Posted to Ode by Anne Thomas
Several years ago, I wrote about my friend Ichinohe, the healer. Since that essay appeared, my beloved friend has gone through many profound changes. One time, when I went for a massage, he said, “I know my body very well. There is something wrong with me. I must go for a check-up.” And sure enough, that investigation revealed a beautiful, perfectly formed spiral pattern of teeny cells spread out across the lining of his intestines. Cancer. When he told me about it, he said, “The doctor was amazed. He had never seen anything like it. And indeed, it was magnificent. It looked like the galaxies. It formed a perfect, balanced arrangement.”
I personally felt that orderliness came from Ichinohe’s years of meditation and deep spiritual attunement. But why cancer? Why something so lethal for someone who had devoted his life to healing others?
He and I talked about what all this meant and what the treatments would entail. “I will lose my hair,” he said. Remembering my own mother’s months of intolerable suffering, I smiled and only said. “Ichinohe, the only thing that will get you through this is Love. A thread of Love going to you and from you back out into the world. Hopefully many threads, but at least one.”
Ichinohe was separated from his wife, had no children and had followed very different paths from the others in his blood family. “You must have a reason to come back from the death that chemotherapy inflicts upon you. To be reborn there must be Love.”
We held each other a long time before I left. And although we kept in close touch, I would not see him again for many long, life-transforming months.
When I did see him, he was in hospice. His bones stuck out of his cheeks like knives. His arms were as thin as reeds. And in contrast to that emaciation, his legs were hugely swollen and his stomach bulged out from the lymph that his body could no longer regulate.
Yet, his eyes were alive and bright, his mind clear and sharp.
“I’m not the man you remember,” he greeted me. True. But only outwardly. On a far more important dimension, inwardly, he had evolved through a profound spiritual unfolding. His soul glowed around and through him. In my eyes, he was manifesting more of his true self than ever.
Again we talked, to the extent that he was able. “Anne, listen. Hear what I have learned. We cannot carry any one else’s burdens. I’ve tried all my life. But the higher we ascend the mountain, the harder it becomes. We have to put aside other people’s burdens. We can only carry our own. Getting to the peak is extraordinarily demanding. You have to leave all excess behind. You can carry only yourself—and even then with great difficulty.”
I have thought about his words from the perspective of cooperation and mutual self-help that I live by. I have come to believe he never meant to live a selfish, self-centered life. He surely never did. Rather, I think he was warning me not to scatter my energy on things that did not matter. He was reminding me to stay focused and to live each moment with an alertness and keen wakefulness.
And more awake I did become. More keenly than ever before I sensed the passage of time and myself as part of it. Despite experiencing my own mother’s death at an early age, up until then, I had lived with the attitude of infinite stretches of health and possibilities. Of course, intellectually I know otherwise. But emotionally I was worlds behind. But suddenly, I saw ever so clearly the obvious: everything is constantly becoming something else. And life’s ongoing transitions included me.
With that acute awareness motivating me, I decided to take some very practical steps. I set out to make a Japanese will. Even though I own very little here, I wanted to be sure my money would not be spent either on a funeral or on shipping my body back to my home country.
For the Japanese, ancestors are a real, living, very influential presence. So, funerals are extremely important. They pave a way for the deceased to follow, while reassuring them of the family’s ongoing concern. And of course, they also set up a positive condition, enabling the dead to return as benevolent ancestors to assist the living. So, funerals are no small matter and the expenses involved can be astronomical.
I respect that tradition, but hold a different outlook. For me when the soul separates from the body, its journey is not a social matter, but rather a deeply personal one. Yet since the body will remain on the physical dimension, I prefer to leave my physical self and belongings to benefit those on earth.
I have documents to be an organ donor and am now in the process of giving other parts of my body for medical research. I plan to give my belongings and any money I have here to my friend’s homeless center. (See my essay posted in My Exchanges about this center.)
When I spoke to a lawyer about my plans, he stared at me. (Staring is rare in Japan. It is considered rude.) “I’ve never had a case like this,” he said in astonishment. “A foreigner giving everything to us Japanese. It is so unusual.” I smiled and said. “Japan has been good to me. This is my way to say thank you.” So my will was planned.
With the physical taken care of, I moved to my spiritual side. No funeral, but I would like chanting done on behalf of my soul. Buddhist chanting is deep and sonorous. It moves me in unutterable ways. So, I contacted my friend Toki, a Buddhist priest. (See my earlier essay, "Evolving into a Priest: A Biography”)
“Yes, of course, I will do that for you,” he agreed. “But I think you should come and listen to that special sutra so you will know what your soul will experience as it ascends to the non-material dimension.” I agreed and we set a date.
Toki is round and solid. And that serves him very well for the chanting that rises from deep within his gut, rumbling upward, causing his flesh to vibrate with the sounds he is producing. Unlike Thich Nhat Hanh’s delicate suggestion to “invite the bell to sound,” Toki forcefully struck the kettle drum, the wooden plate and the round wooden bell, as he bellowed out the words and the sounds of the sutra.
I could feel myself responding within every fiber of my being. I felt vibrations from deep within. And then I began to rise up and float out of my body, hovering, not broken from my physical self, but not within it either. The final gong vibration was deep and long and seemed to drift outward into eternity. Then it slowly diminished in power until it vanished into nothingness. We sat for a long time in the silence, both of us aware of being somewhere between the earth and eternity.
Later Toki explained to me how Buddhism is very much rooted in the earth and the body. He told me that the open kettle drum could be seen as the head with its opening at the crown. “That is where the exchange of spiritual and physical vibrations take place. The wider the opening, the more we can receive and give back. It is all about cycles: receiving and giving back. Over and over again.
“That energy then goes downward, into the body. The wooden plate is like the solar plexus, right in the center of the body. I give that sharp staccato strikes because that is what the energy there needs in order to balance what is above and below.
“And the huge wooden bell does not flip outward like a Christmas bell. It turns in upon itself, forming a ball. That is the womb. That is where life begins. The sounds from here are very deep and rise upward, up, up, past the solar plexus, up and out through the top of the head. Then everything cycles back round as I continue bellowing out the sutra.
“In Christianity people often consider high soprano voices as heavenly. But that is too imbalanced, too much in the upper regions. Angels have wings. That is what connects the spiritual energy with physical manifestation. That is how energy flows. It is natural. We in Buddhism know that heavenly energy needs the earth. They are not separate. They are one. They are like yin and yang: one ongoing process.
“Our chants start deep and low. They thunder out of the gut, the earth womb, and then resonate upward and outward into infinity. It is all about balance.
“Indeed our bodies contain all the secrets. We just have to learn how to read them. And if you really look, the earth tells the same story. Heaven and earth are one. Once you know, you can see it everywhere. It explodes all around you. All you have to do is open your eyes and see.”
And seeing I am learning to do. Slowly. At the very least, on a mundane level, I hope the choices and preparations I am making now will benefit those I leave behind.
And surely the messages Ichinohe is conveying through his suffering and transition are a very crucial part of this ongoing process of waking up and being alive.
Thank you, Ichinohe, for continuing to give, even as you die. Although your body is leaving the earth, your spirit will continue. Both in Heaven and on earth. Surely you have connected to and radiate a magnificent, life-affirming thread of Love.
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