I have always had a special love for the writing of Albert Camus, the French-Algerian Nobel Prize–winning author and philosopher. From an early age, I felt disturbed and confused by what appeared to be the inherent meaninglessness of life. I became preoccupied with the inevitability of my own death, the certainty of losing or being separated from everyone I ever loved, and the stark realization that there was nothing I could do about any of it. It seemed like my parents had played a bad joke on me—bringing me into this world. I felt gut punched when the full scope of life’s apparent futility dawned on me. But most of all, I felt completely alone with it. Like someone had put me on a cosmic spinning wheel, then pushed me off and left me to tumble into a cold, dark universe. 

A few years later, I would encounter the writing of Albert Camus, and it would be nothing short of an epiphany: I was not alone. His debut novel, The Stranger, explored a seemingly senseless world; his book The Plague took on the inevitability of human suffering; and the most dearly tender and gentle of Camus’s oeuvre, his last unfinished autobiographical novel, The First Man, laid out his own very personal quest for identity and meaning in a world marked by colonialism and poverty. Camus, often labeled as an “absurdist,” a label he himself regretted, was deeply interested in the conflict between our human desire for meaning and the world’s perceived lack thereof. In reading Camus, I felt understood in my own confusion and existential angst. Like no one else, Camus allowed me to see through the eyes of his characters and experience my angst through them—thereby experiencing a community, a form of human union. Camus didn’t necessarily offer solace—I wasn’t sure there was any—but what he did offer was companionship.  

My own angst, despair, and confusion ultimately led me to discover Zen, and despite holding Camus’s writing dearly, it had been a while since I had endeavored to dive back into his work. That is, until recently. While I had known about his nonfiction essay The Myth of Sisyphus—often considered the central expression of his philosophy of the absurd—I had never actually read it. Perhaps it was the companionship that I found and cherished about his novels that made me shy away from his philosophical treatise, which I had written off with preconceived notions that no philosophy could possibly provide answers to these existentialist dilemmas his novels illustrated so well. So it was with some surprise and even a bit of wonder, when recently stumbling over that very essay in a literary magazine, how clearly I could see core tenets of Zen practice expressed there within. It felt like coming full circle; it felt like coming home.

Sisyphus, we are told, was the first king of Corinth and was known for his trickery. He was ultimately punished by the Greek gods for cheating death (if you can believe it…), and, as a result, they condemned him to ceaselessly rolling a rock up to the top of a mountain, at which point the rock would immediately fall back to the bottom. This process would then repeat, ad nauseam, for eternity. “They had thought with some reason,” Camus writes, “that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.” Sisyphus’s story is our story. The story of our life and the human condition. And just like a Zen koan, it confronts us with the deep delusions of our mind and invites us to break open to a deeper reality. “Of course,” we might think, “this is a terrible punishment.” Sisyphus’s task seems meaningless, devoid of purpose, ultimately repetitive, and boring. There is no achievement or progress and nothing to gain. All the things our mind is so fixated on—gone. And to make matters worse, the gods condemned Sisyphus to his task for all of eternity. Our mind cannot even find solace in the idea that eventually it will be over.

Our habitual mind (newsflash!) has a deeply ingrained tendency to seek happiness outside ourselves. Salvation, it believes, comes from things happening to us on the outside: experiences we have, progress we make, things we gain. Take those away and happiness seems unachievable. That is why Sisyphus’s story is such a perfect mirror for the way our mind creates our world. Camus concludes his essay with the following lines: 

“One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the Gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain in itself forms a world. The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Let’s replace the Gods in the story with our thinking mind. The mind that craves approval, progress, possessions, has a million preferences and aversions, and seems to generally be in charge of most of our lives, just as the ancient Greeks imagined their Gods. If we replace Sisyphus in this metaphor with ourselves, it becomes clear that the one that is punishing us is our very own mind. So what does Sisyphus do? He negates the Gods. Is that not what we learn to do in Zen practice? We don’t negate our thinking minds (after all, thoughts are just thoughts) but we negate their godship. We commit to seeing beyond the world of thought. By focusing on the breath, the present moment reality of our belly moving in and out, we allow thoughts to arise and dissipate without clinging to them. We start to look at what is, without the attachment to our thoughts. And just like the wizard in The Wizard of Oz, who turns out to be none other than an ordinary small man, the God-likeness of our thoughts seems to crumble. Our mind may be telling us “this is futile, boring” or simply “I don’t like this,” but we pay this no attention. In Zen practice, we gradually wake up to a reality that is not mediated by our thoughts, where we no longer buy into the narratives our minds create. And how do we do that? By raising the rocks, as Camus writes. By focusing on what it is that is right in front of us: this breath, this step, this task. 

So what happens when we learn to live a life beyond the tyranny of our thinking minds? That thinking mind, that posits happiness as existing on the outside, utterly dependent on what we can gain, achieve, and create in our lifetime? “This universe henceforth without a master,” Camus writes, the master here being none other than our thinking mind, “seems to him neither sterile nor futile.” You may have even had that experience during or after a meditation session: your mind quiets down, and all of a sudden you seem to be able to experience the “same old” environment with completely fresh eyes, as if you saw it for the very first time (you indeed do—as you are seeing without the filter of your thinking mind), and it is more rich, full, and alive than ever before. “Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain in itself forms a world.” This is the reality we can start to experience in Zen practice: namely, that whatever we thought of as a struggle, dull, or meaningless a moment ago, when we wake up to the physical reality of it, “each atom of that stone” is a world in itself. Vast and boundless. “The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.” 

It is not what our mind falsely believes—the outcome, the impact, the thing—that makes us happy. It is the moment-to-moment lived reality of being alive. Our intention and attention focused on the actual “raising of the rock.” This “raising of the rock” is what we practice in zazen: moving our attention from the wandering mind that deals in dualities (meaning, no meaning) to the present moment reality experienced in the body. “Returning” again and again, to the ever new present moment, like coming home again.

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The Buddha taught mindfulness of death teachings in many different discourses. Today we will discuss the Maranasati Sutta (Anguttara Nikaya 6.19). Maranasati means death awareness—marana (death) and sati (awareness or mindfulness). At the beginning of the Maranasati Sutta, the Buddha is said to address the monks, or practitioners (we’re all practitioners), thus: 

When mindfulness of death is developed and cultivated, it’s beneficial. It culminates in the deathless, and ends with the deathless—but how does one develop mindfulness of death?

I’d like to go over these benefits before talking about the specific instructions he gave the monks. 

The Benefits of Practicing Mindfulness of Death

Many of us in the West might be afraid of death—we don’t want to think about it, we don’t want to talk about it—and yet, bringing death into our awareness has many benefits—benefits for ourselves and our loved ones, benefits in how we live, and benefits for how we die. This practice prepares us to have a sense of peace, not being scared and fearful, when the moment of death arises.

The moment of death is said to be a liberating moment. So doing this practice is supreme training for that important moment of transitioning. However, this practice isn’t just for the potential of liberation. It impacts the way we live and how we show up for ourselves and others—loved ones, people we don’t know, and people we have challenges with. 

Living according to our values is one of the many benefits of this practice. When we know that our time in this body and in this life is finite—when we fully embrace finitude—we don’t waste time. When the scarcity of our time comes into the forefront of our consciousness, we tend not to do the unskillful actions that cause harm. When we “greet and hold death as an advisor on our shoulder all the time,” as Carlos Castaneda said, the way we live our life changes. 

We live with more freedom, peace, ease, love, and care because we know there is nothing to hang on to. We are a traveler on this earth. This body is not mine. It’s for rent. This life is for rent. 

When we realize this, we live differently, we live more freely. We let go of our clinging, our sense of attachment to me, me, me, mine, mine, mine. It shifts our perspective. We can live with more freedom, generosity, kindness, and forgiveness. There is nothing to take with us. There’s nothing to hang on to. So this practice is liberating, just as the Buddha says, and it has the deathless as its fruit. 

What does the deathless mean?

The deathless refers to nibbana (nirvana). The deathless is another translation for nibbana, freedom, liberation, awakening. So mindfulness of death practice is a liberating practice. It leads to freedom in the way we live and in the moment that we die—the ultimate letting go. 

Summarizing the Sutta

So with that as the preamble, let’s continue with the Maranasati Sutta. 

So then, as I read, the Buddha asked the monks:

Do you develop mindfulness of death? How do you develop mindfulness of death, knowing how important it is? 

One monk raises their hand and says:

Oh, yes, I develop mindfulness of death. If I’d only live for another day and night, I’d focus on the Buddha’s instructions and I could really achieve a lot. That’s how I develop mindfulness of death. 

And then another monk raises their hand and says:

Me too, me too! I practice mindfulness of death. If I’d only live for a day, then I’d focus on Buddha’s instructions. 

Another one raises their hand and says:

Me too, me too! I practice as if I’d only live as long as it takes to eat a meal of alms food.

And then the fourth one raises their hand and says: 

Oh, Buddha, Buddha, I practice, thinking if I lived only as long as it takes to chew and swallow four or five morsels of food. 

A fifth one raises their hand and says: 

Actually, the way I practice is, if only I lived as long as it takes to chew and swallow one morsel of food.

And then the last one, the sixth one in the story, raises their hand and says:

Buddha, the way I practice is, I might live only long enough to breathe out, after breathing in, or breathe in, after breathing out. That’s how I practice mindfulness of death.

And then the Buddha says:

Okay practitioners, those of you who said, “I think I’m going to live another day or night and I have time,” or said, “I may live another day,” or said, “I may live to eat another meal,” or said, “I may live to eat three or four morsels of food,” all of you are living heedlessly. All of you are living heedlessly. 

Those of you who are practicing while thinking, “I might only live long enough to chew this bite of food,” or “I might only live long enough to eat this bite of food,” or “I might only live long enough for the duration of this in-breath or the duration of this out-breath, that I might die after this in-breath or after this out-breath”—you are practicing heedfully. 

So as practitioners, how do we heedfully practice the instructions of the Buddha? The invitation is not to think, Oh I’ll have time, I have another year, or another month, or another week. 

Heedlessly was considered thinking I have another day, another few bites of food. The Buddha is inviting us to consider that we could die in this moment, at the end of this in-breath or this out-breath, at the end of this bite of food, right here, right now. The Buddha is inviting us to bring death intimately into each breath. 

The Practice of Mindfulness of Death

So with this, I would like to lead a guided meditation for us to practice with these instructions. I would like to invite you to close your eyes, if that’s comfortable for you. To feel yourself sitting or lying down, whatever posture is comfortable for you. Feel yourself having a sense of integrity, a sense of uprightness, letting the body be relaxed while rooted to this earth, to your sit bones, to your feet. Feeling your hands and yet the sense of uprightness, dignity. 

Let us begin by bringing our awareness, our attention, into this body. This long fathom body, breathing in this moment. Feeling the breath where it’s comfortable for you, or in your abdomen, sensing the life force moving through.

This body is alive in this moment and breathing. Let’s connect with the sense of aliveness in this body. Breathing, pulsating, this amazing piece of nature. Through this in-breath, through this out-breath.

After we connect with the living, pulsating, alive nature of this body, let us connect to the fact that this body too shall die. This body is nature. It’s not a mistake. It’s not an aberration. It’s not a problem. Death is a part of life. Everything that is born also dies, and this body too.

Letting the awareness connect with the in-breath, with the out-breath. Settling, calming, and appreciating that death is so close. It’s always close. I might only live as long as it takes to breathe in, that’s all. Or I might live as long as it takes to breathe out after breathing in.

Death is so close and intimate. Can we bring it close and intimate, like a friend who advises us, on how to live, how to practice, how to be in this moment attending to the Buddha’s teachings on love, compassion, letting go, and generosity. 

What if I only have the length of this in-breath to live? The length of this out-breath to live? Can we open our hearts to relax and embrace this liberating truth of impermanence? 

For some of us, this practice can bring up a sense of agitation. It’s okay. You’re not doing it wrong. If agitation arises, let yourself relax with the out-breath. Connect with the sensations in the body in a spacious way, making space for the agitation or the fear that may have arisen. It’s not a mistake. As we allow ourselves to make space and be with what is difficult, arising in this moment. As expand our capacity for peace. To be with what is challenging, we extend our capacity and we cultivate fearlessness, another synonym for nibbana.

So as you do this practice on your own, bring in this contemplation: Death is so close, I might only live as long as it takes to breathe this in-breath or out-breath. 

At the end of this morsel of food, how do you want to live? How do you want to show up? How do you want to cultivate your heart and mind in this short flash that is our life? 

Remember that this practice of mindfulness of mortality is a liberating practice. It ends in the deathless. In nibbana, in freedom, awakening.

The post Death Is a Part of Life appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

That cold, gray afternoon in Nashville, after months of listening to the whir of the oxygen machine that provided continual relief to my mother, a vacuum of silence filled her bedroom. Even though I had known she would die soon, when I stood at the threshold of life and death, I felt like one wrong move would send us off into an abyss of despair. Indeed, the last several months had been one long fear of wrong moves: too much morphine or not enough, too much talking or not enough, not enough water or too much. But this time no hospice nurse or doctor could advise.

Suddenly all the palliatives that had been the source of comfort seemed harshly out of place. Hands shaking in disbelief, I cleared the bedside table of the vials of aquamarine liquid morphine, the anti-nausea salve that was applied behind the ear, and the pink star-shaped sponges for removing sticky mucus from the tongue. Then the ultimacy of the moment crashed upon me. How do I assure her safe passage through this perilous transition?

Kito Sensei had said to call her. The elderly Zen nun had helped my mother and me over the last nine years, freely applying her healing balm of compassion. Thank goodness it was the middle of the night in Japan. Although she devotes long days to ministering to others, at 3:45 a.m. she would be at her old wooden temple where she nurtures the Bodhi tree seeds she brought back from India. The cordless phone in my hand was a lifeline. I knew in my head that Zen rituals recognize the deceased as a buddha, but it was Kito Sensei, in her unheated worship hall ten thousand miles away, who guided me through those terrifying, disorienting moments.

Trusting her to know what to do, I followed her instructions on performing the ritual of safely sending off a person on their journey of death. Rushing about, frantic to treat our new buddha properly, I found the bronze plum-blossom incense burner, sandalwood incense sticks reserved for reverencing buddhas, white candle, and plain carved-wood figure of Kannon, the goddess of compassion, adding some white chrysanthemums I had kept on hand sensing they would soon be needed. The bedside table was transformed into a mortuary altar. It had not been more than ten minutes since my mother breathed her last. As I offered a stick of incense in honor of her, I saw that her face had relaxed into the peaceful smile that I have seen so often in images of buddhas. Our relationship was transforming before my very eyes. “Are you my mother?”

When I placed the incense into the burner, I became one with all who had done so before. In the moment that had threatened to be the loneliest in my life, I experienced instead a profound connection with all grievers from the distant past and deep future. I was not alone. I was held by everyone who has lost a loved one. Kito Sensei had guided us safely through this critical transition with a wisdom that transcended barriers of space, time, life, and death. At that moment my understanding of ritual’s power to heal became a visceral reality.

***

Immersions into the heart of grief are the raw moments in which healing activities thrive. Healing mobilizes our deepest despair and highest values. Healing occurs in the space where fear and love meet.

In the moment that had threatened to be the loneliest in my life, I experienced instead a profound connection with all grievers from the distant past and deep future.

Grieving consumes immense energy. It moves through varied rhythms and appears in sundry emotional shades, from despair to grace. Grief does not follow a straight path—instead, it circles back, lies dormant, bursts out unexpectedly. It holds you down, stirs up old wounds, breaks through walls of anger, and releases anguish. Though grief is undulating and ever-shifting, grievers share in the painful reality of losing something or someone. All losses demand adjustment. Whether the loss is of a job, mobility, confidence, health, a home, or a person who has died, grieving is about transformation. It revolves around integration and deepening acceptance. All seasons of grief involve changes and choices. Some seasons are intense and cacophonous, others subtle and quiet. Grief never completely ends, though it usually relinquishes its tight grip on you as you forge new ways to interact with the present.

When caring for someone in grief, including yourself, open the senses of your heart. Notice how the light that streams in from the cosmos shines through your eyes, warms your voice, and glows through your movements. Observe how muscles and bones provide structural support, however minimal or robust. Breathe in gratitude before talking. Breathe out lovingkindness while listening. Breathe in the beauty of the web of interconnections. Breathe out peaceful joy. Grieve one breath at a time.

***

There is an ancient Japanese Buddhist death ritual that encodes profound healing wisdom in the way it lovingly guides you in your passage into death, echoing the passage of birth. While you were in the womb, an umbilical cord provided nourishment from your mother’s body, which in turn was nourished by her mother, who was in turn nourished by her mother, and so on. The umbilical cord tethered you to millions of years’ worth of organic growth and decay, and to the source of life. You were not alone in the womb.

Death, however, can be a lonely passage, for the radical change unmoors you from the familiar. The Japanese dying ritual begins with placing ribbons in the hands of the person lying on their deathbed. The other ends of the ribbons are secured to an image of Amida Buddha, “the Buddha of Infinite Light and Life.” The ritual enacts the teaching that Amida is to usher you to rebirth in the Pure Land, a womb that offers all you need to attain enlightenment. The ribbons function like an umbilical cord, a conduit to the source of infinite life.

Though I can only surmise the comfort a person feels while dying in this ritualized way, I have already prepared some ribbons and left instructions with my son to place by my deathbed the Goddess of Compassion we got when he was an adolescent. Of course, the conditions of my death are not known, but even just having a vision of how the transition might be ritualized provides some solace. My son, too, will not have to wonder what to do when the time comes. It’s not that I believe I will be reborn in a Pure Land, but I already know that tangibly doing something to remind myself that I am not alone increases the odds of a more peaceful crossing. I will be encouraged to remember that I am supported by a vast network of interdependent activity. An Amida Buddha or Kannon would not make cultural sense for everyone, but it is easy to imagine that someone’s ribbons could be tied to a rock gathered on a favorite hike, an abalone shell, a tree out the window, a statue of the Virgin Mary or Jesus, a sacred text, a hawk feather, or anything imbued with meaning for them.

***

To witness a loved one crossing the threshold of life is momentous. It often catapults a person into a piercing season of grief. Each person grieves in a way that expresses their unique relationship with the deceased and the conditions of their life. As the waves of grief tumble in, sometimes knocking one off balance, many find that having a place to sit still with a picture, a lock of hair, or an item they held precious can help them face the radical transformation. A home altar can be such a designated place where those grieving can integrate loss into the rhythms of daily life. Saying good morning, good night, or anything that needs expression—anger and/or gratitude, asking for and/or offering forgiveness—to the deceased is not necessarily attachment or delusion. It can be done as an act of love.

A home altar can also help the grieving foster a relationship between a child and elders with whom they may never have lived—a conduit to receive their wisdom, support, and love. In this way, the deceased can provide a buffer to challenges and amplify joys. Or in the case of someone who lives alone—perhaps having lost family members through death or dysfunction—meaningful rituals of interaction at a home altar can dramatically reduce loneliness and depression. I once met a woman named Honda-san when I was on a pilgrimage in Japan, and she told me that she calls out “Tadaima, I’m home” each time she returns to her place. Though she feels the support that comes with engaging in home altar rituals for her parents, she holds that “the real memorial ritual is to live well,” and she often asks herself, “Are you living in a way that it is OK to die any time?”

A mourning heart is tender. When we’re in a mode of heightened sensitivity, even subtle things can be vividly sensed, whether painful or pleasant. Gently opening the senses of the mourning heart can present beauty to our wounds. Your heart can start seeing the seeds planted by those who have passed on, continuing their vital energy in new ways. If you listen carefully, the music they made with their life echoes in the wind and wafts on the waves of a bird’s song. In the autumn you can share the taste of harvest bounties; in summer, sweet berries. A porous heart can smell the fragrance of their life qualities lingering. Sensing how death is woven into the fabric of life can ease facing your own demise. Upon death, all of us will transform in ways that offer supportive energy. Grief helps your bones feel the deeper beauty that undergirds life.

Tears rain on the parched heart, quietly preparing it to stir with fresh life. The fog that leaves you lost and struggling to feel meaning and purpose seeps into the shredded fabric of life, delicately mending the threads. Eventually we may find a newly embroidered tapestry, stronger in precisely the places that had frayed. As loss is integrated into a different season of life, it transforms into nourishment that feeds the heart from deeper sources of wisdom and understanding. Grief is a catalyst for healing. Healing grief carves the landscape of your heart in ways that open up deeper pathways of connection to others.

⧫

From The Little Book of Zen Healing: Japanese Rituals for Beauty, Harmony, and Love © 2023 by Paula Arai. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO.

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Pus, boogers, peepee, poopoo. Would you believe that there is a meditation practice based on contemplating these items? It isn’t for two-year-olds, it’s for adults. And it is intended to lead to peace of mind, not agitation, amusement and disgust. It’s one of the classic meditation practices of the Theravada tradition, an orderly contemplation of the thirty-two parts of the body, starting with hair of the head and ending with urine.

If this sounds gruesome, consider that life is gruesome: no one survives. Our opinions and beliefs about life and death won’t offer us any special privileges. Worse yet, it’s the nature of all bodies not only to die, but to rot, crumble, shiver, itch, and to display various forms of ugliness. Yet the extra pain that all of us give ourselves over this entire situation seems, on reflection, unnecessary.

Buddhism offers a number of practices designed specifically to cut through our delusions about the body—charnel ground meditations, contemplations of death and loathsomeness. They are meant to undermine our normal relationship with our bodies. They ease the moment of death, and the moments before death. They don’t aim to ruin our happiness; instead, they expand the scope of love. If taken to heart, they exhaust the source of our greatest terrors.

The sheer volume of thoughts we devote to the body is dismaying. If we look closely at our moment-to-moment experiences, our thoughts, our wishes and feelings, we will see that we constantly strain for more pleasure and beauty. We feel that we should be immersed in a constant orgasm of satisfaction and attractiveness.

Meanwhile, our elderly and uncompromising tradition asks us to recognize the pain involved in carting our body around; to look directly at what goes into keeping the body together. As long as we’re healthy adults, we ignore it as much as we can, denying the amount of work it takes to keep it clean, fed and exercised; submitting without a second thought to the pressures to create for ourselves a super-bionic, pleasure-giving, pleasure-attracting, never-sick body. Then we’re trying to lift a heavy box and suddenly—Spang!— there’s a muscle spasm in the lower back and we fall to the floor wondering if we’ll ever walk again. Or, trying on jeans, in the ugly light of the changing room, we see ten pounds of clabber hanging off the backs of our thighs. Or, sitting in the car, waiting for a train to go by, suddenly a black amoeba crosses the lower corner of one eye. As the sky goes dark, a shaft of the pure terror of death bolts us to the driver’s seat.

And that dauntless, unstoppable little commentator that lies inside us utters a peep of shock. This fear that is so overwhelming: where was it stored? Up to a second ago we thought we knew all the cozy rooms of our body’s mansion; now we suddenly find ourselves alone and frightened, as if we were stranded on a high crag in a thunderstorm. Indeed, we may be passing into the dreaded kingdom of the ill, where we are no longer the persons we wanted to be, no longer able to become what we wanted to become, do what we wanted to do. We will be ruled by unwanted problems: pain and exhaustion, obsession and fear. We may feel that we have failed—failed to eat properly, failed to be tranquil enough—as if a life properly lived would never end.

The source of our terror is attachment: the feeling that our bodies are the most precious possessions we have. It is within this attachment and all of its associated assumptions that we live most unquestioningly. The body: what is it really? Do we actually possess it? Is it really precious and beautiful?

The good news is that even the bodies of Arnold Schwarzenneger and Cindy Crawford are transitory. Besides, they require eight hour workouts on top of genetic endowment. After meditating even a little on the thirty-two parts of the body, we have a different feeling about seeing Cindy Crawford’s bone structure—we see bones, not a cultural value.

In contemplations of the loathsome, we are asked to examine carefully all parts of the body, their actual qualities, and to ask ourselves whether we should value it the way we do. What is a human face? It is a piece of skin full of holes, “like an insect’s nest,” the Visuddhimagga says. The brain “… is the lumps of marrow bound inside the skull. [I]t is the colour of the flesh of a toadstool; …the colour of turned milk…” All of the body parts are visualized specifically, in detail. The twenty nail plates. The skeleton, with many bones. Imagine, as you walk along, the movements of your tiny toe bones inside your shoes; take a few minutes to remember the skull behind every face.

Do you feel horror, or a kind of relieved and interested recognition, or both? If it’s horror, is it to the same degree as your denial?

It’s crucial to the success of foulness practices not to get sidetracked by psychological defense systems. Remember that the small mind pursues an ostrich strategy, as if not thinking about bad things would cause them to disappear. Death and decay are the worst things, so all resources will be deployed to forget about them. One defense can be humor. You might feel highly amused by the solemnity of the creepy language in the classic meditation texts, imagining them being read in the voice of Lon Chaney. “Just as duckweed and green scum on the surface of the water divided when a stick . . . is dropped into the water and then spread together again, so too, at the time of eating and drinking, etc., when the food, drink, etc. fall into the stomach, the phlegm divides and then spreads together again . . .” (Visuddhimagga, Nanamoli, p. 280). UUUGGHH!!! you say. Those guys could really dish it out!!!

The mind defends itself, too, by fascination and curiosity. A friend who went to the morgue in Bangkok reported that she could feel her mind developing a sense of fascination to cover up her fear. Eventually, however, nausea overtook her and she tried to escape through the back door—only to find a courtyard full of rotting body parts and pools of blood swarming with flies.

Yet another defense can be pride in what we see as our spiritual progress through contemplating the repulsive. During one three-month course at the Insight Meditation Society, yogis were passing around photographs of three corpses. “Wow,” we said, peering at the bloated face of a young woman who had drowned. It was kind of scary, kind of fun, like a game at a slumber party. Most of all, we felt we had in our hands a special means to meditational success—not an image of what we would surely, one day, become.

It’s easy to dismiss and denigrate these loathsomeness practices. With yet one more line of defense we protest: Why not deny the truth as long as we can? Why dwell on the horrible side of life when, after all, we can put the same amount of energy into distracting ourselves and pursuing pleasure? Do we want to become inhuman beings who don’t care whether we live or die?

But we might just as well ask if the result of loathsomeness practice might be a profound and subtle, wild, and fearless joy. Perhaps, through this practice, we will come to really love life without holding back from any part of it, including the infirmities and decay of sickness and old age. Perhaps we will even be able to develop a mind that laughs at death. Why not begin to free ourselves from attachment to the body, which is disappearing anyway? We don’t have to be so bound by these meat puppets that we drag around.

⧫

The title of this article was inspired by the band Meat Puppets.

From the Fall 1994 issue of Inquiring Mind (Vol. 11, No. 1) Text © 1994-2020 by Kate Lila Wheeler and Inquiring Mind

Related Inquiring Mind articles:

https://inquiringmind.com/article/2501_6_rand/

https://inquiringmind.com/article/2501_w_sumedho-its-like-this/

https://inquiringmind.com/article/2801_41_stahl/

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My friend Michael died in late January at the age of 39. Two weeks prior, he and his partner Addie came to Buddhist practice for the first time at our temple in Malvern, UK. He had four months between his cancer diagnosis and his death. In the shadow of his shortened life, I have been asking myself what it means to live a good life. Is it necessary for us to have a spiritual practice or a spiritual dimension to our lives in order to live well? As a Pure Land Buddhist, I have also been wondering if Michael, having said the name of Amitabha Buddha during his single time at the temple, is now in Amitabha’s Pure Land. I will explore these questions by telling you about three moments in our brief friendship that I will never forget. 

In the first moment, both of us were fully alive. I first met Michael through our local Extinction Rebellion (XR) group, and on that day we were taking part in an action in London. At 7 a.m., sixty people from XR shut down the Lloyd’s of London building. This financial institution insures 40 percent of the world’s energy, including some of the world’s most environmentally destructive fossil fuel projects such as tar sands pipelines and new oil and gas exploration. Somehow, Michael and Addie had managed to climb up the outside of a spiral silver staircase and installed themselves in one of the curved landings. They were maybe fifteen floors up. Once there, they unfurled their huge blue banner, “End Fossil Fuels Now”, to the cheers of all of us below. Michael climbed up and down the outside of the building five times, without a safety clip, to get the banner perfectly straight. It was seen by thousands of office workers that day. 

That afternoon, as the protest came to an end, they both began shimmying down the exterior roof of the stairwell—much more difficult than climbing up had been. I was there to meet them at the bottom as they made their final jump down. They were covered in black dirt and brimming with adrenaline. They were afraid that police were waiting to ambush and bundle them into a police van, so we walked as fast as we could away from the scene. I held their hands as we walked, and the energy surged and shook through Michael’s hand and into mine. 

I had such profound gratitude for them both in that moment. They had done this dangerous thing because they loved our planet fiercely and because they were frightened (as I was) about the climate emergency. They could see that the traditional ways of affecting change weren’t working anywhere near quickly enough. They saw the need for non-violent civil disobedience, as it has been necessary and effective many times in the past. From where I was looking, what they did that day was a brave and selfless act. It was the act of bodhisattvas.   

The second moment was a gift for me. It was a few hours after the most frightening activism that I had ever carried out, “Rebellion of One”. Alongside other XR rebels around the UK, I had designed and painted a placard that read: “I’m terrified starving people will resort to violence because of the climate crisis”. At a pre-appointed time and with a nod to my hidden support team, I walked slowly onto a busy city center road, my heart banging, and sat down. After half an hour of drivers shouting abuse at me and my rather unpleasant arrest, the policeman on the desk at the station took my details for the charge and then let me go straight home rather than putting me in a cell. When I walked out of the police station, Michael and another member of the group were there waiting for me. They had both volunteered for police station support—a vital role in actions that include arrests. Michael offered me a hug, and I received it gratefully. For the first time since the action began, I felt safe.

The third moment I’ll never forget was also a hug. It was at the end of our Buddhist practice a couple of weeks ago. We had practiced together in our shrine room—sitting in silence, chanting, reciting the refuges and precepts. We sat around the dining room table and drank tea. After a while, Addie and Michael answered my question of “How are you both?” by exchanging looks and then, with the babble of other voices surrounding us, Michael told me that he didn’t have long left. Before they went home, I gave them both a hug. When I hugged Michael I was too close to his bones. As we lingered for a moment, I felt like he was saying, “It is true: I am dying.” I hoped that he heard from my hug, “I know, and you are loved.”

The great sage Shinran, founder of the Jodo Shinshu school of Buddhism, taught that if people were to say the name of Amitabha Buddha even once they would be taken to the Pure Land when they died. There they would be provided with the perfect conditions for enlightenment, and then they could return to this world of suffering and work toward the liberation of all beings. What would this have meant to Michael, who recited the Buddha’s name alongside us in the shrine room but who (as far as I know) wasn’t aware of Amitabha’s vow? Did the small amount of practice he did that night bring him any comfort? If he’d had longer at the temple, would it have helped him? Did his saying of the nembutsu make any difference to what happened to him after his death? 

I can’t answer those questions. What I do know is that, whether or not he had a formal spiritual practice, he was deeply connected to the Earth and he was inspired by her to take selfless action. What is spirituality for, if not to connect us to things that aren’t ourselves and inspire us to compassionate acts? I’m sure that, like all of us, he was burdened with karma and limited in various ways by his particular wounding. The Buddha will have seen that and understood. 

Whether or not Michael knew it, the Buddha accepted and loved him just as he was. I witnessed only a tiny fragment of what Michael did and how he lived. From what I saw, I can say with confidence that Michael was a good man who lived a good life. I trust that the good from his compassionate actions will continue to ripple out. 

I was happy to receive Michael and Addie into the temple. Their coming here in the first place was a kind of nembutsu in itself—a calling out for something, an asking for grace. I trust that we can turn toward the light at any time and that the light takes many forms. I trust that when we ask for help from the Buddhas, we receive it. I trust that there is a great benign unfolding, even if I don’t understand it much of the time, and that we are all playing our parts. Michael played his part perfectly—with or without his prostrations to our golden Buddha two weeks before he died. He played it by being a kind boyfriend and a fierce activist. He played it by offering hugs to people who needed them. He played it by being himself. I bow to him, and to all the good he left behind. May he be at peace. 

In memory of Michael Dunn (3/19/1983–1/24/2023)

The post A Life Cut Short but Lived Well appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

As we approached the cadaver lab, I was filled with trepidation. The smell hit me first: an acrid odor of formaldehyde permeating everything it touched. It was so overpowering that even our toughest-looking classmate, covered head-to-toe in tattoos, got woozy and had to step outside. We were at a local community college, and my colleagues in a yearlong Buddhist chaplaincy training and I were about to come face-to-face with two corpses.

We were there to gain a deeper understanding of what it would be like, as chaplains, to be with death and dying, and to hone our own practice of death contemplation.

The truth is, I’d been quietly dreading this moment. In the year prior, one of my housemates had passed away suddenly due to complications from an autoimmune condition, leaving our household shocked and grieving. My mind often flashed back to the call with the hospital, and the nurse blurting out, “I hope you’re sitting down,” before they delivered the incomprehensible news. I couldn’t seem to let go of the memory of seeing my friend’s body in the ER devoid of the life I had witnessed just hours before, or the nagging question, “Is there anything I could have done?” After all that, what would it be like now to intentionally be with the dead?

If you had told me as I walked into the cadaver lab that this would be one of the most beautiful and life-affirming experiences I would ever have, I would never have believed it. But that morning, so much changed. In spending the day contemplating the bodies of the dead, I discovered a sense of wonder and amazement—and a deeper connection to my own impermanent and precious life.

Facing the truth of our own death can bring us back to life.

While death contemplation, or maranasati, is a pillar of Buddhist practice and a core element of the first foundation of mindfulness, this practice had typically left me feeling unsettled. More often than not, death contemplation yielded a sense of impending loss and grief, rather than the acceptance of impermanence one might hope to find. But here at the lab it was different. 

As I looked around the room, I saw something I definitely hadn’t expected: There were posters and cards created for the cadavers by students, celebrating and thanking them. The walls were plastered with messages of love and gratitude. There was a warmth and reverence here that was so different from my own experiences of death. This was the first of many surprises. 

As our day at the lab unfolded, we were taken to the body of a woman. While a student showed us the corpse’s organs, tenderly pointing out the liver, kidneys, ovaries, and so on, a sense of awe overcame me. It was nothing short of profound—not only to see the intricate and beautiful inner workings of a human body for the first time, but also to be surrounded on all sides by people I knew and trusted, all teeming with life, while we stood in amazement over this body. What had once been animate, alive, full of something mysterious and vital, no longer was. The contrast between us and her was astonishing.

Questions of life and the mystery of death swirled through my mind. Where does consciousness go once it leaves the body? What is the animating force, and how can it leave a person so completely? What dies? There was something in the stark difference between my living body and her deceased one that jolted me into a distinct state of awareness. 

Instead of grief or fear, I was filled with joy and an immense sense of love. The life force that had once filled this woman’s body and connected her to family, friends, purpose, and meaning felt miraculous. And so did the force that lived within me. All of that life ultimately had left her body, and one day it would leave mine too. What happened after that remained a mystery, but suddenly, not a scary one. It felt boundless and beautiful.

For the first time, death contemplation filled me not with the dukkha (suffering) of clinging to a life I could not fundamentally control or protect, but with the sense that I had been given a great and precious gift. To experience the mystery of life inside a body, right here, right now.

In the Satipatthana Sutta, the Buddha provides careful instructions on a cemetery contemplation practice in order to establish mindfulness of the body. He guides the monks to whom he is speaking on how to observe corpses in various states of decay, while contemplating the existence and impermanence of their own bodies. For a monk (“he” in the quote below) to accomplish this, the Buddha explains:

Furthermore, as if he were to see a corpse cast away in a charnel ground—one day, two days, three days dead—bloated, livid, and festering, he applies it to this very body. ‘This body, too: Such is its nature, such is its future, such its unavoidable fate’…

My body, too, will die. Depending on our context and history, this can be a terrifying reflection or an inspiring one. For me, the traumatic nature of death—the sense of instability and lack of safety it evoked—had until this moment eclipsed the possibility of awe. 

But under the right conditions, facing the truth of our own death can bring us back to life. We begin to feel life coursing through us and marvel at just how wild and mysterious that state of being actually is. 

Feeling my own life force in such stark contrast to the bodies I sat with, I found that death contemplation could not actually be separated from aliveness contemplation. In turn, I regained a sense of wonder from which peace could finally emerge. It was as if death and life were two aspects of a teacher, suddenly ready to whisper secrets into my ear.

When we learn to listen to this teacher, we start to see things differently. Myself, my housemate, and all beings are actually part of some great mystery that include both life and death. Yes, we may still cling desperately to our life, health, and all the things we so dearly love—that’s human. But all the while, this aliveness hums on in the background, beautiful and finite within our bodies. It becomes clear as we contemplate death that we can no longer take life for granted. We begin to remember, as the poet Rumi writes:

“People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.”

The post What a Visit to a Cadaver Lab Taught Me About Death Contemplation appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Funerals have always frightened me as grim and formidable events. They remind us of injustice and mortality, and they reveal the inevitability of death. Death is simultaneously so simple and so complicated, and while we cannot romanticize grief as a mere celebration of life, it’s a crucial time for our deepest expressions. Those of us who continue to live must take our time to send sacred spirits to their afterlife. For years, I treated grief as if it were an unimaginable taboo. I raced toward mythical sunny utopias where sadness does not exist. I tried to escape the grief that required me to facilitate many funerals in my head. I have spent so much time running away from my looming grief, sprinting toward a purely joyful existence with intrepid speed. When I looked back at the tiny speck of me, I saw with widened eyes my deep neglected grief and my flowing sadness: the only thing I distanced myself from was me.

The Western world is obsessed with binaries, splitting joy and sadness into enemies. Life and death are classified as direct opposites too. Human beings have long understood the ecstasies of happiness and the heaviness of sorrow. Joy never ceases to be beautiful, while grief never seems to get easier. Binaries create fragmentations and opposing forces, and do not regard joy, sadness, life, and death as intrinsic to the wholeness and balance of being. While sorrow and death are difficult and scary experiences, instead of being taught how to feel and navigate them, we fear them so much that we strive to completely avoid them. It is not surprising that in the Anthropocene, human beings are obsessed with inventing technologies to achieve immunity to both sadness and death.

In his debut novel On Earth, We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong wrote, “Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it.” If we befriend only what feels good, we alienate our hurt. When we are judged by others and ourselves for weeping about separation, heartbreak, trauma, tragedies, accidents, and death, we push vital parts of ourselves away. The binaries of good and evil categorize our difficult feelings as evil, and our happy feelings as good. When sorrow is seen with self-judgment, it can generate a great sense of fragmentation within. Suppressing our sadness can grow into a cruel cynicism, making us scared of our own feelings and doubtful of the fullness of life.

We are taught that grief is dysfunctional and unproductive and that it gets in the way of our work. Or we are encouraged to milk our grief and capitalize on our experiences, generating trauma porn for the masses to consume. Either way, we are dissociating from grief and isolating ourselves in the process. When I was presented with the urgency of my mourning [following the end of an abusive relationship], I did not know what to do with my feelings. Instead, I dedicated myself tirelessly to work, to production, to proving myself immune to suffering. Even though death is inevitable, and loss occurs every day, it seems that we are less equipped to deal with it than ever.

The Western world is obsessed with binaries, splitting joy and sadness into enemies.

When our grief is neglected and unfamiliar, we begin to isolate ourselves in confusion. We cannot see that there are whole and multidimensional beings around us who have experienced heartache, and we become ignorant to the fact that we can be supportive to one another during these painful times. In a world dominated by performances that encourage us to portray ourselves as our most joyful, we begin to assume that everyone is free of grief. Perhaps we just want to cry with one another without judgment, or weep by ourselves and know that we can process our grief with somebody we trust. What happens when I am no longer embarrassed of my grief, and I am surrounded by humans, plants, and animals who hold me while I cry?

Amid our tumultuous global circumstances, we are experiencing much collective premature and unnecessary loss. Ironically, we are losing so much because of greed. We are in collective mourning, and we need to acknowledge our grief without exploiting it. Right now, collective grief is just as important as collective joy. Grief is an ancestor who teaches us to exercise constant and immense gratitude. Funerals are opportunities for us to express unconditional love. There is much to learn from swimming in the deep shades of our grief, and we will emerge from it basking in the sun. If we cannot honor our endings, then how are we supposed to usher in new beginnings?

When I was a teenager, I attended my po po’s (grandmother’s) funeral in Hong Kong. It was a traditional Buddhist ceremony held in a temple, and my extended maternal family had all come to pay their respects. As part of the sacred ritual, we prayed and chanted for nine hours to usher my po po’s spirit to the afterlife. Several monks guided our chants while we were kneeling, standing still, or walking in circles. It was pivotal to chant out loud so that her spirit could hear us, and the louder and more repetitive we were, the better. We had to commit to the melodies of the chant so that our message of grievance was clear. Her spirit needed to hear our grief so she could travel safely.

I noticed that with repetition, the chants began to envelop my body. They allowed a vital energy to be released from my soul, an energy that had long been constricted in my chest. During the lengthy ceremony, some of us wept in between chants, some of us chanted loudly then softly, and some of us needed moments of silence. There was no judgment, no hushing, and there was always immense respect. It dawned on me while I was chanting that this was the first major death I had experienced. I realized that the purpose of chanting was not only to usher my grandmother peacefully into the afterlife, but also to release our grief into the ether. It gave us a safe space to express how much we missed her and loved her.

The next day, our family shared a meal together. I remember sitting at a round table opposite my gong gong, my po po’s husband, with at least fifteen of my relatives. We were sharing food and conversation and eating our favorite dim sum dishes. I looked up from my bowl and noticed that there were tears streaming down gong gong’s face. He did not say a word, but he also did not stop his tears from flowing. He just sat there eating, sitting with the foods that he’d shared so many times with his wife and his children, and cried. His tears did not make anybody at the table uncomfortable, and I do not think they made him uncomfortable either. After a while, I gave him a hug and began to cry as well. We did not say anything to each other and just allowed this moment to unfold. Our grief was connected as we held each other through it. I learned so much about grief that day.

How do we mourn the relationships that we have lost with people who are living? I have heard many friends describe breakups as a kind of death. X [my ex-partner, who was also my abuser] had not died, but our relationship was long deceased despite our toxic efforts to revive it. Our relationship had a soul of its own. 

Sometime after the rekindled relationship ended, I performed a long overdue funeral for the soul of our lost love. On small pieces of paper, I wrote every slur he had ever called me that was etched into my mind. This was an extremely painful practice, because I had to recall so many of the vulgarities that still lived within me. Each time I wrote something down, it felt like an extraction of poison. Looking at these slurs on paper allowed me to see that they were not inherent parts of me but lived outside of me. They were projections used to invoke fear in my spirit, and at the same time were reflections of the fear that lived in X’s heart. Twenty scattered pieces of paper surrounded me in a circle, and I read each of them out loud, burning them one by one. I cried as I read them, and I felt myself missing him too. This was a ritual of release. I watched them turn into ashes and realized that I was initiating a long overdue funeral service of my own. I allowed myself to weep as loudly as I needed to. I wept about the pain, the violence, the abuse, and for the first time in a long time, I wept for me.

Grief is an ancestor who teaches us to exercise constant and immense gratitude.

The funeral for our relationship helped me to express all my complicated emotions in an alleviating synthesis. In that moment, I no longer compartmentalized my feelings in binaries of good or bad. I stopped chasing utopias and allowed myself to steep in the depths of my grief. I let all the nuanced feelings that were held in both/and to come together and coexist. I finally gave myself permission to miss him as all the joyful, loving, painful, and violent memories played out before me. I wept and sobbed and lamented out loud, sending the lost soul of our love affair to the afterlife. Grieving my life without him meant that I had to usher in a new life. The ceremony simultaneously honored the death of our relationship and celebrated a new mysterious beginning that awaited me.

I do not believe that grief ever disappears. Grief morphs and shape-shifts as we honor it, as it begins to entwine with the contours of love. At times, it can tug at your heart and break it, especially on days when you feel vulnerable and tender. On other days, it can fill your spirit with immense gratitude for a life that was shared and a life that continues. In the Tibetan Book of the Dead, I learned that death is not an ending but a transfer of energy. As our tears send spirits to the afterlife, their energy is transmuted to new life. Our grief transforms, too, into an energy of love.

When I finally grieved my relationship with X, I was able to acknowledge that my capacity for tenderness did not die along with our union; I just needed to be redirected toward myself. I grieved our relationship to make space for new possibilities of true love. When I grieved my po po, I deeply appreciated her life and my own, and I watched the seeds she planted blossom into illuminating seedlings of her legacy. Each time I have explored the murky waters of grief, I have become profoundly closer to myself. To this day, grief has shown me that love does not die at the face of death; it is transformed. Our funerals are commemorations of life, and they honor what needs to be released. When you grieve deeply, you are shown your abounding capacity to love. Love does not die. Love sprouts from the ground that we have nourished with our tears.

⧫

Adapted from Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy, and Connection by Mimi Zhu (Penguin Random House 2022) 

The post Grief Is an Ancestor  appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The climate rages planet-wide. Empty waterways warn of coming hunger. Floods swallow towns whole. Fires consume state-sized swaths of land, land and all its creatures. As this world careens into chaos, as hatred grows and kindness shrinks, as we all burrow down into our conflicting, agreed-upon beliefs—it becomes crucial to revisit the Five Remembrances. Here they are, loosely translated:

1. I am of the nature to grow old. I cannot escape old age.
   
2. I am of the nature to grow ill. I cannot escape sickness.
   
3. I am of the nature to die. I cannot escape death.
   
4. I will be separated from everything and everyone I hold dear.
   
5. My only true possession is my actions.
   

Puts everything in perspective, doesn’t it?

These five verses from the Upajjhatthana Sutta form what might sound like really terrible news for the untrained ear. I mean, buzzkill after buzzkill. But the truth is, these form the pathway to liberation itself. 

When I use these Five Remembrances as a first practice every morning, I move through each day with so much more presence, ease, and equanimity. I’m not saying I’m “there.” But thinking about these verses before I get out of bed helps me cultivate their spirit. It guides me around their neighborhoods—which I’d like to do for you, now.

1. I am of the nature to grow old. I cannot escape old age.
I used to think that aging gracefully meant things like: I would move more slowly because I chose to, not because my back was killing me. Or, I would stop worrying about everything because I was wise, not because suddenly “everything” disappeared from my brain. 

But I was wrong. Over the past thirty years, I’ve dealt with multiple surgeries, seizures, stuttering, memory lapses, and a concussion that altered my sense of balance forever. Now, as I approach my 68th birthday, I realize that aging gracefully means being willing to deteriorate in real time without anesthesia. It means just saying yes to what is—not spending money on balms and Botox to hide it. I can stop beating myself up or working myself into the ground to fool everyone into thinking I’m 45. It’s like, ahhh. I can be 68. It’s good. This is life living itself through me.

This first remembrance helps me bow to the whole sky-wide sunset of my age, the drowning of the day, the deepening of the dark, and the wrinkles and the spots on my skin. 

2. I am of the nature to grow ill. I cannot escape sickness.
Just remembering this simple fact can lessen our suffering when we do fall ill. We catch a cold, or the flu. Or something scarier, maybe. I’ve been through Lyme disease. I suffered a very serious nervous breakdown. I’ve had chronic bronchitis. When we’re born in a human body, we are probably going to be sick in some small or big way, at some point in our lifespan. It’s ok. It’s part of our nature. We cannot escape it. Life is living itself through us, and that is what it looks like sometimes.

3. I am of the nature to die. I cannot escape death.
This one. Boy oh boy. We live in such denial. Every day, we move around like we’re going to live forever. Ages to go! But the truth is, any of us could be hit by a truck today. How does it feel to think about that one? Think about it. 

Do you feel a shift? 

Jack Kornfield once shared during a teaching that when he leaves the house, he takes a moment to look at his wife mindfully—to let it sink in that, for whatever reason, he might never see her again. As I think about practicing in this way, I feel cracked open. And surprisingly, it’s not morbid at all. It’s more like—if you’ve only ever seen a photograph of the ocean, but now you’re standing on the shore with your feet sucked into the sand as the waves retreat before pummeling into you again. You can smell the salt and feel the water and the wind and it’s all just so… real. That’s how it is to hold the fact of death in your back pocket.

Still, there’s no need to overthink it. The Grim Reaper does not have to be your screensaver. But, you know, have coffee with the guy every now and then. Know that death is built into our program. That way, you won’t waste so much of your life trying to outsmart it.

4. I will be separated from everything and everyone I hold dear.
This is true without exception. Either because they change or they die, or I change or I die. It’s all going away. But this does not need to be cause for sadness. This can be cause for unconditional appreciation. Joy, even. 

For example, if a messenger from the future came and told you, “Today is the very last day you’ll see a daisy (or play with your dog, or listen to music… you get the idea),” how precious would that element in the world be all of a sudden? 

If we’re going to be separated from everything we hold dear—how much gentler might we be with our possessions? How much more respectful? If we can recognize that this is all a fleeting gift from the universe, and we have no idea how long we get to keep it, wouldn’t we treat everything that passes through our hands, our ears, and our lives with a little more appreciation?

5. My only true possession is my actions.
The only thing I can take with me, when I go, is my actions. If I hold this in my heart every morning, it sets the tone for my day in a way that nothing else can. Once I know that I will absolutely grow old, get sick, and die, and that I’ll for sure be separated from everything and everyone I love… what’s left? My actions.

Everything I do carries weight. Everything I do matters. But not in that oppressive sense of Everything-Will-Be-My-Fault-If-It-Goes-Wrong. It’s more like everything I do comes front-loaded with consequences. And, since I’m going to carry them with me, I get to choose what they are.

So, say I’m on my way out the door of this life, having lost everything—my home, my family, my friends, my sanity, my ability to keep from soiling myself. I’ve lost it all. And on my way out, I have to take everything I’ve done. Everything I’ve said. Seeing it like this gives me an intimate relationship with my actions that shapes how I live in the moment.

Do I really want to fill my luggage with these snarky comments about someone we all agree is an idiot? Probably not. Not the thoughtless sarcasm, either, or the lying, the yelling, or the betrayals large and small. It would be like lugging around a big box of rocks. 

If I’m going to carry everything I’ve done, I want to pack that second of silence, when I didn’t spit back an angry retort during an argument. I want to tuck in my side pocket that time I let someone cut into the traffic even though I was in a hurry. I want to make sure to pack that particular morning of spaciousness I offered my wife so she could just be who she is, unimpeded. That’s what I want to carry. 

What about you? What are you going to do today, now that you know you’ll have to carry it all with you when you go? Pack smart, is all I’m saying.

The post Working with the Five Remembrances appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

I traveled with my dad—‘H’, as we called him—in the back seat of the car. It was the same route we’d driven a million times: to Tesco, to drop me off at the station, to drop me off at the airport, to drive up the M25 to my sister’s at Christmas. It was a suitably cold, drizzly afternoon, our destination emptied of people by rain and virus.

Our tiny group trudged through the rain to a large oak tree, the designated spot. The whole place appeared to have been designed by computer. I took the plastic lid off the long cardboard tube, which was both disturbingly heavy and disturbingly light. I broke the paper seal and there was ‘H’—as fine as flour, as white as rice—and I poured him in pluming, wind-blown arcs across the grass. There was a stiff breeze and I had to take care to avoid him being blown back over my new trainers.

Out of everything connected to my dad’s death, this was the most grotesque—that we found ourselves acting and speaking as though living, breathing, vibrant, chuckling, grumpy, boozy, Sudoku-filling, paper industry prodigy ‘H’ had become lifeless white ash sinking in semi-circular lines into cold wet grass on a gray September day.

Believing in Father Christmas is one thing, but to believe that a person is a pile of ash who somehow continues in that form! And yet we actually said things like, “He’ll be happy here under this oak tree,” and, “Would you like to go and visit ‘H’ under his tree?”

Family and friends seem to find nothing controversial in the frequently expressed hope, “May he rest in peace.” Yet it implies doubt about the outcome—the suggestion, clearly, is that our loved one might not “rest in peace.” The implication: they might become “a restless spirit”—a ghost, no less; perhaps a zombie! In our age of (selective) political correctness, no one finds this offensive.

Similarly, many of us seem to feel obligated to say, “He passed.” Where to, “the other side?” We’re back among the ghosts! When a soap bubble bursts, did it “pass,” or did it cease to exist? Or we say, “He passed away,” to persuade ourselves that he is not dead at all, not even “resting,” but has embarked on a mysterious journey, like Bilbo Baggins of Bag End. It doesn’t help to be confronted by these delusions of mass pathology and denial at a time when the mind is already reeling.

On the other hand, it did help to know that my dad would have perceived the whole ash-scattering event as risible. I remember him saying something like:

“I don’t give a hoot what you do with me when I’m gone, I won’t be there!”

Indeed, even without the virus, it would have been difficult to have any kind of church “service” knowing that the person being honored would have considered every aspect of the process a meaningless (and expensive!) farce exploiting minds less rational than his own. After the cremation, we had played a selection of his favorite songs and had a drink. Did it “honor the dead” to play, “It’s Not Unusual,” by fellow Welshman Tom Jones?

That night, looking up at the ceiling in the pitch black of the room where he had died, I didn’t “honor” my dad, because I don’t really know what that means, or why it’s relevant, in reference to the death of a loved one. I did find myself reflecting on Ernest Hemingway’s version of honor and heroism, of “grace under pressure”— an old fisherman battling sharks to save his prize catch; a civil war volunteer fighting a suicidal rear-guard action to save his comrades. It seemed to me that real heroism is much more mundane.

Real heroism is trundling to and from Tesco every day, for years, in a little red car to do the shopping when you were once a shooting executive star. It’s falling and cutting yourself horribly because your 87-year-old skin is so thin, and just getting up and carrying on. It’s carrying the empty bottles and rubbish down a flight of stone steps day after day because it has to be done, even though you’ve fallen many times in the house and falling down the steps would be fatal. It’s losing every last one of your friends, until you are the longest-surviving member of your local club, and the village is empty of familiar faces, and just carrying on. Heroism is sitting on a sofa, day after day, watching daytime TV, because there’s not much else you can do, when you don’t believe there’s much point to anything anyway because you’re an atheist, and just carrying on.

‘There Is Darkness and Nothing Else’?

After my dad died, three related phenomena were clearly evident: a storm of thoughts in my head, a searing pool of emotional pain in my heart, and a witnessing consciousness observing both.

Here’s a storm-chasing snapshot of my mind the night after he died. Without himself becoming infected, my dad had been stuck in a COVID-ridden hospital for the last four weeks of his life, unable to see any of us:

‘“I better go, Davy; I’ve got two scoops of ice cream waiting to be devoured. Bye!” My god, those were the last words he ever said to me! How on Earth can he have died within 24 hours of being let out of hospital? Why did they let him go, if he was so ill? They said his heart was at 25 percent capacity, his kidneys the same or worse. He had no idea if he was even on steroids or not. How will we take care of mum during the lockdown? She’ll be alone in the house having lost her partner of 65 years. Sixty-five years! And now she’s alone at the age of 85! How must that feel?! How can we get medical help to her without her getting COVID? She almost fell over this morning because she hadn’t slept. Are we going to lose both of them in the same month? “Please, you can just pick me up and take me home—I’ve been stuck here for weeks; I can’t take it any more. Just take me home.” He must have been suffering horribly to say something like that. “But there’s no care package, if you just leave, Dad; you’ll be on your own.” We should have just taken him out, we shouldn’t have just left him there. How is it possible he could just die within 24 hours of being sent home? Will I end up being poured in white plumes across the crematorium grass? Who am I kidding? Of course I will! How will we take care of mum now? “I’ve got two scoops of ice cream waiting to be devoured.” Mum’s alone for the first time in 65 years! He said to her: “Try to remember the good times.” How could he die the day after coming home?…’.

And so on. This painful, endlessly cycling thought-storm was waiting for me in the treacherous wee small hours of the night. As Rabindranath Tagore wrote so beautifully:

Day’s pain, muffled by its own glare

burns among stars in the night. 

— The Complete Poetical Works of Rabindranath Tagore 

And this burning emotional pain was the second phenomenon: intense sadness, anxiety, and anguish in the center of my chest. This pain was, of course, provoked by thoughts. But the pain, in turn, fuelled more thoughts.

Surging thoughts, pain, and then a mysterious third phenomenon: my awareness, my consciousness, watching both. 

Indian spiritual teacher Osho told a wonderful story of an epiphany on the theme of this witnessing consciousness:

‘One of the great philosophers of the West, C.E.M. Joad, was dying, and a friend, who was a disciple of [mystic] George Gurdjieff, had come to see him. Joad asked the friend:

‘“What do you go on doing with this strange fellow, George Gurdjieff? Why are you wasting your time? And not only you… I have heard that many people are wasting their time.”

‘The friend laughed. He said:

‘“It is strange that those few people who are with Gurdjieff think that the whole world is wasting its time, and you are thinking that we are wasting our time.”

‘Joad said: “I don’t have much longer to live; otherwise I would have come and compared.”

‘The friend said:

‘“Even if you have only a few seconds more to live, it can be done here, now.”

‘Joad agreed.

‘The man said:

‘“You close your eyes and just look inside, and then open your eyes and tell me what you find.”

‘Joad closed his eyes, opened his eyes and said:

‘“There is darkness and nothing else.”

‘The friend laughed and he said:

‘“It is not a time [for me] to laugh, because you are almost dying, but I have come at the right time. You said that you saw only darkness inside?”

‘Joad said: “Of course.”

‘And the man said:

‘“You are such a great philosopher; you have written such beautiful books. Can’t you see the point, that there are two things—you and the darkness? Otherwise, who saw the darkness? Darkness cannot see itself—that much is certain—and darkness cannot report that there is only darkness.”

‘Joad gave it consideration and he said:

‘“My God, perhaps the people who are with Gurdjieff are not wasting their time. This is true, I have seen the darkness.”’ (Osho, The Razor’s Edge, e-book, 1987)

It is true! There is the darkness—the storm of thoughts driven by intense emotional pain in the chest—but there is also a witnessing presence observing the darkness. The darkness is not observing itself. The darkness and that which is aware of the darkness are not the same.

When this witnessing awareness focused on the thoughts in my head, they proliferated and the emotional pain in my chest increased. By contrast, when the witness focused on the emotional pain, something very different happened. At first, the pain actually seemed to increase, because I was facing it directly for the first time. But as I continued to divert attention away from the thoughts to the pain, as I delved into the pain as deeply as possible—feeling the sadness, the anguish—my thoughts were deprived of the energy imparted by attention and started to subside. As the thinking subsided, so did the thought-driven pain in my chest. The more I focused on the painful feelings, the less energy was available to maintain both thoughts and pain.

Even this slight improvement was a relief, an encouragement. I continued to focus on the pain, which lessened even more. Thoughts continued to pop into my head, of course, but they now had less emotional pain to feed off and so couldn’t reinforce that pain so easily.

Eventually, it reached a point where I was enjoying watching, feeling the pain; I didn’t want to stop. In fact, I was no longer sure if it really was pain now. What was it, then: pleasure? In the immediate aftermath of my dad’s death? It seemed almost indecent!

The darkness and that which is aware of the darkness are not the same.

As the pain continued to reduce and thoughts lessened, a moment came when I was so focused on feeling that a tiny gap appeared in the chain of thoughts. Through that gap, a minute but intense point of bliss sparked in my chest. It was a blazing, ecstatic spark of love and delight.

I focused attention on this tiny spark, which dissolved, spread, and deepened, so that it formed a shimmering pool of bliss and love across my chest and upper back. It wasn’t that I felt love for anyone in particular. Rather, love was there and I felt love for whichever person popped into my thoughts, or for whatever object popped into my sense perceptions.

The burning anguish had now completely disappeared. I felt ecstatic delight, happiness, peace—I was overflowing with a loving warmth. This loving bliss—why not call it loving bliss rather than the tautological “loving kindness,” as if we’re reluctant to admit we feel bliss?—stayed with me for the rest of the day. In reference to this experience, I made this short entry in my journal four days after my dad had died:

‘Bliss in the afternoon meditation.’

This is an example of one tiny moment of nonattachment and it was the result of passive observation, not an act of will.

Attachment and the pain of attachment are ultimately made up of thoughts—when we stop focusing on thoughts and start focusing on perceptions, sensations, and emotions, the thoughts subside. When a tiny gap eventually appears in the chain of thought, an internal source of love and bliss ordinarily obscured by the cloud of thought is able to blaze through this gap in the clouds.

This doesn’t mean giving up parental or filial love to diminish attachment, and it doesn’t mean mollifying sadness by ascribing emotions to a pile of ash; it means an outpouring of love that flows to children and parents, and in fact, to everyone and everything.

Other attachments then begin to fall away. Ambition for sensual pleasures, attention, applause, fame, and gain starts to lessen because we know their pursuit generates vast clouds of thought that painfully obscure our inner bliss. When we have tasted this authentic delight even once, our priority instantly becomes that of refining and deepening the art of self-observation.

Unspoken Secrets

I’ve written about my experience, not because I think it is in any way exceptional—millions of people have been experiencing this and far more profound results from meditation for many thousands of years. I’m sharing it because it has radical implications for our whole approach to suffering and happiness.

Like so many of us, I grew up in a culture that persuaded me to believe that my emotions were too much for me to handle. Powerful forces in our society encourage us to view anxiety, craving, sadness, and grief as illnesses that require therapeutic and pharmacological intervention. That may indeed sometimes be true in the case of severe depression, for example. But there is a deep problem here.

In his important book, Undoctored – Why Health Care Has Failed You And How You Can Become Smarter Than Your Own Doctor, US cardiologist Dr. William Davis blows a loud whistle on modern health provision:

The unspoken secret is that providers prefer treatment over prevention, expensive over inexpensive, patent-protectable over non-patent protectable, billable procedure over non-billable procedure, BMW over Toyota Prius. . . Healthcare is a business, a big business (the biggest business of all in the United States), a business that continually seeks to grow its revenues and profits. 

— William Davis, Undoctored (Rodale, 2017)

The logic of this will be familiar to anyone who has been following Media Lens over the last 20 years, and it surely rings true for anyone who has interacted with Western health care.

The damning conclusion from this courageous insider reads:

In other words, neglect the cause, profit from the treatment. It is the unspoken but defining mantra of modern health care. Health is not part of the equation. 

This helps explain why so many of us have been persuaded to believe that we can’t cope with our emotions, perceived as overwhelming, unmanageable. Our militarized culture even uses the term “panic attack” to suggest we are being assaulted by some vicious enemy.

But these are our emotions; they are part of us. They contain crucial information, deep wisdom about the wrong paths we are taking. Very often, they are psycho-physical dissidents challenging the follies and ambitions of our ego, utterly detached as it is from the reality of our bodies and the rest of the natural world. The head is full of hot air, dreams; the body and its emotions are rooted in reality. Feelings are far more honest, a portal to truth.

There is a terrible price to pay for medicating, silencing, and numbing our emotional dissent. The whole lesson of so many mystics over millennia is that the art of living involves precisely overcoming our head-trapped numbness, in becoming acutely sensitive to the cryptic messages of our feelings, no matter how painful. The more closely we listen, the more deeply we understand. Not just great but entirely unimagined treasures may then pour into our life and world.

The post Burning Among Stars in the Night  appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

It’s sometimes said that life is a precious gift, but I wonder if that’s the best metaphor. Is it better to understand one’s life as a loan? A loan that can be called in at any time, sometimes with no warning at all. We are reminded never to take it for granted. Does that make our lives even more precious?

We naturally seek stability and security, but Buddhist teachings emphasize that everything is impermanent and insubstantial. The world isn’t a collection of separate things: it’s a confluence of interacting processes, and those processes include you and me and everyone we know. That means there’s nothing to cling to, and no one to cling. Shunryu Suzuki, founder of the San Francisco Zen Center, said that nonattachment isn’t about getting rid of things, it’s accepting that they pass away.

A student asked Zen master Unmon, “What is the goal of a lifetime of practice?” He replied: “Responding appropriately.” We practice not to transcend the world, but to transcend our egos. Our path isn’t about escaping this world, it’s about becoming more intimate with it. But how do those of us who live in Boulder, Colorado, say, respond appropriately to events like the supermarket shooting that killed ten people a year ago today, on March 22, 2021, or the wildfire that destroyed over a thousand homes just east of town in December 2021?

In the Buddhist tradition, there are different answers, because there are different ways of understanding our emotional life. One answer is that our practice helps us find a place of imperturbable equanimity and serenity that is impervious to tragedy. No matter what happens in the world, we are at peace. We accept it, not because that’s what we want to happen, but because that’s what did happen. There’s some wisdom in this, I think, but not enough. It seems an example of what Zen calls “clinging to emptiness.” There’s something dualistic about it: we dissociate from our experience of the world.

The Japanese poet and Zen master Ryokan Taigu was once asked: “Is there no way to avoid calamities?” Ryokan replied: “When you meet a calamity, meet it completely. That is the wondrous dharma of avoiding calamities.” But how do we meet completely calamities such as mass shootings and uncontrollable wildfires?

In central London there is a memorial to the victims of the World Trade Center terrorist attack. The inscription simply says: “Grief is the price we pay for love.” That’s all. Our grief is the homage we pay to what we love. Then never to grieve would be to close ourselves off from love. That points to another way of responding. Instead of trying to avoid grief, can we meet it completely, by opening ourselves up to it and becoming intimate with it?

Often we resist that. We are afraid of being overwhelmed by unbearable pain. We worry about becoming stuck in such a dark, heavy place. We forget that grief, too, is not a thing, it’s another of those impermanent processes, with its own dynamic—sometimes surging, sometimes ebbing. The whirlwind of emotions is so powerful and disruptive, but whirlwinds don’t last forever. To turn away from it usually makes it worse. As in our meditation, we need to trust the process and let it do with us what needs to be done. That is how we pay homage to what we love and have lost. That is how healing occurs.

Healing doesn’t mean the process of grieving is finished. But when the whirlwind dies down, we might find that we are a different person, maybe living in a different world. The disorientation can cut through the bullshit of our usual preoccupations. Realizing so directly and deeply the fragility of life encourages us to ask what’s really important. We are confronted by the most crucial koan of all: what do I really want to do with the time that’s left to me—with this precious loan?

The post How to Handle Grief When Equanimity Isn’t Enough  appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.