This podcast is offered by San Francisco's Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Well, what a wonderful treat to be with you this morning. How nice to be back at Zen Center and see old friends like Paul and many old buddies from Zen Center days. So I want to talk a little bit about my work with the dying and hopefully we'll find some Dharma in the middle of it. Usually you do when you're around people who are dying. You know in Japanese Zen some of you know there's a beautiful term Shoji. Shoji. And it usually translates as birth death. One word. No real separation between life and death. other than a very small, thin line that joins the two.

[01:03]

I don't think we can be fully alive without maintaining some awareness of death. Death's not waiting for us at the end of a long road like we must mostly imagine, but it's here with us in every passing moment, in the marrow, of every passing moment. And she's the secret teacher hiding in plain sight that shows us what matters most. And the really great thing is that you don't have to wait until the time of your dying to learn what she has to teach. In fact, to imagine that at the time of your death, you will have the physical strength, emotional stability, the mental clarity to do the work of a lifetime is a rather ridiculous gamble. So I would encourage you not to wait and for us to engage in this conversation now.

[02:13]

In the past several decades, we've made dying something, oh, we've professionalized it and we've institutionalized it, and we've, oh, made it something strange. And in the course of that process, we've come to doubt, I think, our innate wisdom and compassion, and so we've become frightened. So I think gatherings like today are really wonderful opportunities for us to remember, in a way to remember what we already know. Yeah. that we can reach out in the darkness and embrace someone else's suffering as our own. We can do that. Everybody here is capable of doing that. Without a reminder of death, at least in my experience, we tend to take life for granted.

[03:21]

And we get caught in... endless pursuits of self-gratification. But when we keep death really close at hand, really right at our fingertips, I think what happens is that we don't take ourselves or ideas so strongly. We don't hold on so tightly. We let go a little bit more easily. I think when we understand that death comes to all of us, we recognize we're in the same boat. And actually, it causes us to be kinder to one another. Now look, I'm not romantic about dying. I think it's hard work. Probably the hardest work you may ever do. And it can be beautiful and messy and painful and cruel and transformative. But most of all, it's ordinary.

[04:25]

It's normal. All of us will go through it. None of us get out of here alive. I mean, maybe this morning. But I don't even guarantee that. You know, I'm sitting here and I can't help but remember the beginnings, you know, 30 years ago. I was just upstairs in room five is where the hospice started, you know. Leslie James was the president then. And I remember she ushered me into room five. It had shag carpeting at the time. And she said, this will be your home. And I have to go now. And that was the beginning of Zen Hospice. And I went down to the basement, found an old door, and made a desk out of it, put the phone in my name because it was cheaper, and we began.

[05:27]

It was Martha De Barros, you know, who had the idea to start Zen Hospice. It was her brilliant idea. It was a really great idea. And I came along to help her. We didn't have much of a plan, actually. In fact, Zen Center wanted to know, how long will you do this And in those days at Zen Center, you said six months. That was the correct answer to give on just about anything. It wasn't too long, but it was just enough to demonstrate commitment. Yeah. We started working with people who lived on the streets. People who were living on the margins of society and didn't trust too much. I changed a lot of diapers on park benches behind City Hall. After a while, I remember the very first patient, we moved upstairs to room 48. We snuck her in, actually.

[06:33]

And then I would come down to the dining room, and I'd see Zen students. I'd say, you want to learn how to take care of people who are dying? And we'd bring them upstairs and show them. That's kind of how we got going. And then we moved eventually across the street to the guest house, which wasn't a hospice at first. It was kind of, well, it was a guest house. And some students were living there. And we moved in dying patients. And eventually the students got tired of living with dying patients. And so they moved out. And then we didn't know what to do with the building. I said, well, I know what to do. We'll make a hospice out of it. That's how we began. So it was a kind of fusion of spiritual insight and practical social action. people we cared for, they didn't know beans about Buddhism. And they weren't interested in any dogma.

[07:35]

They just wanted to be warm, dry, and inside. There was a Vietnamese man, I remember, in the front room, and he was scared of ghosts. And And his roommate, Isaiah, an African-American man, was very, very comforted by visits from his dead mother. There was a father, a man I worked with on Potrero Hill, he had contracted the HIV virus from a blood transfusion. He was a hemophiliac. But the year before, he disowned his gay son because he had AIDS. And now the father and the son were in twin beds in the same room being cared for by Agnes and the son's mother and the father's wife. A lot of people we worked with died in their early 20s, having hardly begun their life.

[08:35]

And then there was Elizabeth, who I remember at 93, said to me, why has death come for me so soon? Beautiful people. Some as clear as bells, others couldn't remember their own names. Alex didn't live far from here and he had AIDS dementia and one night he crawled out onto his fire escape and he froze to death. People with political power acquired wealth. Other people with no more than the shirts on their backs. And for some dying was a great gift and They made reconciliations with family, and they found a kindness that they'd never known in their lives, actually. And other people turned toward the wall in withdrawal and hopelessness. And they never came back again. All of them were my teachers. So I always like to call them up whenever I give a talk like this, because when your teacher's in the room, they keep you honest.

[09:41]

is inevitable and intimate. And yet I have seen ordinary people, the people I'm describing, you know, there's no practice in their lives, so to speak, enter into this process that seemed unbearable to them, unimaginable to them. And yet within it, they found themselves to be more expansive than the small separate self they'd taken themselves to be. This isn't a fairy tale, I don't think. I don't think it contradicts the fact that there's also suffering in the process. But I think really it's a transformation of tragedy that's possible. Now, we might say opening in the final days of one's life or even the final minutes of one's life is too late. And I might agree. But here's the thing. If it's possible then, it's possible now.

[10:48]

And we don't need to wait until then. This is the great legacy that people offer us. So a while back, when we first started the volunteer training, somewhere along the way there, listening to the people that we served and accompanied, who are our teachers, we developed some basic principles, we could call them precepts, that guided our work with people at the end of life. They remain and still remain, I think it's an hospice kind of guiding principles for how to be with people in these really vulnerable moments. But it turns out that they have a relevance for the rest of us in living a more happy and meaningful and I think purposeful life. So we called them the five invitations. And the first one is don't wait.

[11:51]

Waiting for the next moment to arrive, we miss this one. I can't tell you how many times I've been with family members who are sick with their mothers saying, when will mom die? Waiting for the moment of dying, we miss all the moments in between. So don't wait. We have this Phrase we use in our culture so much, later. This is a deceptive word, later. It kind of gives us a buffer between us and death, a comfortable illusion of space. But you know, we study in our practice that everything comes and goes, right? Everything comes and goes. This morning's breakfast, last night's lovemaking, My blonde hair. Maybe you're like me.

[12:55]

Do you like to lie in bed in the morning? I love to lie in bed in the morning. It's one of the biggest hindrance to my practice. Lie there, it's just perfect, right? Blankets are just right. The sheets are warm from the night before. It's just fantastic. All is good in the world. Everything is right. And then you have to pee. And so you get up and run to the toilet, come back, try and get into bed and create all the conditions again, hoping to get it just right. But it's never the same, actually. Intellectually, we understand that our mother's treasured vase will one day fall off the shelf. Our work is to bring that understanding from our intellect into our hearts. We are at once here and disappearing.

[13:58]

It's interesting to me that we always think about everything's changing except me. Right? Everything, the whole world is changing. Everything is changing. Seasons come and go. Everything changes except me. I'm the one solid thing moving through a changing world. You know, in Japan, every spring cherry blossoms cover the hillsides. There's a place where I teach in Idaho where outside my cabin there are these little tiny blue flax flowers that last for one day. Tell me, how come those cherry blossoms and those flax flowers are so much more beautiful than plastic flowers? Isn't it the brevity of their lives? Isn't it their fragility that in part gives them their beauty? Carol Hyman wrote, if we let go into uncertainty and trust that our basic nature and that of the world are not different

[15:07]

And the fact that things are not solid and fixed, this becomes a liberating opportunity rather than a threat. What becomes undeniable when you're sitting with people who are dying is that that fragility and impermanence is at the very nature of our life. That we're always coming together and falling apart. Tsukiroshi said, against a background of perfect harmony. And it's possible to hold it all with love and compassion. So that's the first invitation. Second one is, welcome everything, push away nothing. Now that sounds great, it would make a good bumper sticker. But how do we do that? Welcome everything, push away nothing. wrote that, I remember the word welcome, it sort of confronts us.

[16:14]

It confronts our usual rush to judgment. We don't have to like what's arising to welcome it. Nor do we have to agree with it. We just have to be willing to meet it. There was a friend of mine who went to dinner at a mutual friend's house. eminent psychiatrist, who had developed Alzheimer's in the last few years of his life. And they rang the doorbell and the door opened and they were standing on his front stoop. And he looked at them for a moment and he said, I'm sorry, I don't recall people's faces anymore. And he said, I really can't remember your names. But I know this is my house. And I know that my job in my house has always been to welcome everybody who came so please come in James Baldwin the great African American writer said there are many there are many things that we must face that we cannot change but nothing can be faced excuse me nothing can be changed until it's faced

[17:36]

There are many things that we must face that we cannot change, but nothing can be changed unless it's faced. So this, to welcome everything and push away nothing, it can't be done as an act of will. This has to be done as an act of love. To be human is much more than getting born. And getting a good education and finding the right partner and getting a pretty house and on a nice street and then going to sleep and waking up in the morning and doing it all over again. It's an invitation to feel everything. To come into direct contact with a strange, beautiful, perfectly ordinary thing we call life. It's an opportunity to be conscious of the fact that some of us will make love while others make war. to recognize the truth that there are babies like my granddaughter, who I will see later this afternoon, whose mother kisses a bright future into her cheeks.

[18:49]

And there are babies like my friend Carolyn, who were left in a dumpster when they were born. And there are children, you know, who will make tents out of bedsheets and couch pillows. And there are other babies who are crying in refugee camps. and this devastation and this hopelessness, and there's the passion and the holy commitment, I think, to create a better future for everyone. Welcome everything. Wish away nothing. Do you know what's going to wake you up? I don't. I don't know. So I have to welcome everything. invitation is bring your whole self to the experience.

[19:54]

Bring your whole self. We all like to look good. We want to be seen as capable or strong or intelligent or at least well adjusted. And we like to project a positive self image onto the world. Few of us want to be known for our fear or our helplessness or our anger or our ignorance. But sometimes we're more of a mess than we'd like to admit. At least I am. Yet it's curious to me, one of the things I learned in working with folks on the street was that the parts of myself that seem most undesirable, the parts of myself that I was often most embarrassed by or ashamed of even, they were often the very aspects of myself that allowed me to build an empathetic bridge to other people. You know, in caring for others, we imagine it's our expertise that will help us serve them.

[21:02]

And that's true. It helps enormously. But also, our fear helps. And our helplessness helps. I have a lot of tools. I've been doing this for several decades now, and I have a whole toolbox of tools, a big yellow toolbox at home. But I don't place that toolbox down between myself and the person I'm serving. If I do, one of us is sure to trip over it. So I don't leave with my tools. I don't leave with my rhetoric. I don't leave with my Dharma wisdom. I leave with my humanity. There's a story I like to share. It happened years ago, not too far from here, on Bush Street. I had a friend of mine, John, who was dying of AIDS. And there were a group of us who were looking after him. And this one morning, he lost his ability to stand or to hold a fork or to speak in an intelligent way.

[22:10]

This all happened in one morning. And it was my day to take care of him. And so I went to his house, and I sat at his kitchen table, which was always kind of a mess. John's house. I couldn't find my friend. I mean, where was he? He'd just been there the night before. John had these anal fistulas, like tumors, and constant diarrhea, and taking care of him was a lot of work. We would move from the toilet to the tub, back and forth. dozens of times in the day. And the day rolled into the night and night into the early hours of the morning and I was just tired. And I just wanted him to go to sleep and to somehow wake up in the morning and have this nightmare be over. And I'm not proud to say, but it's true that I was manipulative and cajoling and treated him like an infant sometimes.

[23:17]

He really loved my friend. I moved him back from the tub to the toilet and he was sitting there with his pajamas down around his ankles. I was washing my hands in the sink and I looked in a vanity mirror and I could see he was mouthing something to me. So I turned around and he whispered to me, you're trying too hard. And I was. I was trying too hard. Trying to be somebody. Me, Mr. Hospice. And I sat down beside the toilet and I just began to weep and cry. And that moment was the most tender moment in our whole relationship. Because you see, in this moment we weren't so separate. There we were together. Completely helpless together.

[24:33]

I've been afraid to go there before. I was afraid that if I went into that territory of helplessness we'd both get lost and I couldn't be of any use. But that isn't what happened. The situation showed us what to do next. But we couldn't have known that until we were willing to enter the territory. Bring your whole self. Wholeness doesn't mean perfection. It means no part left out. My daughter and I, we like to go shopping in loose clothing stores, consignment shops, you know, like Crossroads. And she picks out a great little paisley scarf or a little leather skirt or something, and she goes to try it on, and I walk around the store looking for other good finds, you know. And we were in this one shop, and I liked it a lot, but mostly I liked these tags that they had on the clothes that said $9.95. And, you know, because the clothes were missing a button or they had a little stain or, you know, something like that.

[25:42]

And then they said, 985, as is. I like that. I want to get those tags. I think we should get them for ourselves and each other. I take you as is. as is. No part left out. You know, in our practice, in our tradition, there's, downstairs I remember finding a book of lists in the library. Just, it was all it was, just lists. Lists of the four of this, the seven of that, the six of this, right? Our oral tradition. And there are, of course, lots of lists about compassion, but, you know, they all boil down to two things. We could think about boundless compassion or universal compassion, compassion which embraced all of us for all our lives, whether we knew it or not.

[26:49]

And then there's everyday compassion, when we do stuff, when we feed people, when we chain-soiled sheets, when we stand up against injustice. Everyday compassion, it gets tiring. You get exhausted. So it has to be sourced in universal compassion or boundless compassion, absolute compassion. If not, we run out of juice. But absolute compassion, universal compassion, boundless compassion is just a big idea unless it's given expression through everyday compassion. So it needs our arms and legs. Needs our tongues and eyes. This is how it shows up in the world. My friend, Bernie Glassman, Roshi, you know him. Great mischief maker. He was teaching in Germany a few years ago and he was talking about Avalokiteshvara, the great bodhisattva of compassion.

[28:00]

You know, by some accounts, she has 1,000 arms. On another account, 84,000 arms. We'll just take 1,000 arms today. And in each hand, depending on the depiction, there can be a tool or sometimes an eye, but more often an ear, an ear to hear the cries of the world, and 1,000 arms to respond. It's a beautiful image. And Bernie was talking about this, and a man raised his hand, and he said, that's a very beautiful metaphor, but I have only two arms. What should I do? And Bernie said, I'm sorry, you're mistaken. And the man looked and he said, no, I'm quite sure I have just two arms. And then Bernie did something simple and beautiful, very Bernie-like. He had everybody in the room raise both their arms. Go ahead, do it. Look around. Those of you in the front, turn around, look around. Thousand arms.

[29:03]

We're it. Nobody else is coming to the rescue. We're Abelokiteshvar. We're the thousand arms. This is how it takes shape in the world. The fourth invitation is find a place of rest in the middle of things. We often think we'll find rest later, you know, probably when we go on retreat or go on vacation or when our list gets checked off. But I don't know about you, but my list never gets checked off. So if I wait for that, I'm in trouble. So many things I want to share with you about this, but just sitting here, something came to mind. Some years ago, I had a Heart attack. I was teaching a retreat on compassion for doctors and nurses and I had a heart attack. Big deal, triple bypass surgery, 12-hour surgery, really big deal.

[30:12]

And I was, I wasn't going to talk about this. Suzuki. Anyway, I was in the hospital and I was in the recovery unit and I was in this kind of sci-fi kind of movie, there was monitors everywhere, and I had tubes coming in and out of every orifice, and I was still intubated, which meant a machine was breathing for me. And my son, my adult son was there, very loving, and one of my best friends, who's a meditation teacher, was there. And a respiratory therapist came in the room and said, let's pull out that tube and see if you can breathe. And I said... And I took a pad of paper and I wrote on it, I'm scared. And I handed it to my friend, the meditation teacher, and he said, Frank, find your breath.

[31:17]

And I went to find my breath, but I couldn't find my breath because the machine was breathing for me. What will you meditate on when you don't have a breath? And then he said, sense your body. And I tried to sense my body, but there was this anesthesia fog coming through my body and I could barely feel it. I was just upstairs bowing to the Kaisando, you know. In this moment in the hospital, I thought of Suzuki Roshi. David Shadwick tells a beautiful story in his book about the night before Suzuki Roshi died. He wanted to take a bath. Noga-san said, no, no, no. But Otohira, his other son, was there. He picked up his father and he carried him in and lowered him into the tub. And as the story goes, Suki Roshi got very scared. And Otohira said, father, calm yourself.

[32:23]

Find your breath. I'll breathe with you. And your teachers come to you when you most need them, huh? And Suzuki Roshi stabilized and he was fine. So I thought, if Suzuki Roshi can be scared, I can be scared. And I grabbed my friend, the meditation teacher, and I pulled him close to me. And I put my ear next to his mouth. And I borrowed his breath. stabilize until I could find my own. Then I waved to the respiratory therapist and they took out the tube. Find a place of rest in the middle of things. Last one is cultivate don't know mind. This is one we're familiar with.

[33:25]

I felt obliged to put something Zen-like in the list. You know, this is not an encouragement to be ignorant, right? Ignorance is not not knowing. Ignorance, I wish it was, just not knowing. Ignorance is misperception. It's we know something, but it's the wrong thing. And then we insist on it. There's a lot of that going on in the world right now. Not knowing is different, right? It's curious mind. It's ready mind. It's a mind full of awe and wonder. The night before my surgery, my son came to see me, and we were having a heart-to-heart talk. We love each other a lot. In the middle of this conversation, he said, Dad, are you going to live through this? And, of course, I love him, and I wanted to reassure him, so I started to say, yes, of course, don't worry, it'll be fine.

[34:28]

But out of my mouth, I heard myself say, I'm not taking sides. And I was so surprised. I wasn't trying to be sage or Buddhist or anything. It was just true. I wasn't taking sides. And we both were a little shocked by this. And then we both relaxed. Because when the truth's in the room, you know, it's very reassuring. Letting go is one way we prepare for dying. I'm not so sure we can prepare for dying after all these years. I used to think I knew a lot about dying and then I had a heart attack and I was much more humble. The view is very different from the other side of the sheets. But letting go is a way that we can prepare. Suzuki Roshi reminded us that renunciation is not giving up the things of the world but accepting that they go away.

[35:35]

It helps us also to appreciate the flip side of loss. You know, when we let go of old grudges, we give ourselves to peace. And when we let go of fixed views, we give ourselves to not knowing. And when we let go of self-sufficiency, we give ourselves into the care of others. And when we let go of clinging, we give ourselves to gratitude. And when we let go of control, we give ourselves to surrender. Surrender is different than letting go. You know, when we let go of something, we have this feeling of distancing ourself from something. Releasing. There's a release in it. But when we surrender, we feel ourself coming closer to something. Something we've known all along, actually. But we come closer to it. We become more intimate with it. We stop fighting. We stop fighting. Let go of resistance.

[36:43]

Surrender is infinitely deeper than letting go. Surrender is stepping into not two, not one. So in our practice, you know, there's a lot of encouragement to reflect on dying, to come to know it. And it's not a protection against death. It doesn't save us. Rather, it's an opportunity to become more intimate with life. The value of this reflection is to see how our ideas, our beliefs about death are affecting us right here, right now. Contemplation and death is too important to be left to the final moments. I mean, I was in the kitchen at the guest house across the street sitting at the kitchen table one day reading a book of death poems you know that tradition on the day of your death you write a poem that tells the essential truth of your life and if you don't die that day it doesn't count you have to write another one the next day so I was reading this book of Japanese death poems

[38:10]

And there was a woman in the hospice at the time. Her name was Sono. And she was sitting at the kitchen table with me, and she said, what is that? And I explained it, read her a few poems, you know, like Kozan's famous one, empty-handed. I enter the world barefoot, I leave it. My coming, my going. Two simple happenings that got entangled. I was reading some of these poems there, and she said, I want to write one of those. I said, great idea. You should do it. What's the form? I said, don't worry about the form, just write it. So I went downstairs to the office and some hours later she summoned me to her room and I came up to her room and she said, Frank, I've written my death poem. She said, and I want you to learn it. She said, I want you to learn it by heart. She didn't say memorize it. I want you to learn it by heart. He said, I want to know it lives in someone's soul.

[39:14]

So I stayed there at noon for quite a while, a long time. It took a while for me to learn the poem. I never wrote it down. She said, when I die, I want you to pin it to my bedclothes and I want to be cremated with it. I said, okay, we'll do that. Do you want to hear her poem? She says, don't just stand there with your hair turning gray. soon enough the seas will sink your little island. So while there is still the illusion of time, set out for some other shore. No sense packing a bag. You won't be able to lift it into your boat. So give away all of your collections. Take only new seeds and an old stick. Send out some prayers on the wind before you sail. Don't be afraid. Someone knows you're coming.

[40:18]

An extra fish has been salted. Isn't that beautiful? This is a woman who lived on the margins of society, one of those people you would have walked by on the street. Don't just stand there with your hair turning gray. Soon enough the seas will sink your little island. You're not exempt from this. So while there is still the illusion of time, set out for some other shore. Practice now. No sense packing a bag. You won't be able to lift it into your boat. It's not what you gather around you that will make you happy. So take only new seeds and an old stick. Isn't that a beautiful image? I think about old farmers, you know, stick in the ground, make a hole, drop in a seed. This is a woman who understands death is not a full stop. Send out some prayers on the wind before you sail. Don't think you can do this alone. Ask for help. be afraid. Someone knows you're coming. In other words, we've all been through it before. An extra fish has been salted.

[41:24]

So these are our five invitations. An invitation is a request for you to show up. If I invite you to my house for dinner, it's a request for you to come and be present. These invitations are a request. The event is your life. And the request is to show up for it, fully and completely. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click giving. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[42:17]

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