Comments on D's Death in The Snow Leopard
Peter Matthiessen
In November 1971, I attended a weekend retreat at the New York Zendo.
All-day meditation in the lotus postures can be arduous, and D,
who had been suffering for two months with mysterious pains, de-[106]cided
to limit herself to the Sunday sittings. On Saturday evening, when
I returned to where we were staying, she opened the door for me;
she was smiling, and looked extremely pretty in a new brown dress.
But perhaps because I had been in meditation since before daybreak
and my mind was clear, I saw at once that she was dying, and the
certainty of this clairvoyance was so shocking that I had to feign
emergency and push rudely into the bathroom, to get hold of myself
so that I could speak.
Before dawn on Sunday, during morning service, D chanced to sit
directly opposite my own place in the two long facing lines of Buddha
figures—an unlikely event that I now see as no coincidence.
Upset by what I had perceived the night before, by pity and concern
that this day might be too much for her, I chanted the Kannon Sutra
with such fury that I "lost" myself, forgot the self-a
purpose of the sutra, which is chanted in Japanese, over and over,
with mounting intensity. At the end, the Sangha gives a mighty shout
that corresponds to OM!—this followed instantly by sudden
silence, as if the universe had stopped to listen. And on that morning,
in the near darkness—the altar candle was the only light in
the long room—in the dead hush, like the hush in these snow
mountains, the silence swelled with the intake of my breath into
a Presence of vast benevolence of which I was a part: in my journal
for that day, seeking in vain to find words for what had happened,
I called it the "Smile." The Smile seemed to grow out
of me, filling all space above and behind like a huge shadow of
my own Buddha form, which was minuscule now and without weight,
borne up on the upraised palm of this Buddha-Being, this eternal
amplification of myself. For it was I who smiled; the Smile was
Me. I did not breathe, I did not need to look; for It was Everywhere.
Nor was there terror in my awe: I felt "good," like a
"good child," entirely safe. Wounds, ragged edges, hollow
places were all gone, all had been healed; my heart lay at the heart
of all Creation. Then I let my breath go, and gave myself up to
delighted immersion in this Presence, to a peaceful belonging so
over-whelming that tears of relief poured from my eyes, [107] so
overwhelming that even now, struggling to find a better term than
"Smile" or "Presence," the memory affects me
as I write. For the first time since unremembered childhood, I was
not alone; there was no separate "I."
Already the Buddha-Being was dissolving, and I tried to convey gratitude,
to inform It about D, but gave this up after a moment in the happy
realization that nothing was needed, nothing missing, all was already,
always, and forever known, that D's dying, even that, was as it
should be. Two weeks later, describing to Eido Roshi what had happened,
I astonished myself (though not the Roshi, who merely nodded, making
a small bow) by a spontaneous burst of tears and laughter, the tears
falling light and free as rain in sunlight.
One intuits truth in the Zen teachings, even those that are scarcely
understood; and now intuition become knowing, not through merit
but—it seemed—through grace. The state of grace that
began that early morning in the Zendo prevailed throughout the winter
of D's dying, an inner calm in which I knew just how and where to
act, wasting no energy in indecision or regrets: and seemingly,
this certainty gave no offense, perhaps because no ego was involved,
the one who acted in this manner was not "I." When I told
the Roshi that I felt this readiness and strength, even a kind of
crazy exaltation, he said quietly, "You have transcended."
I think he meant "transcended your ego," and with it grief,
horror, and remorse. As if awakened from a bad dream of the past,
I found myself forgiven, not just by D but by myself, and this forgiveness
strikes me still as the greatest blessing of my life.
In those last months, it seemed that love had always been there,
shining through the turbulence of waves, like the reflection of
the moon in the Zen teachings; and love transformed the cruel and
horrid face that cancer gives to death. One day, knowing she was
dying, D remarked, "Isn't it queer? This is one of the happiest
times in all my life." And another day, she asked me shyly
what would happen if she should have a miraculous recovery-would
we love each other still, and stay together, or would the old problems
rise again to spoil things [108] as before? I didn't know, and that
is what I said. We had tried to be honest, and anyway, D would not
have been fooled. I shrugged unhappily, she winced, then we both
laughed. In that moment, at least, we really understood that it
didn't matter, not because she was going to die but because all
truth that mattered was here now.
After D's death, I wondered if the specter of remorse might overtake
me. It never did. In the grayest part of the empty months that followed,
my heart was calm and clear, as if all that bad karma of the past
had been dissolved on that early morning of November.
Toward that Presence who prepared me for D's death I was filled
with gratitude, quite different from the thankfulness I felt toward
Eido Roshi and toward D, toward kind family and friends and children.
It was not that I felt grateful to myself, yet the question seemed
inescapable: where could that vast Smile reside if not in my own
being? In chanting the Kannon Sutra in such desperation, I had invoked
Avalokita, but I had been paying no attention to the words, only
to D, who sat in the line of Buddha forms across the way. And so
it was hard to identify Avalokita with that Presence unless He was
also D, also myself—in short, what Meister Eckhardt meant:
"The Eye with which I see God is the Eye with which God sees
me." Or Jesus Christ: "I and my Father are One."
Surely those Christian mystics spoke of the Lord-Who-is-Seen-Within.
That year I was a new student of Zen, expecting nothing, and almost
another year had passed before something said by an older student
made me realize what had happened. I went to Eido Roshi, who confirmed
it. But a kensho, or satori, is no measure of enlightenment, since
an insight into "one's True Nature" may vary widely in
its depth and permanence: some may overturn existence, while others
are mere tantalizing glimpses that "like a mist will surely
disappear."" To poke a finger through the wall is not
enough-the whole wall must be brought down with a crash! My own
experience had been premature, and a power seeped away, month after
month. This saddened me, although I understood that I had scarcely
started on the path; that [109] but for D's crisis, which had cut
through forty years of encrustations, I might never have had such
an experience at all; that great enlightenment was only born out
of deep samadhi. In this period the invitation came to go on a journey
to the Himalaya.
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