Death
This article is one of the chapters from a new book called Birth and Death written by Rev. Master Leandra which was published recently. More information about the book follows the article.
I find more and more often returning to the question of birth and death—small wonder perhaps, now that I am in my mid 80s and have a long life behind me.
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It is a paradox that the more we take on board and are in touch with our responses to even the smallest changes in our environment (both external and internal), the more we also come across our internal stability which is not stirred by conditions. That stability is the Unborn, the fundamental nature of being. It is beyond pain, for here there is no suffering, (as it says in The Scripture of Great Wisdom). Alertness to the transient brings together awareness and memory. The French philosopher Simone Weil in her book; Waiting for God1, said that it is the power of attention that points to eternity. She said that if we pay attention closely enough we will come to know the transcendent, for it lies in the centre of the human heart and mind. She wanted to appreciate, understand and weep with the suffering of the world.
So each morning, as I awake to a new day, I see myself as somehow a new person in spite of there being nothing fundamentally different: my arthritic legs are still arthritic, but there are subtle changes too and it feels right to not go down the path of wondering why the pain is more or less intense than on other mornings. If I were to do that, my whole being would be narrowed and confined to the perception of pain. Then I would be a person looking for a remedy rather than one accepting circumstances as they are at that moment.
We are going to die. We are always dying. Death is now as each moment passes irrevocably.
So what then is a reliable refuge? This question takes me to a depth I will never be able to fathom. It takes me to the question, “What am I?” This is a depth I must explore quickly, for (as it says in Rules for Meditation); “life passes as swiftly as a flash of lightning”. There is an urgency to this.
When we have been practising wholeheartedly for decades, it is not surprising that our awareness and scrutiny lead us to engage with the onset of old age, disease and our inevitable death. A fine trainee I know was once on the verge of moving from his current house to another one that could be adapted for his increasing frailty and ill health. He wrote the following; “I have found a buyer for this house but haven’t found one to move to. So I know where I am leaving from, but not where I am going to.”
Taking his predicament more deeply, the trainee had looked into the meaning of the word ‘dwell’, which though it does mean to live in a place, can also mean to live in a particular way, and in addition could mean to remain for a time. This had brought up for him the thought of living in whatever house for the time being, and of dwelling in this body/mind for the time being. This life, he had realised, and this “I” is just for the time being.
For me this brought to mind Dōgen’s expression that reality manifests itself for the time being as an ordinary person, a paraphrase from the chapter called Uji, or Being-Time, from the Shōbōgenzō.2 Everything is in this moment. Awakened practice can only happen in this present moment. As Dōgen also taught in this chapter; “Although the Dharma might seem as if it were somewhere else far away, it is the time right now”.
I was and continue to be grateful for the time spent training with the writer, grateful for the years we have been practising together even though I live in a monastery and he lives the householder’s life. What in particular resonates for me is that both of us in our own ways are sensing what remains to be done as we approach the end of life and are deepening our trust in what is, without having an idea of what’s next.
This sense of trusting reminds me of another member of our congregation, called Brian who came to be in a hospice towards the end of his life. I am reminded of his ‘excitement’, that he would soon have the opportunity of dying and would ‘know’ what death is, and what comes next.
The final stages of Brian’s death though were hard to witness. He was in immense pain; he tore out the tubes infiltrating his body, he rattled the cage of his bed. In the midst of witnessing this, I turned to a poem by the American poet Mary Oliver, called; When Death Comes.3 It ends thus; “I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”
My sense that Brian had not simply visited this world was reinforced at his funeral in Gateshead. The chapel was packed with his mates who worked for the company where Brian was foreman. So many men indeed that the majority were not able to get into the chapel itself, but stood outside.
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When the time comes to die we can take nothing with us. If we can truly acknowledge this we can cease from causing ourselves unnecessary suffering by desperately trying to hold on to anything—even the sense of what we are.
Are you afraid of dying?
If you are, is that partly because you don’t know what will happen after you die?
Here are a few possibilities:
Energy is neither created nor destroyed. Just as the elements of our body: carbon, nitrogen and calcium, passed through countless material forms before our birth, so too will they be recycled when we die, to become part of building many new forms, from plants to people. In the same way psychic energy (relating to, or denoting faculties or phenomena that are apparently inexplicable by natural laws) is also recycled. Phenomena relating to the soul, mind or spirit, such as anger; compassion; confusion and clarity will all continue on and be part of a new constructed self.
Once we accept the fact that body, heart, and mind are inseparable, we can become free of the struggle to make the mind, spirit, or soul remain active after the body stops working. Everything is interconnected, and after death no part of us stays as it was. You may go to heaven, paradise, or hell, or be reborn into this world with the deepest, unknowable part of yourself, but it is extremely unlikely that any part of your body or mind will be brought with you as it now is. This realization may initially cause a great deal of angst. However, we all need to start with the acceptance of its truth. Only after we fully face, take up our abode in, and make peace with the existential reality, can we become liberated. As it says in The Scripture of Great Wisdom; “For here there is no suffering … In the mind of the Bosatsu who is truly one with Wisdom Great the obstacles dissolve.”
With the constant updates in the media about the number of coronavirus deaths and with the constant updates too about the rise, then fall, then rise again of infections as new variants appear, we cannot avoid thinking about death. It does not help in the face of this to cling to doctrines or to the soothing words of others. They don’t ultimately cut the mustard. Instead, we must, as it were jump out of bed as soon as the alarm clock rings. Don’t just lie there. How else, but with such a bright willingness can you even face death, which always comes?
Am I afraid?
I used to hope it was merely the process of dying that frightened me. Once in a Dharma Interview, (where monks speak privately with their Abbot), I was invited to call death to be there in front of me, rather than lurking behind my shoulder. What excellent advice that was, because following it allowed me to be at one with my death, to truly look death in the face and thus to begin to realise that death is not an object separate from myself—death outside me, so to speak, and me inside. Instead, life and death are one reality: as I took my first living breath, it was, at the same time the first breath of dying. We are all dying all the time.
“If I say I am not afraid of dying, am I deluding myself?” This is a question it behoves me to keep asking. Yet these days when I do ask myself this question, it doesn’t feel like I am deluded when I answer myself, that I am not afraid of dying. After all, I do know other aspects of fear, so I do know what it is to be afraid.
Even so, though I do know that I can be at one with ordinary fears, I do need also to take on board the possibility that fear of death is the ultimate fear; one that is too big or too opaque for me to be easily at one with. Nobody else can take away this concern for me. So what’s to be done? My response is to investigate with all the integrity I have at my disposal, with all the longing to know reality. To explore what it is to be a human being who is both a lonely individual and at the same time inextricably the whole world, utterly connected with everything else. It seems worth all of us asking ourselves what we wish for in life given the personal being we see ourselves as, and also asking what we wish for our world from which we cannot separate ourselves. It is delusion to think there can be any separation.
Scrutinize carefully—don’t try to dodge your moral, preceptual nature that shrivels when, for instance, you say that which is untrue. This is for your sake as much as for the sake of others. Don’t let yourself get away with fudging things in the hope that it will make them easier to accept. Unless we kill ourselves death is not a decision we make, therefore let us decide to live life as fully engaged as we can by being open to everything, able to hold everything in a spacious stillness, a radiant calmness. We are thus learning to cradle both the immense sorrow and the wondrousness of life, cradle both at the same time. We are learning to be with pain and pleasure, joy and sorrow, with hearts fully open. Hearts that are intact even when it feels they have been irreparably broken.
How about in old age approaching our inevitable death with a youthful curiosity as well as with courage and a willingness to keep growing? This will require attentiveness and working with our hardwired emotions; seeing from moment to moment that we always have a choice to react more intelligently and kindly to others, and to resist hurting them because of our confusion and self-centredness. We may still be at the stage of aspiring bodhisattvas, (beings who help others), yet it is important to acknowledge that our aspiration to be of service remains unwavering in spite of the mistakes we make. It helps to cut off any desire to justify our selfish behaviour immediately we become aware of an unskilful habitual response.
“Do we have a mountain of karma to clear up before we die, in order not to be reborn?” Here is a question some ask. We do undoubtedly have to deal with what we have done. We are responsible for cleaning up the karma we received at birth, and if we work at this we will pass on a welcome gift to future beings. Surely, it is deeply saddening to know we have been continuing acts of body, speech and mind time after time, even though they make us ashamed and lead us to suffer as much as the suffering they have inflicted on those we have hurt. Yet, with sincere practice the landscape can change and the task of cleansing is never over for we see at deeper and deeper levels the harm we have been doing to ourselves and to others. We peel off yet another skin of the onion.
We take responsibility for all the mistakes we have made, rather than slithering away and hoping to excuse ourselves by blaming others or blaming unfortunate circumstances that we try to insist were not of our making. This will be an amazingly beautiful process of growth and maturation. We are uncovering insight into the samsaric web we have been weaving through our thoughts and actions and the ensuing karmic consequences, both good and bad, that have endlessly rippled out. This spiritual maturation is a background from which compassion flows naturally.
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HOW TO DEAL WITH THE LOSS OF A DEARLY BELOVED BEING
Penetrate the loss, express it as eloquently as you are able and then let go. Don’t deny death and grief, allow them to flow through you. There is for all of us unimaginable loss ahead including the possible end of human life on earth. How will we bear the grief ahead, will we allow grief to make it harder to act? We may want to find a ‘cure’ for grief. Rather, allow the possibility that grief too is a Buddha. It can be a wonderful teacher. We are invited to be stained by grief, made holy by grief. Know that grief is a form of love and then as we go on without our beloved, love isn’t diminished. We are transformed by our loss. A genuine love acknowledges our debt to our beloved and we can be alone with dignity.
We are all coming to realise what life and death are. The understanding of today is not the understanding of tomorrow and yet nothing is missing in the understanding of today. Without fail, this coming to realise assists us in being with what, in The Scripture of Great Wisdom, is described thus; “all things…are neither born nor do they wholly die”. I had a profound sense of this on the first anniversary of the death of a fellow monk, particularly of the words ‘nor do they wholly die’, as for me she had not wholly died, her presence continued, and continues to be vividly here, now. Our disagreements, though sometimes forcibly expressed, had never divided us. I recalled recently, for example that at one point she had been certain that a particular person should not be ordained as a monk. Eventually that person was ordained, but then later chose to leave. Their time here as part of the novitiate was not a mistake as I know that it has helped them to find another way of offering to others. So it turns out that neither my fellow monk, nor I was completely right nor completely wrong. I find myself wishing we could discuss this again. Yet there is no need to, for in a mysterious way we keep up the conversation.
Some of what we say about birth and death can lose its punch if we recite something so regularly that we hardly notice what we are saying. For example, the shaving verse monks recite each week:
Now as we are being shaved, let us pray that we may leave behind worldly desires for eternity; After all, neither birth nor death exist.
Such a verse has a tremendous power, yet from frequent repetition we can fail to see it.
The wave and water analogy that is often used in Buddhism has helped me to see there are two dimensions to life and we touch both. In the historical dimension there are certificates for birth and death—this is the wave that has a beginning and an end. However, in the dimension of immediacy, the flowing world of water, there is no beginning and no end. As our great spiritual ancestor, Nagyaarajyuna said in a work called The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way:4
Before something is born, did it exist?
Something already present can’t be born.
To be born means from nothing you became something, from no one you became someone.
But nothing can be born from nothing.
I have tried reciting these words as if working with a kōan, so that whenever during a day I recall them, I say them to myself without expecting a comprehensible answer.
I continue to long to understand birth and death completely and that longing is taken to my sitting place, for on my cushion there is a deep trust in the efficacy of zazen to solve the riddle of the no-birth of all things. To find a calm peace in the midst of thoughts such as these is the demonstration that life is a continuum. In this very moment now anything can happen. While it is the case that to speak of happening implies duration, what is required is to carefully observe what changes, as duration unfolds. We can become more alert to one thought ending and another not yet begun and rest in that space which could be described as the unchanging heart of this very moment.
Although I am often uneasy when I talk about the present moment, I also sense that dropping the notion of the present moment altogether is avoiding what is important. For now, the conclusion I am stuck with is that the present moment holds the recent past together with the immediate future. I think I am suggesting that maybe we discover more about being a human being by dropping any concern of defining the present moment, or for that matter of defining any concept. Rather the direction of concern might more profitably be engagement with a deeper awareness of the consequences of living one way rather than another.
Nirvana seems to me at present to mean extinction, extinction, extinction. Extinction of all notions and concepts; such as birth/death, being/non-being, coming/going. Nirvana is the ultimate dimension of life; a state of coolness, of peace, of joy, of profound serenity. It is not a state you attain after you die for you can reach it right now. As Dōgen says in the chapter called Gyōji, or Continuous Practice, from the Shōbōgenzō:2
On the great road of Buddha ancestors there is always unsurpassable practice, continuous and sustained. It forms the circle of the way and is never cut off. Between aspiration, practice, enlightenment and nirvana there is not a moment’s gap; continuous practice is the circle of the way.
In the Avatamsaka Sutra we are assured that in touching one moment with deep awareness, we touch all moments. If you can live one moment deeply that moment contains all the past and all the future. Touching nirvana frees us from many worries; things that upset us no longer feel that important and a day later we can look back in some puzzlement at how stressed we allowed ourselves to become.
I remind myself that I never know anything with unwavering certainty. Acknowledging this pushes me further off balance and into unknown territory. Then great joy arises because it is evident that life and death are always sufficient and my befuddlement is no hindrance. As we step into the unknown the door to death opens. Let us step through it with curiosity instead of fear.
Notes
1. Weil, Simone, Waiting for God, Routledge, 2021.
2. Taaahashi, Kazuaki, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dogen’s Shobo Genzo. Shambala, 2013.
3. Oliver, Mary, Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver, Penguin Books, 2020.
4. Kerzin, Barry, Nāgārjuna’s Wisdom: A Practitioner’s Guide to the Middle Way, Wisdom Publications, 2019.
Birth & Death is a 116 page book written by Rev. Master Leandra which was published in March 2022. It comprises ten chapters on many aspects of Buddhist practice, including Consciousness, Learning from All Living Things, and Enlightenment … Awakening. Copies are available to purchase from the bookshop at Throssel Hole, and also via https://www.lulu.com
