On Dying
Rev. Master Meiten McGuire
At the end of the group last Tuesday, we were asked to send merit to the client of one of our members. When the client didn’t show up for an appointment, she went to his home and found him dead of a heart attack which turned out to have happened several days earlier. She found his body and, quite naturally, was still coming to terms with it. Then after we’d finished, another group member came up to me and told me about her 23-year old friend having died in a fire during the night three days ago. Her friend and her two equally young roommates were killed during the night after their sofa caught on fire. She felt still in shock at the sudden death of a friend. How to live with some balance and sanity in a world of impermanence and uncertainty is why we train.
Great Master Dogen put it so well in Rules for Meditation, which we recite before our first sitting and which is recited daily at Soto Zen training monasteries: “Oh sincere trainees, what use is it to merely enjoy this fleeting world. Quickly the body passes away, in a moment life is gone.” He also asks that we not forget the true dragon [Awakened Mind, Buddha Mind], not to waste so much in time in rubbing only part of the elephant [the phenomenal sensory world we live in] but advance inward directly along the road that leads to the Mind, That which is beyond the impermanent and changing. According to Houston Smith in his “Religions of the World,” all religions address this in one way or another, indeed they are created by man because of the sense of separateness from what he as a Christian called God and which the Buddha called the Unborn, Unchanging, Undying.
That we don’t know from our existential predicament thus expressed is why we train to, as it is put in “The Scripture of Great Wisdom,” gobeyond the human mind which understands life events from a conditioned wrong view. As you know, the Buddha-to-be on his deep awakening experience came in touch with his ‘myriad past life,’ clearly seeing one life in detail and then another and another. He then saw how ‘beings pass away and are reborn according to their deeds.’ Thus, rebirth and the law of karma [cause and effect] are foundational to his great teaching of the Four Noble Truths, the teaching that is unique to Buddhas. Obviously, this was the big awakening coming from his opening to the way things are. Thus he commented, “I just teach Seeing the Way Things Are.” Or in another context, “I teach only two things: suffering and its end.” Thus, we begin here and now with this human condition and go beyond to That which we’ve lost touch with through life after life of searching looking in the wrong direction for the end of suffering.
The above is one way of putting the Right Understanding which is the first factor of the Fourth Noble Truth, the Eightfold Noble Path leading to the end of the unsatisfactoriness of ordinary life as we know it. In other words, we have to recognize this aspect of our lives sufficiently to begin somehow questioning whether it has to be this way or perhaps not. For many, and certainly for me, we come gropingly to this recognition before launching on a spiritual search for Somethingthat is at this point hidden from us. This is ‘going on beyond the human mind’ in order to find the peace and ease that surpass all understanding: it requires over and over again finding that willingness, that courage really, to move into the Unknown.
What motivates us is the unsatisfactoriness [dukkha] itself, and we come to see more clearly that the basic dukkha is trying to hold onto as real and permanent that which always is changing [anicca].Through conditions arising from a vast past, we are caught in a wrong view of who we are and what the seeming external world is. This is the karmic predicament we face and come to question in some way that allows the magnificent turning inward to advance directly along the road that leads to That which is bigger than this fleeting world of our conditioned body-mind. As you’ve heard me frequently say, what we’re doing in thehardest thing in the world to do, going beyond the safe even when unpleasant known into the great Unknown we’ve lost touch with. That it can be done is the Buddha’s promise: Don’t believe anything because I tell it to you; make it true for yourselves. This is a teaching for here and now…”
Within this Right Understanding we can find a spiritual grounding when faced with the tragedy and unsatisfactoriness that life brings. The Buddha when referring to himself as a ‘physician’ for the suffering world prescribed one ‘medicine’ only: meditation. Why? Because so long as we are caught within the seeming reality of this saha world of impermanence we will suffer. That is the First Noble Truth with which the Buddha began his own great search and where we start too—that’s just the way it is. If we simply stay trapped in the karmic conditioning attempting to make it go away, we’re inevitably on the wheel of birth and death, Samsara, perpetual wandering. As the Buddha put it, we’ll go on and on “hindered by ignorance and fettered by craving,” which is a helpful condensation of the twelve links in the Conditional Arising of a new being, a ‘you’ and a ‘me.’
Friends, we’re here this time around with the excellent good karma of having been born in the human realm along with countless favorable circumstances to move off this wheel where we are driven by a sense of self which keeps us moving in the direction of suffering. The ‘ignorance’ is that of not knowing who we are, of having lost touch with our basic connectedness with all beings, not separate, not isolated, not alone in the way we implicitly have taken ourselves to be. In being stuck in this wrong understanding, we take others, our world, as separate too. And truly the sad shocking events of life have the purpose of shaking us to look more deeply—is this really so. We long for ‘Something More’ than this fleeting world. As Dogen asks us, “What use is it to merely enjoy this fleeting world?”
There simply has to be sufficient awareness of “quickly the body passes away; in a moment life is gone,” as Dogen put it. Death is the great equalizer and the awakener. It awakens us to the vital need topractice, to determinedly keep going in the very midst of life itself. “We stand against the world of this conditioned mind in order to train in Wisdom.” This is the magnificent choice we make over and over again that truly leads us toward the end of suffering. Impermanence isn’t going to go away. The Buddha hits hard at this sobering truth. We who are true seekers of Great Truth choose over and over again to “train hard, for this is true enlightenment,” again to quote Dogen’s “Rules for Meditation.” No one can do this for us. As the Buddha taught out, “You must make the effort. Buddhas can only point the way.” Doubt arises, of course. Puzzling, painful events of life come and challenge us over and over again. And we learn little by little, as it is put in one of Psalms [I think], “Grave where is thy victory? Death where is thy sting?” The great purpose of this precious life of ours is to come to know this for ourselves. Dear Ones, we have everything going for us, and right now is the opportune moment, which the Buddha urges us not to let pass in vain. We’re all on a magnificent Journey to return to our true Home where living and dying are viewed as passing phenomena in a great Karmic Play. As we see this for ourselves, we come to know the freedom of Zen as pure meditation loosens little by little the karmic bonds of clinging.
