Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘I lived in a Buddhist monastery for over a decade. I arrived feeling fearful and fractured, having just lost my mother to a sudden aneurism. I remember a conversation from my first visit there. I was in the dining hall, speaking to a monk and nun, and I brought up the subject of my mother’s passing. I braced myself for a change of subject, which is what I had become used to—the awkward silence, the “I’m so sorry for your loss,” the pivot to lighter matters. Instead, these two people leaned in. “Tell me what happened. How did she die?”

There, the subject of death was not unwelcome. I was relieved. It felt, as if for the first time, like someone was mirroring back to me that what happened was not a tragedy. It is part of being human, this mortality. You can learn from it—a lot. In that monastery, I found a culture of reflecting on death as a practice.

All communities harbor their own cultures, for better and for worse. A community’s culture is a shared perspective that surrounds our sanghas like an aura, emerging from what we think, believe, feel, and do. It is by nature invisible, intangible. The death culture found in Buddhist sanghas is an example of a shared perspective, one that opens up a new vista of understanding for those of us who live in a death-denying society. This might be one of the better parts of sangha culture, when we find that subjects that are taboo elsewhere are welcomed here. That can produce healing. We find ourselves making friends with people who can support us in ways that others cannot, or will not.’ (from Lion’s Roar)