"Suddenly I understood that we must take care of things just because they exist." "I'm twenty-six and I feel as If I've lived my life. Strange sensation, almost as if I'm close to death. Any desires, ambitions, hopes I may have had have either been fulfilled or spontaneously dissipated. I'm totally content. Of course I want to get deeper, see clearer, but even if I could only have this paltry, shallow awakening, I'd be quite satisfied.... So in a sense I feel I've died. For myself there is nothing else to strive after, nothing more to make my life worthwhile or to justify it. At twenty-six, a living corpse and such a life! ... If I have another fifty or sixty years (who knows?) of time, I want to live it for other people. What else is there to do with it? ... So I must go deeper and deeper and work hard, no longer for me, but for everyone I can help."
“…Maura O'Halloran was born in Boston, the daughter of an Irish father and an American mother…Her father died when she was fourteen, and she played a large role in the upbringing of her four younger siblings. From a young age, Maura displayed a deep awareness of human suffering… Her concern for social justice was accompanied by a serious attraction to the spiritual life. After experimenting for some years with various methods of prayer and meditation, she decided to explore the wisdom of the East.
In 1979 she flew to Japan and applied and was admitted to a traditional Buddhist monastery in Tokyo… Her journals offer an unusual record of her experience, which included sustained periods of meditation, arduous manual labor, and an ascetic discipline of mind and body. After six months of intensive training, Maura experienced an ecstatic breakthrough. While being interrogated by her Roshi she was suddenly overcome by tears and laughter. "It is enlightenment!" her Roshi cried. Afterward, when she went outside, she was overcome with a feeling of compassion for everything in existence.
This was not the end of her training. In the months that followed she concentrated more energy than ever on her meditation and her self-discipline. By the next year her Roshi made her an extraordinary offer. If she would agree to marry a fellow monk, he would entrust his temple to her. Torn between the desire to obey her Roshi and a conviction that this was not where she was intended to remain, she experienced a strange physical collapse.
Maura did not consider enlightenment something to be grasped for herself alone. Rather, she wished to empty herself to serve others in the way of compassion. This was Maura's wish. But it was not her karma. Instead, after leaving the monastery on her way back to Ireland, she was killed in a bus accident in Thailand on October 22, 1982. She was twenty-seven.
In a letter of condolence to her mother her Roshi wrote, "She had achieved what took the Shakuson [Shakyamuni Buddha] eighty years in twenty?seven years. She was able to graduate Dogen's thousand-day training. Then she left this life immediately to start the salvation of the masses in the next life! Has anyone known such a courageously hard working Buddha as Maura? I cannot possibly express my astonishment."
Maura's story has earned a devoted following among Christians as well as Buddhists. Her short road to holiness in a Zen monastery has been compared to the compressed career of Therese of Lisieux, the French nun who set out as a child to become a saint. Both young women, having accomplished their spiritual business in this world, promptly departed. It is certain that Maura would have identified with the words of Therese, who said she hoped to spend her heaven doing good on earth.”
~ Robert Ellsberg
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