Days Like Lightening

Last night, in our Zoom Zen meditation gathering, we read a short passage from our 13^th century Korean ancestor Chinul. Chinul is credited as being the founder of the Jogye school of Korean Son (Zen). My teacher’s teacher, Seung Sahn, founder of the Kwan Um Zen school, was his 78^th successor. So through my teacher, George Bowman, I am Chinul’s 80^th successor. Yikes!

I suppose we are all the successors of so many geniuses and ruffians. If you could count back 80 generations, I wonder what you would encounter? What lineages we could all claim—women and men of great courage and faith as well as people of questionable ethics and behavior. Those who lived in times of prosperity and those, like us, who lived in times of crisis.

But sometime around 1200, somewhere on the Korean peninsula, Chinul wrote this reminder for us all: ‘The days and months go by like lightening; we should value the time. We pass from life to death in the time it takes to breathe in and breathe out; it’s hard to guarantee even a morning and an evening.’ I have read this passage for many years and each time it brings me up short. But in this time of uncertainty, even familiar words seem to contain some new import.

Days and months do go by like lightening. I am constantly amazed to find myself an old man of sixty-seven, when I remember so clearly being a young man. ‘Just the other day’….can now mean last week, last month or several years ago. My grandson, now nearly fourteen months old, was born just the other day. How quickly our lives pass and how surprisingly easy to miss this wild evanescence in the pressure of our daily responsibilities.

Life, as Chinul says, is not guaranteed. Our usual sense of the solidity and stability of life is a delusion that, while necessary and comforting, is ultimately not true. We all have many different reactions when we remember or when we are forced to confront the ephemeral quality of life. Chinul, I believe, is not trying to scare us, but to turn us to wake up to the preciousness of our lives in this moment.

Reminders of our shared mortality and fragility are now woven into the fabric of our daily lives. Walking down the street, I move to the other side of the sidewalk when I pass someone. I am afraid that I might either contract or spread this novel corona virus. But these reminders work both ways. Now complete strangers walking by the Temple will sometimes stop and smile and ask about my health as I work in the gardens. We smile at each other, remembering that we are connected.

So as we live into the full extent of the pandemic, whatever that may be, let us remember to value the time. Remembering the momentary miracle of breathing in and breathing out, let us take delight in the people and the fullness of life that surrounds as is us.