At the temple our group discussion was about the fear of losing one's mind and one's life and about the Buddhist concept of no soul and no self. We talked about the fear of loss—through senile dementia, Alzheimer’s, mental illness, and of course death.

 

Vera wept.

 

Two others wiped away tears.

 

Dean and David and I sat together later and continued our discussion of death and grief. I mentioned that I had asked my students to write of what they considered the peak experience of human life on earth.

 

"What would be the Buddhist answer to that?" Dean asked.

 

Awakening? Enlightenment? Nirvana?

 

I didn’t know.

 

It was hard for me to think that way. I thought we might tackle the subject from the other end. I mentioned that at age seventy-two my father, feeble, blind, and sick from diabetes, had taken his own life.

 

"What would be the Buddhist view of suicide?" Dean asked. "Is there even a self to kill?"

 

I didn’t know.

 

I told Dean and David the story my friend Billy had related to me about his Tibetan guru Chogyam Trungpa at the funeral of his friend the Zen master Shunryu Suzuki. At the ceremony Suzuki’s students affected a stoic demeanor in keeping, they thought, with the teaching of their master:

 

No birth, no death.

 

But Trungpa Rinpoche, the students found to their astonishment, was sitting alone in a corner, sobbing.

 

“Why are you crying?” they asked him.

 

“Because it hurts!” the lama answered.

 

“Yes, that’s right,” David commented. “I thought when I first started that if I practiced and got enlightened I would never be sad again.”

 

I was reminded of another remark my friend Billy had made. I had described how I had been unable to utter a word at a funeral I recently attended. There all of the words in my head, I told him, sounded to me hollow and false.

 

"Sometimes the only thing we can do is be present and allow our hearts to break," my friend replied.

 

Later I told the master.

 

“Yes, this is so,” the master said.

 

The master explained that there exists no entity we can call “Buddhism” and consult for the “right” answers to our questions, no Central Buddhist Authority, no Buddhist Central. The master said that students sometimes expect of Buddhism what they have learned to expect from previous religious practices—an organized system of belief and an authority to whom they can appeal in order to resolve their doubt and confusion and to answer their questions.

 

“We have to do the hard work of seeing our own true nature and the true nature of reality,” the master told me.

 

He paused.

 

“We have to stand on our own two feet," the master said, "and come to our own conclusions.”