I gave this talk at our Full Moon Zen evening sit on July 11, 2024. A recording follows the text.

This is the Evening Gatha we’ll hear chanted in half an hour or so:

Let me respectfully remind you:

Life and death are of supreme importance.

Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost.

Each of us should strive to awake

Awaken! Take heed:

This night your days are diminished by one. 

Do not squander your life.

I turned 62 yesterday. That’s not so very old, I suppose, yet it’s not so very young, either. It’s the average age at which people retire. I’m now eligible for social security, as one of my younger brothers reminded me. It means AARP has been pestering me to join for over a decade now. It seems my progressive lens prescription got much stronger in my annual eye exam last week.

I’m in that age range when many of us develop an increasing sense of our mortality. I’m not talking about awareness that I could die any moment, which is a fact each of us lives with always. I’ve been aware of that for a very long time, having witnessed a couple of terrible accidents. I’m talking about an awareness that my days are numbered even if I live to a ripe old age. That awareness has grown more slowly from an abstraction to a felt reality, primarily over the last couple of years.

I thought it would be fitting to reflect on the Evening Gatha having just passed this milestone. We don’t know the precise origin of this gatha. (The word “gatha” comes from a Sanskrit root meaning to “sing or chant or recite,” by the way. Gatha is a generic word for verses or prayers we chant or recite.) We know the Evening Gatha was used in Huangbo’s lineage in 9^th century China. We meet Huangbo in several koans. He was the teacher of Linji, to whom today’s Rinzai Zen tradition is traced. So the Evening Gatha probably is about 1,100 years old.

In Japanese monasteries and temples, it’s inscribed on the han, the wooden sounding board that’s struck to call people to meditation practice, just as we use it on sesshin. It’s recited by the person striking the han, which is different than our practice of reciting it as we close the day’s last practice period.

The Evening Gatha reminds us of our mortality, like the Five Rememberances and other Buddhist teachings. This isn’t morbid. It’s a call to be fully present to this fleeting life we’re living. There’s contemporary support for this ancient wisdom: Research that shows awareness of our mortality is lurking in our subconscious, making us anxious. Making us cling to our tribes and their dogmas, fearful of and biased toward others. But this same research shows that reminders of our own mortality make us more open and charitable; less inclined toward prejudice.

Let’s look at the Evening Gatha bit by bit:

Let me respectfully remind you . . .

Zen is a path of remembering and forgetting. We must remember; awaken from our slumber, our dullness.

And then we must forget. We can regard the awakened state as something too special. As we begin to awaken, it becomes the object of the very obsessive self-consciousness that typifies the dull state. That’s making enlightenment something personal; something we possess. 

We need to forget that, so we can remember the rose petals and the scent of jasmine tea. As the Taoist sage Chuang Tzu said, “when the shoe fits, the foot is forgotten.”

. . . life and death are of supreme importance.

Indeed, though I’d prefer to say birth and death are of supreme importance, because it’s all Life, as the Zen teacher Mel Weitsman said as he was dying.

Time swiftly passes by, and opportunity is lost.

Many of us have things we want to do that we’re not doing. Things that feel core to who we are. We bypass or defer them for many reasons, some of them valid, like genuine practical constraints, but many of them questionable, like others’ expectations of us, fear of failure, or fear of success. Systematic surveys of those close to death suggest that not having done what feels most true to us is a common regret.

There’s no rewind button for life. Yet we can get stuck in a state of regret, missing opportunities we still have to adjust course and do what we still can do.

Each of us should strive to awaken. Awaken!

Each of us should strive to awaken to this “one wild and precious life,” as Mary Oliver called it in her poem The Summer Day, and to answer the question she puts to us at the end of it:

            Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

            Tell me, what is it you plan to do

            with your one wild and precious life?

Take heed! This night your days are diminished by one.

My days are numbered even if I live to a ripe old age. Yours, too. If you don’t yet live with that awareness, strive to develop it! Not an anxious, morbid awareness of impermanence, but a vital and vitalizing awareness of it. This is one purpose and one of the greatest gifts of our practice.

Do not squander your life.

We can squander our lives in a relative sense, but from the perspective of the Absolute your life can’t be squandered. Still, as Rilke wrote, the God—or the Universe—wants to know itself in you. 

Does the Universe know itself in you? Do you know yourself as the Universe knowing itself? If so, there can be no deep regrets. Even if you didn’t get to walk the career path you might have preferred or to hike every field and valley you dreamed of hiking, you found the Way.