(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 by the way is my new by four calls. It's the only second time I've actually worked with them and they're great. As long as I sort of don't do this and it goes all blood, but I do this. But that means I can look up at you. That's why I got by four calls. All right, this is a talk. (audience laughing) You mean taking them off is that a joke, right? That might be the only joke in the talk, but I do have a joke. Now, you've got to, you know, those of you who've ever told a joke to this number of sophisticated, of being people, you're going to be with me on this. It's a joke ahead on the radio and it's about death. There aren't any many jokes about death, but if you've heard it, please do not shout out the answer. So a married couple, aged 90, decided they're going to get divorced. So someone goes along and I'm going to say, "Look, you've left a bit late, haven't you?" And they said, "Well, we decided we'd wait "until the children were dead." (audience laughing) I couldn't have paid all of you to laugh. That must be funny. (audience laughing) Now, this talk started out... Wow. All right, that's it, yeah. (audience cheering) We have a minute. This talk started out... (audience laughing) Death and Buddhist. And just before I'd not long get into avoiding doing it when my mother took ill, and then, you know, with her... Aplomb in timing, this year's down there, she died. So it was... I thought, "Well, I saw..." It's a good, I have a good excuse and good reason for not doing this. I could just ring out the people who notice their life. My mother died, et cetera. But then I thought of Buddha. I thought, "Well, actually, one of the things "I put my mother, I remember, is that in her prime, "she was operated on by the doctors. "So I'm told five times." And she used to sort of be knocked down, and then she bounced back up. She had a lot of resilience. And I thought, "Well, it's not fair to me "just to use her as an excuse "for basically no one to do any work." So I decided I would do the talk, and then, because part of the vanity came up, the council thought, "Well, why don't I do the talk here, "as well?" So that's why I'm standing here. So it's not the same talk as the one I did on Tuesday. I've cut out huge chunks of poetry. You'd be glad to know. Right, this is me. You're gonna try and work with these now. Here we go. Right. So the very first thing you say is this. As far as death goes, I know nothing. Right, I don't know anything. But actually, as I look around, actually I know none of you know anything either. So we're sort of in a way, we're in the same boat. We're not in the wiser, but death. Although we have to make an effort and we do try. But the first thing I'd like to say about death in the Buddhist is that, first of all, I'm a human being. I'm a human being first. I'm a Buddhist second. And that's important to me, because I think that historically, people with religious views don't mind persecuting and oppressing folk who don't actually believe their views or even their version of the same views. So I'm a human being first. And I actually feel that the Buddhist dharma, that's its whole tendency. The tendency is humanity comes first before, in a way, the doctrine and the dharma. There's no point in a way being a great Buddhist but having no sense of consent for human beings just as themselves as human beings are. And the Buddha dharma is first and foremost a compassionate view. The other thing I'd like to also say in preparation for saying a wee bit more is a line by Padma Sambaver that I like. I remember and I like it. I believe Padma Samba said this. He says to his disciples, always remember this and you won't go far wrong. I do not know, I do not have, I do not understand. So I like that again because it gives me a lot of leeway. I don't have to pretend to you that I know or I have or even that I understand. And there's a sense of freedom for me in that. And I remember when I was a student how I don't know how it happened but I got into this mindset where I had to know everything. But the thing about being a student is that the more you learn, the more you understand you don't know if you see what I mean. It's an endless process. And then one day when I was a student, one day somebody asked me something that could have been perfectly trivial but I brought the habit that several years in the education industry had developed in me. I said I don't know. And it was a bit of a liberation, a bit of a relief to say I don't know. So that's fair enough. I'm all right about that. I don't know, I don't have, I don't understand. Now, a little quote here. "Dess has 10,000 several doors for men to take their exits." Death is 10,000 several doors for men to take their exits. That's by John Webster in the Duchess of Marphy 1612. Now, just to let you know, by reading through a few books when death one comes across quotes like this and that's where I go at that actually. I haven't even read the Duchess of Marphy. I'm never likely to actually. But we all know that about death having 10,000 several doors. Okay, and for the Buddha Dharma, what we have to remember, if nothing else, death, it might seem a strange thing to say, but death only arises in dependence on birth. If you aren't born, then you don't die. Which is rather sort of, it seems a bit nonsensical to us, but from the Buddhist perspective, this is something you have to understand about death. You only die first you are born. And we are born, that's the thing. We have been born, and now we are alive, and yes, we will all die. Every one of us is gonna die. Say that again. Every one of us has got, that is the part we protest in, and here, we free minister in a previous life, perhaps, once to sort of just make sure you understand you're all gonna die, and myself as well. And as I said earlier, I was saying to somebody in Norwich, I'm gonna say, look, we're all gonna die. And this guy says, could you exclude me from that, please? (audience laughs) I knew him as well. He's been around there for a while for donkey's years. I said, okay. So when I said, we're all gonna die, except for my friend here. And he smiled, and we were all laughed at, and he knew it was, there was no exceptions to this rule whatsoever. So there's all sorts of ways to die. And when I was thinking about that, and in being in mind, you don't die unless you're born. I asked myself a question, which I'm gonna ask you. We might find something interesting. Let me say this, in Norwich, there was no response of any interest at all to this question. (audience laughs) Now, do we have in the community here, any interesting places of bus? Was there anybody born in an interest in place, e.g., the back of your black cab? Between Heathrow and Victoria? Yes. (audience murmurs) (audience laughs) I'm sure we all find that quite interesting as well. (audience laughs) Okay, so Africa, not bad. Africa, but wait, wait, hold it. Was it in a house, or was it in a hospital in Africa? (audience murmurs) No, no, everybody gets born in a hospital these days, eh? No, something, anybody else? No, anything? Yes. (audience murmurs) (audience laughs) Is there anybody from these islands who's got somewhere interesting? (audience laughs) Nothing else, we've got a volcano, we've got Africa. Anything else, nobody, no? So, it's true, isn't it? We're all born at home or else in a hospital, right? All fair enough. Now, the next question I've got to ask people, and it's a sort of serious question. Look, does everyone actually know that they're going to die? Does anybody actually know this? No. (audience laughs) Well, look, is it a surprise for anybody to know that they're going to die? Are you surprised? Are you sure you're surprised, no surprise, eh? All right, so everybody here knows they're going to die, right? This is great. I was telling a friend of mine, he says, you've got to ask those questions, it's called audience participation. (audience laughs) And believe me, you really have participated. Thank you. (audience laughs) Anyway, my shorter oxford dictionary, my shorter oxford dictionary makes these suggestions for death, eh? The final cessation of the vital functions of an animal or plant, the loss or cessation of life, eh? The final cessation of the vital functions of an animal or plant, the loss or cessation of life, it does actually go on, but it doesn't really say much more than that, that's essentially what it does say, eh? Now, life, meanwhile, is equally broad, and meaning, and for life, what we get is, the period for birth to death, primarily the condition, quality of fact, of being a living person, the property which differentiates a living person from a dead one. So the definition of death is if you're alive, and the definition of being alive is if you're not dead. (audience laughs) That seems to be it, but anybody, we all know, since we all know we're gonna die, don't we? We all have a working idea of what death is. We've got a working idea. Now, but there can be exceptions. And I was reading Lyle Watson's book on the biology of death. During the 19th century, it was a bit of a, it was a bit of a cultural maker of angst about being, people worried about being buried alive. And often it did happen. And he gives an example, one of the examples I thought was, well, other it was at least bizarrely humorous, is that a man was dead, he says, and this is what he says, man's lying dead, and they bring him in, put him on the autopsy table, and the doctor gets his knife, and it's just a bit to cut the guy open, shh. And suddenly the corpse puts a hand up and grabs a bear, that's right. That is like this. And so they realize the guy's alive. But the doctor drops dead. (audience laughs) And you think that was funny, oh, that's funny, all right? Well, the doctor, that doctor was probably a married man. We kids, I mean, all right. Anyway, he dropped dead, actually. So there are some exceptions there, but most of us know what we're talking about when we talk about death. Now, another thing about death, I think I can say quite safely is that everybody, well, most of us fear death, and sometimes you quite strongly fear death, and sometimes we feel quite sanguine about it. But actually, it does cause an awful lot of fear in our lives, and it pursues us, well, sometimes, certainly when I was younger, it pursued me on a sort of daily basis. As I've got older, I was imagining, when we were young, when we were young, and in our life, in the room of our life, this thing starts appearing, right? And you think, what's death? And you feel really weird and creepy about it. But see when you get to being middle-aged, it's sort of formed, it's a lot more solid. What you do is you put your TV set on top here, right? And then you can sort of set back, and here's your telly on top of the table called death, and you just set back with your six pack and think, "Well, well, what next?" So I think that is a difference between middle-aged people, like myself, and when I was younger. Now, it's just a small thing, a bit. Well, I won't name the man we all know. He was telling me of a dream last week. He said, "I had this dream about death, and it was something really, really frightening." And so he told me the dream, and what it was was he goes into a sort of strangely uncanny room, rather bare, and here's his mum and dad, who had both dead, slammed in there. And he sort of says, "Well, oh, I'm gonna die." But the big moment that really got him worried was when some way his plastics were taken off him, his Visa card and his American Express, perhaps. I don't know if he's got that. His plastics were taken away, and he was staring at the wallet with his credit cards, and then he felt really bereft. He felt really bereft, and so when you get to heaven, you know, American Express, et cetera, will not do nicely. Thank you. (laughing) Whoa, why? I did a night school course in being a stand-up comedian, and failed. Anyway, he felt really bad. He felt really bad when he took his plastics away. And of course, the good thing about that, I mean, what is so obvious about that, is that the plastics represent money, represent power, represent ego extension, represent the opportunity, jump on a plane and go somewhere else, and don't come back or do this or do that. Take away your plastics and what have you got left there. So it's actually a very interesting and useful metaphor for maybe modern personalities, maybe in the old days that they've been gold or something. Anyhow, death can take us apart, this fear, this knowledge. And we can destroy our life fleeing from it in pursuit of safety. Yet that safety within the terms of the life we lead, we know does not exist in. And all of us here know we're gonna die, we've already established that, and all of us march daily towards this certain fate. Every one of us marches daily towards this certain fate. Now, death, when we look at it, when we let it, when we look at it frankly, or sometimes it just troubles us or pursues us, it can be like a wedge, death driven through our being, through our heart, knowing that we are, knowing that one day we will not be. Now we might be reconciled to our own death, or numbed, or living in a stupor of uneasy truths about it, but then there is everybody else, or nearest and dearest them. And they are mortal too, and will die as well as us. We are attached to them in pain and shoes. And usually to live is to be attached, and to love is to be attached. And attachment often means actual loss, or the fear of it. Now, I would say, saying to people as a parent, for me, a sensitive parent is somebody who sits with their feet in a river of fire for a sense of parent. I did hear of a family in Wales who, finally the last child was taken from them when they started keeping it in a cage. And that's after 20 years of social work intervention. So some people do have children, but they're not very sensitive, but sensitive parent is like having your feet in a river of fire. And it's perfectly obvious that Buddhist, I think, if you just think about it for a moment. As a flower needs the elements of its sustenance, so does our human heart need friendship and love. The very doors though that death knocks upon we have built with our lives out of necessity. And death knocks upon the doors of our flesh. It is an ingredient essential to the consistency of our senses, which make our world dualistic, flooded with opposites. Whether it's life, that is death. The paraphrase, Buddha Gosha, in the path of purity. And I want you to just read this, it's a paraphrase of Buddha Gosha. So I'm concerned to stay in contact with you, but on the other hand, I want to sort of express the rhythms of the language. When we are born, we are born along with aging and death. The cremation fires shine in our eyes. The undertaker's hands are upon us, even as we lie in our mother's arms. Our lives are frail, dependent on so many things, food, shelter, sleep, how hot or cold it is, and much more in an ocean of conditions. Nor do we know when we will die or wear or buy what means, disease and accident. From all directions, the ways and means and moment of our end can come. Our future is sinless, unpredictable, yet certain to fall. Even if we lived 100 years, this is still short. But we might die young. None among us ever knows. All the evidence bears this out. Our common human past is full of great beings. People develop them with high qualities, with lives meritorious and great understanding, even enlightened ones. Yet all have gone from this mundane world, which is ablaze with burst and conditioned life and resultant death. Why should we stand out alone, faded, to outwit and master death when even the Buddha's goal, leaving a pool of dust? It is unbelievable to think that we shall stay here. When we think of our body, what makes us think that by means of it, we will change the course of history, as if the long-known processes of our lives would stop in the face of pressure from our heart. Every mirror that shone back our foolish face would crack on these reflections of a hopeless case, thinking life, thinking like this can only make us laugh. Outside our body lies the vast world, the storm and spray of myriad lives. It is the same upon our flesh and within it. Countless beings, creatures born to live and die, finding their meat upon us, making a life out of our flesh. They cover us inside and out, like the stars. As clouds pass and the sky above, so disease billows about us at all times, testing us with clouds of illness. We are like a besieged city, with a thousand gates, ever vulnerable, faced with defeat. Why should we be stupidly proud, combing our foolishness into an idiocy? All of us know this, but every dawn brings forth a forest of hopes, or hard air and truths chucked out, passed over in favor of a dream. All the mundane victories, wealth, status, power, progeny, unlimited extension of ourself, our name and reputation to resound down throughout time somehow beyond our death, even as we live forever. All success like this lies easily within the grasp of death and hence destruction. Everything like this without doubt will be taken away from us. mundane failure is carved upon our face, even in the womb. OK? If we are blind to our potential in our depths, we will fail, even here, which is the worst pain for in our depths lies the key to our freedom. Without freedom, our lives are always stalked by death, which comes among us wielding weapons in the aspect of a murderer. We flee, yet where is there to go? The long shadow of our end is made by our beginning. Is there no insight to be gathered here by us? Only a single point of a wheel ever touches the ground, even as it speeds along. So it is with the moments of our human lives, which each in its tongue rises and falls, appears and disappears. Short is our moment of life in the ultimate sense. Is there no insight to be gathered here by us? That's a part of Raisa Buddha Goshah. Buddhist view death, then, is a natural part of life. It is one of the conditions we could say for life to arise and without which it would not arise. In one of the core stories from the arising of the Buddha, Dharma, can sense the four sites. So we go right to the very core of the human condition with the Buddhist Dharma, right from the beginning. The human being who became the Buddha said, "Arthur Gotima saw these sites and such was the effect on his life that he left everything he knew, had, and went forth in search of wisdom and truth." And these four sites were a sick person, an old person, a dead person, and a secret after truth. For the first time, Siddhartha Gotima understood the processes of dissolution that are inherent in our lives. Once born, there is no turning back from death, no standing still of the stream of life, no ever clear sky of perfect health, yet wisdom he understood was possible. Insight can be gained into the nature of the lives we lead. The secret after truth that Siddhartha saw, seated with the gaze of aspiration reminded him. So the Buddha Dharma has foundations in human experience, perennial, incisive of the heart of our matter. No divine voice spoke or ordained the Buddha Dharma. No angels poured out of a heaven to announce Siddhartha's fate. He was born in the breath and blood like us, carried within his mother's flesh, the necessary months, his place of maternity was the side of a road where his mother stood, holding a tree for stability. As a child left her body and fell to the earth, dust was his fate from the beginning. He had the same marks as ourselves, similar experiences, a human being born as we are born who awakened his mind to become a Buddha. Thus, Buddhists have always tried to face our human reality as openly as they can. They try to be realistic. They oppose pessimism. They encourage themselves and others to live to our purpose in wise happiness, even in the face of death. Fear of death then is something a Buddhist tries to overcome, to conquer it before he or she is conquered by it. It is not a passive relationship between death and the Buddhist. It is a struggle to the finish, whatever that may be, but which would ideally be an emancipation, a profound understanding of mind. If this seems strange to you, what you have to realize is that the Buddhist life is a strenuous one. It is a life of active awareness, even in the deepest stillness a Buddhist would express vivacity. Death we know is not unexpected for a Buddhist. This is reflected doctrinally in the teaching of the three marks of actionists, of human existence. The first mark is that everything is impermanent. All things change. The second is everything is insubstantial in itself. Everything is a composite of other things composed. An endless process is combined into a related. The third mark, everything is dukkha. It is unsatisfactory. Happiness always bears its burden of pain, joy today, gone tomorrow. It can be suffering. It can be sorrow. The second and third view can be included in the first by the arising consequence of it. Everything is impermanent. Things then are not really things. They are more properly to be understood as processes, as dynamics, as streams combining and dissolving anxiously, interpenetrated. Because nothing is fixed, we need not remain in the chains of our upbringing. Not only can we free ourselves, we can decide the direction in which to shape our mind. That direction for the Buddhist is the awakened mind, enlightenment, Buddhahood. Life, therefore, takes on the aspect of practice. For a Buddhist, death is a part of life. Death is a part of the practice of a Buddhist life. This is easy to say, but we have already agreed that death can be a source of great fear. Dealing squarely with death as part of life requires sensitivity, not only to others, but especially towards ourselves. There are at least two general ways of dealing with inner death and life amongst us. We've shown it very good. I forgot to say that. One is flight into sentimentality. The booze, et cetera, are plunging our head into a TV set, metaphorically speaking. Story from the Sufis that I might have got slightly wrong, never mind. Young man goes to the market, standing there, looks up, there's death. Death is looking at him. Death waves. Young man runs away, jumps on the horse, and rides out of his behind, fast and furious, rides for Ozanos, and Ozanos, and Ozanos, to Samarkan, rides into Samarkan, finds a house, locks the door, sits down, as he gives us a say. It's dark. I've done it, I've made it. Knock on the door. He owns the door. Death is standing there. Death says, this morning, I'm just waving it. He said, I'd meet you in Samarkan this evening. [LAUGHTER] [GRUNTS] Whoa. I got that one for autonomy, and she got it from room here somebody or other. No, where does-- oh, yeah. Now, the other way, the common way, in failing ways, is to deal with death. It's by fight, for example, cynicism, or looking resolutely the other way, or fitting dentures to our heart, metaphorically speaking, so that we can grit them. And I have an example here. It was giving me a chance to sing a song. An example, an example of fight when we deal with death. And it's from an image I remember seeing a scene from the movie, "Oh, What a Lovely War." I don't know if you know this one. But it's a trench. And all the live soldiers are in the trench, and it's a sunny day, and the guy comes out, and he's stripped of the waist, and there's a foot sticking out the trench, right? A leg sticking out the trench. We are put on it. And it's a dead soldier's limb. So he puts the hangs his mirror-- that's right, he hangs his mirror on the foot. And there's the mirror, and there's the foot is the mirror, and he's shaving, and they're all there. And as he shaves, these things boom last night. Herbong the night before. Herbong the again, Tamaraith. You've never been bomb before. And they're all sing like that, right? And there's this dead body. It's a prop to the guy being able to shave. So in a way, I think that that is-- for me, that's an example of hardening. That's a bit fighting death and armoring ourself, and it doesn't actually work either. As usual, there is a middle way between these opposites where we neither run away or harden ourself. But death and all it implies is best not treated lightly and view the fear it can create. And this is hard for us as our culture. It's full of superficial, superficial, death-dealing images. Now, just last week I came back from an order weekend. It was a Saturday. I came back early in a few weeks. And I go in, and I switch on the television. And what I saw was one movie. I saw a bit of one movie, and there were four people killed in that movie, and the time I saw it. And then I switched on to another movie, married to them all, but something. And the bit I saw, well, two people were killed. And they were all brutally killed, eh? And so I'm looking at this, eh? And what I notice, too, is that in addition to the death, some of the people involved in these killings either directly or tangentially. That's not a Scottish word that, so I'm not quite sure how to say it. Tangentially found, right? So some of the people who are involved in these models tangentially, or otherwise, found love at the end of the film, which solved everything. And like an all-contering ampheta mine, moved from the deeper end-- thank you. From the deeper end of the swimming pool of our ordinary mind, limited in self-limiting, we might think that being able to sit through a stream of such brutalized images could mean that we have dealt with death, eh? Like the cigarettes, smokers, deal with the fumes in their lungs, in casual exhalation, imaging, ease, and resolution. Sorted. So this is how one might foolishly think one is dealt by death, which is-- I love doing this. I've did it several times and choose, you know? And you see, sorted, right? That's death, sorted. Voice of truth, you're speaking now? Not so. Not so. It's not sorted at all, eh? A personal experience. When Buddhists practice the spiritual life, they challenge their minds. They upset the prejudices, habits, and their usual human vacuousness, eh? Ajita and I, one set out to challenge our minds on the issue of death. And every night, we would recite the root of the verses of the six bardos seven times. These bardos are traditionally seen as the intermediate states between death, quote, and buzz. Yeah. And all this we did, all this we did at midnight, when the country slumbered. And all unintegrated forces could find a place in the eye. We practiced, and after a week or so, people walked around, loud, white, it seemed to us, through drifts of futility. Every action contained in itself an equal and opposite gray shadow of destruction. We were, in fact, succeeding in making death tinged normality. I completely lost my way there, eh? We were succeeding in death tinged normality. I don't know what that means either, I'm sorry, right? Well, we were succeeding, what we were trying to do, we were actually being successful. Was it spring? Was it autumn? Or was it both combined, life and death, dancing in amalgam, swaying in a new reality? We could not keep it up. The sunlight in our eyes was bleaching the world, graves bubbled everywhere in doom-pointing time, cremation, dust-filled the streets. One day it dawned on us, we were depressed. [LAUGHTER] Now, some of you may have foolishly thought I was going to say we were enlightened, or at least stream energy, say, no, we were depressed. We were depressed, eh? What are you doing to get depressed? Well, we stopped that practice. [LAUGHTER] And we felt as though the fountain of life welled up in us again, eh? And we felt we'd been born again in the warm red sea, rolled in, and I found my voice. It was, oh, what a day we-- I stood in a rowing boat in a lock somewhere with amorati, just shouting and bellowing at the hills. And I felt so glad to be escaped from death. It was such a relief. We decided that we had run out of positive emotion and had succumbed to an experience of death in life as the wasteland. Few years later, I tried alone, for I had the taste for the sharp fierceness of the practice, and what I thought of as its cold desolation. I remember the streets of the city cracking or so I thought, in the tension between meaning and futility, I wanted that. Eight weeks into this practice, I was sitting on the number 20 bus going up the Great Western Road. Rain streaked the windows. I saw my reflection in the weeping glass and recognized that I had been gently teased into depression. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, but you didn't give up, did you? Again, I gave up. [LAUGHTER] Now, actually, when we look at it, we were looking at death, and we got a result. We're actually quite depressed and nervous, and I got depressed a second time. But in a way, it was a result, actually. But it does say, it does tell us that we mustn't be too blind about death and think, we can deal with it. It's not like that at all, I believe. It's not as easy as that, eh? So I think that we must approach death with care. And like the Gorgon's head, it may be best viewed in reflection. Now, Ajita came to his own terms with death. Cancer pursued them for several years, sometimes raucous, sometimes silent, finally deadly. He was 46 when he died, and I carried out his funeral. Now, I just want to do something that, when I was thinking about Ajita, I want to just indicate to you what death by cancer, in a way, is like by a sounder. It goes like this. It goes like this, eh? [GRUNTS] [GRUNTS] [GRUNTS] Ajita went on the app for a year. Now, he's a big, fine man. And when I saw him in his coffin, he was a total skeleton. So, you know, we have to laugh. Yes, that's true. But when cancer calls, and Ajita died. Anyway, all the arts are mirrors to view death through as we are. As are the many direct meditative practices and reflections, the Buddhists have generated over the centuries. And by these means, we can make an approach to death, and it's commonly perceived, perceived long fingers of loss, grief, isolation, and despair, with some hope of personal safety and understanding. In other words, practices help us to approach obliquely, something that perhaps is too terrible for us to look at face-to-face for most of us. Two letters to show the effect of death on people's lives. For Oscar Munster and Max Jacobs, you might not going to get these because I think I forgot to bring them. Sorry about that. I forgot to bring them. So we'll just pass on. A few words now on my mother's death on the 10th of January and the year 2000 at 5 a.m. in the royal infirmary. Yes, I was on my way to retreat, to the chairman's retreat, and I rang up my mother, and she says to me, "Your father's got the flu. "Your brother's got the flu that absolutely, you know, "knock for six." And I don't actually think you should come. Come up, 'cause you might get the flu in. I said, "No, I really want the flu more." And she said, "Well, I'm not being..." This is what she said, like, "I'm no being funny, son, "but I don't think you should come up." And because, you know, I only visit Glasgow periodically, I said, "I understand, I won't come." So anyway, I goes on the retreat. Couple of days go by. This is a Monday I talk to her. And by the Thursday, I get a phone call to ring my sister, I ring her up. My sister is at a witch's end. She's absolutely done. And turns out my mother's been seriously over the flu as well. And my sister told me several times about funny scenes of taking my mother to the loo. And my mother was no lightweight, okay? She was no lightweight. There's my dad who's dying of the flu. There's my mother who's comatose with the flu. And there's my sister, I'm gonna carry my mother to the toilet. So they take my mother to the toilet. My old girl, eight-year-old doctor. (laughing) And my sister was saying, "They don't get back into the bedroom." And my mother would be, I said to be trying to put my mother down on the bed. And my mother would just fall back once. And my sister would be stressed underneath my mother, laughing her head off. You know, just laughing there is my poodle more, completely comatose lying in top. We have my poodle feelers like this. Anyway, this is, it got too much when my sister, and my other sister was coming up from London the next day. So I decided I'd stay on the retreat. Anyway, she was taken into hospital. That Friday, I think. And according to my sister, by the way, shows you that some people can be less than saints of, when the district not stunned up, she looked at my mother in the bed. And in the presence of my mother and my sister said to my sister, "Your mother's dying!" Just like that, she said, partly. And she says, "Yeah, she said the stroke." And then, according to my sister, the district not seen, looked in the mirror, and sorted her hair. She really sort of, you know, well, she needs to stay since the sensitivity, let's face it. So off goes my mother to the infirmary. I buy a cut, he brings me to Glasgow, and I get down there, and he goes away, and I drive down into the royal infirmary. And there's my mother lying there, and she's out, she's not there at all. She's in a coma of some kind. So, you know, we go through all the rigmarole. And one of the things about the rigmarole, about dying and death, is that in a set, when nobody really finally wants to see it, nobody wants to sort of say, "Oh God, she's going to die." It's all couched and, well, maybe it'll know or maybe it will. And it all gets, it gets very, well, it gets, it's full of unknowns. You just don't know what's going to go, go down next. And so, anyway, there we spend time, we were mother. My father and my brother could not come to the hospital, they were too ill, so that was me and my two sisters. And we, well, in the end, we managed to get her to come alive and speak to us. And she came out, and we held her, we held her hands, we touched her, we reassured her. And, you know, and she, she, she, she surfaced and for once or twice and, and she said, you know, "What were, oh, I saw it way me, a bit like that." And, and we said, "It's a flume on, it's in your chest." But we didn't say, "It's pneumonia more." And known as the old person's friend. So, all her vital functions were normal. She should have actually lived, but she didn't even live. And when me and my sisters went away, when I was lying in Heruka thinking about my mother, from my heart, I told her to heart heart, "If you want a die, it's okay. It's okay to die. Don't worry about us, don't think about us, just let go and die." And that's what I told her. And in a way, that's what I, in a way, expected. And we went there on the Sunday and I leaned over to my mother just before I left and I put my cheek to heart cheek and it was so warm and soft. You look at all people's faces and you think, they look a bit like old rhinos or something like that. When you touch, touch face to face, it was so warm, it was so soft and I kissed my mother. And her mouth was so dry and she kissed me. And I think the last sight I had of her alive was my head on her head and her eyes looking into each other's eyes, although her eyes, well, were pretty blurred in her sense. So, we've just looked to each other. I said, I'd see her later and I never did. That was it. I never did 'cause she died five o'clock the next morning. I guess one of the messages and meanings about that is that never put off till tomorrow what you think you've got to do today when you're dealing with somebody who's gonna die. Anyway, that happened. There's two little things I'd just like to say here. An image, a memory comes back to me as a child and I'm about four I've worked out and four years of age and I'm standing in Cathedral Street, Glasgow, which is where we used to live. And I'm standing there and my mother is standing here and she's big, my mother, certainly in comparison to me. She's a big, bodily woman in her prime mural. She's had three children, she's got big hips, she's got big breasts, she's big. And in top of that, her thyroid, unbeknownstly eyes, is wobbly, so she's going up, do, do, do, do, do, right? But she's big and she's starting and talking to my father and my father's looking at her and she's looking at my father and I'm looking at the two of them and I'm not sure what's going on actually. I knew something's happening and behind my father is his work, Morseman's, what he polishes, marble. And somehow I remember that scene and somehow I always want to add to it that the sunlight was falling on us all. The sunlight was falling on us all, it's 1954. Who was alive in 1954 in the summer? Show me your hands please. The sunlight was falling on us all, yes. And it fell on my moor and my dad and me. No, if I had tongue ruined and looked behind me, I would have seen the royal and feathery. I'd never thought to look. And if I had looked closely and we are in eye of prophecy, I would have seen word two and word five because they are visible there when my moor was taken half a century later to die and indeed she did die. Now, one or two little things about this, I went there at six o'clock in the morning, I got there before my family, my mother was dead for an hour and I was put in a room, a very desolate room of very high ceilings with these high neon lights that they set up there like sort of vultures looking down at you and it was a terrible refrain. I said, what the hell am I doing sitting here? So I get up and I say, well, I meet the dust who's a nice kind, we buddy, but this height, she's looking up at me. I say, look, I'm a Buddhist. I'm trying to eat it all right, et cetera. I'm a Buddhist and it's according to my faith because when you're doing reconventional people have a face, it's quite a good thing to have a face, but according to my faith, I should spend time with my mother's dead body as soon as possible, okay son, come with me, so we go in and there's my mother laid out and this is marvelous, she looks so peaceful, right? So I decide I will talk to this woman, my mother. So I sit down, I sit down and all that's between us and all those other old people and sick women 'cause it's a women's ward, all that's between us is a cotton. But what can I do? So I whisper quietly in her ear, I say, more, you're dead. She doesn't answer back. She did more, right? And I say, look, I just let go, relax. It's okay, everything's fine. And then I say, go to the odds of the light 'cause she was in a way a Catholic. What you can't say go to the odds of the Buddha, certainly don't want to say go to the odds of the cross. So I say, what cross, son, is that? Go almost cross and go, let's go cross. (audience laughing) No, no, no, no, they're great cross in the sky. Anyway, I said, go to odds of the light. And then I'm wondering where my family, I saw, I go out and I go, and there's the rest of the ward and I say, eh, elderly women sitting on the end of that bed. (laughing) Oh, this is six in the seven in the morning, but there's no rest for these people, no rest for the ill, and they're all, (laughing) and as I walk, I look, there's a younger woman, a younger woman, and she's halfway out of bed, looking at me, and she's terrified. And I feel sorry for her, but actually I feel sorry for her, but that's the way it is, dear. People die, this woman, mama always died. You can hear it, I'm really sorry, but you're just gonna have to carry on listening. So I just didn't bother my backside, basically, but she, whether it upset her or it didn't. And my sister spoke to that woman and did say, yes, this woman was terrified. The death in the next bed did terrified her. And it's very unfairy people in a hospital, particularly young people, when somebody drops dead in the ward and the body is like, no, it's left there, it's covered where cotton, and everybody knows something has happened and it's turned into a catastrophe, which it needn't be, so that's the way it is. So that was the people in the ward. Now, two little things, I just want to get out here. On my way, after my mum was dead, I'm driving along the Great Western Road, strange to say, I stop in the traffic lights, I look to my left and the traffic go in the other way, there's a girl. There's a woman, she's not a girl, she's a woman, and she's sitting in a car and she's facing the way she's gonna drive, and her head comes back, her head comes back like that, and I'm looking at her head, and then it comes forward like that, right? And what that image tells me is I understand how we live with so deeply imprinted notions of eternalism. It was the gesture of her head, the looking forward of her mind and eye, into the road, into the distance, not thinking that death might be waiting there for her in a car crash or anything. It's that look and I recognise that look in my own life, and indeed in all our lives, it made me realise that how eternalism works through our lives. And then, going up the bias road one night to the evolution shop, there's a delicatessent, I'm carrying my shopping, and as I come up, our girl comes out the delicatessent, she's carrying a cup of coffee, she's carrying a cake, she walks in the delicatessent, she's not wearing a coat or anything, she's got a penny, she walks slightly up in front of me, I'm interested, what is this about? She goes up to the doorway of the shop, next to the delicatessent, she puts her hands into the darkness of the doorway, hands come out of the darkness of the doorway, take the coffee and the cake. I'm uplifted by that. I'm uplifted by that. So, I walk up and I look casually to see what is going on, it's a man down on his luck, it's a man being destroyed, it's a man living on the street, it's a man with nothing, and it pleased and pleasured and made me feel good that the people in this delicatessent saw cared enough for this person, this total stranger, that they gave something, they were generous. And as far as I'm concerned, every generous act resounds on all our hearts and every unskillful heart act shatters our hearts as well. So, when I see generosity, I'm uplifted, it's great. Now, I walk by this guy and I decide, I can't go by this act of generosity and no do something. So, I reach in my pocket, there's a pound coin, I walk back, I give the man, I give him a pounder and we look at each other. Just for a moment, we look at each other as two human beings and then the nihilism of his expectations creeps in and I withdraw from him for I don't wish to be involved. But for a moment, we were involved, one being where the other is. So, I just want to say that. Here we go, I'm going to read on. In my mother's dying face, I saw her father's face. Since I take after her, I saw my own dying. I will look like her, who looked like him, who showed in his features that gathering of time in the flesh that makes a family face. She was dead when I got there and when I saw her, she was sinking into herself as I watched and yet I spoke to her. All the world faded away for her. If there was bewilderment for her, there was also joy. She had sprung up in a slow rising, the weight of daily care is gone. An easy loss to bear for her face, it seemed for its flesh laid down the masks, burdened and now could be itself, just as it is, a freedom, searching, groping and almost beyond belief, a finding of something of itself. I likened her to a stream clearing itself, prone on this bed of death. She saw the fires of my death at my birth and looked upon her own mortal blaze in the fiery exchange of being. When I was born, now I'd like to amend a poem here, the only poem I'm going to read by McDermott. It's called That My Father's Grave, but this is for my mother, eh? I'll just read it in Scots, but you'll just, you know, the sun licked still on me. You, round and could, we look upon each other now, like hills across a valley. I'm named Mayor, Your Son. It's my mind, nay, son of yours that looks. And the great, darkness of your death comes up and equals it across the way. A living man upon a deed man thinks in any smaller thoughts impossible. So there is loss yet there are continuities. Brian Aldis, the writer, noted how he became possessor and possessed of what he called the oldest face. It jumped the centuries and the generations. The rock beneath the facade of youth. The mark of connection that rises in and out of time, binding flesh and bone. At my mother's funeral party, I saw this, astonishingly, people who looked like their parents, unbelievably, young people who looked so different from their parents and who had become so light them as they had aged. In his book, the Isles Norman Davis tells how, at the end of the last ice age, a young man was buried. In 1903, his body was discovered in the area of Cheddar Gorge. In 1996, a sample of DNA was taken from it and compared the samples taken from a number of volunteers from among the villages of the present Cheddar District. They were looking for a match. They found one. Mr. Adrian Target, aged 42, a history teacher. He was a direct descendant through the maternal line of a person who lived in that approximate area 10,000 years before eight millennia BCE. Wow. Fantastic, isn't it? There are continuities. And by the way, everybody here had an ancestor in the ice age. It's OK. Don't feel deprived. Death, we have seen as part of the condition of being human. Buddhist or merely human beings who practice a particular path in order to deal usefully, effectively, and happily with that condition. All of us are individually trying to deal with our experience of being human. All the dead are like echoes in the rooms of our home. They can affect us, like faded letters, folded up and worn, discovered in our back pocket, heartfelt exchanges that turned the ink to blood. All reveal across the centuries how death happens individually and yet from a wider view each forms a part of our unity. And our death will happen to us individually without a doubt. And we in our time will be part of that unity, which is the past. How are we to deal with a certain truth of the loss of our life for deal with it we must? The Buddhist deals with it by trying to break through to a deeper and truer understanding of the nature of the lives we lead. From that deeper understanding of the lives we lead, the Buddhist gradually recognizes the dharmic truth that there is a state of mind, of being called the deathless. The deathless. A state of being, we might say, beyond the grip of death. This does not mean that we would live forever. For to be beyond the grip of death for the Buddhist is to be also beyond the grasp of life. How do ordinary lives look to a being in the deathless state? It looks like this. Our life is made by our mind, led by it. Should we live with our mind, corrupted with negativity, then misery will follow. Should our minds be purified in free of such negative traits our actions will follow suit and happiness arises. We make the lives we lead. Nothing need binders when we understand this. All too often though, we can lead a life that buries us. No wonder we fear the grave. It may be the state of our heart. Habit, superficiality, and vagueness. These are the forces that drive us down into our drowning in time. From the deathless state, our ordinary lives look like they are lived upon a wheel of fire where most of us rage in flames of self-addiction. This state alienates us into a sense of isolation where we bummed desperately and try to quench the fires with new desires to supplant the old, not knowing the act like oil to feed the flames. Nor does it end when our body dies, our volitions, our willed actions, all our consequences soldier on, not us somehow, yet somehow connected, like the oldest face or our own, we are reborn. From the very beginning of our life, strangers are implied. They are the ancestors of the flow of our consciousness, which is our mind. Their actions, their consequences have helped to make us and we with our life in time are building this stranger who will come after us, connected, and at the same time, not. In Buddhist terms, this is the world called samsara. The deathless state arises, independence upon wisdom and wisdom is never present without compassion. Compassion is the expression of wisdom, of the deathless state. From the deathless state, a being would look with compassion on our travails and would try to help us. In this way, the Dharma, the Buddhism pinges on the world. This samsara imposites in the structures of our dualistic minds and opposite. The deathless nirvana enlightenment. The Buddhist sees enlightenment as a blessed release from the stream of conditioned things, from processes, composed of other processes and endless combination. Nirvana, the deathless, occupies a middle position between or above all extreme conceptions of existence and non-existence. It casts aside all those views derived from these extremes which wrong our mind. All these different expressions find a home finally in eternalism or nihilism that we will live forever or we will disappear. Phenomena, our lives arise independence upon conditions. This thesis is the essence of the teaching, the realization of which constitutes enlightenment according to Sankarakshita. There is no mystery. We just misunderstand the structures of our mind. We think we are things when we are marvellous process. We think we are of recent birth when the stream of our consciousness may have voids for so long in time that only a Buddha could know. We think we are finite and will die soon and we will and yet we won't. We think we are negatively alone and in that sense of separateness we are. But in our depths we touch our unity and rest there in our uniqueness. We think we will never be happy. That's true if happiness is something we draw blood for, either of our sales or others. We think that we are unreal when we are very real and intrinsically of consequence. We think our lives are meaningless and they are if that is what we think and still are even if we think they are not, if in reality we have misunderstood our depths and misinterpreted our potential. When, oh, an image, I'd like to finish on an image. As we used to say 10 years ago in the F.D.I.B.O. and people used to stand out and I'd dread it and the guy would say, I'd like to finish with an image. And I would just imagine half a ton of scrap iron being dragged on to the stage with a guy. I'd be thinking, oh no, not another one of those images. Oh, clank, boom, bang. And usually there'd be some poor old bodhisattva. Okay, okay, I'll say it, okay. And poor old bodhisattva, we'll do it to make an end into the talk. Anyway, I've got an image here. It's an image. And I've been trying to sort this image out for two years and I still haven't managed it, but I'll keep going there. When we were children, we thought that there was only one dawn, one sunset, and that we saw and called our own. Later on, we realized that the world turned and there was always a dawn somewhere, always a sunset. It made us think of day and night in endless pursuit, like jewels, one dark, one light that beautified the world. We were happy to know that the sunset and the dawn were always there in stillness, built of movement, witnessed by humanity and because we are of humanity ourselves, witnessed by ourselves. I've lost that one anyway. Then we saw that the sunset and the dawn were concepts, glorious yet partial statements of the truth. It was our minds that passed into light and shadow upon the turning world, the light emanated from the same place, its fall upon our world, an amalgam of shadow and light, two opposites sprung by circumstance from a unity. The tundling earth danced in our tundling mind creatures, sorry, the tundling earth danced in our tundling mind creatures on it. We made the shadows and light, but the sun just is. Now we understood that the sun is not only a disc of glory in our sky. It is a sphere, light pours out from it at all points, only some falls upon our world with which we work shaping our shadows and light. Most of our sun's light goes elsewhere to light the universe. Might this not be the same for our mind? Death in the Buddhist, a matter of humanity, in our mind's death chases life, chases death, chases life in endless reworking of the unifying light called by the Buddhists or Buddha nature. Andrew, the poets that we heard earlier, I didn't read, they're all dead, they're all in a unity of the past, flowers that grow unbidden in our garden for our pleasure. That's my mother, dead also, now in that same unity of the past, rebuscing herself perhaps back into the knowing life as we speak, then myself also dying. And then it's all diverse and unified by our being seated here, right now beside our very own death on such good terms as well, in a natural embrace. We can go anywhere. We wish making our own way as death and the Buddhist makes theirs to our their stated call, which is enlightenment, nirvana, the deathless. And the deathless arises independence on the middle way, and the middle way arose independence on the Buddha. And the Buddha left this world and took his paren of Vana. Thank you. 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. [Music] [Music] [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
