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Death and the Buddha's message
BhikkhuJayasara
Bhikkhu Veteran
Since an incident like today brings death to the forefront of peoples minds.. this is the perfect time to discuss death and what the Buddha said about it.
We know that the Buddha urged us to "think about death with every breath". We also know that he urged his disciples to go to charnal grounds where dead bodies were left to decompose to observe the different stages of death and decay. Today in many Buddhist meditation halls we may see a hanging skeleton as a left over from that practice some 2600 years ago.
If you have not seen this Dhamma talk on death by a monastic dieing of cancer.. I highly suggest it - youtube.com/watch?v=oBIMRCRh_Xs&feature=share&list=PLuD1xfDfsh6z7e9YR_qLsk19jJXJhyUr5
He calls death the ultimate test.. and that he wants to pass it. He talks about what the Buddha said about death and how we should be mindful of it.. an amazing talk and well worth the watch.
How often do you contemplate death in your practice? I think it's easy for me because I have seen so much death in my 34 years , including the death of my own wife to cancer 7 years ago, and all my grandparents and other relatives since age 10, that It is a topic I am comfortable with, while others it may be a scary proposition to begin to ponder. What is your practice of death awareness?
We know that the Buddha urged us to "think about death with every breath". We also know that he urged his disciples to go to charnal grounds where dead bodies were left to decompose to observe the different stages of death and decay. Today in many Buddhist meditation halls we may see a hanging skeleton as a left over from that practice some 2600 years ago.
If you have not seen this Dhamma talk on death by a monastic dieing of cancer.. I highly suggest it - youtube.com/watch?v=oBIMRCRh_Xs&feature=share&list=PLuD1xfDfsh6z7e9YR_qLsk19jJXJhyUr5
He calls death the ultimate test.. and that he wants to pass it. He talks about what the Buddha said about death and how we should be mindful of it.. an amazing talk and well worth the watch.
How often do you contemplate death in your practice? I think it's easy for me because I have seen so much death in my 34 years , including the death of my own wife to cancer 7 years ago, and all my grandparents and other relatives since age 10, that It is a topic I am comfortable with, while others it may be a scary proposition to begin to ponder. What is your practice of death awareness?
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SN 15.3 Assu Sutta: Tears
"This is the greater: the tears you have shed while transmigrating & wandering this long, long time — crying & weeping from being joined with what is displeasing, being separated from what is pleasing — not the water in the four great oceans.
"Long have you (repeatedly) experienced the death of a mother. The tears you have shed over the death of a mother while transmigrating & wandering this long, long time — crying & weeping from being joined with what is displeasing, being separated from what is pleasing — are greater than the water in the four great oceans.
"Long have you (repeatedly) experienced the death of a father... the death of a brother... the death of a sister... the death of a son... the death of a daughter... loss with regard to relatives... loss with regard to wealth... loss with regard to disease. The tears you have shed over loss with regard to disease while transmigrating & wandering this long, long time — crying & weeping from being joined with what is displeasing, being separated from what is pleasing — are greater than the water in the four great oceans.
"Why is that? From an inconstruable beginning comes transmigration. A beginning point is not evident, though beings hindered by ignorance and fettered by craving are transmigrating & wandering on. Long have you thus experienced stress, experienced pain, experienced loss, swelling the cemeteries — enough to become disenchanted with all fabricated things, enough to become dispassionate, enough to be released."
Death has been on my mind for many months now. My best friend Cheryl, someone I've known and loved for 41 years, passed away earlier this year. I am still very sad about her passing... she was only 54 years old and died as a result of alcohol abuse for many many years.
My life and mind was run through a meat grinder of emotions as I journeyed with her along those last couple of years. I was angry with Cheryl for becoming an alcoholic, I was disgusted with her for repeatedly giving up on (very) short-lived times of sobriety, I was pitying of her because I realized she had no control, and yet I felt love for her all at the same time. She was the sister I never had. And she was a great person... kind and compassionate; a good friend.
But in the end, I feel like I failed her. I failed as a friend. Oh, I know I couldn't 'save' her; could not change the ultimate outcome of her disease, couldn't even prolong that outcome; nothing I could have done would have changed her health or avoided her early passing.
So how did I fail her? Because I wasn't there - at her bedside, holding her hand, and preparing her to pass while letting her know that someone really truly cared and would miss her horribly when she was gone. I went to see her twice (in the nursing home) a few days before she passed away.
I honestly don't think she was admitting to herself she was going to die.
She looked awful, felt worse than awful and the doctors were all telling her that her body was shutting down; liver function was down to less than 15%, blood was leaking from lesions along her esophagus, and other areas internally; kidneys were failing.
Yet, she told me how silly it was that "someone suggested hospice to come in and talk to me'. I told them No Thanks!" and talked about going home in a few days...
And I didn't dispute any of that. Why? Because I didn't want to face my own emotions, my own sadness, my own pain, so I let her dwell in that denial.
I think this was wrong for me to do. Most of her (very dysfunctional) family was pretty much used to ignoring her desperate situation and living in their own world of denial as well. I knew this, and yet I used them as an excuse- as justification- for not "butting in" and insinuating myself into Cheryl's last few days alive. This was a time for Family, I told myself, not for a friend to be in the way. Her family needs to be there with her, not me...
But they weren't. and I despise them all for that. Cheryl died one night, all alone, with no one holding her hand, no one to comfort her, no one to cry with her.
All Alone, in a depressing, ugly, nursing home room.
I can't blame anyone but myself for not being there. There are no excuses. She would have been there for me if things were reversed, I'm sure of it.
I have such deep, deep pain and regret about my actions, my choices, my excuses... It absolutely haunts me.
I have not forgiven myself and I don't know if I can. I hope I never fail anyone in that situation, again. Ever. So yeah, to answer the OP question, death has been in my thoughts and within my awareness very much so lately.
I just now realized as I glanced down at my desk calendar; today is Cheryl's birthday- she would have been 55.
@Jayantha
got a little caught up in my own 'stuff' -- I forgot to say
Sorry about your wife.
As for the horrible school incident today... I have no words...
as for my wife, I can only wish her well that she was able to come to another human rebirth so she can practice dhamma and eventually reach the deathless. I don't really hold much attachment to "her" anymore, or even my own family.. which is why I guess I feel im ready to renounce. Of course I have attachment to those I grew up with and love.. but I'm starting to see them more as fellow beings in samsara, rather then " my" father, "my" mother etc. It was a weird feeling one day about 9 months ago when I had a thought about my mother and my mind , directly from my subconscious.. said " this being".. instead of "mom".
but this is a large digression.. we should be talking about how we are mindful of death every day so we are not careless.
We all have strong emotions surrounding the circumstances of life relating to death. For example we may have love or other emotion for a dead friend, lover, parent or child. We all have a relationship with death.
I had strong emotive dreams, of my dead father. By that I mean the emotion was stronger than the content. Pain and dukkha. This may take time to heal. The reason we continue conversation, therapies, dream dialogues and spiritual practice around the dead, is because they live with and within us. Not necessarily in some woo woo realm but in manifestation and memory. Often raw and real.
Part of practice is letting the dead 'die after they are dead'.
How can we let go of positive or negative attachments towards people, pets and the death of good or bad times?
It is the practice of being in the present.
I will do my puja for the peace we all seek this day.
Rest In Peace
if you've never done metta before and need some instructions I'd be glad to point you in the right direction.
http://web-beta.archive.org/web/20060426023241/http://pages.britishlibrary.net/lobster/rip/
If you live your life as if already dead, things take on a new life . . .
And
Not bad as an practise exercise in exploring ones fears of extinguishment.
But
Fully living ones life as one is, means never needing to be an act.
Unless you happen to be part of the cast of the "walking dead".
@MaryAnne
Just a few thoughts that I'm not sure will be of much help.
I for one think that Friendship is about caring to the best of our ability, not about being perfect. I also don't think its just about being as good a friend as someone else might be back to you.
You are not sure you were able to be there for her finale just as she was not able to forestall it for you. All beings are a mixture of strengths and frailties. Isn't it strange why we'd focus on one or the other for either ourselves or others.
The last stages of death by liver failure results in a deep unconsciousness slide into death. Difficult to ascribe, alone, tears or the feel of a held hand to.
Folks notoriously behave badly in the face of death because nothing rattles the cage of our ego's making like the possibility of our own end. If you wish to honor your friends life, you can do this by transmuting this perceived failure of yours into facing the tenuous nature of all of our existence. Death only seems strange because we have chosen to not see it everywhere we look, thanks to Ego fear. Death is really only the name for a rapid change that eventually touches everyone. We arise as a temporary composition and disperses just as quickly. Your friend, like everyone else, was a bubble in a stream, a phantasm, a dream... to quote a poet.
What you describe as a failure to be a true friend,
I'm sure that she,
like me,
heard only the love of a sister.
Perhaps authenticity, defined as the lack of acting, is nothing more than how we act, without choice based on emptiness or a repitoire of reflections. Sometimes the subtelty of our arisings is more deep rooted than one individuals living . . .
If your "as if already dead" is just a lobster's trick of pissing into the ego's gas tank, then I expect I'll hear your engine sputtering all the way to the end of the path.
When my mother looked at my father’s body (maybe an hour after he had died), it was clear to her. She said: “that’s not him” and she never paid much attention to it. They had been married over sixty years, so it wasn’t like she didn’t care.
I didn’t cry over my father, I cried because my mother did. For my father I just felt relief. His struggle was over. I’ve felt like that again and I have seen it with others. After a fight of months or weeks or days; death is just a relief.
I suppose the sudden death of a young person or a child even, is so hard to swallow because their death is not placed in the context of old age and a painful struggle on a sickbed. The contrast with youth and health and joy is what makes the image so painful.
What I’m trying to say – I suppose - is that we need to look a little closer at what exactly upsets us when someone died. There are a number of storylines; we have our (selfish) emotions of grief or relief; there’s the pain of close family and friends we share; and there’s a contrast we create; a story we make up about what the life of the deceased should have been like.
But I believe that the main person in the drama (the deceased person) is okay. Dead people are not rotting flesh or skulls and bones; dead people are fine.
We don’t shed our tears over them. We shed our tears out of compassion with the living; or we do so out of self-pity; or we just create a drama in our heads because we love the drama and really want to cry every now and then.
I hope this doesn’t come across as very blunt. I honestly think that spiritual practice is about looking a bit closer at what our thoughts and emotions really are about; to unmask them even. But at the same time we are not trying to become heartless.
I guess unmasking our superficial emotions is supposed to open up our hearts.
Instead of being caught in our personal drama we can allow great compassion.