Dying Before You Die—Deux

By the time of my thesis defense, I had been practicing meditation in the Zen tradition for about five years. My first live exposure, ironically enough, also came at MIT, in 1966. Walking down one of the interminable two-tone green corridors one day, feeling rather alienated and out of sorts, in part because of the to-my-mind cynical and obscene war I felt we were perpetrating in Vietnam, my eye caught a flyer on one of the massive bulletin boards lining the hallways. It read, oddly: “The Three Pillars of Zen.” …