Zen - The Great Matter of Birth and Death

Zen is a way of looking at life and death in terms of the heart sutra. The old zen masters considered death an urgent matter, Urgent and unknowable. This possibly apocryphal story goes that a samurai asked the eighteenth century end master, hakin, where will you go after you die? Hakin, how am i supposed to know? He said he was a zen master but not a dead one.