The Things We’ve Handed Down

Happy Chinese New Year! It’s the biggest holiday of the year, and everyone in the family gets to share in the thing we Chinese do best: eat. When I say family, I mean the whole family. In some households, the guests of honor are the dead ancestors, who even get served their favorite dishes. Why let a little thing like mortality get in the way of a good meal?

We Chinese have always been big on respecting our ancestors. When my grandfather died, my grandmother set up a little shrine in their cramped Chinatown apartment, complete with burning incense and a picture of him as a young man. At Grandma’s behest, my brothers and I had to stand in front of the shrine and bow to pay our respects. 

My family wasn’t even vaguely religious, so all of this seemed like irrational gobbledygook to me. I remember shooting my parents a WTF? look, as Grandma grabbed my wrist and pulled me toward the altar. My mother motioned for me to shut up and do what I was told.

Over the years, I’d come to see all of this as a quaint, outdated example of self-soothing superstition. We fear death, I reasoned, so we conjure up the presence of the dead to reassure ourselves that our own existence will never end.  It all made perfect sense, but it was no use to me in a modern, rational world.

Recently, I was invited to a Zen jukai ceremony, in which two friends formally joined with their Buddhist community. It took place at the San Francisco Zen Center, in an airy old refurbished barn, nestled in a lush, peaceful gulch on the edge of the Pacific Ocean. 

The ceremony included a naming of the long line of Zen teachers who had passed down their wisdom over generations, so that it now flowed through the current abbot of the center to our friends. Later, one of them told me that this had been especially meaningful to her, because it helped her see and hold the gifts her father had passed down to her before he died a few years before. In that moment, something clicked for me. 

We speak to our ancestors, not so they will hear us, but so we will continue to hear them. By taking in the gifts they have handed down to us, we remind ourselves of the responsibility we now bear to convey them to the generations yet to come. In our gratitude, we create the fuel for our generosity, and the virtuous cycle begins again. 

Each of our lives, by itself, is just a tiny, meaningless point--unless it’s a point on an unbroken line.