It is a great honour to be asked to talk to you on this very special day of the year.

I would like to begin by telling you a haiku which I wrote some time ago and which is a development of a very famous Zen Buddhist koan :-

All is paradox.
Listen to one hand clapping.
That is too much noise.

It is indeed paradox piled upon paradox that you should have asked me, who am not a religious man, a man of faith; who am an Englishman, who knows so little of Japan and who speaks no Japanese, and is not a gardener, to help you design a garden which you are thinking of building, not in Japan but in England; a Zen garden, for you, who are Pure Land Buddhists.

That this should have happened at all, and happened in so short a time, is as much a surprise to me as it is, I am sure, to all of you.

In so paradoxical an enterprise as this, I am well aware that the chances of failure are legion.

What is being planned is a garden surrounded on three sides by a wall of pure dobei, with trees beyond, and a viewing shelter in one corner, made entirely of English oak with a thatched roof overhead.

The garden itself will consist of nothing but islands of moss with twelve rocks, set in a sea of raked, granite gravel.

It will not be a garden for walking past.

The restrictions of the site have been turned to advantage and there will, in fact, be no way of walking by.

To really see the garden, you will have to come to it and when you have seen it, turn round and go, and many will almost certainly do just that and turn away with hardly more than a glance.

But what we are trying to make is a place of peace; a place of stillness and quiet a place to encourage contemplation and meditation; a place where some, very few perhaps, will be helped to move beyond all thought, and who, like the garden itself, will simply 'be'.

With such an aim, you can see that there can be no halfway house, no half success.

If the garden is made as it should be made, it will be a place where rocks and moss and the raked, granite gravel will also be mountains and clouds and islands and forests and oceans; a place of spaces more vast than the garden itself; a place to see motion where nothing moves and stillness where there is movement.

It will be a place that encourages the perception that things which are, and the things which seem to be, are seldom the same; to sense the eternity of the passing moment and the brevity of time in a timeless universe far beyond understanding.

Each one who comes to the garden will bring to it something different and take away from it what is their own, but the garden will be the same.

I know that for me, who have learnt as a scholar and learnt in my life, how little I know, the motionless waves that march and counter-march in the spaces of that small garden will represent, amongst other things, the boundless seas of my ignorance.

Of course, if the garden is not, in its own way, simply beautiful, none of these things will happen.

On the other hand, if what we succeed in making turns out to be nothing more than a pretty place, a' Japanese' curiosity set in a London suburb, it will indeed be a total failure and, in the deepest sense, all the work and all the expense will be wasted.

But even that will not matter, for what we will do will I hope have been done for the doing, and nothing else, and success or failure will come alike and mean no more than a change in the weather.

For that to be true, or even partly true, for it is a thing that is easy to talk about and hard indeed to achieve, there must be no fear, and that has led me to think of the thing that most people have feared the most since the dawn of human consciousness.

Today you are marking the anniversary of the death of Shinran Shonin.

During the past year you have built a home in the Temple in which the aged may live and die in peace.

So it is that, the thought of the garden, the seeming timelessness of the rocks that we have been searching for at the foot of the mountains, have made me think of what is for me the meaning of death.

I have said before, at the start of a poem that some of you know:-

Do not be afraid
of chaos,
for it
is a part of the whole
like any other.

I said it should not be seen as an enemy.

It should not be hated or feared, for then it will not be understood.

Without understanding it, you will never be able to see it for what it is, a realm of infinite possibility waiting with limitless gifts for those who are not afraid, and approach it with understanding.

Even more do I think that to understand death is to lose all fear.

However much I may fail, as most of us do, in living my life as I wish to live it, and think that it should be lived, death is not, so it seems to me, notwithstanding the horrors that often precede it, a terrible thing or something to try, however vainly, to flee.

It’s not merely something that has to be bravely borne, or even a thing to be welcomed in hopes of a heaven beyond.

If we truly do for the doing, there is no need to fear the future, to flee from the joys of this life, from love or marriage, or from a delight in beautiful things, for fear of a sense of loss and of sadness when they are gone, or because we know that life is short and that we ourselves must all of us die.

If we can indeed do for the doing, each instant becomes an eternity, and death can be understood as the positive thing that it really is.

Without death, you and I would not be here.

Without death there would be no evolution, no progress, no human race.

All animals, whether or not they are vegetarians, only live by being surrounded by death, and as Kenji Toda said to the London Eza of us, the human race, by killing. If most of the cells of which we are made were not programmed to die, neither we, nor indeed any complex, living organism could ever develop, much less survive.

A few weeks ago, in reading the book of the Sutta-Nipāta, which Chimyo sama, knowing my ignorance, gave me, I read a verse in the Uragasutta which greatly impressed me because, in its own, confidents terms, it runs parallel to my own necessarily tentative working hypotheses about life and death.

It reads:-

"He to whom there are no (sins) whatsoever originating in fear,
which are the causes of coming back to this shore, that Bikkhu
leaves this and the further shore, as a snake (quits its) old worn
out skin.”

Each one of us is a universe seemingly made up of billions upon billions of tiny atomic universes swirling within us like the myriad stars and galaxies swirling in the infinite spaces of the sky. Each instant a billion enter our own little universe from the universe we perceive to lie outside of us, and a billion others leave.

Each one that enters our universe may have come from the chaos of free space, or may have migrated from some inanimate form, or some living thing, which may be alive now, or which may have lived aeons ago.

In a similar way, each one that leaves may itself be transformed, or may recombine within some inanimate form, or some other living thing, whether now or far into the distant future.

It seems to me, therefore, that when I die and make room for others, the myriad atoms which happen to make up what I am at the time of my death, will dissipate into nature's limitless universe and then, like all those which have once been a part of that ceaselessly changing me during my life, will be me no longer.

There will be, it seems to me, no longer a me upon this or on any shore.

In a very short time, as time goes, the memory even of some part of what I am, or have ever been, will have gone.

It will be as if I had never existed and yet, forever, I will have been, and that will not matter either. In that sense, it seems to me that when I die, I shall be and not be and neither will matter.

And now, as I began, perhaps not altogether seriously, with a haiku based on a koan, I will end with another haiku which is, I am happy to say, much more straightforward.

I wrote it a long time ago as a love poem for one woman, but it is, at the same time, a poem for each of you and for anyone who may wish to listen. It is also a poem which deals with life and death, a poem about the garden which may or may not be built and which, if it is built, may not succeed in its purpose. The seventeen syllables and three short lines of the haiku are all about doing for the doing, nothing else. It goes like this:-

I am. I love you.
All that I have, I give you,
no fears and no hope.