ABSTRACT
A Zen practitioner called Yuan and his teacher Wu went to a house to pay their respects to an acquaintance who had died. The stance of a Zen practitioner who is willing to contemplate death and that of the therapist who is open to converse about suicide with a potentially suicidal client go against collective moral opinion, for in both cases the customs and social mores of the ethical dimension are suspended in the name of ethics. In Zen we speak of living-and-dying as one and the same, rather than pitting them as Eros and Thanatos in endless scuffle. Far from being gruesome, this stance may be understood, in Zen terms, as dana or generosity – the first of the six Buddhist paramitas or ‘virtues’. Influenced by ancient Chinese poetry, the writing of a short death poem or ‘farewell poem to life’ is a centuries-old practice both in Japan and within the Zen tradition.
