What is life worth?

To most of us, at some moment or another, the spectacle of death must have given rise to the deepest of thoughts and profoundest of questions. What is life worth, if able bodies that once performed great deeds now lie flat and cold, senseless and lifeless? What is life worth, if eyes that once sparkled with joy, eyes that once beamed with love are now closed forever, bereft of movement, bereft of life? Thoughts such as these are not to be repressed. It is just these inquiring thoughts, if wisely pursued, that will ultimately unfold the potentialities inherent in the human mind to receive the highest truths.

--V. F. Gunaratna, "Buddhist Reflections on Death"

Yearning for peace?

Our fear and misunderstanding of death may lead not only to our own suffering, but to suffering for all beings. We see this potential, for example, in the realm of politics and public policy, as Daniel Goleman suggests in this quote from his 1985 book, Vital Lies, Simple Truths: The Psychology of Self-Deception.

[I]t was noted thousands of years ago in the ancient Indian epic, the Mahabharatta, in which a sage poses the riddle, “What is the greatest wonder of the world?”

The answer: “That no one, though he sees others dying all around, believes he himself will die.”
In the face of our individual powerlessness, we find it somehow reassuring to cling to the illusion that there is something—some new weapon, a defensive shield in space, a new missile—that can protect us against nuclear death.

And so the strategists’ secret is abetted by the self-deception that leads people to want to play along, to believe, to deny the truth of futility and hopelessness in planning for nuclear war. If we are to avoid the endgame of human history, we would do well to consider just why we fall prey so readily to such a fatal delusion.

Perhaps in the current struggles over the control of gun ownership, we can see this same pattern playing out. Is it possible that some percentage of people who buy guns do so out of fear of death...or the fear of loss that feeds the fear of death? Is it possible that if they developed deeper understanding of death, they would find a different way to seek the peace they desire? And what of our own lives? What harm might we be doing to ourselves and to others out of a lack of understanding of death? These are not questions with right or wrong answers--and there may be better ways of framing them--but perhaps they are questions worth grappling with in our quiet moments, when the mind can face them with some equanimity.

In our own yearning to understand death, can we perhaps see yearning for true peace? And can we use this to inspire ourselves to the effort required for this understanding? The world may be secretly hoping we can.

Not mine

How many parents get into a lot of suffering because they think the child who’s been born from the womb is my child, my son, my daughter. I was trying to mention last week that you just give that person a body, look after them, train them, give them an education, feed them. Where that person came from, the important part of them—their mind, their stream-of-consciousness, whatever you wish to call it, their character—carried with all its karma from their past life—who knows where all that came from? And a woman becomes pregnant and has got this body in there that is waiting for something to come in, who knows what will come in? There have been wonderful parents who have had monsters for children. There have been monstrous parents who've had saints for children. And of course you are probably somewhere in between, although sometimes you may think “maybe on the monster side” with your children. But why is that? Every sort of child psychologist would know that it can never be explained by the genetics or by the situation of the parents or the economics or whatever else. There are so many other factors that it can only be something that comes into the child from birth, from outside the birth. That’s why, as a good mother, you should look at your child as someone who’s a friend for a few years. Someone who has come into your life but doesn't belong to you.

Nature will teach that to you when your child leaves home, when they go their own way. You realize they are not an extension of you. They’re not part of your body like your arm or your leg which you can tell what to do. But they will go their own way. The sooner one realizes that—they aren’t mine, they’re just my responsibility for a while—the whole attitude becomes different. Instead of becoming a control, domineering attitude, it becomes a sense of responsibility, a sense of care and love, but a respect for that being as being independent of us. In other words, we can learn how to let go. Even if that child does something we don’t like, even really does something, even the worst thing that child can do, die. Even then, if we realize that that is not ours. The child has come in according to its own karma, its own nature. It’s now gone. We don’t need to grieve and to be upset. It wasn't ours in the first place. It came in unbidden. It went without saying farewell. That is the nature of life and death.

So the idea of non-Self in this sense is realizing we don’t control. There’s not a person who owns another person. But deeper than that, to be able to let go our loved ones, being able to let go of our possessions. They are not ours. 

--Ajahn Brahm, "Anatta, Non-Self"

"On the Death of the Beloved"

On the Death of the Beloved
by John O'Donohue

Though we need to weep your loss,
You dwell in that safe place in our hearts,
Where no storm or night or pain can reach you.

 

Your love was like the dawn
Brightening over our lives
Awakening beneath the dark
A further adventure of colour.

The sound of your voice
Found for us
A new music
That brightened everything.

Whatever you enfolded in your gaze
Quickened in the joy of its being;
You placed smiles like flowers
On the altar of the heart.
Your mind always sparkled
With wonder at things.

Though your days here were brief,
Your spirit was live, awake, complete.

We look towards each other no longer
From the old distance of our names;
Now you dwell inside the rhythm of breath,
As close to us as we are to ourselves.

Though we cannot see you with outward eyes,
We know our soul’s gaze is upon your face,
Smiling back at us from within everything
To which we bring our best refinement.

Let us not look for you only in memory,
Where we would grow lonely without you.
You would want us to find you in presence,
Beside us when beauty brightens,
When kindness glows
And music echoes eternal tones.

When orchids brighten the earth,
Darkest winter has turned to spring;
May this dark grief flower with hope
In every heart that loves you.

May you continue to inspire us:

To enter each day with a generous heart.
To serve the call of courage and love
Until we see your beautiful face again
In that land where there is no more separation,
Where all tears will be wiped from our mind,
And where we will never lose you again.

"Love and Fear"

"Love and Fear" - New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care from On Being on Vimeo.

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