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Pure Heart, Enlightened Mind

Maura O'Halloran

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Oct 22, 2018
Category: Spirituality

Most mornings, as I start to work, I close my eyes and ask for help. Just that. No glance at the heavens. No formal prayer. Decades ago, I’d tried to make a movie of Maura O’Halloran’s book; a few years ago, I reviewed it here. And then she’d faded… until last week, when I began the day by asking her for help. Why? I looked on Google and saw that October 22 marks the anniversary of her death. I took a breath. Oh. And although I’m ambivalent about spiritual connection with the dead, I found myself thinking, “Somebody up there likes me.”

We all have met at least one young woman like Maura O’Halloran. She’s frighteningly bright (Maura, from Boston, won Ireland’s highest academic award in 1973 and graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1977 with a joint degree in economics and sociology). She’s passionate about helping people (during college, Maura worked with Irish drug addicts and the poor). She doesn’t care at all about "female" issues (Maura wore shabby clothes and doubted she’d ever marry). And then, just when everyone else is getting sane and making some accommodation with the Real World, she goes off on a great adventure.

For Maura O’Halloran, that adventure was Zen training in Japan . She went to the Toshoji Temple in Tokyo in 1979 for training under its distinguished teacher, Go Roshi. It’s an impossible discipline: 20 hours of sitting at a time, begging in freezing weather, endless chores . She loved it. By 1982, she was enlightened. Maura was the last person on earth to brag about her accomplishments, but it’s quite clear — she reached a level of feeling and thinking that a great many of us would give a lot to have.

"Pure Heart, Enlightened Mind" is a collection of Maura’s journals and letters. They give an amazing insight into the process of Zen training. But that’s not the reason to read this book.

The real attraction is that it speaks to the most essential spiritual concerns — it slices a layer of dullness from your brain and helps you see clearly. [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]

Some samples:

"In the afternoon, I was very aware. Without an effort, I was just doing whatever I was doing, without distraction or forcing. Occasionally the thought would pop into my head, ‘Hey, your mind is still.’ Then even that vanished."

"I look at the clock. It is two o’clock . A long time later I look at the clock and it is only two o’clock. It is always two o’clock. I feel a great peace."

"Suddenly I understand why we must take care of things just because they exist; we are of no greater and no lesser value."

"The begging isn’t bad at all. I wear literally ten layers of clothes and once the fingers and toes are numb, you don’t feel a thing. It’s nice walking through the streets singing at the top of your lungs. It’s like Christmas caroling every day…."

That Maura O’Halloran is dead seems, if not a tragedy, at least an irony. Having achieved a level of enlightenment in just a few years that the Buddha took 80 years to reach, she left the monastery for a brief trip to Thailand in 1982. The bus driver fell asleep, the bus went off the road — and that was that. Dead at 27.

What do you make of this passage from her journal?

“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.”

Did she suspect her light was going out? In this life, we won’t know. I do know that when I think of Maura, I feel….oh, warm. Not because I sense that she’s somewhere close, looking out for my family and me (I wish!), but because she represents the highest level of the possible: a person with pure dreams who made them all come true. No matter how many years you have on the planet, it’s pretty hard to top that.

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To read a generous selection from the book, click here.