One Time, One Meeting

The poet William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) hated being old. In his late poem “Sailing to Byzantium,” written when Yeats was in his early sixties, he described an “aged man” as “but a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick . . .” And in “The Tower,” a poem of the same vintage, he likened the “absurdity” of “decrepit age” to a battered kettle tied to a dog’s tail. Invoking the traditional duality of body and soul, Yeats contrasted his “passionate, fantastical / Imagination” with the humiliations of physical decline. By common consent, Yeats’s late poems are among his finest, but the agon they so memorably dramatize is that of an aging artist resisting with all his imaginative might those inevitable changes that happen to us all.

Zen teachings also address those changes, but they offer a very different perspective. Nowhere is that perspective more concretely articulated or more forcefully asserted than in the litany of home truths known as the Five Remembrances. Here is Thich Nhat Hanh’s translation:

1. I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.
2. I am of the nature to have ill-health. There is no way to escape having ill-health.
3. I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.
4. All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.
5. My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground on which I stand.

Objective in tone and straightforward in expression, these bald assertions have none of the rhetorical drama of Yeats’s lines, but their import is no less grave. “Human kind / Cannot bear very much reality,” wrote T.S. Eliot in his poem Burnt Norton, and these five observations, read in tandem, require us to bear a great deal. Yet, according to Zen teachings, which urge us to contemplate the Five Remembrances on a daily basis, the benefits of doing so far outweigh the attendant discomforts.

To begin with, practicing with the Five Remembrances brings into the foreground those realities that many of us consign to the background of our awareness—or exclude altogether. Although those realities are the ground bass, as it were, of the human condition, we tend to keep them out of hearing. By making the stark facts of aging, illness, death, and loss the focus of conscious attention, we take a step toward acknowledging their immanent presence in our lives. And, rather than view those realities as enemies or as evidence of some defect in ourselves or the universe, we recognize them as a natural part of being human. Rather than reject them, we invite them into our consciousness.

To do so may seem like accentuating the negative, but in my experience the effect of the practice is quite the opposite. Not only does it align our minds with things as they actually are, rather than as we might fancifully have them be. It also prepares us for the “terrible changes,” as they are sometimes called, that may well lie ahead. Josh Bartok Roshi, a contemplative therapist and Spiritual Director of the Greater Boston Zen Center, likens the Five Remembrances to a vaccination, which cannot forestall the vicissitudes of life but can significantly reduce their impact. Having endeavored to embrace the whole of our existence, including its darker aspects, through daily contemplation, we are less likely to be shocked or thrown off balance when untoward events overtake us. We can retain our equanimity.

In similar fashion, the practice of the Five Remembrances can also help us befriend our deepest fears. As Thich Nhat Hanh explains, through this practice we “make friends with our fears of growing old, getting sick, being abandoned, and dying.” Though ever-present and sometimes debilitating, those fears are all too easily ignored or suppressed, whether through denial, busyness, or incessant distraction. By naming them outright, and by bringing mindfulness to the feelings, thoughts, and states of mind that they engender, we can diminish their pernicious force. They may never go away, but neither will we allow them to govern our lives.

As commentators on the Five Remembrances have noted, the fifth differs in character from the previous four. Where the first four implicitly look backward, the fifth looks forward. Where the others acknowledge forces of nature over which we have little or no control, the fifth reminds us of our power of choice and our status as moral beings. And though the Five Remembrances in general admonish us to accept our frailty and impermanence, the fifth summons us to remember that our thoughts, words, and actions will constitute our legacy. Reason enough, one might conclude, to explore this time-honored practice and its transformative potential.

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I am of the nature: Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching (Parallax, 1998), 115-116.

Josh Bartok Roshi: “The Great Matter” (podcast), Greater Boston Zen Center. https://bostonzen.org/podcast/the-great-matter/.

As Thich Nhat Hanh explains: The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, 116.

Photo: Thich Nhat Hanh at Deer Park Monastery, Escondido, California