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Rev. William Masuda
A few weeks ago, my wife and I visited the UC Santa Cruz campus to see the cherry tree planted in memory of our daughter, Ariya. We missed seeing it in full bloom by a week, but the remaining blossoms were nevertheless captivating in their fragile beauty. The tree is a memorial to our daughter – the short, beautiful life she lived. The tree continues to remind me of the fragility of life itself.
Twenty one years on October 1, 1987, on the first evening of her sophomore year at UC Santa Cruz, Ariya was riding on the back of a motor scooter, returning to campus from downtown. A car suddenly emerged from a side street and the driver of the scooter swerved and accidentally hit the concrete island in the middle of the street. Ariya was thrown from the back of the scooter and landed on her head. Her brain stem was immediately crushed - a fact we later struggled to understand and accept. We clung to our hopes and prayers that she would survive this traumatic accident. Still, she never recovered or regained consciousness, dying with no awareness for a goodbye; triggering in us an indescribable surge of grief, bewilderment, and loss. The pain of losing one’s child, and for me, she being my youngest and only daughter, was indescribably searing. She was suddenly taken away. I wanted to scream, but no sound would come forth. Only the tears and sobbing seemed to cover the gaping emptiness prevailing within.
In those moments I was trying to grasp and cling to my faith in the Nembutsu, but no amount of grasping could assuage my pain; nor could it solve my loss and grief.
It was not a crutch for these moments of helplessness. The Nembutsu served, instead, as a steady beacon of light within those ensuing moments of anger and confusion. It illuminated each painful moment I was experiencing, and simultaneously moved me quietly, mindfully, and compassionately. Each of us who loved Ariya and grieved her loss seemed, to me, to be encircled by the Nembutsu, inexpressibly beyond any adequate loss seemed to be encircled by the Nembutsu, inexpressibly, beyond any adequate words of comfort or solace. It brought clarity when clarity escaped me. It illuminated reality when the reality of her loss was so painful to accept. It called to my heart voicelessly, assuring and reassuring me that her true life was present right here, forever, in the light and life of the Nembutsu.
In one sense, we have moved on from that awful day with some measure of understanding; at the same time, each mindful moment of her loss continues to inspire me with compassion for each treasured and precious moment we share in love. She has died, but yet is extremely alive in this gift of Nembutsu. Her presence is deeply felt whenever and wherever the Nembutsu is heard or invoked. In Namu-amida-butsu, she and I continue to walk together a path of ineffable freedom given.
So, our recent visit to the UC Santa Cruz campus and viewing the cherry blossoms awakened my consciousness again to the ever-present mystery of Nembutsu. In it we again embrace true life in the silent blooming and scattering of the fragile cherry blossoms. The mystery of Nembutsu, too, of going and returning from the Pure Land to this samsaric world of birth-and-death is also captured in the priceless moment of viewing the cherry blossoms. In the words of the late Rev. Hozen Seki:
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Death is not destruction or annihilation or disappearance. Rather is freedom we experience at death – perfect, total freedom , freedom to go on; and it is liberation from suffering. I am often reminded of the fact that the sutras put the Pure Land in the west. When the sun sets in the west, this is likened to death. But in the morning, after its seemingly total disappearance, the sun appears again. So it is always like that – it goes away and keeps coming back, manifesting in every possible way , for the benefit of other – that really there is nobody [resting eternally] in the Pure Land.