"Love and Fear"

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Death as a spur to religious practice

Tibetan Buddhism places a particularly strong emphasis on instructions concerning death, and Tibetan literature is full of admonitions to be aware of the inevitability of death, the preciousness of the opportunities that a human birth presents, and the great value of mindfulness of death. A person who correctly grasps the inevitability, of death becomes more focused on religious practice, since he or she realizes that death is inevitable, the time of death is uncertain, and so every moment counts.

An example of this attitude can be found in the biography of Milarepa, who began his meditative practice after having killed a number of people through black magic. The realization of his impending death and the sufferings he would experience in his next lifetime prompted him to find a lama who could show him a way to avert his fate. His concern with death was so great that when he was meditating in a cave his tattered clothes fell apart, but he decided not to mend them, saying, "If I were to die this evening, it would be wiser to meditate than to do this useless sewing."

This attitude epitomizes the ideal for a Buddhist practitioner, according to many teachers. Atisha is said to have told his students that for a person who is unaware of death, meditation has little power, but a person who is mindful of death and impermanence progresses steadily and makes the most of every precious moment. A famous saying of the school he founded, the Kadampa, holds that if one does not meditate on death in the morning, the whole morning is wasted, if one does not meditate on death at noon, the afternoon is wasted, and if one does not meditate on death at night, the evening is wasted.

--from Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism, by John Power 

Death of a Tibetan master

Everything is caused by something before it

And it may well be that coherence, synthesis, causality, and sequential, lawful change, which Einstein says is embodied in the entire physical universe--it may well be that all of these manifestations of lawfulness continue after our death. Why would it be that causality goes right up to death and suddenly the universe becomes a-causal and molecules start bouncing around randomly? Actually--if you think there is something as absolute and final as death is often construed to be--then you are being non-scientific, since the essence of the scientific world-view is continuity of causality. Everything is caused by something before it. Everything that exists will cause something after it. ... [Past wars] have not gone away. They will actually never go away as long as there are people who continue to suffer from the residues of violence.

--Paul Fleischman, An Ancient Path (free e-book)

What is reborn?

For from the beginning, we have been taught, Buddhism holds that the dead have been reborn (or reincarnated – the attempt sometimes made to suggest some sort of difference between the two in ‘Buddhist English’ has little to recommend it). Whether the dead are reborn immediately after death, as is the doctrinal position of the Theravāda Buddhism of Southeast Asia, or there exists a short period of up to forty-nine days before rebirth, as is common in the Buddhism of e.g. Tibet or China, makes little difference. The fact is that soon after death the dead have gone beyond recall, reborn perhaps as happy beings known as ‘gods’ (deva), or as warlike ‘anti-gods’ forever jealous of the gods, or perhaps once more as humans, or non-human creatures such as animals, fish, cockroaches or wiggly worms, or hungry ghosts, or worst of all reborn in one of the many terrible hells of Buddhism in accordance with the moral quality of their past deeds while alive (‘karma’).

Of course, it is perfectly possible that one’s dead family members have been reborn close to their living descendants, and hence are still capable one way or another of being in a dependence relationship with the living.  But once more the majority doctrinal position of Buddhism has been to deny that these beings could be seen as actually still being our former family members who have passed on and to whom we hence preserve our familial duties of former times. This is because (we are told in so many introductory books on Buddhism) the Buddha did not hold that the reborn being is literally in all respects the same as the being who died. The reborn being is certainly not in any meaningful sense the same person as the one who died, and this point is recognised quite explicitly in several influential Buddhist philosophical traditions (Williams 1998: Chs. 3, 5). A cockroach cannot be the same person as one’s grandfather. 

The link between the ‘reborn being’ and the ‘being that died’ is explained in terms of causal dependence, where karmic causation is held to be a central factor in holding the whole process together. And it is essential to Buddhist doctrine that with causation there is absolutely no need for some sort of permanent, unchanging, enduring self-identical bearer of personal identity – a ‘Self’ – to link the one who dies and their rebirth (Collins 1982). All that happens is that at death the psychophysical bundle, made up out of a stream of physical events, sensations, conceptual activities, various other mental events including crucially one’s intentions, and that awareness which is necessary to any conscious experience (i.e. the five classes of psychophysical events known as the ‘aggregates’) reconfigures. Doctrinally speaking, a living being is nothing more than a temporarily structured configuration of physical events, sensations, events of conceptualisation, various mental events such as intentions, and awareness, without any enduring Self (Pali: attā; Sanskrit: ātman) to glue him or her all together. Even when alive these aggregates (Pali: khandha; Sanskrit: skandha) form a flow, a stream, with no stability save that provided temporarily by the structuring causal force of previous actions. At death one configuration breaks down and another configuration takes place. Thus the person is reducible to a temporary bundle of events where all constituent events are radically impermanent, temporarily held together through causal relationships. Thus even if one’s family members have been reborn in close relationship to their grieving family, this doctrinal position would entail that the rebirth cannot in any meaningful sense preserve enough identity to entail the normal social relationships and duties incumbent upon close or even fairly distant family members. The dead may be all around us, but they are no longer our dead.

--Introduction, Buddhist Funeral Cultures of Southeast Asia and China

49 days

Those who are familiar with the Buddhist traditions of East and Southeast Asia may be familiar with the 49-day ceremony for the deceased. This ceremony reflects the prevailing beliefs in these traditions that rebirth occurs seven weeks after death. The Southern Buddhist tradition, however, does not have this belief. So we see that what we may think of as "Buddhist," in the sense of the tradition at large, may in fact be "buddhist," if we may think of that word as pertaining to a subset of the larger tradition.

The Buddhist tradition has often found ways to accommodate itself to the indigenous beliefs and practices of various cultures. In fact, the tradition's facility with handling death in large part accounted for its success in spreading beyond India!

Death indeed was and is at the centre of Buddhist culture and has on a ritual, ideological and even economic level played a crucial role in its development and spread. Death was from its beginning an event that was seen as particularly central to Buddhist interests. Throughout Asia it has always been recognised that Buddhists are specialists in death. One of the things that attracted Chinese (and Tibetans, for that matter) to Buddhism was its clarity about what happens at death, the processes needed to ensure a successful death – the welfare of the dead person and his or her mourners – and its clarity about what happens after death and its links with the whole way someone has lived their life. No other rival religion in Asia had at that time such clarity. It was a major factor in the successful transmission of Buddhism from its original Indian cultural context. (from the introduction to Buddhist Funeral Cultures of Southeast Asia and China)

So we find in certain regions of Asia in which the ancestor tradition is very strong, this practice of the 49-day ceremony, which incorporates certain features of preexisting traditions without compromising the overall principles of Buddhism. A lovely description of the Vietnamese approach to death ceremonies, which crosses religious boundaries, may be found here.

This blog offers resources on some of the regional traditions, which may promote better understanding of this phenomenon of adaptation.