Swords Into Plowshares
Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash
That Old Grim Reaper
scythe cutting through delusion
like Manjusri’s sword
SURVIVAL OF THE OLDEST IS NOT NATURE’S WAY
It is not natural to put the younger members of the species at risk to protect the older members. This goes against Nature. The survival of the species determines age-related triage in favor of those most likely to survive, to survive longer, and to reproduce. Yet humans do this in wartime, with the draft and other means of conscription, and we are doing it again in the face of the pandemic, by sending our younger first responders into the fray, while protecting the elderly and senior leaders by isolating and quarantining them.
Whether or not we believe in an eternal soul, or reincarnation as did the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Hindus, or resurrection as do modern Christians, we finally come to face our mortality in person. In Zen, the only mate who will accompany us to the grave is our deeds. Whatever wealth, honor, or powers of reasoning we have accumulated in managing and manipulating the vagaries of behavior and vicissitudes of fortunes encountered in life, they serve us little in the face of death.
On the cushion we sit “without relying on anything” as Master Dogen reminds us in his version of “Needle for Zazen (Zazenshin),” including all the tricks and trinkets we have assembled in our toolkit. Try as we might to think our way to enlightenment, or to reason ourselves into insight, we find ourselves failing again and again. Finally, we must surrender to the chaos of not knowing, and abandon our reliance on reason itself, spawn of philosophy and the other kind of Enlightenment. We find verification of our practice in “making effort without aiming at it.”
Needless to say, this is a very uncomfortable place to find ourselves, at a pass that is not really negotiable in any ordinary sense. Seikan Hasegawa, a Japanese Rinzai master, reminds us that putting off confrontation with this particular koan of aging until we find ourselves on the death-bed is futile, “like eating soup with a fork,” paraphrasing. We need to confront reality when we are young and vigorous, “stamping life and death on your forehead and never letting it out of your mind,” to paraphrase a truth long lost to attribution. Life takes its meaning in the context of death. If you find that too morbid, just imagine what life would be like if we did not die. Its meaning would be entirely different, and not entirely positive.
When the grim reaper arrives, we may want to embrace her/him as Manjusri, his/her relentless, unforgiving and unsympathetic scythe, no different from the sword of Manjusri, cutting through our final delusion. Preferable to die on the cushion, of course.
Zenkai Taiun Michael Elliston
Elliston-sensei is the Atlanta Soto Zen Center’s spiritual leader.