A Brief Post About Death and Shit: Actualizing the Fundamental Point

My old friend (and a true one) Yvonne Rand , also a successor of Katagiri Roshi, used to say that there’s a Zen saying that every good Zen talk included at least one story about shit and death.

Roshi used to talk a lot about death. One of his most frequent comments: “When the airplane starts to fall from the sky, maybe even a Zen master will scream. There’s no guarantee.”

In terms of shit, his main thing was to mindfully use toilet paper to wipe his butt. “Just use one square” was one of his practice suggestions, one that I haven’t followed. Yes, I’m just too big of an asshole.

But I think my almost 13-year old son reached a new stage in development the other day, what Piaget called “waking up to shit.” Dogen may have had the same breakthrough in mind when he coined the phrase, Genjokoan of shit (or in English, just plain shit).

After getting home from work I was flipping through the mail when I stopped and uttered, “Shit!”