Sunday, September 5, 2010

The Death of a Zen Master


Osho talks about death in  "Vedanta-Seven Steps to Samadhi":
... Because only waves are born, the ocean remains the same. The many are born, the one remains the same. You are born and you will have to die; hence the fear of death, so much fear of death, but the Brahman in you is unborn and undying. Everyone is afraid of death. Why this fear? And nothing can be done about it; only one thing is certain in life, and that is death.
It is said of one Zen master, Tojo, that he remained silent his whole life, he would not speak. When he was a child it was thought that he was incapable of speaking, but he was so intelligent that sooner or later people realized that he was just keeping silence, he was not dumb. His eyes were so radiant,
intelligent, wise; his behavior, his actions, were so intelligent that people became aware that he was simply keeping a deep silence – maybe continuing some vow to remain silent that he may have taken in his past life. And he remained silent for eighty years.
The first and last statement he made was on the day he was going to die. The morning he was going to die, just as the sun was rising, he collected his followers – many had started following him. He was not speaking, but he was living something, and that living something became so significant to those who could understand that there were many who followed him; many were his disciples. They would just sit around Tojo, they would just be in contact with his silence, and many were transformed.
He collected all his followers and said, ”This evening when the sun sets, I will die. This is my first and last statement.”
So somebody said, ”But if you can speak, why did you remain silent your whole life?”
He said, ”Everything else is uncertain, only death is certain. And I want only to speak about something which is certain.” Once born, death is certain; everything else is uncertain. Why is death so certain? Nothing can be done about it. Science may help to prolong life, but death cannot be destroyed, because it is implied in the very phenomenon of birth; it has happened already.
Death is one pole of the same phenomenon of which birth is the beginning, the other pole.