Chanting at the Bedside: A Zen Talk on Loss and Practice

A Sunday dharma talk at Providence Zen Center in Rhode Island was supposed to be about art. That was the plan, at least. Chris, a dharma teacher who was born and raised in Lincoln, Rhode Island, and who now sits on the center's board of trustees, had prepared something lofty on art and the Diamond Sutra. Then the material changed on him. What he gave the room instead was an account of a motorcycle accident, a hospital bed, and a Zen community that responded to one chanting request from people who had never met the man lying in that bed. The session, which also included Zoom participants, was introduced alongside Kwan Haeng Sunim, abbot and co-guiding teacher at the center, who took questions afterward. Read closely, the talk is a study in what practice looks like when it stops being an idea and becomes a hand you hold in a room full of machines.

What happens when a planned dharma talk turns personal?

Chris opened by admitting that the talk he had first imagined was the kind he calls fancy schmancy, the high-flown sort about art and sutra. Then his situation changed, and so did the talk. He chose to speak about something closer to everyday life, and he framed it with a preface that matters for everything that follows. As a child, he said, he did not have much of a father figure. His mother worked a lot. At about eight years old he met his best friend, David, and went to David's house, where David's father simply invited him in, fed him, and asked whether he wanted to stay over.

That small gesture is the spine of the talk. A dharma talk in a Zen center is often built around a text, a koan, or a question about the mind. Here the teaching arrives through a household: a boy who felt he belonged somewhere for the first time, and an adult who made that room possible. Zen teachers have long pointed out that practice is not only something done on a cushion. Chris's talk makes that point without citing it. The cushion, in this telling, is the kitchen table of a friend's family.

Who was Uncle Bob, and why does his story carry the teaching?

The friendship with David deepened until the two boys started calling each other cousin. David's father became Uncle Bob. Chris describes walking into the house without knocking, a kind of full Kramer entrance, and being treated as family. Uncle Bob, he said, was a man who helped his family, cared about the people he loved, and was always generous. He was not perfect. He had his hang-ups and his vices, as everyone does, but he had been helpful to Chris throughout his life, and Chris said plainly that he owed him a great deal.

The circle widened. There was Uncle David, not to be confused with cousin David, and Aunt Lynn, and others who helped shape Chris's life. Chris identifies Uncle David as his first teacher, the person who brought him to this practice. That detail is easy to pass over, but it is the point. Lineage in a Zen community is usually described in terms of transmission from one teacher to another. Chris is describing a different kind of lineage, one passed through friends, relatives, and the ordinary generosity of people who take you in.

What happened in the hospital, and how did Chris respond?

The accident came while Chris was finishing his student teaching, in March. Bob hit his head when his motorcycle went over and he slid. Chris recalls a late-night call from Bob's daughter, Sarah, who was crying and struggling to get the words out. He was shocked, he says, and then immediately went into organizing mode, calling the family and trying to get everyone together. He admits that this is simply his habit, and the room laughed at his self-awareness.

When he reached the hospital a few days later, he met Bob's wife, Sandra. He was trying to steady himself and bring good energy into the room. But Bob was completely unconscious. Chris described the injuries plainly: a traumatic brain injury to the front and back of the head, a fractured part of the skull, a spinal fracture, and a broken tibia. Earlier, Chris noted, someone had resuscitated Bob after he went down, and the family was lucky that someone was there. The talk does not resolve how Bob's recovery unfolded; the portion of the recording available for this article ends with the family still in the middle of it, and the account should be read as a report from inside that uncertainty.

What does chanting for someone who cannot respond actually do?

Chris explained his approach to chanting for the newer people in the room. Chanting, he said, is a practice we do to harmonize with ourselves and with others, and it also puts a positive energy into the world that can help people. That is the frame he used at Bob's bedside. He held his uncle's hand and chanted. There was no response. Bob was conscious in a clinical sense, and the situation was stable but not good, and Chris kept chanting, sometimes calling out the words in fragments that the room could only partly catch.

It is worth lingering on what this practice demanded of him. Chanting over an unresponsive body is a discipline that asks the chanter to give up the sense of control. Chris had spent the earlier part of the talk describing himself as someone who organizes everything. At the bedside, the only thing left to organize was his own attention. That is a shift many students of meditation will recognize: the practice stops being about getting a result and becomes about being present in the one hand you can hold.

How did a sangha respond to one request?

The next day, Chris reached out to the wider sangha and asked people to chant for Bob. The responses came quickly and in numbers he did not expect. He received emails from people who did not know Bob at all, people who had heard his name because Chris talked about him often, and people who simply sent a kind of energy that felt, in his words, like it was for you. He said the sangha really took care of the situation.

That is the part of the story that makes the talk more than a personal confession. A request for prayer that goes out to a community can become a practice with many hands. The people who chanted did not need to know Bob to do it. They needed to know that someone in their community was in trouble, and that the chanting was a way to show up. The talk leaves that idea standing without decoration.

Chris also drew on his uncle's own faith. He described Bob as a devout Catholic, and he recounted conversations in which they talked about what he calls true nature, an idea he connected to the common ground across traditions. He spoke about people of different countries, religions, and backgrounds, and suggested that all of us share the same basic human experiences of desire, mind, food, sex, and community. The recording is fragmented at these points, so the exact wording of his uncle's views is not reliable here. What comes through clearly is Chris's conviction that the faith of a Catholic uncle and the practice of a Zen student were not at odds at the bedside.

Who is Kwan Haeng Sunim, and what does his background bring to the room?

Kwan Haeng Sunim, per the event description, met Zen Master Seung Sahn at the Cambridge Zen Center in 1986. He ordained as a novice monk in 1998 at Chik Chi Sa in South Korea, according to that description, although the spoken introduction gave the year as 1999. In 2003 he received bhikku precepts at Tong Do Sa, also in South Korea. He has lived and practiced mainly at Hwa Gye Sa and Mu Sang Sa in Korea, where he served as housemaster, media director, and head monk. He received inka in December 2020, and he now teaches and practices at Providence Zen Center in Rhode Island, where he is abbot and co-guiding teacher.

Those credentials matter for a talk like this one. Inka is a formal recognition of a teacher's authorization in the Zen tradition, and bhikku precepts mark full monastic ordination. A student who has held roles as housemaster, media director, and head monk has seen a monastery from the inside, including its logistics and its daily rhythms. When Chris's personal story arrived in the room, it landed with a teacher who knows how a community carries a crisis.

What does the Q&A add to the talk?

After Chris finished, the session opened to questions. Kwan Haeng Sunim and the room took questions in a way that stayed close to the lived experience Chris had described. One participant asked Chris a question about his background, referencing his own first introduction to Zen through a friend and his Catholic upbringing. The conversation tilted toward the same theme as the talk: what happens when different traditions meet inside one person's life, and how a community keeps a practice alive through an ordinary, unplanned crisis.

The session closed with announcements, including a one-day event scheduled for November 21st. The announcement details are not fully legible in the recording, so readers wanting specifics should check the center's own listings.

Where to go from here

• Watch the full recording to hear Chris tell the hospital story in his own voice, including the pauses and the laughter that the written account cannot carry.
• Look into the Seung Sahn lineage and the Cambridge Zen Center, the place where Kwan Haeng Sunim first met his teacher in 1986.
• Consider the question the talk raises: who in your own life gave you a seat at the table when you needed one, and whether you have ever said so to them.
• If you sit regularly, try chanting for someone who is struggling, with the intention Chris described: practice that harmonizes you with others and sends out a positive energy into the world.
• Check Providence Zen Center's own schedule for upcoming dharma talks and sangha events.