60 Corpse

For twenty years I maintained a daily routine.

Though I often called myself a Buddhist, I had no teacher other than my two friends John and Billy, first by mail and later by email, and the writers whose books I was constantly reading.

Neither did I sit.

In addition to the dozens of dharma books I read on spirituality and religion of all kinds, on meditation techniques, and on yoga, to try to figure out what had happened to me and what I had experienced, I also read books about World War 2 and the Holocaust. In one of the dharma books I learned of "savasana," the "corpse" or "dead body" pose for relaxation, and this was the pose I adopted for my nightly meditation. It seemed the simplest, and its simplicity and its name seemed to suit me both because I was a beginner at Zen and because I had become obsessed with world war and its industrial killing and megadeath.

From 1975 to 1984, each night when I went to bed, before I fell asleep, I lay flat on my back, no pillow under my head, either in bed or on the floor. I closed my eyes, spread my legs slightly, my feet eighteen inches apart, my hands at my side a foot from my hips, my palms up, the tips of my thumb and index finger of each hand meeting lightly in a mudra, the "gyan," and I followed my breath. I did this until my breath slowed and my mind was calm.

On some nights I lay on my back and followed my breath for only ten minutes; on other nights when my mind wrestled in turmoil over my marriage or my job or both I might lie on my back in bed and follow my breath for an hour or more. The longest I ever lay in this meditation was three hours.

This nightly ritual I continued without missing a single night for nine years. Though I tried to be aware, alert, and vigilant, meditating with my eyes closed meant that I sometimes—perhaps often, I'm not sure—dozed off and fell asleep. I knew because, when I woke, my thumb and finger tips had slipped from their mudra and no longer touched. Then I resumed my meditation or rolled over and went to sleep.

Each morning when I awoke the first thing I did was remind myself of the precepts I believed I had learned from my religious experience—no killing, no lying, no attachment.

Let go and be kind.

Each night when I assumed the pose of my corpse I practiced dying. I practiced giving up everything, surrendering, so that if I died before I woke, as the prayer I recited as a child suggested, I could surrender to death totally and accept it, and so that if I woke I could start fresh and new from zero and do my best again each day to foster nonviolence.

Just words.

Still, in my silly way, promise and practice I did and, thanks to the magnitude of my private experience, with regard to virtue I was from that time forward never again a cynic.

Never.

But this is not to say that I was virtuous.

Not at all.

In retrospect I see that my savasana and precept practice was a lazy man's Zen, but it comforted me, and from it I received much benefit. But in the ninth year of this practice my discipline weakened—I don't know why—until at the end my meditation was no more than my token assumption of the corpse pose and the mudra for just a few minutes and then even that, too, dwindled to nothing. Part of it was Krishnamurti, whose books I had come to love.

Throughout theological history we have been assured by religious leaders that if we perform certain rituals, repeat certain prayers or mantras, conform to certain patterns, suppress our desires, control our thoughts, sublimate our passions, limit our appetites and refrain from sexual indulgence, we shall, after sufficient torture of the mind and body, find something beyond this little life. And that is what millions of so-called religious people have done through the ages, either in isolation, going off into the desert or into the mountains or a cave or wandering from village to village with a begging bowl, or, in a group, joining a monastery, forcing their minds to conform to an established pattern. But a tortured mind, a broken mind, a mind which wants to escape from all turmoil, which has denied the outer world and been made dull through discipline and conformity—such a mind, however long it seeks, will find only according to its own distortion.

A second part was my job.

Teaching.

I had always been a dedicated educator. Now my daily classroom teaching, because it seemed to demand of me such vigilance, had begun to feel like religious practice.