And here are a few written excerpts of other talks.
This was January. Fukui prefecture, where the founding temple of Soto Zen has just sat for 1,200 years, was covered in snow. I had experienced the lack of heat in old Japanese buildings. I had also experienced the even frostier treatment of Westerners seeking to practice zen at traditional Japanese temples, and this was the mother ship.
At that moment I would have given anything to be able to muster a rational argument in favor of beaches and the bitter melon that Okinawans use in their cooking. But all I could think was, I'm being forced to do what I've committed to do. Life is saying to me: Okay, let's see your cards.
That's how I found myself touring a thousand-year-old temple in the company of one Reverend Kuroyanagi (Black Willow), head of the international division of Eiheiji. He had served for eight years at a temple in L.A. and spoke excellent English. Although he was at least in his fifties, possibly sixties, he had an amazingly youthful face and always seemed to be laughing, even when his expression was serious. I was impressed by him and decided I might as well ask the Question. This was the question that if I got the wrong answer to it from someone I trusted, I couldn't continue on this path. This was the first gate.
The question was about desire. From my several years of reading, it seemed a common interpretation that the goal of zen practice is to eliminate or otherwise transcend so-called "worldly" desires. I had two issues with this. First, it didn't seem possible for a human being to eliminate desire. Even more problematic, it didn't seem desirable.
Admittedly, many of the problems of human psychology are caused by people's blindness to and mismanagement of their desires. Conversely, the things that make life worth living, pleasures both simple and intricate, human relationships and artistic creations, depend on some form of desire. I couldn't imagine what a world devoid of desire would look like, and I didn't want to find out. Most of all, I didn't want to declare allegiance to a repressive, life-hating way of thinking or being.
Alexander McCall Smith writes that priests and doctors shouldn't set themselves against anything human. So I'm going to say first that desires are inexhaustible, and that's a good thing.
So his understanding of the inter-reliance of life and death was not merely theoretical; it informed his actions on a daily basis. Life and death are not really opposites; they are part of a single mechanism. We need death to help us live a good life. Living in full awareness of the nearness of death is possibly the best way to live a life you won't regret when it comes time to die.
We do it with hope that one day we will learn the smallest of our actions has consequences beyond our imagining, and we will learn to care for these consequences, because the present gives birth to the future. We hope that people everywhere will one day come to know that many of the things we fight for, the borders and prejudices, us and them, are invented–that in reality there is no separation–everything exists together, intimately linked, a single life force expressed in infinite, breathtaking variety.