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.
