The Dance of Life and Death

"Koans are those baffling puzzles Zen masters put to their students. The purpose of a koan is to burn through the notion that you can reason your way to wisdom and awakening. The aim of all koans is to fry your rational mind, to exhaust your capacity to create verbal hideouts behind which to escape the inevitability of death, and in this way to realize the reality of your own impermanence.

"This is the koan that is the Book of Ecclesiastes: How do I live well in the face of impermanence, a state of continual emptying, unknowing, and uncertainty? You cannot answer this as an observer. You can only glimpse the answer in the midst of your life — this moment, or perhaps this one. Or to borrow from Zen master Hillel, 'If not now, when?' (Pirke Avot 1:4). Ecclesiastes is not about the afterlife or how to escape the inevitability of death. It is about reality — wild, raw, and impermanent.

"The world revealed in Ecclesiastes is an impermanent world of continual emptying. Ecclesiastes calls this hevel. Trying to grasp something in this world, trying to hold on to anything in this world, leaves you breathless, exhausted, and anxious. This impermanence is the nature of nature, and because this is so, the world lacks surety and certainty; change and the unknowing that change carries with it are the hallmarks of life. In Ecclesiastes you spend no time longing for escape from impermanence, but rather learn to live well in the midst of it. This is what the Book of Ecclesiastes wants to tell us. This is why it was written. This is why it is still read some twenty-five hundred years later."

Living with the Impossibility of Escape

"The bulk of the Book of Ecclesiastes is an examination of life without escape. It offers no alternative to impermanence, and hence it is profoundly nonreligious. Religion is all about escape, but what you really want to escape from is inescapable — it is yourself. As long as there is an 'I' seeking salvation, redemption, enlightenment, heaven, nirvana, or surrender, there is no salvation, redemption, enlightenment, heaven, nirvana, or surrender. The more you struggle, the stronger the 'I' becomes and the tighter the noose of despair grips your every living moment.

"You cannot understand the Book of Ecclesiastes merely by reading it or even studying it closely. Studying the text is not a waste of time, but just another way to pass time. It is just one more thing to do when you know that doing it will get you nowhere. You only understand Ecclesiastes when you live the truth its author perceives: the truth of endless emptying, havel havalim; no escape, the truth that there is nowhere to go and nothing to get, only this moment to live."