I'M NOT WHO I USED TO BE by Zochi

So, today I want to talk about aging and our Zen practice.  Now, some of you are (at least in my opinion) younger, some of you are middle-aged (and perhaps observing the changes in your aging parents), and some of us are old as dirt.  I really wanted to differentiate aging from sickness and death for the simple reason that sickness, trauma, and death can come to anyone at any time.  In fact, as a brand-new junior priest my first official ceremony was a funeral for a young member of our sangha.  And in the last week, close friends of ours lost their son tragically.  So today, I just want to focus on aging, although parenthetically I’ll touch on the other two inevitables.

A student once asked Shunryu Suzuki, “Why do we meditate?” “So you can enjoy your old age,” Suzuki answered.  I would change the word meditate to practice since our Zen practice is an holistic one that should incorporate all aspects of our lives.  Suzuki made this statement when he knew he was already ill and he was finding a way to continue enjoying his life even so.  This practice we have is in one sense preparation for old age, even if it might be decades away.

To disabuse anyone that the Buddha was somehow miraculously different from us let me relate some history of his latter days.  He was basically thrown out of his own sangha and with a dwindling group of followers began a slow trek toward Kusinara.  He was 81 and had a bad back.  Aging had taken its toll.  On the way he had fallen seriously ill and nearly died.  At one point his attendant Ananda went to him, bowed down, massaged his limbs and said, "It's amazing, lord. It's astounding, how the Blessed One's complexion is no longer so clear & bright; his limbs are flabby & wrinkled; his back, bent forward; there's a discernible change in his faculties — the faculty of the eye, the faculty of the ear, the faculty of the nose, the faculty of the tongue, the faculty of the body."

Buddha responded with these words, “Ananda, I am old now and worn out.  Just as an old cart is made to go by being held together with straps, so my body is kept going by being strapped up.  It is only when I withdraw my attention from the world and enter into the signless concentration of mind that my body knows comfort.”  There you have it – just an old man dealing with the inevitable.

Yet, we could possibly think of aging as a gift – we survived.  Physically of course we do slowly deteriorate, but maybe there is a deeper point about aging.  And as an old trope puts it – old age is not for the faint of heart.  And living in a 55+ community is like living with the walking wounded.  Yet, I think of aging in much the same way as I think of our Zen practice – as well as being a gift it is also a privilege.  It is a privilege in that yes, we have gotten this far and like our practice not everyone has been gifted that opportunity.  We might be somewhat beaten up or scarred but we have managed to endure, hopefully to have endured more wisely.  We are fortunate to have this privilege of aging and of being able to be in this zendo and to just sit in the midst of all the craziness in the world that surrounds us.  I think growing old becomes a further opportunity for us to see things as they are and not as we might have imagined or wanted.  In fact, our practice if we consider it is about this strange process of letting go.  A process that might take years and in fact if we think about it is very much the essence of our practice – at the end of our lives letting go is the totality.  Shunryu Suzuki intimated this when he wrote - I discovered that it is necessary, absolutely necessary, to believe in nothing.  I think a necessity that becomes more apparent as we become older.

Probably when we are younger practitioners, it is about letting go of the three poisons and all of their baggage that holds us back, all of those quote attachments unquote we frequently talk about in the zendo.  Yet I feel that as we age there is a kind of sea change in our perspective.  This letting go becomes more about change and loss and our response.  As Lewis Chikudo Richmond said, “There’s some point in your life, early or late, when it hits you that you and everybody else that you care about and love are not going to be here eventually, so now what? That’s the gate. And when you’re at that gate, life changes on you. It has a different coloration. It’s more precious. It’s more serious. You feel a loss of innocence”.

At the same time many of us are faced with those issues of physical (and possibly mental) deterioration.  We learn to face increasing limitations in our capabilities.  One author also observes, “This aging brings up key issues of our identity, of the many roles we’ve played in life, roles we may have strongly identified with.  We’re forced to confront who we are apart from those roles.  Aging uncovers attachments we didn’t even know we had.”  It can strip us of our pretensions.  So, how do I meet those challenges of loss and limitations apart from just sitting?  How do I meet those challenges with an open heart?  For some reason Bernie Glassman’s three tenets of peacemaking came to mind.  Joan Halifax discusses them in regard to those who are dying, those who are grieving, and caregivers.  I realized that I am a caregiver of myself and these tenets apply directly to me as well as to others.

I paraphrase, “the first tenet, not knowing,” invites me to give up fixed ideas about myself and to open the spontaneous mind of the beginner.  The second tenet, bearing witness to myself calls me to be present with both my own suffering and joy, without any judgment or any attachment to outcome.  The third tenet, compassionate action, calls me to recognize that this practice is about engaging with the world, as it is, with a commitment to free myself and others from suffering.”  The tenets in this case are about making peace with myself, of calm acceptance of things as they are.

Chikudo Richmond in his interview intimates about the three tenets when he said about clinging to the past and regret – “regret is the ego trying to distort what is unchangeable…but I think transforming regret into appreciation is one of the main values (of our practice) …What’s real is that this is your life, and it happened, and there’s no going back.  There’s only altering your attitude and perception about it so that you can go forward”.  I add, so that you can engage with the world, as it is.

Similarly, Buddha’s final words apply to all of us as we age, “Everything changes.  Work on your awakening with care”.  So, this challenge of aging calls us to pay attention now, to be present rather than being absent, to being here and fully aware,  to being with this aging with an open heart.

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Gathas for Meditation and Reflection  by Robert Aitken Roshi

When I’m worried about my condition

I vow with all beings

to rest in my human condition

breathing in, breathing out, heart beat.

Sitting alone in Zazen

I vow with all beings

to remember I’m sitting together

with mountains, children, and bears.

When something precious gets stolen

I vow with all beings

to acknowledge that soon I’ll release

all things to the king of thieves.