The Final Word

A friend recently asked me ‘if belief in reincarnation is necessary to travel the Zen road.’ He claims that as he prepares to pass the ¾ century mark he feels some increasing interest in finding closure. So I offer a few words to my friend and to everyone reading.

The historical Buddha lived sometime around 550 BC in what is now northern India and Nepal. He gathered large numbers of followers as he wandered through the countryside but he established no monasteries and left behind no written words. His teachings were passed on orally for several hundred years before they began to be written down. When people began writing down what had been orally transmitted, these writings, or sutras as we call them now, were rich, varied and self-contradictory.

Re-incarnation was a common belief of the Hindu environment in which the Buddha taught. Many of the original sutras talk explicitly about the goal of practice being to escape this endless cycle of rebirth—that we will be born over and over until we finally see the full truth of the Buddha’s teaching. This teaching of reincarnation and focus on a path of many lifetimes to freedom is often thought of as a part of Buddha’s original teaching.

But in a number of the sutras, the Buddha is clear that Buddhism is not a path of belief in a set of religious or philosophical truths. The Buddha once said, ‘A proponent of the Dharma does not dispute with anyone in the world.’ Stephen Bachelor in his detailed exploration of these issues in AFTER BUDDHISM adds: ‘The Dharma cannot be reduced to a set of truth-claims.’ Later on Bachelor reports that his personal Buddhist path ‘has led me away from a religious quest for ultimate truth and brought me back to a perplexed encounter with this contingent, poignant, and ambiguous world here and now.’

‘A perplexed encounter with this contingent, poignant, and ambiguous world’ is a lovely description of the Zen way. The Zen tradition can be seen as a reform movement in Buddhism arising in medieval China. Zen was a reaction to the codification and solidifying of Buddhist teachings into something at odds with the primacy of experience over dogma that the Buddha taught. Zen claims that all the wondrous teachings of the Buddhist tradition are contained in each moment of our reciprocal encounter with life itself. The true Dharma is beyond whatever can be said or written or even thought.

I’ve often repeated the story of the student who comes to the famous Zen master and asks: ‘What happens to us after we die?’ The Zen master replies: ‘I don’t know.’ The student persists: ‘How is it that you don’t know? Aren’t you a Zen master?’ The teacher replies ‘Yes, I am a Zen master, but I am not a dead Zen master.’

Anything we say about the life that happens after the life we know in this moment is speculation. But we can know the life-and-death of this moment. We can also appreciate that all of us are continually ‘reincarnated.’ I used to be the father of a young daughter, now she is the mother and I am the grandfather. I used to be able to shovel snow, go skiing and then get on with the rest of my day. Now I shovel snow and then come back inside to rest for a while.

Each morning I am reborn as myself again. I do best when I can be curious about who I am this morning and not assume that I am simply who I was yesterday. In this way, I find the teachings of reincarnation quite accurate and helpful. But I am quite skeptical of anyone who claims to have the final word on the shape and size of life. Even the final word of Zen is not to be trusted.