Thoughts On Death
Ven. David Xi-Ken Shi
It does not take long when we begin to study Buddhist text, either in the legacy teachings or contemporary authors, to encounter thoughts on renewal, transformation, discovery of no-self, rebirth, letting-go, and impermanence, to jar the mind (ego perhaps) into personal concerns of our own trek though life to the only conclusion that is a reality; our own death. It is an opportunity to remind ourselves of the value of the limited time we have in this human form for us to awaken to the nature of the Universe. It is a reminder that life is short and we will also transcend this life – to be blunt, we too will die.
All of us have been conditioned by a value system based on a false sense of security, especially in the younger segment of life. Our society and Western culture values long term goals, continuous achievements, acquired wealth, images of what a good-life is and how to get it, working to promote our own physical perfection. Our culture values, perhaps above all, the notions of being strong, invulnerable, and victorious. We like winners. It is not surprising that most of us carry a deep-seated fear of insecurity. Many of us deal with this feeling by ignoring the reality that change comes to us, but come it does.
The biggest fear of insecurity is the fear of death. Many people I talk to are terrified of dying, and expend vast amounts of energy avoiding any thought or indication of what is absolutely inevitable for each one of us. The degree to which we are caught in the fear of death is the extent to which our life seems to have little meaning. I wonder if whenever we resist change in an inordinate way, that resistance is an attempt to keep things the way they are and thus forestall the end time. As long as we hold on to any idea of a separate and permanent self, we will always be acting in fear of death. We may not be consciousness of this as the ego-mind wants to avoid thinking about the alternative of its own existence.
How do we engage our fear of death? This requires a state of practice that completely understands the nature of the Buddhist lessons on not-self and impermanence. Meditation offers a complete set of tools to begin to overcome this very natural fear of death. Seeing, feeling, and knowing the movement of each unrepeatable breath, we come to sense the reality of change. We observe the birth and passing of sounds and smells, the arising and passing away of emotions, and the beginning and end to our thoughts. We begin to understand that every passage between moments involves the end of something. No phenomenon ever returns in exactly the same form. We begin to deeply know that our own passage out of life must happen just as swiftly and surely someday. When we take refuge in the arising and dissolution of phenomena, on a momentary level, we begin to awaken to the reality of our finality instead of struggling with it. We live WITH our mortality, not just in spite of it.
What I find so wonderful about what Siddhartha Gotama awakened to, is the liberation from the notion that having a permanent self we fear what will happen to us when we die, to the knowledge that we are, and will ever be, expressions of this Universe, no matter the form. Yes, the form will change, but what we transition to is what we originally were in the beginning. No matter our form now, or maybe next, we are dependent on what has always been. In Buddhism, this is know as the principle of Dependent Origination. We say emptiness is form, and form is emptiness. So death is not an ending, but a continuation of a process with no ending.
EXERCISE:
I want you to consider doing this in one of your next meditation sessions. Take a stick of incense and light it. Take your position on your cushion, and after taking a few deep breaths to quite the body-mind, watch the incense. Watch the smoke as it dances around as it responds to the air. The smoke is the result of the incense changing form, from a solid to something entirely different. Watch as the smoke, which is just the chemical breakdown of the material of the incense, disappear upward. Is it really gone? No it is not. Something can never become nothing, it just transforms and becomes another expression. The chemical compounds are just released to be used for another form. Which is one of the mysteries of our Universe. After the stick of incense is completely burned, it appears to be gone, but we know it has now taken on a different expression of the Universe. Our life is like this stick of incense, it is just that it takes longer to transform from one expression to another. Contemplate on this, perhaps even repeating it over a week, and see what lessons you are awakened to.
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