The Spiritual Life

… Let me tell you a little story about what I mean by nonattachment, not being attached to things. It doesn’t mean not caring and it doesn’t mean indifference. There was a great Zen master who was dying. He was lying in bed and sitting next to him was his great disciple, the one who would be his successor when he died. And the disciple said to the master, “Get well quickly because we want you to give a talk on the Buddha’s birthday.” The master said, “Supposing I don’t get well?” And the disciple said, “Well then we’ll get somebody else.” The master said, “Supposing you can’t get someone else?” And the disciple countered, “Don’t talk a lot of nonsense. Just turn around and go to sleep.” Now, that may seem like a very callous conversation but underneath is a great love, a great love between these two, maybe greater than any other relationship could be. But, there was no attachment with it. When the master said, “Supposing I don’t get well,” and the disciple responded, “Then we’ll get somebody else,” it was a simple factual statement recognizing that people do pass on. But life goes on and there will be somebody else. This seems to me to be the key feature in defining a spiritual life and bringing it in into your own everyday life without having to get away to the Himalayan foothills.

Unless one recognizes impermanence and accords with it, there can be no happiness in this life. You know, “I have a beautiful wife, I am doing very well in business, I have a swimming pool, two lovely obedient children. Will my wife always be lovely, and will the children always be obedient, and will I always have the swimming pool and will I always be prosperous?” Life doesn’t work like that. And yet, people tend to feel that if they can acquire a certain status, a certain way of life, that it will be permanent. Most people live as though they never expect to die. They live as though they are immortal, while knowing that they are not immortal. We talk about fifteen years from now, and yet I might not wake up tomorrow morning. If I don’t wake up tomorrow morning, that’ll be no great loss. I had a good life, we’d say. But if you can recognize the impermanence and recognize that there is this possibility and not fight with it, then you can live every day as though it’s your last day. And if you live every day as though it’s your last day, it’s going to be a very happy life. If someone told you that you have fifteen days to live, you’d probably make them fifteen very full days, unless you were worried about the stock market going down. So, this is the way we have to do it.

So the key to a happy life, it seems to me, is to recognize impermanence and to accord with it. And this is analogous to a situation very often described: You are a traveler who comes to an inn, and you settle down comfortably for the night. You have a good meal; you go to bed in a comfortable bed. But you know you are going to travel on the next morning. You don’t get confused and feel that you’re always going to be at the inn. Truthfully we are all travelers at an inn, ready to pass on, in one sense, the following day. Unless that impermanence is recognized, there’s going to be suffering. A wife has a husband, and the husband becomes ill, and there’s the threat that the husband might not live, and she is frantic. We have to ask from a psychological point of view: Is she frantic for him or is she frantic because of what she faces after he passes on (which is a different question that we won’t deal with.) But she is distraught because he may pass on, yet it is in the nature of things to pass on.

…So I would say the starting point of the spiritual life must come from recognition of impermanence. In some disciplines, it is attained by finding that which is permanent. Those of you who have listened to music from India know that there is one instrument with a steady drone underneath – on just one note. Are most of you aware of that? Then, against that, the soloists improvise; it’s almost like jazz in some ways. That steady instrument is the one thing that is unchanging, whereas teachers advise, “Know that one thing by which all things are known.” That is what I mean by the “Growth of Certainty.” Know that one thing. Don’t imagine that one thing.

Excerpted and reprinted with permission from Good Karma Publishing. Available as a booklet through the New Mexico T’ai Chi Chih Association for a small fee (tel 505-299-2095), or as a free e-book downloadable on http://www.gkpub.com/talks.php.