[This document can be acquired from a sub-directory coombspapers viaanonymous FTP or COOMBSQUEST gopher on the node COOMBS.ANU.EDU.AU orANU Soc.Sci.WWW Server at http://coombs.anu.edu.au/CoombsHome.html]The document's ftp filename and the full directory path are given inthe coombspapers top level INDEX files][Last updated: 2 May 1994]----------------------------------------------------------------------"DEATH IS A SACRAMENT".This text addresses some of the most fundamental and delicatereligious issues. Therefore, it should be read, quoted and analysed ina mindful way.The text was originally published in MMC Summer 1993 pp 1-6. Allcopyrights to this document belong to Subhana Barzaghi Sensei,Kuan-Yin Zen Center, NSW, AustraliaEnquiries: The Editor, "Mind Moon Circle", Sydney Zen Centre, 251Young St., Annandale, Sydney, NSW 2038, Australia. Tel: + 61 2 6602993----------------------------------------------------------------------Death is a SacramentSUBHANA Barzaghi SenseiSubhana's talk, dedicated to the memory of Father Bede Griffiths, wasgiven at Spring Sesshin 1993, Gorrick's Run Zendo.Immediately we start to speak about death in our culture, it conjuresup all kinds of images of something morbid or depressing or tragic orpainful, Our Western culture is particularly good at hiding death andmaking it something alien. We immediately cover up a corpse and lockit behind closed doors, cover it over with a sterile sheet, in someways denying death's relevance to life. There is such a great fear ofextinction that we treat death as something taboo. We live with thisanxiety about death, as if it is a denial of our rights to continualand perpetual self-determination.My first early experience around death was certainly not a pleasantone. I was working as a nurse at the Lorna Hodgkinson Sunshine Home inSydney. I normally looked after children Ñ a ward of twenty-eightunruly mentally retarded boys Ñ but on one occasion I was transferredto the geriatric ward and I was rostered to a mentally retardedpatient there who was dying. I think I was rostered because nobodyelse wanted to take care of him. When I went in there he could barelyspeak and state his needs. The smell was repulsive: everything cameout in the bed; there was excretion everywhere. I did not know how torelate to this situation at all: I was twenty-one. As the days went onhe became worse and he died. I felt that this was a very tragic andrepulsive way to die because I had no way of meeting this person'sneeds or even communicating with him. I felt totally inadequate. Iwent straight to the matron's office and said, 'If you don't transferme back to the children's ward, you're going to have one less nurse onMonday morning.' In those days, I don't think we were prepared fordeath or how to deal with it Ñ I certainly wasn't prepared, in anyway.Many years later I had another experience, completely different fromthat. When I was a midwife for seven years, delivering babies at home,on one occasion I was assisting some dear friends. The labour was notprogressing well and was showing obvious signs that the woman and thelabour needed attention. So we transferred her to the hospital. Duringthe pushing stage one could tell that there was something not quiteright. The pushing stage was very, very difficult for her, unlikeother situations that I had been in, so we picked up on something onan energetic level. When they tried to find the baby's heartbeat onthe monitor, there was no heartbeat. That is not uncommon at thatstage of labour: when the baby is so far down in the birth canal, onecannot always pick up the heartbeat. Nevertheless the doctor alsosomehow felt that he must get this baby out. When the baby was born,it was dead.The father, who had done a lot of work on himself, was a veryinteresting person, very spontaneous. He just let out an almightyscream that went right through the hospital. The nurse burst intotears and ran out of the room. The doctor cleaned up and didn't knowwhat to say. So there we were. I was with this couple and this deadbaby. What we decided to do was just walk right out of the hospital.We took the baby with us. Nobody was going to stop us Ñ they didn'tknow how to respond anyway. We got into their van and drove offsomeplace in the middle of the night and we all sat there in the vanand passed round the dead baby and started singing to the baby andspeaking to the baby. Of course there was a huge amount of tears andenormous grief, but I was also amazed, in looking at this baby's face,at how exquisitely peaceful it was. So I had the most extreme emotionsof incredible peace and at the same time extraordinary grief. I couldnot sleep for three days; it was a very strange experience, a verybeautiful experience as well.These early experiences led me to question, what is death? When thebody dies, what remains? This is an important question, and we take itup more fully in our miscellaneous koans. The koan is, "When youseparate into earth, water, fire, and air, where do you go?" Zentraining and any truly deep religious experience should answer thesequestions of life and death, or at least put to rest some of our fear.There are some parallels between deep sleep and death. Each night whenwe lie down to sleep we enter into our dream world, our consciousnessand our senses begin to fade, and the world disappears; all the dramasand pleasures and successes and failures dissolve into the silence.Our attitude to sleep is to welcome deep sleep: it is a relief, italleviates some of the stresses of the day. Yet we view death withsuch fear and anxiety.The apparent division between birth and death is not so total as weimagine. The question is, who dies? What dies? In our practice thereis the small death of the body, and we may die a hundred deathswithout touching the great death of the mind. This great death of themind is very important. The death of the mind gives birth to wisdom,and this wisdom is timeless, boundless state, right here and now,where there is no self to take refuge in. When we ask the question,who am I? or what am I? it is the I that is not known. What you areyou must find out. In some ways, we can only describe what you arenot. You are not the world; you are not even in the world. It is morelike the world is in you. In Zen we call this experience, 'I alone andsacred in the whole universe.' Another way of saying that is,'Buddha-nature pervades the whole universe.' There is no separationthere, and when we say, 'I alone and sacred in the whole universe,' wedo not mean this self-important, self-conscious little 'I.'So death serves the deepest interests of a religious life, byreminding us of the emptiness of desires and plans and achievementsand self-interest. It keeps us in check in some way. All of ourcompetitiveness seems madness when we cannot take anything with us.Our spiritual maturity and freedom lies in our readiness to let go ofour self-importance.When I was in Los Angeles, maybe six years ago, I was given tickets toa really interesting play. It was called 'AIDS Us.' It was a play likeno other play that I have ever been to. There was a very smallauditorium and there was no barrier between the actors and the peoplein the audience, no separation. All the people on stage had AIDS andthey just got up and talked about their lives, how extraordinarilydifferent their lives had been since they got AIDS. And instead of'dying with AIDS' they reframed it and thought of themselves as'living with AIDS.' It was quite an extraordinarily empoweringexperience for these people and the people in the audience. Therewasn't a dry eye in the house. And this was in the early days, whenthere was a lot of paranoia and misunderstanding about AIDS. At theend of the play everybody from the audience just walked right down andeverybody hugged and greeted everybody else. There was a totalbreakdown of fear; there was no sense of alienation; everybody washugging everybody else. And that was a fairly straight audience, andback in those days that was quite an amazing experience for me.It was certainly my first contact with anyone who had AIDS, andparticularly a whole stageful of people. They later took that play tothe White House to raise money for people who had AIDS.There is interesting research now available about people's near-deathexperiences. The chair of the Department of Parapsychology at BristolUniversity has done interviews with people who had near-deathexperiences. She explored them from a range of approaches, from themedical to the religious. The biological-medical argument is that thereason people consistently see a great light at the end of a tunnel isbecause the brain is being starved of oxygen, and therefore everythinggoes dark; people thus experience something like going through atunnel and coming out to the light on the other side. This argumentcan explain why there is a tunnel, but it cannot explain why there isa light at the other end. They haven't got an answer for that one! Theresearcher Ñ and she was taking a straight scientific approach Ñ saidthat maybe Buddhism had some answers there, the best answers. BecauseBuddhism says that the self is merely a construct and that were-create the self over and over and over again, moment by moment. Andat the time of death the physical construct of the self starts to fallaway: body and mind falling away, that moment. And we can witness thegreat light, we can witness the emptiness. And this also accounts forpeople's consistent experiences of the interconnected oneness with allthings in those near-death experiencesThere is a range of beliefs about death that we may have subscribed toat some point. The scientific view is that we live once; we die once;death is total extinction. This of course is very rational, and thereis no proof to support any other view, nothing else is available. TheChristian view is that there is life after death; for those who findGod, the kingdom of heaven is open for eternity; for those who rejectGod, there is hell for eternity; the earth is but a brief home, atesting ground for our love of God.A Buddhist view of death is that we are all waves on the ocean; eachwave is born and dies repeatedly, according to our underlying forces;there is rebirth until enlightenment, until we get off the wheel ofsamsara. A variation of that is that there is reincarnation, until thedissolution of the ego, when the soul becomes one with the absolute. Iam still not sure about any of those beliefs.Years ago, when I was at Kopan monastery, at the age of nineteen, Idid my very first meditation retreat. I was naive enough to sign upfor a thirty-day retreat. Kopan monastery is just outside Kathmandu inNepal, and the lamas there, Lama Zopa and Lama Yeshe, were wonderfulteachers. For all beginning students they used to make us meditate ondeath for two weeks. Then, if that was not enough, we would have tomeditate on the hell realms for two weeks. We started out on thatretreat with 150 people and about thirty of us finished. They werealways saying, 'The reason we get people to meditate on death isbecause it motivates people to practise.' I'm not sure about that!But, twenty years later, I have come around to thinking that the lamashad something that was important there: they weren't so eccentric andcrazy as I originally thought.Tibetan Buddhism focuses a lot on understanding the process of deathand dying. The lamas used to say that the moment of death is potentwith opportunity, because it is then that we have access to thefundamental nature of mind. This luminous clear light will manifest;it will naturally manifest. This is a crucial point, because it isalso at that point that we can attain liberation. However, we usuallydo not recognise it, because we are not acquainted with it, here andnow in our practice, in our daily lives. So they emphasise that it isright now in our practice, in this lifetime, that we must encounterthat unmanifested great mind, establish that essential recognitionhere and now.Just after that thirty-day retreat, I was getting on a plane to leaveKathmandu to go back to India. I had always had a childhood fear thatI was going to die young: I carried that fear with me almost everyday. I know some of you here also have that fear. That morning I wokeup and I thought, 'Well, I'm going to die.' Instead of saying tomyself, as I would usually say, 'Oh Subhana, don't be so paranoid, sodepressive,' after meditating on death for two weeks up in Kopanmonastery, I thought, 'Well, OK, I'll just go with it.' So I decidedthat every single thing I did that day should be complete in itself.Every movement Ñ lifting the arm, bringing it back Ñ was complete;there was death in that moment. Drinking my tea: that was the lastmoment I was going to drink a cup of tea. Eating my toast: that wasthe last time. So there was an incredible preciousness about each andevery thing. And it took an incredibly long time to pack my bag Ñ Ithought maybe I was stalling too, about getting on that plane.Eventually in the afternoon I got on the plane: it took me all day toget there. We were in a light aircraft, going through a turbulentcloud formation out of Kathmandu; the little plane was bouncing allover the place. I thought, 'This is just like my life: being in oneendless turbulent cloud formation, bouncing up and down all over theplace.' Then in the next moment the plane came through into an openblue sky, very clear; you could see the patchwork fields of Indiabelow. And although it was not an awakening experience, it gave mehope and inspiration. It gave me a glimpse that maybe there issomething that does not die, that cannot be destroyed, and every nowand then we get a glimpse of it. That there is something greater thatcontains all this.Another reason the Tibetan lamas would say why it was so important tomeditate on death and the hell realms was because it gave a story, anexplanation, about the six realms of existence. These are the Tushitaheaven or heavenly realms; the demigods; the human realms; the animalrealms; the hungry ghosts, or demons and spirits, or Preta realms; andthe hell realms. The lamas would say that it was so precious to beborn in the human realm. If you are in the hell realms there is somuch pain and suffering that one can only survive; all one can do iscope with the pain. So in the hell realms there is no spirit ofinquiry for realisation, to attain the Way. The same with the otherextreme of the heavenly, blissful realm. It is so blissful, sopleasant, we are having such a good time being blissed out, that thereis no inquiry in that realm either. The human realm was alwaysconsidered the middle path, the middle realm, where there is a balanceof pleasure and pain. It enables us to explore more deeply into themeaning of life. You can think of 'realms'; sometimes I find it morehelpful to think of them as states of mind rather than realms. We cango through those states of mind even in one day, here in sesshin. Ifwe translate the realms to the now, this middle realm is a balance ofpleasure and pain: don't get stuck in heaven! That is not the Way.Some equanimity is the middle ground, is the perfect ripe place forawakening the mind.When we think of birth and death we encounter the concept of karma. Iwas recently reading 'The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying', by SogyalRinpoche. He gives a lovely metaphor about karma and rebirth that Ithought I would like to share with you. I always stayed right awayfrom the concept of karma. Somehow I could never get my head aroundit, how to put it all together. Sogyal illustrates it in the followingexample.The successive existences in a series of rebirths are not like thepearls of a pearl necklace, where they are held together on a threadall the way through, like a permanent soul. It is not like that, hesays: it is more like a series of dice or blocks, all piled one on topof the other, one supporting the other. There is no identity betweeneach block, but they are functionally connected. One functionallysupports the other. It is more like that than it is like a permanentself or permanent soul running through all existences. There is onlyconditionality between the blocks.If we apply that understanding right now, to this very moment, rightnow, we have a whole series of mind-moments, a whole series ofconsciousnesses. There is seeing, there is hearing, there is thinking,there is feeling. There are just these moments of consciousness,functionally connected. We just sit with that awareness, that emptyawareness. There is no permanent self that threads itself through allthat. We just hear it arising and passing away, each moment, righthere. When we stay with that series of mind-moments Ñ and they happenso fast; the mind is happening at an incredible pace, seeing, hearing,thinking, feeling - we notice the impermanence. We are very aware ofthe constant flux and change. Impermanence has many gifts, but itsgreatest gift lies buried deep inside. The fear of impermanence thatawakens in us, the fear that nothing is real, that nothing lasts, isin fact a great friend. Because it drives us to ask the question, Ifeverything dies and changes, what is truth? Is there something beyondthe impermanent appearances of life? Is there something that survivesall the deaths of the world, all the many changes? There are vastimplications in this fundamental fact of impermanence. When we trulysee into impermanence, we can see into the empty nature of things andwe can also see that it is not-self. These three faces of the truth Ñimpermanence, emptiness, and not-self Ñ are right there in eachmoment.Many times a friend dying can also give us a glimpse of this timeless,boundless reality. There is such an energy around birth; there is alsoa wonderful energy around death, around someone dying. It can awakensomething in us. When someone is dying, everyone around that personhas an opportunity to be touched by that life-death-life nature. It isa very precious opportunity. Life and death are not opposing enemies,but are complementary within the totality. When we are in touch withthat we are touching this death-less, this change-less, that bringsdeep peace. But most of the time we do not bother to be conscious ofour mortality and the cessation of all that we have known or lived foror loved or worked for. None of us can say how we will relate to ourimpending death. But if we live more conscious of death, right now, ineach moment, we might greet the dawn and the bird and the stars atnight with a lot more presence and immediacy. Life is nothing but aperpetual fluctuation of birth, death, rebirth. Death exposes itselfeach moment. Even in a single thought there is a beginning, middle,and end of the thought. There is a beginning, middle, and end of abreath. There is the sound of the bird that returns to the silence. Sothis moment is birth, this moment is death. This moment is rebirth,this moment is deathless. Can we embrace it like that?A book that everybody seems to be reading at the moment, 'Women whoRun with the Wolves', by Clarissa Pincola Estes, has a description ofSkeleton Woman. She says that if we embody the old wise woman shewelcomes death to her heart, death to her fire. She knows death aslife-giver, as death-dealer. And women unconsciously practise thesecycles of birth, death, and renewal every month, through the constantcycles of the filling and emptying of our life blood: every mooncycle. The cycles o Skeleton Woman flow deep through our bodies,throughout our entire life. This is indeed a series of births anddeaths. But if we hold on to life with fear of death, o losing ourcar, our house, our friends, our children, this fear creates somethinglike dead fingernails in the mind. The essential life and love cannever leave you because you are that.. And when we awake we hold tonothing. It is neither conscious nor unconscious. It is that pureheart of awareness. It is that true nakedness beyond all appearance.Everything exists in its light. The essence of awareness neither diesnor is reborn. It is this changeless reality. And life and death thenare married in the emptiness. In the Hekiganroku, Case 3, 'GreatMaster Baso is unwell,' this master is dying and the head monk askshim, 'How is your reverence feeling these days?' And the great mastersays, 'Sun-faced Buddha, moon-faced Buddha.' What did he mean?'Sun-faced Buddha, moon-faced Buddha.' This man is dying. Whether heis sick or well, the master is at peace. In other words, he sees allexperience as Buddha-nature.When I was in San Francisco a couple of years ago I had a wonderfulopportunity. I was visiting John Tarrant Roshi and staying withGovernor Jerry Brown, an ex-Jesuit. One night he said, 'There is aremarkable man over at Berkeley: why don't we go and meet him?' Theman's name was Father Bede Griffith: some of you may have met him orknow of him. He was a Christian priest who lived in India forsomething like thirty years, and who seemed to be able to assimilateall kinds of practices in his ashram. When they were chanting, oneminute it was Buddhist chanting, the next minute Hindu, the nextminute Christian. He would include all of these things. We went to theNo Gate Zen Centre in Berkeley. There was a small Zen sesshinhappening downstairs, with a Zen teacher giving a talk. We trudgedupstairs to meet Father Bede Griffith. When we walked in, he wassitting on his bed. He was quite old and not very well and could notwalk easily. He was dressed in his orange loincloth, which he wearsall the time. He was a wonderful little old man, with silvery hair anda long white beard. Jerry happened to ask him a really interestingquestion. He said, 'What is death?' And Father Bede Griffith all of asudden became excited and brighteyed and filled with joy andenthusiasm, and said, 'Death is a sacrament. I am completely lookingforward to my death.' I was sitting right next to him on the bed and Iwas stunned. I never met anyone with such an enthusiasm for death, andsuch joy and love for death. 'I am completely looking forward to mydeath.' His attitude about death meant that he was living life to itsfullest. His gift of no fear is the greatest gift we can give toourselves or to others. When we give this gift then life is asacrament, we meet life to its fullest.May all beings receive the gift of no fear.----------------------------------------------------------------------end of fileÿ