Death and Its Discontents--Part I

I’d like to open with reading of a poem by Hahn Shan (aka Cold Mountain), a medieval Chinese poet of the Zen tradition: 

Having a body or not having a body—
Is there self or no self—
I ponder deeply like this.
For a long time, I sit leaning on the rocks:
green grass comes up around my legs
red dust settles on my head.
Already I see worldly people
offering wine and fruit at my deathbead.  (Essential Zen 74)

I’ve spent much time wondering and meditating on what my Buddhist practice means in terms of death, and in particular, my death.  After all, aren’t we all concerned about our own deaths?  Perhaps there are exceptions, but it occupies many of our minds, particularly as we get older or experience a trauma.

I often use as a meditation guide—one that I read in a Sutra that I can’t find, so please comment if you know—imagining myself (like Hahn Shan above) walking in charnel houses where corpses are in various stages of decomposition.  This exercise reminds me of the impermanence of my own life and shows me my own destiny, and it keeps me a bit humble, as you can imagine.  Yet, this mantra, if you will, is just that, imagination.  I am projecting myself into the future in order to master my fears of death.  Somehow, though it isn’t fully satisfying, so I have continued to seek understanding.

Aside from straight-forward imagining, Zen has indirect ways of thinking about death.  To explain one of the most common, I borrow a word from Ian Zidalis’s recent Dharma talks: Anatman (Sanskrit) or Anatta (Pali) = “no soul” or “non-self.”  In the poem I opened with, Hahn Shan’s first three lines refer to this concept.

In his talk, Ian read from the book What the Buddha Taught (1959), where Theravada scholar Walpola Rahula asked,

If we can understand that in this life we can continue without a permanent, unchanging substance like Self or Soul, why can't we understand that those forces themselves can continue without a Self or Soul behind them after the non-functioning of the body?

When this physical body is no more capable of functioning, energies do not die with it, but continue to take some other shape or form, which we call another life.... Physical and mental energies which constitute the so-called being have within themselves the power to take a new form, and grow gradually and gather force to the full.

Ian compared this understanding of the soul to the Hydrologic Cycle on Earth, where water moves through various bodies but always remains water.  Thus, Rahula is arguing that death is not really and end because the energies that make up our impermanent substance, or soul, continue to move through time, the universe, and many (re)incarnations.

The cycle nature of the soul resembles the larger circles of life in Buddhism, Samsara and karma, the circle of birth and death.  From a scientific perspective, spiritual cycles are indistinguishable from recycled atoms and molecules in the physical world.

These cycles also teach us that there is not difference or distinction between life and death.  Again, poet Han Shan expresses it well:

Searching for some meaning to life and death,
Try comparing them to water and ice.
Water freezes over and binds into ice,
Then the ice melts, turning back to water.
 Whatever dies had got to be reborn
And everyone alive dies once again.
Water and ice don’t harm each other
Life and death are both equally good! (Path of Direct Awakening, 92)

Han Shan’s analogy not only uses water as a figure for human life but through it connects all beings, elements, and phenomenon in the universe.  In other words, all is one, as Buddhism stresses in its non-duality.  So, we can see these similarities on many levels of being and time, from the biological to the geological to cosmological.

Biologically and anatomically, we ourselves are constantly recycled.  Although the estimates vary, biologists say that every atom in a human body is replaced every 10-15 years.  In truth, we are never the same person we were a moment ago.

On the geological level, Poet Lorine Niedecker makes the connection between the iron in our blood and that in the rocks of the Lake Superior area:

In every part of every living thing
is stuff that once was rock 
 In blood the minerals
of the rock            (Collected 161)

In a note from Niedecker on the poem in the book’s footnotes, we see her Zen-like attitude towards the interconnectedness of life: “The sea went over and left me dry, parched for knowledge! The feeling of being a part of all this. How?—the body, the unconscious. Let us sing, as they say in church.”

This geologic sense that Niedecker gives us of the interconnectedness of my life to all things can also be magnified to a cosmic scale.  Last Dharma talk [Apr 3, 2011], I spoke of the “rubber band” theories of the universe and how they open the possibility of a scientific understanding of reincarnation as samsara.  If both science and Buddhism are right, we will all be sitting here again in an infinite number of lifetimes.

This change does not just affect physical things.  In the idea of anatman, soul/spirit/mind/consciousness also change forms.  In other words, we (when there really is no distinction between self and other, individual soul and anatman) return to the universe when we die in the form of atoms, energies, soul, etc.  That dynamic reveals the impermanence and interconnectedness of all things.

Such eternal return includes all pasts and all futures, including the concept of past and future.

Living in the moment, I detach myself from myself in the form of the fear of death, which is the desire for life.  In his book on death, Thich Nhat Hahn quotes the Buddha from the Sutra on Knowing the Better Way to Live Alone, the Bhaddekaratta Sutta:

The Buddha taught:
Do not pursue the past.
Do not lose yourself in the future.
The past no longer is.
The future has not yet come.
Looking deeply at life as it is
in the very here and now,
the practitioner dwells in stability and freedom.
We must be diligent today.
To wait until tomorrow is too late.
Death comes unexpectedly.
How can we bargain with it?
The sage calls a person who knows
how to dwell in mindfulness
night and day
'one who knows the better way to live alone.' (Our Appointment 5)

Death is an attachment to a future that never arrives.  As the Buddha continues:

When someone thinks about the way this body…feelings…perceptions…mental factors…consciousness will be in the future…his mind is burdened by and daydreaming about these things which belong to the future, then that person is losing himself in the future. (Our Appointment 6)

In some sense, as I mentioned in my last talk, this future that the Buddha refers to is a future that never comes.  If we are fully aware in the present moment, the future is not a concern and each moment is born anew, without anticipation (a form of desire) of the next.  In a sense, that moment between an exhalation and an inhalation, where your lungs are still, is a kind of death; I mean, who knows if you are ever going to inhale again?  Sometimes in my meditation, I try to be present as long as I can in that moment between breaths, and if I do, if I’m meditating well, I never know if the future actually comes because I’m still mindfully in the present.

Personally, I carry this notion of the future a bit further:  my death is a future that never arrives.  As Maurice Blanchot argues, death is always only the death of the Other.  I only experience other people’s deaths.  I will never experience my own death because once I am dead, my anatman will have changed forms and I am no longer “I” or “me”.  In this life, I only experience the death of the Other, but that experience of the death of the Other is the self, the experience of “no self.”

Yet, as Ely Kugo has taught us, we have an ego that is important to be aware of.  Although anatman may be translated as “no self,” Buddhism does not deny the self because it eschews all dualisms. In the above quote, the ego is necessary so that one “does not lose oneself in the future” past or even the present.  Even the Buddha has acknowledged that grief and suffering over the death of others, along with one’s own fear of death, are natural parts of life.  It’s not that we won’t have these feelings—its that we must practice mindfulness so that they do not rule us to the point that we “lose ourselves.”

As Dogen writes, “To study the Buddha way is to study the self.  To study the self is to forget the self” (Essential Zen 77).  The self, the study, the forgetting—these are anatman.

We return to the Buddha’s words and find that he too returns to the idea of the “person” or “the sage,” an individual ego who dwells in mindfulness.  I repeat that last few lines:

The sage calls a person who knows
how to swell in mindfulness
night and day
“one who knows
the better way to live alone”

I leave you with that quote as a way into discussion, as I’d like to hear about others’ meditations on death and how it related to the ego.

Works Cited

Hahn, Thich Nhat.  Our Appointment with Life: Discourse on Living Happily in the Present Moment.  Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1990.

Niedecker, Lorine.  Lorine Niedecker: Collected Works.  New Edition. Ed. Jenny Penberthy.  Berkeley: U of California P, 2002.

Rahula, Walpola. What the Buddha Taught.  New York: Grove, 1959.

Ruppenthal, Stephen H, ed.  The Path of Direct Awakening: Passages for Meditation. Albany, CA: Berekely Hills Books, 2004.

Tanahashi, Kazuaki and Tensho David Schneider, eds.  Essential Zen.  New York: Harper Collins, 1994.