My Zen teacher, Layla Smith Bockhorst, has died. It happened on November 3, after a not-very-long illness with cancer of the cecum, metastasizing to the liver, with which she was diagnosed several months ago. The diagnosis sounded rather dire, in that she was told she had stage four cancer, which is about as dire as it gets. Yet she dealt with that diagnosis as she dealt with everything else: with quiet dignity, carrying on with her teaching duties with our Mountain Source Sangha as well as, and as often as she could. We in the sangha, seeing her mostly on Zoom for our Tuesday and Friday morning zazen meetings, hoped she might be recovering, mainly because we never heard her complain—though she was truthful about being in some discomfort, and not being able to eat very well. This was her way: undramatic, unassuming, preferring always not to be conspicuous, and emphasizing mostly the quiet, fundamental Zen practice of just sitting in zazen (classically, sitting cross-legged with back straight, and focusing on whatever is in front of one, in the moment).
At my age, I am not unacquainted with death, having had both parents, a wife, a sibling, a niece and friends die, as well as three Zen teachers: my first teacher, Robert Aitken Roshi, with whom I trained usually at annual summer sesshins for more than ten years; Joko Beck, with whom I trained, also at sesshins both in Oakland and in San Diego, for several more years; and now Layla Smith, whom I have come to appreciate mostly via Zoom. There have been other teachers, to be sure, but most, like Stuart Kutchins with whom I study via Zoom also, are still living. But never has one of my teachers died while I was actively practicing with her. This time it has hit closer to the bone. That may be because when a Zen teacher dies, it has an uncanny and, to me, indefinable resonance. It is as if we somehow think of these “honored teachers” as immortal—which all are diligent to teach us they are not. Yet we still think it. So when a valued teacher dies, it is almost as if one’s parent or partner or a part of oneself has vanished.
That may be because death, to those of us living, is still the great mystery. We know it is bound to happen. We may even know, as with cancer or advanced age, that it is coming soon. And yet, when faced with the fact of death, of a dead body—as I found out when my late wife, who had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, and was lying “brain dead” in a hospital bed kept alive by a respirator but still alive, suddenly stopped—we recognize death instantly. I am referring here to the change that occurs even before we notice that breathing or heartbeat has stopped, even before we get medical confirmation that it is over. We know. The irreducible and incomprehensible phenomenon that is life suddenly departs. And we don’t know what it is. This pertains among animals or plants or anything alive. We instantly know a living entity, and we just as instantly recognize a dead one. And it is not simply that outward movement has stopped. Because what we have learned from high-energy physics is that even inert bodies, dead bodies, rocks and metals, still have ceaseless motion in their innermost, subatomic elements. So life cannot be defined by movement, nor death by the absence of movement. What is it then? We don’t know; we can’t define it. Which was brought home to me when my oldest son saw his mother lying in that white bed, having, just minutes before he arrived, stopped. Seeing her, he collapsed to his knees and said, referring to that now utterly still, cold, rigidifying body, “What is that? What is that? That is not her!”
If we were to follow most Judeo-Christian religions, we might say of the dead person that the “soul” has left the body. But the Buddha prefigured modern science when he announced his doctrine of “anatta,” or no separate self or soul. Modern materialist science agrees. Nothing we can identify as a “self” or a “soul” can be located in a human body. In its place, most science states or implies that the brain is the essence of life. Hence that awful term we heard referring to my wife, brain dead. When the brain stops functioning, that is, life ceases—so life is brain function, according to science. But of course, plants do not have brain function or even nervous systems, yet living plants or flowers or trees or leaves are clearly alive. And when they wither and shrivel to the ground, they are dead. We all know that. So what is it that animates those entities that are alive. As far as I know, no one has yet been able to locate this animating something. Which is why some philosophers like Bergson coined the term elan vital, and poets like Dylan Thomas in his great poem, referred to it as a force, the “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” Alternatively, some novelists like Mary Shelley seemed to imagine the life force as electricity—hence the astonishment when the human-built Frankenstein monster first moves, and the shout bursts out: “It’s alive!” And yet we know that simple electricity, such as that which seems to animate computers, leaves them just as dead as ever, even before the plug is pulled. And so life and death remain to us, still, just as profound and mysterious.
But I digress. My honored teacher, Layla, no longer manifests motion, or life. That is, her human form, with which we are compelled to associate her, no longer has what we call ‘life.’ She will no longer be able to go on her beloved bike rides through the mountains and valleys and trees of California. She will no longer be able to take sustenance from the so-precious-to-her natural world. She will no longer be able to appear to us on Zoom to give one of her talks on Zen—low-key talks that usually employed numerous references to her favorite Zen writers, like her teacher, Suzuki Roshi, who likewise died of cancer; or Eihei Dogen, the 13th Century Zen ancestor and founder of the lineage from which most modern Zen, and Layla herself, derives. No longer will she be able to deliver essential insights, as she did in her last brief talk, when she said something like, ‘When will you stop thinking you lack something?’ And then, ‘but even when you do, you can regard it as a gift—and, sitting, catch its arising.’ Nor will she be able to embody for us her main teaching—her simple but wise presence that sought no limelight, that was most comfortable avoiding it, preferring simple, quiet zazen to all else.
And that may be, in the end, what Zen teachers have most to offer: the simple essence of living; of being, above all, human; of being even preternaturally human—but being, as Joko Beck titled one of her books, nothing special. That was, to me, Layla’s essence, and that which, I have come to think, is the true essence of Zen: To be human beings, secure in our knowledge that living is simply ‘things as it is,’ as Suzuki Roshi used to say; ‘nothing special’ as Joko used to say; just a tall, lanky guy in a Hawaiian shirt, as Aitken Roshi was when I first met him. And as Layla Smith was and remains: just a tall, unassuming woman from Montana who somehow found, years ago, that the way of life presented by Zen suited her as nothing else ever had or would, and which she embodied to her last breath with dignity and courage and quiet robed grace—and the practice/realization that she was ok, had always been ok, and was going home, going beyond, to her true, abiding no-self. And teaching to the end that we, her grateful and now-grieving students, “standing or walking, sitting or lying down, practicing the way with gratitude,” with all existence, were and are the same.
Lawrence DiStasi
