Life and Death Is a Great Matter
Leland Shields, March 2026
I beg to urge you everyone
Life and death is a great matter
All things pass quickly away…
Each of you must be completely alert
Never neglectful, never indulgent.
This is the encouragement that ends our retreat day, and I’ve been moved and encouraged by it for these many years. It is encouraging when the day ends with fatigue, and still so when the day ends with openness. But it is encouragement to what?
In the phrase, “life and death is a great matter,” “life and death” opens the aperture of our attention to include the four seasons, mountains and rivers, and the joys and sorrows of growth, and sorrows beyond time. Life and death includes the immediate and personal as well, the love and ache of our hearts now, though all of it is personal. Being alert, we are here as part of all of it, without exception.
In a recent book by New Yorker cartoonist, Harry Bliss, he wrote that Star Trek’s James T. Kirk got it wrong in saying, “Space, the final frontier.” Bliss said that “being dead trumps space.” He proposed that high schools should have two semesters on death: the first semester to cover the death of your parents, pets, relatives, and friends. The second would be about your death. He thought there would be a waiting list of goth kids for the class. (From, Harry Bliss, You Can Never Die, 2025.)
How is this encouragement? This is the everyday embrace of the Four Noble Truths. Which is the everyday embrace of all that is, as it is. Not picking and choosing.
The Transmission of the Light, Case 31 goes like this:
Sengcan said to the Zen master Huike, “I am riddled with sickness; please absolve me of my sin.” Huike said, “Bring me your sin and I will absolve you.” After a long pause, Sengcan said, “When I look for my sin I cannot find it.” Huike said, “I have absolved you. You should live by the Buddha, the Teaching, and the Community
Keizan, trans. Thomas Cleary, Transmission of the Light, p. 129.
Sengcan took the encouragement in Huike’s question: Where is my sin and how do I bring it? Me, you, and Sengcan can pause now, for a moment, for a period, for 10 years.
Where? How do I even look? What am I even looking for?
Maybe Sengcan offered a series of presentations to Huike during which Huike rang a bell and said that Sengcan had not brought sin, so Sengcan looked again.
The encounter began with Sengcan expressing his longing to be set free from leprosy, which at the time was believed to be a manifestation of sin. He beseeched Huike to free him of the illness and what he believed it represented. Huike directed him to find the heart of illness and sin. Nothing, nothing, nothing was found.
In his translation, Francis Cook used “wrongdoing” instead of “sin” for this story. In Cook’s version, Huike cleansed Sengcan rather than having absolved him, and the final line of the story was rendered as, “You must rely on the Buddha, Dharma, and Community of believers.” I offer you the alternate translations because in reading the Cleary translation I wondered about what was intended by some of those words (sin and absolved) in the Chinese. The Cook translation seemed to me to carry a similar spirit as the first by Cleary, such that the 2nd amplified the first. (Second translation: Keizan, trans. Francis Dojun Cook, “The Record of Transmitting the Light, p. 158.)
Coming back to the story, the absolution offered by Huike did not rely on healing and was given after the fact, as recognition of Sengcan having seen to the bottom of his wrongdoing. After all, what is wrongdoing without the concept of wrongdoing? What is there to see and to bring back to Huike? Without a pause, Huike follows the absolution with this line:
You should live by the Buddha, the Teaching, and the Community
These last words are only needed if the perspective Sengcan found in his search for his sin was already gone; Huike invites Sengcan to live it now. Also, though there is no sin found, in living by the Buddha, Teaching and Community, there is no denial of precepts, or right and wrong; there is recognition that we are embedded in community, near and far, similar and dissimilar.
Stepping aside from absolved, and not absolved, right and wrong, possibilities are opened and the messiness of indistinct categories melt away. When not insisting on the words, we already know that there is no contradiction to having come to sesshin, to gathering at the bell, and finding nothing, searching nowhere.
Sometime later Sengcan wrote “Verse of the Faith Mind,” and in it he is crystal clear. However seductive, words, symbols, and ideas, come to nothing, and without them, there is no hindrance to the Way.
Here is a passage from that poem.
The more words and thoughts,
the less they fit the reality.
Cut off words, cut off thoughts,
and there is no place it does not penetrate.
I asked a couple of knowledgeable folks who are here today to look at the four Chinese characters of the last line, translated here as, “and there is no place it does not penetrate.” Literally, the four characters are “no- place – cannot- pass.” Our translation added “it” to carry the poems reference to the “Supreme Way” in previous lines. This suggests bare last lines of something like, “Cut off words, cut off thoughts, no place that the Way cannot pass, or cannot penetrate.”
The Tao has penetrated, and is penetrating teeth and gums, socks and windows, so completely that it is indistinguishable from teeth and gums, socks and windows. When alert and not alert, birds fly, wind blows, buds open. Without a word or thought, sink in, rest here.
In compiling Transmission of the Light, Keizan was not done offering something to us, and returned to this in the next case:
Daoxin said to the Zen master Sengcan, “I beg your compassion— please give me a way of liberation.” Sengcan said, “Who is binding you?” Daoxin said, “No one is binding me.” Sengcan said, “Then why seek liberation?” At these words Daoxin was greatly enlightened.
Keizan, trans. Thomas Cleary, Transmission of the Light, p. 132, Case 32.
At the time of this story, Daoxin was a 14-year-old novice monk. After this encounter he took the role of Sengcan’s attendant for 9 years.
When Daoxin asked for help finding a way of liberation, the way Sengcan offered was already under Daoxin’s feet. In this case, Daoxin’s pause before responding is not explicitly mentioned, but you and I take whatever time needed to sink into the question. Who is binding you, now? What is binding you, now? There is no need to make lists or prioritize the possibilities. Giving up everything, without idea of bindings and not bindings, within these circumstances such as they are, with longing or without, Daoxin found no thing – no one, not even himself, is binding him. He may also have found that nothing was not binding him.
Again, what is binding you?
Returning to Huike and Sengcan, after years studying together, Sengcan offered this verse to Daoxin:
Fundamentally, karmic conditions have given rise to the ground
That allows the seeds of flowers to grow.
Fundamentally, nothing has been planted,
And flowers have not grown.”Ferguson, Zen’s Chinese Heritage, p. ~51)
With these lines, Huike gave Sengcan transmission. The first two lines are descriptive of Sengcan’s and Huike’s path together, and they are encouraging to us. Fertilizing and watering the ground of our attention gives rise to sprouting seeds and flowers. Without excuse, qualification, or contradiction, the next two lines rip it all away – no ground, no seeds planted, and no flowers grow.
Here is the heart of Zen; moment by moment we completely give over everything to nothing.
This is not intended to be a riddle; it is intended to bring focus commensurate with the great matter that brought us here, so that we can with a free mind, abandon all ideas of where we’re going, what we hope to get, and what this practice of Zen is about.
This is not passive and does not require ambition. Giving up your hands, the shovel turns over the soil; giving up hands, the dinner fork still finds your mouth. There is no contradiction in fostering fertile conditions of the ground by giving up your hands and planting nothing. The shovel bites the earth for its own sake.
In this dangerous world, of course, we want to protect ourselves and others with planning and strategy. I’ll check the weather app – do I need to bring an umbrella? I have to remember to hydrate. This is a valuable function of mind that has its place. You don’t need it today, it’s ok to abandon vigilance and give up everything, as vulnerable as that may seem. To abandon vigilance, the stream of the sesshin form carries all at the pace of the schedule, without rush or delay.
Give everything to nothing. Rest in the fact of all blades of grass passing quickly away. Rest in the fact of the wind, and the fact of one dance, and many dancing blades of grass rippling across the field. One bell and many sesshin participants rising.
Sengcan brought his individual question to Huike in Case 31. Daoxin brought his individual question to Sengcan in Case 32. The questions arose from longing; longing took their feet to places of practice and desperation gave voice to their questions. For each, Sengcan and Daoxin, we know the ground was well prepared because the pointers they met put their feet under them where they stood.
Where Sengcan and Daoxin stood was in a time of turmoil in the sixth century CE, when the Chinese Emperor Zhou Wudi was determined to eradicate Buddhism and who persecuted Buddhists. Sengcan lived in hiding after the story of Case 31 and spent ten years with no permanent home. We know little about Sengcan because he kept a low profile.
Whatever turmoil is in our lives, further embeds us in the story of Sengcan. Perhaps as always, these old stories of healing and liberation that occurred in a world of turmoil, occur in this very body, place, and time. If Sengcan searched for healing without leprosy, he would tire himself out and set up an endless search for peace in a life that is not his. If Daoxin insisted on liberation that is free of his own preferences in a constricted world, he would be forever reaching for a state of mind that was dependent on circumstances.
Freedom with, liberation with. Nowhere else, no one else. If there is no denial of getting wet and shivering, there is no need to rail against the rain until I’m able to find shelter. The rain arises from its own conditions, whether or not I believe it should be otherwise. Rain, cold, wet are all inseparable from this life and death, this great matter.
I’ll end with the opening lines of “Verse of the Faith Mind.”
The supreme way is not difficult
if only you do not choose.
When there is neither love nor hate,
all is open and clear.
If there is the slightest distinction,
it is the distance between heaven and earth.
If you wish to see it revealed,
let go of preference and aversion.
The conflict between like and dislike
is a disease of the mind.
When this deep truth is not understood,
you try to still your thoughts in vain.Sengcan, “Verse of the Faith Mind.”