THE HEART SUTRA is a great catchall scripture. It pretty much lays out everything you need to know about Buddhism in one little poem. I wrote a whole chapter about it in Hardcore Zen, so I'll skip the long explanation here. But one part of the sutra goes:

All dharmas are marked with emptiness
They do not appear or disappear
Are not tainted or pure
Do not increase or decrease
Therefore in emptiness no form,
No feelings, perceptions, impulses, consciousness
No eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, mind
No color, sound, smell, taste, touch, object of mind
No realm of eyes and so forth until no realm of mind consciousness
No ignorance and also no extinction of ignorance
And so forth until no old age and death and no extinction
of old age and death.

My sister and her husband arrived in Dallas first, then Yuka showed up a couple of hours later. We'd all only just returned to our own places from Dallas a few weeks before, so this represented a major expense for everyone involved. Stacey's kids stayed with their father. By then we'd set up the little butsudan, but we still needed some incense and candles to do the chanting ceremony even close to correctly. The only place we could find any incense was at a Hot Topic in the local mall. We avoided the one called Love on the Beach and went for a plain old sandalwood scent. We lit the incense and some candles Mom had bought for a dinner party ages ago that never happened and gathered around the butsudan as I chanted the Heart Sutra.

So there I was chanting all this stuff about there being no old age and death in tribute to my mom who'd gotten old and died. Was I just escaping into a bunch of comforting words? I don't think so.

The sutra reflects the Buddhist concept of time. As I mentioned before, the only real time as far as Buddhism is concerned is right now. Right now there is no old age or death because old age and death are descriptions of things as they are now when we compare them to things as they used to be. When you eliminate the comparison of things with how they used to be you can't talk in terms of old age or death anymore. We chant the Heart Sutra for the living, to give them solace, but without offering comforting fantasies of heaven and the afterlife.

But even though I wasn't thinking in terms of life eternal beyond the Pearly Gates, the week after my mother passed away I was very much concerned with where she went after she died. The question was troubling me so greatly that I consulted a number of experts who were supposed to know what became of her after she shuffled off this mortal coil. But none of them could tell me anything about where she was.

See, Dad decided to have her cremated. He was pretty distraught that first day, so he left the Flower Mound Family Funeral Home of Flower Mound, Texas, in charge of everything. I thought someone ought to be in attendance at the cremation, as is the custom in Buddhist countries. But when I called the funeral home they had no idea when and where the cremation was to take place. They said her officially designated doctor, Dr. Madhavi Thomas of Texas Neurology PA, was supposed to sign off on some paperwork or something. So I called her office, but no one was there. Then I tried her emergency number and got an answering service who said they'd deliver a message to the doctor and ask her to get back to me. But I never got a call. So I called the funeral home again. And again. And again.

I heard a lot of excuses from the funeral home about why they didn't know what was going on with my mom. But no answers. I called the caregivers who'd worked with her for the past six months, but they didn't know anything either, though they did put in calls to the funeral home, and the doctor too. By this time my wife and my sister and her family all had to go back home. So it was just me and Dad again. Dad was in no shape to deal with this. Besides, he's a notorious yeller-atter of bureaucratic fuckups, so I wanted to keep him as far away from this situation as possible.

Finally, my sister, who is a lawyer, called the doctor's office from her office in Knoxville. Using her married name and not mentioning her relationship to Mom, Stacey gave it her best lawyer stuff. Finally I started getting some answers. Unfortunately the answers mainly amounted to better-worded excuses. Nobody knew yet where the hell she was or what was going to happen to her next.

Which brings up a side point I'd like to make. Hey, America, stop with the frikkin' excuses already! One of the most valuable things I learned while I was in Japan was how to stop making excuses. Over there, making excuses for anything at any time under any circumstances is seen as unacceptably childish for anyone above the age of three. Even trying to explain that your car really did get hit by a falling redwood during a hurricane and an earthquake while your head was being set on fire by a team of crazed pastry chefs and that's why you were four minutes late for the meeting makes you look like a spoiled baby. You just stumble in there with your limbs in casts and your face all blackened by the fire, stammer your most sincere apologies, and then sit down and shut up.

But here in America everybody's just full of excuses. Enough, already! Tell me you don't know the answer, and then go out and try to find the answer. I do not want to hear a bunch of lame-ass reasons why someone else made it impossible for you to do what you were supposed to be doing. Okay? And I especially don't want to hear it when the subject in question is the whereabouts of my dead mother. Got it?

But you didn't want a rant about people making excuses. You wanted to know where people go when they die as told to you by a real live Zen master right here in a cheap-ass paperback book you bought on a whim because it had a funny title. Well, unfortunately, you seem to have me confused with someone dead. 'Cuz I don't know. And neither does anyone else who tells you they do, by the way.

So maybe my mom's in heaven or Krishna Loka or Valhalla, or maybe she's in paradise with her seventy-two virgins. I can't say. Until I finally got some answers a few days later, I couldn't even say whether she was still on ice or if she'd already been burned to cinders and shoved into a $75 cardboard box. (The Flower Mound Family Funeral Home actually charges $75 for a cardboard box for your dead loved one's ashes.)

Yet I do know where my mom went when she died. She didn't go anywhere. She's right here, typing this, reading this, getting confused after having read this as to what the hell the author was trying to say. That's because my mom was a manifestation of the eternal present. So am I. So are you. So's this book. So's the toilet you're sitting on while reading it. There is nowhere for her to have gone. There's nowhere you can go after you die either. There's only here.

In Buddhism, we say that body and mind are one and the same. When you say that, most people think you're taking the materialistic view that the seat of consciousness is in the brain. But that idea is just another assumption made by the human brain. The idea that the brain somehow produces the mind is a carryover from the older belief in the existence of the human soul. It still takes the point of view that consciousness is some kind of fixed entity that belongs to each individual. We've just moved the position of this imaginary object called "self" out of the heart and into the head.

But Buddha rejected both these views entirely. None of our ideas - none of them, no matter how good they are or how supported they are by authority or even research - absolutely none of our ideas can ever, ever, ever be reality. Reality is entirely beyond what you or me or Jesus or the Dalai Lama or any other great master or great deity or great book could ever come close to conceiving of.

Which is not to say that Buddhism rejects good science. Good science and reasonable philosophy are wonderful things. We need them. They help us lead better, more enjoyable, more productive, and happier lives. The computer I'm using to type this right now is the product of the application of good and useful science. Philosophies like pragmatism and existentialism have helped a lot of people in the West come closer to the understanding Buddha established long ago. But the final answers will never be found in science or philosophy, not even Buddhist philosophy. We have the answers with us all the time. The answer to what life is, is life itself. And the answer to what death is, is death itself. Don't turn away from your life and your death, or you'll miss out on everything. Don't try to escape into fantasies of a world beyond this veil of tears, or into depression on contemplating the empty void you think you'll experience once your neurons fire their last. You have no idea either way. And it doesn't matter.

Shit, even knowing what's going to happen doesn't mean you have any idea what it'll be like when it happens. As I sit here writing this very paragraph I know I'm going to be eating lunch in half an hour, then doing a lecture a few hours later. I have no idea what my lunch will taste like or whether my lecture will be a good one or a disaster. No matter what we predict for our futures, we're always wrong anyway...

The only sensible thing to do is to live this life as it is right now. Leave what happens after you die till after you die.

© 2009, Brad Warner, All Rights Reserved
Excerpted from the book Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate ©2009 Brad Warner. Printed with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA. www.newworldlibrary.com or 800-972-6657 ext. 52.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Brad Warner is a Zen teacher, Japanese monster movie marketer, popular blogger, and columnist on SuicideGirls.com. The bassist for the punk band Zero Defex, he lives in Los Angeles. His website is hardcorezen.blogspot.com.