ON LIFE AND DEATH. Part One. The End in Sight. Recollections. Terror of Death. Cremation. The Buddha on Death.A Poem.

Recollections of Getting Close to Death

Death of a Liberated One

The Terror of Death

Bodies for Burning

The Buddha on Death

The Last Breath

Extract from poem, My Last Breath

 

Recollections of Getting Close to Death

A single breath separates death from life.

We can recall our own brushes with death or the potential for death. Many travellers will recall incidents of a brush with death. I can recall some of the incidents in my years on the road between 1967 – 1977. I remember being in earthquake in Turkey with the winding iron staircase of the four story hostel starting to break away from the wall as we rushed downstairs. The old, narrow building shook in middle of the night while some nearby buildings collapsed. I recall the rough seas swelling up as two Indonesians and myself rowed across from Java to Bali in a canoe one night. We used a single saucepan to scoop out the sea water as quickly as possible.

I recall being held up one night at gunpoint in Bangkok, being badly bitten by a poisonous snake on the edge of a rice paddy, bitten by a large, potentially rabid dog while alone in a valley in India, being in a car crash in the monsoon when the car rolled over into a ditch. I recall sitting in the back of an army truck in central Laos during the civil war with rockets landing a few hundred metres away and being swept out to sea in a current on a quiet beach in Victoria, Australia. A surfer came to my rescue.

There is the will to live that releases a strong level of energy to stay alive.

The breath undergoes another change as the body inhales and releases more oxygen with a heightening of the senses. The organic life of the body with consciousness feels a threat to its existence. The same principle applies in the sudden moment close to death, an extended sequence of moments or even running to hours.

I remember the body releasing incredible sensations in the time of feeling close to death. Deep sensations emerge out of the being, sometimes starting in the pit of the stomach. I recall periods of sickness in my travels such as contracting hepatitis in the Australian Outback, dangerously high fevers, food poisoning and other bouts of ills of the body that triggered extreme weakness.

The experience of being close to death, real or imagined, can awaken a gratitude for being alive that enlivens our appreciation for the inconsequential details of daily life. The recognition of the transitory nature of life, of experience, has the potential to elicit a love of the ordinary and familiar.

With mindfulness and meditation, we learn to distinguish the sensations coming out of the body as authentic alarm signals of impending danger and fear with projections, thoughts and mental agitation. It is easy to confuse the two or experience both simultaneously.

Some people will say after a severe illness: “I really wanted to die.” They have meant it or it was a turn of phrase. I can recall nights when sick whether in a remote region of Afghanistan or in the valley of Kathmandu or in the forest hut in Thailand and other places. The nights would seem very, very long in one’s aloneness as the body struggled with sickness. I would start to feel a little better when the dawn came. It felt like a relief to have got through the night.

I remember times of vulnerability due to a genuine uncertainty about the future, whether hours, days or weeks. The Dharma practices, the quiet determination not to buy into the thoughts and story and breathing through the waves of sensations, hot and cold in the body, helped to deal with the proximity of the fragility of existence, real or imagined as well as  the feeling at times of lifelessness about the body. At times, one groans with the pain or tosses and turns or lies helpless and surrenders to the process.

A single moment has the capacity to end our life or change our priorities for the rest of our life.

‘Death’ of a Liberated One

Outside of the hospice and hospital, we rarely have the opportunity to witness the end of a person’s life.

I recall witnessing the final days of a 73year old monk, Por Longbhut, in our Buddhist monastery, Wat Chai Na, Nakornsridhammaraj in southern Thailand. The monks and nuns in the monastery had great respect for his practice and wisdom. Every day without exception, he stood for three hours in meditation under a tree without moving his feet or turning his head. He died with a depth of calm and clarity despite great pain.

I recall a small group of monks one morning having a Dharma discussion with him. One of the young monks said to him: “Luang Por (elder brother), you are an old man. Lord Yama (the Lord of Death) circulates the Earth every day making it the last day on Earth for millions and millions of people. The day must be getting closer when Lord Yama points his finger towards you.”

Por Longbhut smiled and replied: “Lord Yama travels all over this world looking for Por Longbhut but he is not to be found and never will be found.”

We bowed to Longbhut. His words communicated the emptiness of self existence.

Some weeks later, the doctor at the nearby hospital diagnosed Longbhut with inoperable liver cancer. Longbhut continued his standing meditation for as many days as he could. He agreed to go to hospital for further checks. He then told the doctor he preferred to die in the monastery.

The doctor, who advised the monk to stay in the hospital, said I would have to sign him out. I did and we returned to the monastery. A few days later, I was on the morning alms round in the nearby village. Longbut sent a novice to fetch me with the words “waylah mah lao – meaning “Time has come.”

Por Longbhut knew he would die that day. For his final hours, I lay besides him in his hut. In gradual death, the senses fade away one by one. First, the capacity to taste fades with no interest in liquid or food. Then smell fades. Then the sight goes.

“Mie hen” (No seeing), he whispered.

Next the capacity to hear stops.

Finally, the body sense fades. He gave a gentle final squeeze of my hand as I lay besides him. His hands started to go cool and the coolness moves its way through the whole body. His last outbreath quietly and faintly expelled itself from the body. I stayed besides him until the body had become totally cold. We shared the same horizontal posture. One alive and one neither here, nor there, nor in-between.

During the weeks with his painful form of cancer, he never complained about his condition. He never reacted. He took no painkillers. He quietly endured with immense equanimity and a steadfast presence. That evening, we carried his corpse into the Dharma hall and laid it on the floor at the front of the hall. We chanted. Ajahn Dhammadharo asked me to give a talk on my relationship with Por Longbhut and on death.

At the end of the talk, I said to the monks, nuns and laypeople. “We have been living in the presence of an arahant (a fully liberated one, who has exhausted any personal issues)”

The Sangha of monks, nuns and laypeople spontaneously said: “Sadhu. Sadhu. Sadhu.” (“Well said. Well said. Well said).”

The Terror of Death

The consumer culture often attempts to push away the terror of death as far as possible. Fear of death arises due to clinging to life and the continuity of existence. This fear of death shows itself in resistance to its exploration, a reluctance to engage in conversations about dying, pain and death and an avoidance of seeing the deceased to avoid a first-hand experience of a lifeless body.

It is not unusual for children and adults to spend decades without the opportunity to witness a dead body. If it happens, it might be seeing briefly a very elderly relative, such as a grandfather or grandmother. We rarely have the opportunity to see dead people of a variety of ages to remind us of the inseparable inter-connection of life and death. We need to sit in front of a corpse and meditate for an hour on impermanence and death. Such meditations have the capacity to change our priorities and values.

It is not unusual for a loved one or close relative to decline to see the dead body of somebody they know. The person may say: “I only want to remember the person as I knew them in life, not in death.” There is a forgetfulness here that death belongs to life. Without life, the subsequent death could never arise. To see the person in life and death offers a holistic perception.

Obsessed with desire for consumption and goods and alongside avoidance of non-existence, we keep death at a distance even though it gets closer to use day after day. There is a futility in resistance to the exploration of death since death remains forever close at hand no matter what we think and do.

We never know what percentage of our life is over. We may not know how close we are to the final day. I have photos at home of groups of meditators and myself taken since the 1970s. A percentage of these smiling people from teens to the elderly have left this world.

The perennial desire for self-gratification, security and goods often serve as a means to avoid facing up to death. Regular reflection and communication on death has the potential to contribute to a wise, sane and balanced view about life. We can put our needs and wishes into perspective. Meditation on death provides that perspective.

We need a dramatic change in our attitude to pain, dying and death to embrace wholeheartedly the field of existence and non-existence. Ageing, pain and death do not get in the way of life but confirm life equally as much as happiness and health. In that respect, the West could learn a great deal about the attitude, approach and enquiry into death practised in the Buddhist meditation traditions in the monasteries of the East, as well as other cultures. Engaged in the exploration of life and death, Buddhist monks and nuns remind us to “get real” rather than avoid enquiry into death.

There is seem to be little point in hiding death or wrapping death up in glowing tributes or claiming with absolute assurance that we have one life or many lives. During my years as a Buddhist monk in two rural monasteries of southern Thailand, I received much encouragement in the teachings and practices to reflect and meditate on death. In a large hut, where the Abbot (Ajahn Dhammadharo the Vipassana (Insight Meditation teacher) met monks, nuns and lay people, he kept a glass case with several corpses including children, women, a monk. Insulated with formalhyde, these corpses served as a reminder to everybody of the close proximity of death, no matter what our age.

The teacher also had hanging up on the wall a large painting showing the cycle of life from birth to death. The painting consisted of a baby, then switched to a 10-year-old, 20-year-old ,30-year-old 40-year-old, 50-year-old, 60-year-old, 70-year-old, 80-year-old, 90-year-old and 100-year-old. The painting showed the aging process and the gradual shrinking and contraction of the body in the last two or three decades. In the painting, the elderly person required a walking stick to indicate how slowly she and he moved due to old age.

Life is not  a picnic.

Bodies for burning

The Ajahn would regularly talk about dying and death as much as about kindness, empathy and happiness. Between 80 -100 monks and similar number of nuns lived close to the Dharma hall and the teacher’s hut. The huts of the monks formed a kind of semi-circle under the trees with some sandy ground in the centre often used for meditation in the sitting walking and standing postures. The very centre of this piece of ground contained the location for cremations.

The construction for cremation consisted of two narrow walls around a metre high and two metres along. The two walls faced each other with a gap of about a metre between them. Upon the death of a monk, nun or lay person living in the surrounding villages or local town of Nakornsridhammaraj, the corpse would be placed on a pile of branches and logs on the ground between the two walls.

The monks would stand around the corpse and chant on the impermanence of all things. As the wood was lit to burn the corpse, dressed with face visible, we reflected on the brevity of life, on the insecurities of existence and the significance of non-clinging.

During my three years in the monastery, I attended a cremation about once a week or more, from new born babies, to children, teenagers, adults of varying ages, right through to the very elderly. Death came from a variety of causes including sickness, diseases, natural causes, misdiagnosis, accidents, drowning, self-exit, suicide, murder and political conflicts. The dead obviously included the young and the old, the rich and the poor, the healthy and the sick, the wise and the foolish. We regarded the inclusion of death into our meditations as a welcome reminder to live calmly and with clarity through the journey of change that made up our life.

We received a strong encouragement to explore Dharma teachings and practices to give us support right until the very last outgoing breath of our life. Many monks, nuns and householders sincerely believed in rebirth giving them consolation as life drew to a close. They believed that if they led a good, meritorious life, it would naturally lead to a good rebirth. Others were not concerned with the future after they died but remained intent on finding the deepest truths about what it means to be human. The teacher gave no significance to rebirth, future lives and outcome of karma. He placed the priority on practice, insights and immediacy of liberation from any kind of clinging subtle or gross.

I have a photograph in my photo album at home with my teacher holding the hand of a corpse, a Buddhist monk when he was alive, and myself holding the other hand of the corpse. The three of us stand beneath tree in the grounds of the monastery. Years later, I recall showing this photograph to a middle-class couple in England, who felt repulsed that we would wish to hold the hand of a dead person. Fear of death, repulsion towards death exaggerates the significance of death.

The Buddha on Death

Inspiration for meditation and reflection on death comes directly from the Buddha. In his classic text on the Four Applications of Mindfulness (Satipatthana Sutta, MLD 10), namely body feelings states of mind and the Dharma (teachings and practices), he encourages meditation on nine different kinds of corpses.

The contemporary generation of mindfulness teachers rarely mention the practice of mindfulness on ageing, pain and death although it is a major theme running through the classic discourse of the Buddha. This discourse serves as the basis for all mindfulness teachings. He said to meditate on a corpse, inwardly and outwardly, oneself and others, so that “one does not cling to anything in the world” including the body, self or life. He further emphasised: “Truly this body is of the same nature, it will become like that (other corpses) and cannot escape from it.”

In the Buddha’s discourse on mindfulness, he then listed the kinds of decay of nine kinds of corpses.

  1. a dead body that is one, two or three days dead or more, bloated and festering
  2. a dead body that has been eaten by crows, vultures, dogs or worms
  3. a dead body with flesh and blood and held together with sinews
  4. a dead body smeared with blood
  5. a dead body without flesh and blood
  6. a dead body with the bones scattered in different directions
  7. a dead body with just white bones left
  8. a dead body that is more than a year old with only the bones rotting
  9. a dead body with bones crumbling to dust.

During my years in the monastery, I had the opportunity to see all manner of dead bodies along with the varieties of conditions of the body after death. Sometimes, the family of the deceased would place the corpse in a coffin for weeks or months in the monastery before taking the corpse out to cremate. Relatives would request that we keep the body in a coffin until family members living overseas could return home for the cremation. We then had the opportunity to open the coffin to see the corpse in various stages of decomposition.

From time to time, the teacher would take a number of younger monks and nuns to the basement of the local hospital to see naked corpses of all ages lying side by side on top of cold, concrete slabs. Some had died only minutes before. Others were undergoing an autopsy to determine cause of death. A knife was use to open and peel back the skin of the front of the body to examine the various organs and intestines. We stood in silence around the concrete block with the dead body. The teacher would speak on death for a few minutes and we concluded with a short chant on impermanence.

After three years, I left the monastery to go to a cave on Pha Nga island in the Gulf of Siam. A young Thai in his early 20s came to see me. He wanted to live in New Zealand and asked me to write a reference for him for the New Zealand embassy. I very rarely had a visitor.

A few days later, his father came to the cave. With tears in his eyes, he asked me to accompany him to his village. In the small, single story wooden home, he took me to the bedroom. His son was lying on the bed. There were five bullet holes in his chest. A villager, who could speak some English, told me that the young man had gone to the police station. A fierce argument took place. In his rage, the police offer pulled out his revolver in the police station and shot the young man at point blank range. No charges were made. The senior police officer transferred the policeman to another police station on the mainland in case the villagers pursued the killer.

I called the family, friends and villagers together. I chanted the Taking Refuge in the Three Jewels, namely the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, the five precepts of not killing, stealing, sexual abuse, lying or abuse of alcohol and drugs. I then spoke about the importance of practising to live with impermanence, loving kindness (metta) and equanimity.

I reminded everybody present we are all subjected to birth, aging, pain and death. I said the police officer had created for himself a terrible karma. I said the first precept is the major ethic because there is nothing more serious than deliberately taking away the life of person. We all sat in silence for a while. I then returned to my cave. Two or three days later, the father visited me again in my cave to offer a dana (donation) in the form of a small gift.

The Last Breath

A person in the very last days of life may be unconscious, due to a stroke or massive heart attack, or conscious or coming in and out of consciousness. The physical being  may engage in involuntary reactions, such as sudden  jerks, agitated movements and changes in facial expressions. The loved ones may feel genuine concern that the dying person is going through a lot of suffering as death approaches. It may not be the situation at all, despite the facial expressions, the jerking body and the gasping for breath. If the person’s life has shown much love, kindness and empathy, plus a certain peacefulness in the latter years of his or her life, then such beneficial states of mind will give support in the very last days. The energetic disturbances in the physical body do not have the power to trigger psychological suffering for those who have found their peace with life.

Some people have led demanding and angry lives with unresolved control issues. They cling to their existence, influences and possessions. Such people may experience both physical agitations along with emotional and mental suffering as the hour of death gets closer. The unresolved history of fears and aggression, distress and suffering get released due to the physical agitations. At the very end of life, the body/mind has exhausted itself and so death comes quietly and peacefully for the vast majority of people, whether angry types or exude a degree of calmness.

There are those who believe in rebirth. Some senior Buddhists claim that the last mind moment determines the next life. There is no substantial truth in this view.  In the unfolding process of becoming, the pressures in the movement of life emerge as the outcome of the whole of the life. The last mind moment has a small part in the scheme of things. The way we live generally has an impact upon the way we die. If there is a rebecoming, it will not rely upon a single moment but on the force of movement of life as it arises and passes, arises and passes.

In the ideal circumstances, a person dies at home with a loved one present or loved ones, such as family members and friends. With love and kindness filling the room, the dying person moves quietly and gracefully into death with the last out-breath fading away from the body. To witness the end of a person’s life constitutes a sacred and precious moments.

The loved ones who are present, act as the ‘midwives’ for the dying person’s transition from life to death. Many people report that they can still feel the ‘spirit’ of the person, especially a much loved person, after the person’s body has gone cold.  This is a normal perception whether the witness is a theist, atheist or agnostic. In such times, it is important to respect this sense of the spirit of the person without making esoteric beliefs out of it. Some people simply like to stay in the silence of the deceased for a period of time to come to terms with the passing out of this world of a life.

Some family members may wish for the deceased to stay in the house for a day or two until it feels like the ‘spirit’ has been absorbed into the quietude. A person approaching death may make requests, spoken and written, to the loved ones. It may or may not be possible to carry out such requests whether requests concern time at home after death or time of funeral. While the living wish to support the wishes of the deceased, the practicalities may require a different course of action.

The family need to remember they support as best they can such wishes.  They may need to remember they are doing their best under difficult and sometimes painful circumstances. It is terribly easy for stress and outbursts of anger to arise between family members taking up different views about the period after death, funeral arrangements and attending to any will.  Kindness must take priority over agitated outbursts out of respect for each other and for the deceased.

Usually, the face of the corpse stays familiar for three days or so. Then the face begins to sink. The eyes sink in more. The face muscles slump. The face flattens onto the bone to show a different face to the living person. If the corpse remains in the home for three days, it will require large amount of ice packs under the body and on top of the body is to keep it cold. This prevents leaking of fluids from the body and decomposer.  The body becomes very heavy when the life has gone out of it. The silent times with the deceased can provide time for appreciation and gratitude along with reflection on one’s own life and mortality. There is an opportunity for recognition of deep values and their application. The presence of a corpse can put out life into perspective.

People also die outside of their home and away from the loved one. Staff in a hospital will move a corpse quickly from a bed or operating theatre to make way for the next patient and do not wish to increase the stress and fears of other patients. The deceased will be moved from the hospital, the hospice or another location to the mortuary and then the funeral parlour and placed in a coffin.  Family members and loved ones may feel sorry that they will not have as much time as they would have liked with the deceased.

If  not possible, the need for the quiet meditative period of reflection and stillness may have to take place elsewhere, perhaps at home, a chair in the garden, sitting on a park bench or a walk in the nature. It is important to ensure that the meditative quietude takes place rather than getting swamped in funeral and organisational details.

In the emotional life, there will be the feeling of sadness at the loss of the loved one. This sadness is the normal, healthy emotional response to the death of a loved one. The sadness may stay  for hours, days or longer. Reaction to the sadness comes in the form of grief and despair. The grief and despair confirms the desire of the self for the situation to be different. The lamentation and despair does not confirm the love of the deceased but only confirms the desires of self-interest. “I don’t want to lose you” is the rage against the night, the statement of self-interest.

Sadness confirms natural empathy, a wish for meditative reflection and developing a  capacity to live with the vulnerabilities of life. We pay our respects to those who die through our sadness, our empathy and love for others, not through reactivity, guilt and blame.

Extract from My Last Breath”*

My last out breath becomes the final act,

no marks of my departure will be found,

my life dissolves upon the simple fact,

I fade away from stories I expound.

 

Pursued events devoid of merit’s worth,

my life lasted no longer than a flash,

and sees the blessings truth to then unearth,

and years gone by, a mark with just a dash.

 

For my last prayer, I shall say just “thank you”.

as my last breath becomes the wind on land,

and know my cells dissolved in grains of sand.

 

May all beings explore life and death

May all beings explore the challenge of the day

May all beings live with freedom

 

*from a poem in Poems from the Edge of Time
by Christopher

 

 

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