(upbeat music) This podcast is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for Your Life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. Thank you and happy listening. - This is impermanence of the body and recollection of our own death. And so this is reflections on impermanence. I rewrote quite a lot of this talk. I have given it before, but I rewrote in the aftermath of Bantay's death, and it's given me quite an age, a realness, and also a poignancy to what I wanted to say. For 10 years, I have worked for the Order Office, and that is an organization which promotes harmony, good communication, and resilience, I would say, in the order worldwide. So it's kind of a secretariat or something like that. We support, the team has supported the international order convenience. So for 10 years, I was coordinator of Bantay's death, aftermath, if you like, whatever came next. And those arrangements came to an end three months ago. So I had a little bit of a narrow escape. But, you know, I've been prepared. I was on 24/7 alert for 10 years. So, you know, it was kind of ever-present, really. So we were talking consistently over those 10 years, changing our ideas. Bantay gave us different instructions. So we were always in this kind of flow of preparations. So I thought I was prepared for his death. I thought having thought about it and discussed it a lot, I thought I was ready. And despite that, when I heard and afterwards, I went through all kinds of different moods and emotions that I could not have predicted. So I heard that Bantay was really poorly and had gone into hospital when I was at my mum's flat in Somerset. My mum is in her home. She's quite poorly. And I'm starting to clear out her belongings. But I was there on my own doing that. So that's quite a strong thing to do anyway. I was right away from the Sangha, you know? I hadn't got my mates around me. And I went to sleep knowing Bantay was in hospital. And when I got up the next morning, I thought, my first thought was, he's not going to survive this time. He's had pneumonia before. He's been in hospital before. He's not going to survive this time. So what can I do? So I got up and because I was in position, I knew the mantras he'd requested. So I got up and I chanted the mantras for him. And then I sat with the realisation that this might be it. And then about an hour later, Arasaki, who's in my chapter, rang me to make sure that I knew that he died. Because we had that arrangement within our chapters. And I thought, the time has come. You know, the time has come. We've thought about this for so many, for such a long time. So I went back to Sheffield that evening. And the next day, I went to, we had a rolling vigil for 24 hours at Bantay. So I kind of caught the tail end of it, which was good. And I sat through three cycles of chanting and sitting. And then I went home and had my lunch. And then I walked around the park. And when I walked around the park, I felt so strong. I couldn't, I thought, you know, I was an unusual response. And I just felt strong because Bantay had taught me what I needed to know. He'd left the information for me. I was confident in my practice. I was in good communication with other people. I didn't know at all, but I didn't have to know at all. I had to know what was suitable for my practice. And I felt I'd got a bit of a handle on that, thanks to Bantay, thanks to his teaching, thanks to his movement, thanks to his order. I was in a good place. And it was very, very strong and kind of freeing, you know, in some way. I can't really explain it now, but it was like that, or that's what it felt like. And then the next day, I went to my Chigung class and I was really upset. There was something in my body which was upset, you know, and swinging my arms and patting my body and it would just all woke up. And I was really upset and ho-hum, that's what happened. And then all the women's chapters came together in Sheffield on the Sunday. And we just talked of our experience of Bantay, Sankarachita, Bantay Ergion, Sankarachita, truly Ergion now. And it was so moving, it was so moving and personal, although not everybody in the room had had contact with him, even, not even been physically in his presence, some of them, very few, but. Then I decided I write for the gratitude book. So this thing on the Buddhist Central Alliance then, write a page on gratitude. And it was easy. I don't do writing, but it was easy. And all the time I had this lump in my throat, so there we are, we had a bit of, oh, he's gone. And then the funeral. So going down to the funeral in a coach from Sheffield, 60 people from our Sankar, a long day meeting friends, but also poignant, dignified, celebrated, celebratory, and a real coming together, a real coming together, over 2,000 people there, and being hugged and kissed lots, which was very nice. Yeah, so a whole load of different stuff, and it's still going on. You know, it's still going on, it's not done, it's not done. And then I got home and wrote a will. It's will number three, but I decided, you know, as your life changes, then you have to make different provisions. So I've been thinking about it for ages, but I was actually sort of galvanized into it, and it's all signed and done, and my children know where it is. And fantastic, it actually kind of pushed me into finishing it, pushed me, propelled me, that's a better word, isn't it? So one of the blessings that I find in the order is this ability to open up in challenging situations, and to turn towards and face things in a very kind of real way. I do honor that and appreciate it. And I'm hugely grateful for the response that I met on the death of Bante, and it seemed to me like within my anger and the people I know and people I don't know, we all moved closer together. We all moved closer together. It was, you know, I really appreciate that. Sanger Rachael is commented in his writing that someone with the basic knowledge of Buddhist teachings are probably have all they need to travel a long way along the path. Four noble trees, eightfold path, you've got it. Okay, that's a basis, it's different for different people. But what we lack, he says, are the emotional equivalence of our intellectual understanding. Say it again, it's really, really important. The emotional equivalence to our intellectual understanding. And a consequence of this is that we simply forget what we believe to be true, because we aren't emotionally speaking completely convinced by it. We just don't let it sink in well enough for it to influence our behaviour. And this is particularly true when it comes to keeping in mind the truth of impermanence and the truth of death. As I have just found out again, I was admonished as to be a logically prepared for Banteau to die. But my emotional responses were something else. Quite different. Different. The Buddhist scriptures all encourage us to prepare for our own death and act in the knowledge and emotional understanding that death cannot be avoided. Gampopa, he says. Furthermore, death may come at any time and I will lose this excellent opportunity. Therefore, abandoning action done solely for this life, I shall strive day and night on this path and so make this life meaningful. Gampopa was writing in the 12th century in Tibet, but his work echoes verses from earlier times, the time of the Buddha, the Dasar Dharma Suta, which is one of my very favourite. It's brief, succinct, logical, all the things I revere. Okay, the Dasar Dharma Suta is a series of reflections and I will talk about three of them. It's one of 10, three of 10, firstly. All that is mine, beloved and pleasing will become otherwise, will become separated from me. This should be reflected upon again and again by one who has gone forth. Whatever we love or are attached to will be taken from us. When you die, you leave everything behind. You do not get to the end of your to-do list. You will not survive your own death and yet we often act as if we're immortal. Shanti Devi in the Bodhicharya Vittara echoes this. This body is but an object on loan. In a moment, life breaks its word. Life breaks its word. This is an invitation for us not to hold onto acquisitions, status, situations, experiences, and even at the end, our own physical body. In the Paranavana Suta, the Buddha, beautifully, it's such a lovely phrase. He relinquished the life force. He relinquished the life force and gave up to death willingly. And this can be done. I was with my father when he died and I believe he did that. He waited for my mum and two of his daughters to turn up. And then as soon as we arrived, he relaxed and died. He relinquished the life force. The Dasadama Suta says, "The days and nights are relentlessly passing. "This should be reflected upon again and again "by one who has gone forth. "The days and nights are relentlessly passing." The reality is that with every waking moment, our life becomes shorter. One day, we will wake into the day of our death, the day that we die. I was on a Buddha field retreat once and a few years ago. And I was very close to the earth, very close to the elements, and being outside does something quite different to me. And I can recommend retreats in fields. And Kamala Shili was talking about the imperative of practice in the light of death. And he said something like, "One day you will wake up into the day of your death "and it will not be one of your better days." LAUGHTER I was really shocked. I was actually very shocked. That really kind of brought me up against something that it was not going to be a good day. It was not going to be a good day. And I had to prepare for not good days now, because I want to do it as well as I can manage. I want to be able to die appropriately in some way. I don't know what that's going to be like, but that's what I would like to wish to do. Again, Popa says in the dual tournament, "This life has many dangers. "It is more fragile than a bubble glowing in the wind. "It is a great marvel to have time to live, "to breathe in and out, and to wake up from sleep. "Death is an invitation to get on with our practice "as well as we can every day of our lives. "This can be seen as a reminder of the urgency of practice. "The truth of our own death brings us up against the question, "What am I doing with this life? "What is important to me? "How do I act in this knowledge?" I think I'm not going to say it as a quote, because I don't think I know it properly, but Bante says something like, "Plan like you will live forever. "Practice as if it's your last day." That's a paraphrase. I don't know what, you know, it's something like that. That's the Donald Suter again. "Have I experienced any profound truth or wise insights "so that when facing death, "I need not feel ashamed when questioned "by my spiritual companions? "We're in this together. "This should be reflected upon again and again, "or one who has gone forth. "The reality is the practice we do in this lifetime "will be halted on the day we die. "An important question is, will it be enough?" This is an invitation to review our effort and progress while we're alive, so that we won't be disappointed with ourselves at the end of our life. Taking on the truth of death can also be an encouragement to practice and not be disappointed. I used to work in hospital at one stage, and I remember very clearly, a man coming onto the ward I worked on, and he so regretted the path of his life. His actions towards other people, and it was heartbreaking. And I just thought, I don't want that to happen to me, I really don't want that to happen to me. I used to work in residential homes as well for a little while, and one of the women in one of the homes I'd worked in was a very, very proper Catholic, and she was terrified of dying in her sleep. Absolutely terrified, she'd have all these routines that she had to do before she went to bed, and they were all like, protection against death, because she didn't want to die without being absolved, because she feared what she'd done in her lifetime, and I thought, one, I'm never going to be a Catholic. (LAUGHTER) Secondly, I don't want to die in fear. I really don't want to die in fear, I want to do my best, that want to help me. Can I die without regret? Would that be good? Both these sections refer to our death. The reflections are also about how we live this life faced with the reality of our own death. It's really easy to distance yourself from your own death. I can think that the hopefully very old lady fit and dwell, (LAUGHTER) called "Came Suri", lying on her deathbed, will not be the one that I know today, which, of course, is rubbish, it will be. It will be. (CLEARS THROAT) We live in a culture which does not frame death well. Our society does not do death well. We've lost our intimacy with death. Honestly, facing the truth of death is often encouraged in our culture, and it can take various forms. I can think of three, you can probably think of more. So we centre-mentalise it. We make it fluffy, pink and fluffy. So, the Victorians were particularly good at this, and there's just tons of art, paintings of the deathbed, often of children, mothers in childbirth, all their family kind of flopping around them and, you know, a light hovering in the window and things like that. There's tons and tons of pictures like this. And it was a time when death was really common and upfront. So, it's not really surprising if you were middle-class. If you were a middle-class man, you might die when you were 45. That was average life expectancy. If you were a working man, it was half that. If you got to 28, you were doing well. It's shocking, isn't it? So, death was very present. And the Victorian era could be accused of even having a sort of morbid fascination, and a particular obsession with death and dying. Victoria did it well, Queen Victoria did it well. I mean, she went into the morning for years when Albert died, and it all became terribly fashionable. Special gear, you know, frogs, things like that, yeah. And artefacts, you know, cameos and all sorts of things. And it was almost exaggerated and self-indulgent, and that's what sentimentalities like. It's like not making it real, it's making it something else. But at least they didn't pretend it didn't exist. Now, when people who die, particularly people who die young or have aggressive illnesses, they're called victims. What a weird word. What a weird word, as if it doesn't happen. So sentimentalities like a gushing emotion to a stranger situation, although it's often nothing that you are personally involved in, it's vicarious, yeah? We also industrialised death in this country, in our culture. We make it a business, a process which is hidden and often ever so expensive. I thought about becoming an undertaker at one stage. I thought, well, I could do that, I could be an undertaker. And then I discovered that you were almost part of the emergency services. So you had to turn out in the middle of the night if somebody died, which would do fancy. And it's because people don't like having bodies in their houses. As if, you know, it's just like, you have to throw it away somehow. Or something like that, I don't know, I find it very strange. I met a friend recently, I was just walking in the park and she was walking like a dog. And she said her mum had just died, and there's big blocks of flats near where I live. And the lift wasn't working, and so they would have to get the body out down the stairs in daylight. And her mum had been dead for some time already and she just caught the undertokers. And they didn't want to take the body down the stairs. And they didn't want to take the body down the stairs because people would see them. What? She couldn't understand it either, you know. And then she just said, oh, just take the body down the stairs, it'll be all right. I'll go in front of it, you know. I'll deal with anybody we meet. They know who my mum is, I know. It's almost like it was a secret. We have closed coffins, we embalm the dead, so they look beautiful. And Jesse Comitford, who was one of the famous Litford sisters, aristocratic extremists, in some ways, all sorts of extreme ways. She wrote in 1963, so this is a really long time ago, she wrote a book called The American Way of Death. And in it, this is one of her least graphic paragraphs. She describes in exquisite detail how each body is sprayed, sliced, pierced, pickled, trussed, trimmed, creamed, waxed, painted, rouged, neatly dressed, transformed from a common corpse into a beautiful memory picture. Turned into somebody we don't know. I won't even start talking about cryogenic freezing. We can act like and pretend that death does not exist, it does not happen. Our culture also commercialises death, I think, we have this phenomenon called the bucket list. Everybody will have come across this. I looked at it, I thought the internet, it's just pages and pages on bucket lists and how wonderful they are and what you can do and where you can go and buy them. And it's a consumerist, acquisitive side of many of the lists, which is almost like a shopping list. Are we just trying to deny the idea of death? Pretend that there's always going to be the next thing, the next thing. It trivialises life, it trivialises life, the meaning and purpose and reduces it to bungee jumping, climbing Everest and swimming with dolphins, which is probably quite nice. But can you understand what I'm trying to get at? We lose our intimacy with death. Death seems to have stopped being part of everyday life and is hidden discreetly behind the sombre windows of the funeral directors. I had this lovely meeting once. Bante had moved to Adistana and we were looking for a new funeral director because it was too far away from what we had in Birmingham. And for Bante's funeral we had a fantastic funeral director. Really good. The first time we met him was really interesting because we wanted to know how we might manage to have Bante's body on view and how long that might be possible for and how we organise transport. So it's all terribly practical and he had to talk to us about, depending on how ill he was, whether he'd been in the hospital, do you know what I mean? Lots, lots of variables. And he was trying not to shock us and we wouldn't try not to shock him. So he was talking euphemistically about the process of dying and what happens after somebody's dying. And I felt like saying to him, we meditate on the dissolution of the body. It's okay, you can say real language. So you mean this, you know, so it was just like we would be really careful with each other. It was a very productive meeting, very good, but interesting in terms of language. We are encouraged to be forever young to believe that 60 is the new 40. Well, actually it's 74. 74 is the 40. Excellent. We pretend it's not going to happen or that it is then the far, flung, unimaginable free future. So when I was a young woman, my children were quite small. My partner, I was diagnosed with cancer and he was really ill. He was really ill and when he was well enough to be out and about after he'd had some surgery but he didn't, he wasn't going to, they just openly shut him back down again. It wasn't anything they could do at that stage. He is still alive. I will say that 30 years later, he's still alive. That's good. And but we used to go shopping, we used to go shopping in Austria, small town, Wednesday, market day, everybody goes shopping. We used to walk down the road and we could see people cross the road because they didn't know what to do. They didn't know what to say to him and it was so upsetting to have that happen. People avoid you because you're so ill. And on another occasion, I had a friend who her first baby was born the same day as my daughter Alice and her baby was born dead. And I wasn't that well and we couldn't see each other for a while. So we sent each other letters, we corresponded for the first few weeks. And then she had another baby and that baby died at birth too. And I couldn't believe it, I couldn't believe it. And my first response was, somebody's made this up. My second response was to get the vacuum cleaner out because in times of trauma, I vacuum floors and it's kind of, it's a repetitive, it's repetitive, it's kind of soothing, it's physical, it gives me time to think. And while I was back in the floor, I said, I went, it went like this. I'm the last person she wants to see, you know, because it's so, it's still very raw for both of us, you know. And I haven't got anything to say, there's, I can't bring her any comfort, you know, there's no comfort in this situation. And by the time I'd finished vacuuming the floors, I got a group on myself and thought, that's rubbish, you know, that's rubbish, you have to go and see her and you have to go and see her today. So I went to see her and it was, you know, totally distressing her husband and her there. They were in bits and I just kept going through the door. I was upset before I even got into the room and I got, I got through the door and I just said, I don't know why I'm here, I've got nothing for you. And she said, you came, nobody else has. Shocking, isn't it? But I can understand why it's so hard, hard for me. To face our own death and to turn towards death is to live more fully. And with the awareness of the choices we have in this life, when Queen Nongchun asks Pat and Samba, a few words of great import, he replies, "Listen, Queen Nongchun, to begin with, pay urgent attention to impermanence." And then says a bit more and then he says, "These are the preliminaries without which no means exist." You have to be, it has to be urgent, but you have to do it now. He is very definite. We can choose to live with more clarity, conviction and urgency. We need this sense of urgency. Do whatever it is you have to do to make progress. Do it now and love it. You know? Engage with it. We don't know what's going to happen. We can't afford to think. This can happen when I retire or when I'm less busy or I've got a bit of cash in the bank. We need to do whatever it is now. The washing up can wait. So facing our own death is also an invitation to live life more fully and more responsibly. By clearly facing death we often challenge other people's views and this has to be born in mind. You might ruffle people up the wrong way. So you change the challenge of the people's views and the assumptions of society. When Grey, my partner was very ill and I was a young woman, my grandmother died of lung cancer when he was 64 and his wife, my grandma, at that time it was like we don't talk about cancer. It's a bad word and we don't talk about it. I remember my grandmother coming to stay with us and she was whispering to me in the kitchen, "How's Grey?" And I just turned around and said, "You'll have to ask him." I thought, "I am not putting up with this." In fact, one of the things that Grey and I did right at the beginning of the illness was we were not going to pretend we were going to speak about it openly and encourage other people to do a sort of policy decision. And it's, you know, I just, you know, with my grandfather, it was all, he was going to get better and he wasn't going to get better, you know? I can't live with that. I couldn't live with that thing. I can't now. So I try and bring to mind my death every day. It's really important for me to do that. And I offer, through the body centre, to conduct funerals because that supports me in my taking on this truth. Some years ago, I had a friend who was seeing somebody who had motorneurone disease, which is a particularly cruel illness. And she had two sisters who'd already died of it. She knew exactly what was in front of her. And she was looking for somebody to help prepare her for death. And they said, "Would I go and visit her?" So I went here to visit her. And I laid out what I thought I might have. She'd been to Tara Locra, actually, but she hated it. She didn't see it at all. But she knew about meditation, new meditation existed. So I laid out what I thought I might be able to offer. And I saw her most weeks until her death, which was three years later. And what she said to me was, she wanted someone to help her die without hating herself. She knew it was going to be a hard path being that ill. And so we did the mindfulness breathing and the metabarthener. And now she got more ill. We did the metabarthener. I did introduce her to the six element practice, but she only understood four elements. So we did the four element practice, special for her. And on the last time I saw her, she was really, really poorly just before she went into the hospice. And we did the four elements practice. And she knew where she was going to be buried. She'd been to see the plot. So we imagined plot of ground. And we imagined lying on the ground in the place where she was going to be buried. And we dissolved our bodies. And she went to sleep as I did the shouldn't have had mantra. And I didn't see her after that until her funeral. Where I met Mavis. Mavis and I didn't know each other then, what we do now. And I just regarded my relationship with Kath as a complete gift because she couldn't swerve away and pretend that death wasn't happening. And I was with her and I couldn't do that either. She taught me how to die. Or one way. She taught me how to die graciously and consciously. A remarkable woman. So practicing through an awareness of death is about abandoning actions which are done solely for the effect they will have in this lifetime. We're not practicing for the sake of making Samsara more comfortable, easier to put up with, but to make real progress with insight in mind. When we die it is only the deepest part of our being, our consciousness that really matters. And the legacy of our life and actions. We leave behind a legacy. However we live we leave something behind. How can we stay open to the truth of death without despondency, horrified anxiety, denial, or depression. How do we meet this really human condition? We can nourish and care for ourselves and others knowing the uncertainty of this life. We can forgive and we can be forgiven. We can learn to love and trust in the Dharma. There's a lovely sutta in the Samutta Nikaya and it's called to Maha Nama. And I'm just going to read this because it's the business. Thus I have heard once the Buddha was staying among the Shaqians in the park then Maha Nama the Shaqian went to the Buddha, bowed to him, and sat down to one side. Then he said to the blessed one, "At times my mindfulness of the Buddha becomes mudded. My mindfulness of the Dharma becomes mudded. My mindfulness of the Sangha becomes mudded. Then the thought occurs to me. If I were to die at this moment, what would happen to me? What would be my future cause? Have no fear, Maha Nama. Have no fear. Your death will not be a bad one. If one's mind has long been nurtured with faith, nurtured with virtue, nurtured with study of the Dharma, nurtured with renunciation and a simple life, nurtured with wisdom, then when this body, which is born of mother and father, and nourished with right and porridge, subject to impermanence, decay and death, when this body is eaten by vultures, dogs and hyenas, nevertheless the fate of the mind will not be a bad one." What do you think Maha Nama? Suppose a tree was leaning toward the east, slanting towards the east, inclining towards the east, when its root is cut which way will it fall, in whichever way it was leaning an inclining lord. In the same way, Maha Nama, a disciple of the noble one, leans towards liberation, slants towards liberation, inclines towards liberation. Have no fear, Maha Nama. Have no fear. Your death will not be a bad one. Your demise will not be bad. We can trust the world of the Buddha and we can trust the Dharma. When we have the capacity to be moved by life and its trans during nature, we can live in the true beauty of the fleeting moment. This is a quote from Dennis Potter, he was a playwright and he did a really famous interview on the BBC in which he's talking about the presence of death. He's very poorly, he's talking about the present death. He's got lung cancer, he's smoking a cigarette and he's sipping morphine. He says, in this interview, the blossom is full in full now. It's a plum tree. It looks like an apple blossom, but it's white. It's the whitest, frotheist, blossomist blossom that ever could be and I can see it. Things are both more trivial than they ever were and more important than they ever were and the difference between the trivial and the important does not seem to matter. But the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous. It's to do with the perspective that you have when you're close to death, either your own death or someone else's. You get a different kind of perspective and in a way we're looking at that different kind of perspective. We can experience gratitude for our life. We can delight in day-to-day beauty and we can love everyone and everything just for the sake of it. So knowing the truth of impermanence is also joyful and life-enhancing. We can do what we really want to do. We can take risks, try things out. You can find out who you really are. We can recognize our habits and free ourselves from them. Fantastic. I made a decision on a retreat in 2006 to speak out. It was an intention at the end of a very strong retreat as I've been on here, which is entirely good. So my intention was to speak out and to hold my own truth and let people know what that truth was and it has changed my life completely. It's been absolutely wondrous mostly. So I've just got a couple of thoughts to finish with really. One of which is I've had some pretty odd experiences in my life that don't make any sense whatsoever. Run completely counter to my understanding of the world and how it works, yet are true. They are in my experience. I know that I don't know everything. I know that life is extremely mysterious and I cannot know what death is. The other thought I have is that I sometimes think that this body is a limitation in itself. In a very sort of scientific way, we know that our senses are incredibly limited. We can't see the full range of light that we know about. We can't hear anything like that to do. We can't smell like dogs do. You know, apparently this is interesting. The sense senses in our nose, if they were all lined up, we'd cover a matchbox. If you're a beagle, they'll cover two footprint pictures. That's different, isn't it? That's a real difference. We don't even smell things properly. And I have strong said sometimes that our human faculties are real restrictions. It's not just they're limited compared with evil ones that we know about on this planet. I'm just thinking sometimes I bet we're completely missing out of some things and that's why when we see glimpses that we can't understand, we're working on another kind of basis altogether that is not every day. Most people see their death as a limitation, but maybe it isn't. Maybe it's a freedom. May we all make good progress and live in joy. We hope you enjoyed this week's podcast. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at FreeBuddhist.io.com/donate. And thank you.
