the neighbor with Alzheimer’s—he’s started coming and going at all hours. The poor man shuffles across his yard and wanders into the labyrinth of manzanita trees bordering his property. Down on the freeway, the traffic has thinned but is still passing in an unending stream, everyone on their way to somewhere, just like her neighbor, her grandmother, her husband and son in sleep, she herself. The night is alive with travelers, this, then, the intrinsic truth of things.

♦

“Travelers” first appeared in Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts, Winter/Spring 2012.

The post Travelers appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.