The Gate Behind Us

Several months ago, a man who was raised Catholic asked if heaven is real. “I understand our body transforms into a cloud, a river, a tree,” he said to the Plum Village monastics, “but I want to know what happens with the soul.” I wouldn’t ask a Buddhist monk to instruct me on the soul nor an afterlife for it because I would be embarrassed, not just by having asked those people that question but by showing my investment in the answer. The Christian notion of heaven is comforting only if you don’t interrogate it. How old are you there? Do babies age in heaven if they did not on earth? What do you consist of, how do you create or maintain relationships, how do you reunite with those promised to return to you? Do you not miss laughter, tears, voices, music, sweaters, chocolate, daisies, the moon? Are there no sensory or intellectual delights? Are your memories of suffering transformed, disallowed? Is it still heaven if there is pain or longing? Is pleasure possible when there is not? There was a time on earth before mammals, before reptiles or birds, before even plants—a time before grief because it was a time before love. Was that heaven?

Yet when the man asked this question, a tiny wishful part of me sat up like a dog with its ears lifted. It’s easy to understand that there is no physical self, because the physical self is made up entirely of non-self ingredients. And without bodily self there can be no birth and no death. No birth is my scrap of comfort because it means no death; I accept one because I want the other, because I believe the rationality ironclad however emotionally challenging. And consciousness, rationally, I would describe as a product of the (non-self) body, a sustained action no longer performed when the body falls apart. But it is hard to silence that wondering: what about the soul, what about the soul? Surely there must be a soul.

In Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Shunryu Suzuki says, “What we call ‘I’ is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale. It just moves, that is all.” And I think he means that we aren’t really even the door, we are the swinging itself, the motion, the movement, never stable and never still. That we are not nouns but verbs, not objects but actions. Maybe the breeze is the thing that flies into heaven, though what is heaven for a wind, or a river? Sometimes I think the only teaching you need is this: Enlightenment, for a wave, is the moment she realizes she is water. Coming from heaven, returning to heaven. Constituted of it. That’s an old wisdom. I suppose the point is that if there is a soul, it’s not mine, it’s not me, I’m just borrowing it for a while the same way I am the oxygen and hydrogen and carbon, and it goes back to the great singular soul. Except there’s no me to do the borrowing, though there is still a me—the whole non-duality thing. Suzuki said this was the most important teaching: “not two, and not one.” Well, it’s the same teaching.

But what is it about dogs and hope and heaven? More months ago, a bereaved woman asked about the passing of her dog: “I have been practicing remembering no birth and no death as it pertains to human beings,” she said, “but I’m very concerned about the spirits of the dogs we have lost in our family, because they’re very special to us… And I wonder if you could share some insight and wisdom in how dogs are also included in interbeing because I’m continuing to grieve but at the same time trying to be very present, and know her spiritual essence is still in me and all around me.” My impression of her request was that she wanted to be told her dog was in heaven, whether or not she expected to be told that. Maybe that was intuitive or me, or maybe it is a gross misrepresentation of her sentiment and a projection of my own.

Sister Tam Muoi replied that she’d had a dog she loved very much too, whose name was Toffee:

To think of Toffee never leaving makes me think of her never coming. There’s a famous koan: What did your face look like before your parents were born? As this piece puts it, “We often think of gates as appearing before us, inviting us to enter, but this koan is like a gate appearing behind you, inviting you to step back into the abiding nowhere—to return to the vastness.” Whose lap did Toffee sit on before her parents were born? Where was her joy on the walk?

Over the new year I read a lot of (translated) Japanese death poems, and my favorites were the ones that captured a sense of returning to a mysterious unknown. I give my name back. I want to see the lotus on the other side. Have you ever watched the video of the dog encountering his person dressed as his favorite toy? There is such a sense of received destiny in the purposeful, delicate way he walks forward, like he’s in disbelief and yet he’s certain. I wonder if that’s really what it’s like.