Life and Death

With palms together,
Good Morning Everyone,

It is still dark outside. My Little Honey woke me at 4 something looking for our portable DVD player. She couldn't sleep. I found the player, made the coffee, and looked over my email on my iPhone.

After a cup of coffee, I decided to come talk to you.

Tomorrow morning I will offer a talk on "Caring for the Buddhist Patient" at the Mesilla Valley Hospice. I am not sure how one differentiates a dying Buddhist from a dying Jew or a dying Christian. At such a point in life, it is this dying that points us to our commonality: all beings die.

Each religion seems to have an idea of the meaning of death. Each offers some solice with some understanding of life after death. This life usually entails communion with a Creator God. The Buddha Way, when looked at as Buddhism, does not share a view of a Creator God. A Creator God might exist, or might not, but a Creator God is not essential to following the Buddha Way.

So, what does a follower of the Buddha Way understand? It depends. For one thing, as is true of all religions, there is no one Buddhism. As the Buddha Way spread throughout the world, it morphed, adapting and adopting various folkways and local customs. A Buddhist practitioner in Thailand understands the Way somewhat differently than a practitioner in Tibet, who differs from one in China, Japan, or Europe.

In the main, the Buddha had little to say about life after death and not much at all about a Creator God. He thought such discussions were a distraction from practice. And they are.

Once we attain a deep sense of the interconnectedness and interdependence of all things, we glimpse into the true nature of reality. One does not mean two. One is one, infinitely. In this sense, a practitioner of the Buddha Way attains no death, no birth. Birth and death are understaood as concepts emerging from ignorance of the oneness of the universe.

So, in the relative world, when someone "dies" what does this actually mean?

When ice becomes liquid, then vapor, what does that mean? And when vapor becomes liquid, then ice?

Eternal processes are just that, eternal processes. They, in themselves, mean nothing. It is we human beings that assign meaning to them. Someone is "born" that is to say, conditions have arisen to make manifest a form. This form seems to divide from its parent, yet we know that what is "parent" is also "child". The division is no different from the flame of one candle lighting the wick of another. One flame or two?

We care for our child, we nurture her, we teach, love, and eventually send her away into the world. Our core is passed on, karma transfers, and we begin to wilt.

What is important is not that we pass away, but that we don't.

In my hand is my father, his father, his father's father, and so on throughout the generations of man and before. Equally in my hand is my son, his sons, and sons after him. And I am not talking simply about DNA. I am talking about everything.

If we were to distill this we would see residue of compassion, love, tenderness, caring, approval, anger, dislike, disapproval, envy, jelousy, greed, and on and on. Our karma.

The good news is that an instant of good karmic conduct can eclipse all the not so good karmic conduct. It does not erase it, but goes a long way toward correcting the pinball's circuit around the universe.

We come to death with acceptance, with an understanding that we live our lives, pass on, and our next generations do the same. Nothing is lost, nothing is gained. The essential aspects of "we" live on. They are passed through each generation, sometimes improved, sometimes not. How we live and what we do with our bodies and our spirit matters. It is the behavior that is our legacy over the generations, our 'life after death'.

May yours be a blessing in the universe.