By David Chernikoff
I was recently sitting quietly in the rocking chair in my home office reflecting on what felt like a koan that many people seem to be wrestling with currently. A koan, as some readers know, is a paradoxical question, story, or statement that is used as an object of meditation in the Rinzai tradition of Zen Buddhism to push the intellect beyond its conceptual limitations. In doing so, it opens a practitioner to a profound intuitive recognition of a truth that words cannot express or contain. A koan is something we live our way to the answer to, as the poet Rilke put it. In this radically transformative process, we are given a life-changing glimpse of what Buddhist teachings call our true nature and reality as it actually is.
How do we stay conscious and live with compassion and integrity at this time on our planet? That’s the koan I’ve been exploring. In my heart, this feels like a critically important question to consider for any of us who aspire to awaken to our deeper nature and to be what the Dalai Lama calls “a force for good.” I don’t feel at all unaware or naïve in relation to the huge challenges we’re all facing on our beautiful blue-green planet. At the same time, I’m aware of the energy I regularly tap into when I remember a comment made by Suzuki Roshi, the highly respected founder of the San Francisco Zen Center: “Even if the sun were to rise from the west, the Bodhisattva has only one way.”
As I was considering this koan, a memory from fourteen years ago came to mind. I recalled a phone conversation I had with Mu Soeng, a Buddhist teacher and practitioner who was then the Director of Studies at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies (BCBS) in Barre, Massachusetts. Mu Soeng had trained with a respected Korean Zen teacher, Seung Sahn Sunim, for many years before taking his current position. Within a short time after we began talking, I could see clearly that I was speaking to someone who had a deep and spiritually mature understanding of the Dharma and the ways it was evolving in the West.
Mu Soeng had been given my name by a mutual friend because Mu Soeng was putting together a new BCBS program on conscious aging. My friend had told him about my work as the education and training director for the Spiritual Eldering Institute, a conscious aging program based in Boulder, Colorado, and Mu Soeng wanted to talk with me about joining the faculty for the new program he was creating. After exchanging initial pleasantries, I asked him to describe his vision of the new program and the courses that would be offered in association with it.
“It’s based on three principles of conscious aging,” he said. “Live simply, care deeply, die joyfully.” I liked the clear, essence-y quality of these three guidelines and the phrases became a new addition to my collection of what I call tattoo-ables. These are brief, pithy teachings that help me to cut through the apparent complexity that arises in my life from time to time, either because of internal struggles, external events, or both.
Live simply, in this case, has several levels of meaning. On the surface, it involves reviewing our relationship to consumerism and decluttering our lives if we’re feeling burdened by physical possessions and the need to maintain them. On a deeper level, it involves knowing who we are and what we care about most.
This is not to be misunderstood as perfectionism. Rather, it’s recognizing the way our aspirations function like a north star that gives our lives a sense of direction, purpose, and meaning.
We need to be willing to look deeply and honestly at our core values and once we’ve identified them, to make a sincere effort to live in alignment with them. This enables us to experience a sense of harmony with our heart’s deepest desire, which is to live authentically and to express our love and wisdom in the world.
Buddhist teachings remind us that we do so as an end in itself, aiming for positive, prosocial outcomes while not being attached to results.
What, then, does care deeply mean in this context? I understand it to mean “keep your heart open to life as it is, even when living in extreme conditions.” We practice self-compassion and self-care in a balanced way that enables us to turn toward the challenges we are presented with and to see them as a curriculum for spiritual awakening. What we come to realize is that, when wisely understood, our own suffering becomes a gateway to compassion for others.
Said another way, when we keep our hearts open to the reality of the first noble truth, we feel moved to do what we can to alleviate suffering in whatever small or large ways are appropriate for us. Slowly, often without knowing it’s happening, we become wounded healers, people whose personal pain has sensitized us to the pain of other human and nonhuman beings. We feel the truth of Suzuki Roshi’s statement about the Bodhisattva rather than understand it only on the conceptual level. The good news we discover is that when our hearts break, they can become larger rather than more contracted. We cultivate what Sharon Salzberg calls “a heart as wide as the world.”
Now we come to Mu Soeng’s third principle: Die joyfully. At first glance, this sounds like some kind of oxymoron. In our modern western culture, death is almost exclusively associated with grief, sadness, and loss. That’s not the case in many other cultures and countries around the globe. While not denying the pain of grief and loss, it’s also possible to see death as a moment of life completion. When a life has been well-lived, the phrase “celebration of life” is an accurate description rather than an empty euphemism. It’s this third principle that pulls together the previous two. We come to see that “conscious aging” is the same as “conscious living.” It describes what conscious living looks like in what one colleague calls “the third act,” the last third of our lifespan.
When we embrace these three principles as guidelines for an awakened life, we come to see how they overlap like a Venn diagram.
Living simply – knowing our core values and aligning our way of living with them – gives us the strength and courage to care deeply – and the combination of those two ways of being allows us to feel like we did our best, in spite of our human limitations, to be an instrument of happiness, peace, and freedom in the world. That realization is what enables us to die joyfully with a feeling of gratitude for the mystery of it all.
In the end, we come to see the truth of Jack Kornfield’s words in the quotation I’ll close this article with: “Whatever your difficulties – a devastated heart, financial loss, feeling assaulted by the conflicts around you, or a seemingly hopeless illness –you can always remember that you are free in every moment to set the compass of your heart to your highest intentions. In fact, the two things you are always free to do – despite your circumstances – are to be present and to be willing to love.”
David Chernikoff will be teaching a retreat for Mid America Dharma on Intimacy With All Things from July 30th – August 3rd, 2025. For more information about the retreat, please see our schedule. Registration opens April 13. For information about David, find his site here.