..续本文上一页same time extraordinary grief. I could not sleep for three days; it was a very strange experience, a very beautiful experience as well.

　　These early experiences led me to question, what is death

　　 When the body dies, what remains

　　 This is an important question, and we take it up more fully in our miscellaneous koans. The koan is, "When you separate into earth, water, fire, and air, where do you go

　　" Zen training and any truly deep religious experience should answer these questions of life and death, or at least put to rest some of our fear.

　　There are some parallels between deep sleep and death. Each night when we lie down to sleep we enter into our dream world, our consciousness and our senses begin to fade, and the world disappears; all the dramas and pleasures and successes and failures dissolve into the silence. Our attitude to sleep is to welcome deep sleep: it is a relief, it alleviates some of the stresses of the day. Yet we view death with such fear and anxiety.

　　The apparent pision between birth and death is not so total as we imagine. The question is, who dies

　　 What dies

　　 In our practice there is the small death of the body, and we may die a hundred deaths without touching the great death of the mind. This great death of the mind is very important. The death of the mind gives birth to wisdom, and this wisdom is timeless, boundless state, right here and now, where there is no self to take refuge in. When we ask the question, who am I

　　 or what am I

　　 it is the I that is not known. What you are you must find out. In some ways, we can only describe what you are not. You are not the world; you are not even in the world. It is more like the world is in you. In Zen we call this experience, ”I alone and sacred in the whole universe.” Another way of saying that is, ”Buddha-nature pervades the whole universe.” There is no separation there, and when we say, ”I alone and sacred in the whole universe,” we do not mean this self-important, self-conscious little ”I.”

　　So death serves the deepest interests of a religious life, by reminding us of the emptiness of desires and plans and achievements and self-interest. It keeps us in check in some way. All of our competitiveness seems madness when we cannot take anything with us. Our spiritual maturity and freedom lies in our readiness to let go of our self-importance.

　　When I was in Los Angeles, maybe six years ago, I was given tickets to a really interesting play. It was called ”AIDS Us.” It was a play like no other play that I have ever been to. There was a very small auditorium and there was no barrier between the actors and the people in the audience, no separation. All the people on stage had AIDS and they just got up and talked about their lives, how extraordinarily different their lives had been since they got AIDS. And instead of ”dying with AIDS” they reframed it and thought of themselves as ”living with AIDS.” It was quite an extraordinarily empowering experience for these people and the people in the audience. There wasn”t a dry eye in the house. And this was in the early days, when there was a lot of paranoia and misunderstanding about AIDS. At the end of the play everybody from the audience just walked right down and everybody hugged and greeted everybody else. There was a total breakdown of fear; there was no sense of alienation; everybody was hugging everybody else. And that was a fairly straight audience, and back in those days that was quite an amazing experience for me.

　　It was certainly my first contact with anyone who had AIDS, and particularly a whole stageful of people. They later took that play to the White House to raise money for people who had AIDS.

　　There is interesting research now available about people”s near-death experiences. The chair of the Department of Para…

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