Bob Schwartz

It’s complicated. Everything. Today as much as ever, maybe more.

Then there is Sodo Yokoyama (1907-1980), known as the Grass Flute Zen Master.

Sodo was a student of Kodo Sawaki. Sawaki was a renowned Zen teacher who had well-known students, including Kosho Uchiyama, and his student Shohaku Okumura.

Less known, Sodo spent the last twenty-two years of his life sitting alone in a public park practicing zazen and playing music on a leaf. Children gathered around him.

Arthur Braverman writes in The Grass Flute Zen Master: Sodo Yokoyama:

Three days before his death, Sodo-san said, “I am grateful to have been able to study Buddhism, I am grateful to have been able to obtain great peace. I was saved by the sunset.

The sunset
unaware of the sunset
is still the sunset

“If people come to visit me,” he said on his deathbed, “tell them I said ‘thank you.’”

It’s complicated. Then it’s not.

© 2023 by Bob Schwartz