Some random observations after meditation, on what should have been my brother’s 68th birthday.
We might be as stunned and overcome by the good things in our lives, the pleasures and love and comforts, the aesthetic joys and the joys of family and friends, as we are by the deaths that darken them, and by the fact of death. Why aren’t we? Why is death the surprise, and life the given? If meditation could change this, even reverse it, it would be worthy of great effort.
When my hands are correctly placed for zazen, I have sometimes thought of the cup made by my palms and resting fingers as a kind of bowl or basin. Jocularly I’ve thought of it as my begging bowl. More consistently, I have visualized drawing my breath out and up through the circle made by my thumbs and fingers, and exhaling it again into the basin the handle of which is my touching thumbs. Today I thought that that cycle of breathing out and breathing in—I word it that way, yet it feels like the reverse—must be like the exhalations and in-drawing of the Tao. Somewhere in Lao Tzu the space between heaven and earth is compared to a great bellows, inhaling so as to express life everywhere. May we think of death as the Tao inhaling us?
If all equally are drawn back into the Way at death—Lao Tzu’s “return to the root”—then there is no better or worse life. And no better or worse death. Today this is comforting.
November 19, 2023.