Leandra Robertshaw, Rev. Master

A transcript of a talk given at the Segaki Retreat at Throssel Hole Buddhist Abbey in 2019.

Don’t we all experience grief? For me there are times when grief is very powerfully felt, yet even then, I watch it coming and going in intensity. There are periods of life, of days, of moments – when it is always there in the background and others when it is not. Not seeing grief as good or bad – not judging it as appropriate or inappropriate at any particular moment, it is allowed its own helpful presence. Not only human beings grieve, all living things do, even trees and plants.

I have on other occasions spoken of how Buddhist practice has led to the wide, deep love that I have for my son becoming a more universal love for all beings. This can be so for all of us and here.

I use the words of Alex Reed in a Journal article entitled Imperfect Grief which points in a similar direction:

As training intensifies and matures, it is possible that relationships become wider and more inclusive –less ‘personal’. Love and compassion may no longer be directed quite so exclusively towards a lover, partner, children or friends, but might perhaps fan outwards, towards all beings.¹

Does the death of a loved one, or even the death of a stranger whom we bumped into at a chance meeting, end a relationship? What lingers in the mind and appears unbidden in the space of meditation? Why are we often returned to grief? It may seem to be a particular grief, yet it may be a universal grief that is attached to no individual object. Both can at times feel unbearable but if allowed the space to breathe, the emotions and thoughts shift and transform. Emotion/thought or thought/emotion (habitually bound together) are always transient unless we are determinedly, desperately, clinging to them in spite of knowing that in doing so we are causing ourselves unnecessary suffering. If we can change tack and come at grief in a different way, we will find there is much to be learnt in the world of loss and sorrow. By allowing the bones of loss to show through, we can in the tangled web of sadness learn more about our humanity. This can stand us in good stead as we discover pieces of our life that we had forgotten: instances of bravery, of accepting and letting things be as they evidenced themselves, rather than immediately trying to alter them; of letting go of how we defined ourselves in the face of contrary evidence that much has changed. We begin to realise that we have been defining a solid self which is unreal, for the truth is there no such thing for we are constantly changing. We learn to not say “I am like this”; rather, we tune in to the non-personal nature of experience.

When we are dying we may grieve for all we are losing, and we may regret that we haven’t made more of our lives; offered more to others; been clearer about how to find the heart of a worthwhile life for a human being; known a real sense of purpose. Perhaps we realise too late that our fear of dying has never been truly accepted and penetrated and that we are still trying vainly to hold on to our disappearing abilities by means of which we used to define ourselves. This is challenging and painful when in our lives, until death is knocking at the door, we have felt we needed to build up a sense of self of which we are rather proud, or at least satisfied with. In our culture it is not only material possessions that we are conditioned to possess and not to let go of but, perhaps more poignantly, the trappings of what we consider our self. There may be a strong sense of a loss of freedom, a loss of self-definition, that leaves us naked and vulnerable. We are having to accept that we can’t bring back that which is already lost; the irrevocability of this can make us feel helpless and very troubled.

Here is an important question: can we accept grief as a gift? Let it work for us? To deny grief is to rob ourselves of the heavy stones that will eventually be the ballast for the two great gifts of wisdom and compassion. I met somebody walking down to the abbey carrying two large stones which he described as his ballast, alluding to the ballast which is placed in the bilge of a ship to ensure its stability.

Grief is not a weakness or failure but a vital part of our very humanity. Grief can open us to compassion. It is an important phase of our maturation as it gives our life of practice the profundity of humility. We are offered the experience of grief to be able to find what life and death are. A chance to scour the heart out with sorrow. What C.S. Lewis described in A Grief Observed: “No one told me that grief was so much like fear. I am not afraid but the sensation lies in being afraid.”² Afraid of what? Of being overwhelmed, undone?

Grief can call us into an experience of raw immediacy that is often devastating. We have to enter this space by ourselves, nobody can really tell us how to do it. We have to work it out ourselves. We have to learn to swim in the waters of sorrow rather than drown in them. The sorrow of great and small losses is a river that runs underground in all our lives. The river of grief pulses deep inside us, maybe hidden from view most of the time, but admitting the truth of its presence, it is free to inform our life at every turn. We are brought face-to-face with our own humanity. What a gift!

Zen nun Rengetsu wrote:

“The impermanence of this floating world
I feel over and over.
It is hardest to be the one left behind.^“3

I found this in a diary I wrote last summer during a retreat at our hermitage in Wales:

Can there be too much of a good thing? I had been longing for opportunities to sit outside in the sun and do nothing but after a while I am satiated and sad realising this can’t be the true path to contentment.

Why? The door to living a bodhisattva life is not about fulfilling desires. Being truly still doesn’t depend on circumstances for the stillness to be grounded; it must exist in the reality of whatever is going on around us, even if the circumstances are very much not what we would have chosen – violence, fear, anxiety, conflicts between people and their ideas about each other.

Yet to sit here in the sun watching the birds and the sheep, this is a delight. And there is more that surrounds the delight for delight is always fleeting.

There is a beauty in knowing that everything we hold dear will eventually slip through our fingers. When we acknowledge and embrace this, we can appreciate the interconnection inherent in impermanence. We are allowing ourselves to be grounded in cherishing what is here and now and appreciating what rises to take its place. Change constantly unravels what we know; yet it also ties us together.

I used to be so pleased with myself and my practice because of the appearance of joy! Almost wallowing in it and adding an extra element by imagining it was evidence of progress. Now it is different. I could still name it as joy but I think contentment is a more apt description. Contentment is immovable; it is Unchanging, Unborn, whereas joy flitted in and out. Contentment is more able to naturally sit side-by-side with grief and loneliness whereas these emotions are more likely to decimate joy.

Shortly before he died Uchiyama Roshi wrote a poem Samadhi of the Treasury of the Radiant Light:

Though poor, never poor.
Though sick, never sick.
Though ageing, never ageing.
Though dying, never dying.
Reality prior to division –
Herein lies unlimited depth.⁴

Here is my version:

Though ageing, never ageing.
Though joyful, never joyful.
Though grieving, never grieving.
Though confused, never confused.
Reality before separation of impermanence and eternity.

Impermanence and death can facilitate us realising the old moment is lost and a new moment arriving. Not calibrating one moment with another, for as Dōgen says one thing is not juxtaposed with another thing.⁵ It is the undivided universe where things are not aligned in space and there is thus no comparison. Impermanence offers liberation and we are simply totally immersed in each moment of our life. With every breath, the old moment is lost and a new moment arrives. Not calibrating one moment with another, simply accept with open hands what next appears, even when tempted to hold on to the last moment and push away the next moment as not what we want.

Change is far more than a fact of life we have to accept and work with. For to feel the pain of impermanence and loss can be a profoundly beautiful reminder of what it means to exist. To understand impermanence at the deepest possible level (we do all understand it at superficial levels) and to merge with it fully is the whole of the Buddhist path. The Buddha’s final words were impermanence is inescapable. Everything vanishes.

This is awesome for me. Death – absence – disappearance. The longer I contemplate life and death the less sense I make of them. Might they be no more than a conceptual framework with which we confuse ourselves? Do the dead really disappear? What about ghosts, visitations from the dead, rebirth, and so on? Is death eternal life; what do we mean if we glibly say death is eternal life, unthinkingly copying Rev. Master Jiyu without penetrating this for ourselves? Is Parinirvana understood as full extinction, something other than death? Already too many questions for me and I expect for you!

We are an ageing community (both monastic and long-term laypeople) in spite of bright new monks and lay trainees, so no wonder death and impermanence come up again and again. All conditioned things pass away. Nothing remains as it was. I am finding Rev. Master Alexander’s failing health a profound teaching. We have been spiritual friends since we both came to our first to Jukai in 1987. Although I am older than Rev. Master Alexander he is likely to die before me. Tears can flow contemplating this. Is this expressing an unhealthy attachment? Not really, more along the lines of total immersion in this human life of relationships and risking the sorrow that comes with deep love and reverence for another precious being. AND there is at the same time equanimity and gratitude for the opportunity to find the spiritual friendships that our lives offer.

All bodies change and weaken, no one is exempt. Mind also changes; for example, we may become more forgetful, think with less agility, less able to express in words what we wish to say. And our views change; that is to say, the way we construct what we think and feel about life and the world. Thoughts and feelings from one’s youth and middle age take on a different flavour. When we are young we know death comes but it doesn’t feel imminent so it doesn’t fill our minds. No need to be concerned with it now. But do any of us really know what we are talking about? Can we tolerate the thought that death may be the ultimate loss. The ultimate impermanence?

Impermanence isn’t later: it is NOW. Not that something, whatever that thing is, will vanish later. RIGHT NOW everything is revealing its impermanence, vanishing before our own eyes. That can feel too scary to truly acknowledge without some sort of dodging or rationalisation. Squeezing through the narrow doorway of now, we don’t know whether we are coming or going, living or dying in any moment. The truth is BOTH coming and going, living and dying together, no separation, no gap.

As Dōgen said “One thing is not juxtaposed with another thing.”

Take heart, for impermanence is also change, which is not necessarily only about loss. Change can be refreshing, renewing even, though it always entails loss of some sort. This in unavoidable but when accepted, despair and equanimity can co-exist. Nothing new is given the space to appear until something old ceases. Dōgen says “Impermanence is Buddha Nature.”⁶ That is to say there is no problem in impermanence if we fully embrace it. Impermanence is not something to attempt to overcome by diligent practice on the path. Rather, fully appreciate impermanence and fully live impermanence. For to live out your life is to live the entire world.

Dōgen again:

“If you want to understand Buddha nature you should intimately observe cause and effect over time. When the time is ripe, Buddha Nature manifests.”⁷

The time is always ripe.

Dōgen seems to be saying that practice isn’t so much a matter of changing or improving the conditions of your inner and outer life; rather, it is a way of fully embracing both impermanence and loss and simultaneously appreciating the conditions of your life, fully embracing impermanence and loss as they reveal themselves.

Present time is ungraspable. As soon as it occurs, it immediately falls into the past. As soon as I am here, I am gone. Unless the first me disappears, the second me cannot appear. So my being here is thanks to my not being here. There is in reality no me anyway; there is only the flow of time.

All states: existence – being-time – appearance and disappearance – are included in the Unborn. Being-time is all inclusive. We are all in this together. Buddha Nature is never alone, never isolated, constantly flowing, always One. You will find help in understanding the immensity of what IS when you let go of the endless chore of trying to improve yourself; of being brutal to yourself by putting yourself under unnecessary pressure. As we recite in The Most Excellent Mirror– Samādhi: “Preserve well for you now have; this is all.”

To end with something Okumura wrote:

“How can I manifest the constant, peacefully abiding reality of life, with the reality of impermanence, which is always changing? How can we live awakening to both sides of reality? I have to find how I can use the rest of my life to express this reality, the reality before separation of impermanence and eternity.”⁸

Notes

1. 1. Reed, Alex. Imperfect Grief in the Spring 2017 Journal of the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives pp. 35- 42.
2. 2. C S Lewis. A Grief Observed, (Faber and Faber, London: 1966) p.1.

3.. From A Buddhist Perspective on Grieving by Roshi Joan Halifax at: https://www.pbs.org/thebuddha/blog/2010/mar/11/buddhist-perspective-grieving-roshi-joan-halifax/

or https://www.trudygoodman.com/healing-great-sadness/

4. 4. Samadhi, Treasury of the Radiant Light: a poem by Uchiyama Roshi from Dōgen’s Genjō Koan: Three Commentaries. (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint LLC, 2012) p. 137.
5. 5. Paraphrase of Great Master Dōgen, Kazuaki Tanahashi, Ed. Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, (Shambhala, Boston and London, 2010) Ch. 23 Buddha Nature, p 237.
6. 6. Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō 23 Buddha Nature, p 243.
7. 7. Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, 23 Buddha Nature. p. 237
8. Okumura, Shohaku. Mountains and Rivers Sutra: A Practitioner’s Guide to Dōgen’s “Sansuikyo” (Wisdom Publications, 2018. Massachusetts, US) or https://terebess.hu/zen/mesterek/mount.pdf p 89.