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[Last updated: 2 May 1994]

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"DEATH IS A SACRAMENT".

This text addresses some of the most fundamental and delicate
religious issues. Therefore, it should be read, quoted and
analysed in a mindful way.

The text was originally published in MMC Summer 1993 pp 1-6. All
copyrights to this document belong to Subhana Barzaghi Sensei,
Kuan-Yin Zen Center, NSW, Australia

Enquiries: The Editor, "Mind Moon Circle", Sydney Zen Centre, 251
Young St., Annandale, Sydney, NSW 2038, Australia. Tel: + 61 2
6602993

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Death is a Sacrament
SUBHANA Barzaghi Sensei

Subhana's talk, dedicated to the memory of Father Bede Griffiths,
was given at Spring Sesshin 1993, Gorrick's Run Zendo.

Immediately we start to speak about death in our culture, it
conjures up all kinds of images of something morbid or depressing
or tragic or painful, Our Western culture is particularly good at
hiding death and making it something alien. We immediately cover
up a corpse and lock it behind closed doors, cover it over with a
sterile sheet, in some ways denying death's relevance to life.
There is such a great fear of extinction that we treat death as
something taboo. We live with this anxiety about death, as if it
is a denial of our rights to continual and perpetual
self-determination.

My first early experience around death was certainly not a
pleasant one. I was working as a nurse at the Lorna Hodgkinson
Sunshine Home in Sydney. I normally looked after children Ñ a
ward of twenty-eight unruly mentally retarded boys Ñ but on one
occasion I was transferred to the geriatric ward and I was
rostered to a mentally retarded patient there who was dying. I
think I was rostered because nobody else wanted to take care of
him. When I went in there he could barely speak and state his
needs. The smell was repulsive: everything came out in the bed;
there was excretion everywhere. I did not know how to relate to
this situation at all: I was twenty-one. As the days went on he
became worse and he died. I felt that this was a very tragic and
repulsive way to die because I had no way of meeting this
person's needs or even communicating with him. I felt totally
inadequate. I went straight to the matron's office and said, 'If
you don't transfer me back to the children's ward, you're going
to have one less nurse on Monday morning.' In those days, I don't
think we were prepared for death or how to deal with it Ñ I
certainly wasn't prepared, in any way.

Many years later I had another experience, completely different
from that. When I was a midwife for seven years, delivering
babies at home, on one occasion I was assisting some dear
friends. The labour was not progressing well and was showing
obvious signs that the woman and the labour needed attention. So
we transferred her to the hospital. During the pushing stage one
could tell that there was something not quite right. The pushing
stage was very, very difficult for her, unlike other situations
that I had been in, so we picked up on something on an energetic
level. When they tried to find the baby's heartbeat on the
monitor, there was no heartbeat. That is not uncommon at that
stage of labour: when the baby is so far down in the birth canal,
one cannot always pick up the heartbeat. Nevertheless the doctor
also somehow felt that he must get this baby out. When the baby
was born, it was dead.

The father, who had done a lot of work on himself, was a very
interesting person, very spontaneous. He just let out an almighty
scream that went right through the hospital. The nurse burst into
tears and ran out of the room. The doctor cleaned up and didn't
know what to say. So there we were. I was with this couple and
this dead baby. What we decided to do was just walk right out of
the hospital. We took the baby with us. Nobody was going to stop
us Ñ they didn't know how to respond anyway. We got into their
van and drove off someplace in the middle of the night and we all
sat there in the van and passed round the dead baby and started
singing to the baby and speaking to the baby. Of course there was
a huge amount of tears and enormous grief, but I was also amazed,
in looking at this baby's face, at how exquisitely peaceful it
was. So I had the most extreme emotions of incredible peace and
at the same time extraordinary grief. I could not sleep for three
days; it was a very strange experience, a very beautiful
experience as well.

These early experiences led me to question, what is death? When
the body dies, what remains? This is an important question, and
we take it up more fully in our miscellaneous koans. The koan is,
"When you separate into earth, water, fire, and air, where do you
go?" Zen training and any truly deep religious experience should
answer these questions of life and death, or at least put to rest
some of our fear. There are some parallels between deep sleep and
death. Each night when we lie down to sleep we enter into our
dream world, our consciousness and our senses begin to fade, and
the world disappears; all the dramas and pleasures and successes
and failures dissolve into the silence. Our attitude to sleep is
to welcome deep sleep: it is a relief, it alleviates some of the
stresses of the day. Yet we view death with such fear and
anxiety.

The apparent division between birth and death is not so total as
we imagine. The question is, who dies? What dies? In our practice
there is the small death of the body, and we may die a hundred
deaths without touching the great death of the mind. This great
death of the mind is very important. The death of the mind gives
birth to wisdom, and this wisdom is timeless, boundless state,
right here and now, where there is no self to take refuge in.
When we ask the question, who am I? or what am I? it is the I
that is not known. What you are you must find out. In some ways,
we can only describe what you are not. You are not the world; you
are not even in the world. It is more like the world is in you.
In Zen we call this experience, 'I alone and sacred in the whole
universe.' Another way of saying that is, 'Buddha-nature pervades
the whole universe.' There is no separation there, and when we
say, 'I alone and sacred in the whole universe,' we do not mean
this self-important, self-conscious little 'I.'

So death serves the deepest interests of a religious life, by
reminding us of the emptiness of desires and plans and
achievements and self-interest. It keeps us in check in some way.
All of our competitiveness seems madness when we cannot take
anything with us. Our spiritual maturity and freedom lies in our
readiness to let go of our self-importance.

When I was in Los Angeles, maybe six years ago, I was given
tickets to a really interesting play. It was called 'AIDS Us.' It
was a play like no other play that I have ever been to. There was
a very small auditorium and there was no barrier between the
actors and the people in the audience, no separation. All the
people on stage had AIDS and they just got up and talked about
their lives, how extraordinarily different their lives had been
since they got AIDS. And instead of 'dying with AIDS' they
reframed it and thought of themselves as 'living with AIDS.' It
was quite an extraordinarily empowering experience for these
people and the people in the audience. There wasn't a dry eye in
the house. And this was in the early days, when there was a lot
of paranoia and misunderstanding about AIDS. At the end of the
play everybody from the audience just walked right down and
everybody hugged and greeted everybody else. There was a total
breakdown of fear; there was no sense of alienation; everybody
was hugging everybody else. And that was a fairly straight
audience, and back in those days that was quite an amazing
experience for me. It was certainly my first contact with anyone
who had AIDS, and particularly a whole stageful of people. They
later took that play to the White House to raise money for people
who had AIDS.

There is interesting research now available about people's
near-death experiences. The chair of the Department of
Parapsychology at Bristol University has done interviews with
people who had near-death experiences. She explored them from a
range of approaches, from the medical to the religious. The
biological-medical argument is that the reason people
consistently see a great light at the end of a tunnel is because
the brain is being starved of oxygen, and therefore everything
goes dark; people thus experience something like going through a
tunnel and coming out to the light on the other side. This
argument can explain why there is a tunnel, but it cannot explain
why there is a light at the other end. They haven't got an answer
for that one! The researcher Ñ and she was taking a straight
scientific approach Ñ said that maybe Buddhism had some answers
there, the best answers. Because Buddhism says that the self is
merely a construct and that we re-create the self over and over
and over again, moment by moment. And at the time of death the
physical construct of the self starts to fall away: body and mind
falling away, that moment. And we can witness the great light, we
can witness the emptiness. And this also accounts for people's
consistent experiences of the interconnected oneness with all
things in those near-death experiences.

There is a range of beliefs about death that we may have
subscribed to at some point. The scientific view is that we live
once; we die once; death is total extinction. This of course is
very rational, and there is no proof to support any other view,
nothing else is available. The Christian view is that there is
life after death; for those who find God, the kingdom of heaven
is open for eternity; for those who reject God, there is hell for
eternity; the earth is but a brief home, a testing ground for our
love of God.

A Buddhist view of death is that we are all waves on the ocean;
each wave is born and dies repeatedly, according to our
underlying forces; there is rebirth until enlightenment, until we
get off the wheel of samsara. A variation of that is that there
is reincarnation, until the dissolution of the ego, when the soul
becomes one with the absolute. I am still not sure about any of
those beliefs.

Years ago, when I was at Kopan monastery, at the age of nineteen,
I did my very first meditation retreat. I was naive enough to
sign up for a thirty-day retreat. Kopan monastery is just outside
Kathmandu in Nepal, and the lamas there, Lama Zopa and Lama
Yeshe, were wonderful teachers. For all beginning students they
used to make us meditate on death for two weeks. Then, if that
was not enough, we would have to meditate on the hell realms for
two weeks. We started out on that retreat with 150 people and
about thirty of us finished. They were always saying, 'The reason
we get people to meditate on death is because it motivates people
to practise.' I'm not sure about that! But, twenty years later, I
have come around to thinking that the lamas had something that
was important there: they weren't so eccentric and crazy as I
originally thought.

Tibetan Buddhism focuses a lot on understanding the process of
death and dying. The lamas used to say that the moment of death
is potent with opportunity, because it is then that we have
access to the fundamental nature of mind. This luminous clear
light will manifest; it will naturally manifest. This is a
crucial point, because it is also at that point that we can
attain liberation. However, we usually do not recognise it,
because we are not acquainted with it, here and now in our
practice, in our daily lives. So they emphasise that it is right
now in our practice, in this lifetime, that we must encounter
that unmanifested great mind, establish that essential
recognition here and now.

Just after that thirty-day retreat, I was getting on a plane to
leave Kathmandu to go back to India. I had always had a childhood
fear that I was going to die young: I carried that fear with me
almost every day. I know some of you here also have that fear.
That morning I woke up and I thought, 'Well, I'm going to die.'
Instead of saying to myself, as I would usually say, 'Oh Subhana,
don't be so paranoid, so depressive,' after meditating on death
for two weeks up in Kopan monastery, I thought, 'Well, OK, I'll
just go with it.' So I decided that every single thing I did that
day should be complete in itself. Every movement Ñ lifting the
arm, bringing it back Ñ was complete; there was death in that
moment. Drinking my tea: that was the last moment I was going to
drink a cup of tea. Eating my toast: that was the last time. So
there was an incredible preciousness about each and every thing.
And it took an incredibly long time to pack my bag Ñ I thought
maybe I was stalling too, about getting on that plane.

Eventually in the afternoon I got on the plane: it took me all
day to get there. We were in a light aircraft, going through a
turbulent cloud formation out of Kathmandu; the little plane was
bouncing all over the place. I thought, 'This is just like my
life: being in one endless turbulent cloud formation, bouncing up
and down all over the place.' Then in the next moment the plane
came through into an open blue sky, very clear; you could see the
patchwork fields of India below. And although it was not an
awakening experience, it gave me hope and inspiration. It gave me
a glimpse that maybe there is something that does not die, that
cannot be destroyed, and every now and then we get a glimpse of
it. That there is something greater that contains all this.

Another reason the Tibetan lamas would say why it was so
important to meditate on death and the hell realms was because it
gave a story, an explanation, about the six realms of existence.
These are the Tushita heaven or heavenly realms; the demigods;
the human realms; the animal realms; the hungry ghosts, or demons
and spirits, or Preta realms; and the hell realms. The lamas
would say that it was so precious to be born in the human realm.
If you are in the hell realms there is so much pain and suffering
that one can only survive; all one can do is cope with the pain.
So in the hell realms there is no spirit of inquiry for
realisation, to attain the Way. The same with the other extreme
of the heavenly, blissful realm. It is so blissful, so pleasant,
we are having such a good time being blissed out, that there is
no inquiry in that realm either. The human realm was always
considered the middle path, the middle realm, where there is a
balance of pleasure and pain. It enables us to explore more
deeply into the meaning of life. You can think of 'realms';
sometimes I find it more helpful to think of them as states of
mind rather than realms. We can go through those states of mind
even in one day, here in sesshin. If we translate the realms to
the now, this middle realm is a balance of pleasure and pain:
don't get stuck in heaven! That is not the Way. Some equanimity
is the middle ground, is the perfect ripe place for awakening the
mind.

When we think of birth and death we encounter the concept of
karma. I was recently reading 'The Tibetan Book of Living and
Dying', by Sogyal Rinpoche. He gives a lovely metaphor about
karma and rebirth that I thought I would like to share with you.
I always stayed right away from the concept of karma. Somehow I
could never get my head around it, how to put it all together.
Sogyal illustrates it in the following example.

The successive existences in a series of rebirths are not like
the pearls of a pearl necklace, where they are held together on a
thread all the way through, like a permanent soul. It is not like
that, he says: it is more like a series of dice or blocks, all
piled one on top of the other, one supporting the other. There is
no identity between each block, but they are functionally
connected. One functionally supports the other. It is more like
that than it is like a permanent self or permanent soul running
through all existences. There is only conditionality between the
blocks.

If we apply that understanding right now, to this very moment,
right now, we have a whole series of mind-moments, a whole series
of consciousnesses. There is seeing, there is hearing, there is
thinking, there is feeling. There are just these moments of
consciousness, functionally connected. We just sit with that
awareness, that empty awareness. There is no permanent self that
threads itself through all that. We just hear it arising and
passing away, each moment, right here. When we stay with that
series of mind-moments Ñ and they happen so fast; the mind is
happening at an incredible pace, seeing, hearing, thinking,
feeling - we notice the impermanence. We are very aware of the
constant flux and change. Impermanence has many gifts, but its
greatest gift lies buried deep inside. The fear of impermanence
that awakens in us, the fear that nothing is real, that nothing
lasts, is in fact a great friend. Because it drives us to ask the
question, If everything dies and changes, what is truth? Is there
something beyond the impermanent appearances of life? Is there
something that survives all the deaths of the world, all the many
changes? There are vast implications in this fundamental fact of
impermanence. When we truly see into impermanence, we can see
into the empty nature of things and we can also see that it is
not-self. These three faces of the truth Ñ impermanence,
emptiness, and not-self Ñ  are right there in each moment.

Many times a friend dying can also give us a glimpse of this
timeless, boundless reality. There is such an energy around
birth; there is also a wonderful energy around death, around
someone dying. It can awaken something in us. When someone is
dying, everyone around that person has an opportunity to be
touched by that life-death-life nature. It is a very precious
opportunity. Life and death are not opposing enemies, but are
complementary within the totality. When we are in touch with that
we are touching this death-less, this change-less, that brings
deep peace. But most of the time we do not bother to be conscious
of our mortality and the cessation of all that we have known or
lived for or loved or worked for. None of us can say how we will
relate to our impending death. But if we live more conscious of
death, right now, in each moment, we might greet the dawn and the
bird and the stars at night with a lot more presence and
immediacy. Life is nothing but a perpetual fluctuation of birth,
death, rebirth. Death exposes itself each moment. Even in a
single thought there is a beginning, middle, and end of the
thought. There is a beginning, middle, and end of a breath. There
is the sound of the bird that returns to the silence. So this
moment is birth, this moment is death. This moment is rebirth,
this moment is deathless. Can we embrace it like that?

A book that everybody seems to be reading at the moment, 'Women
who Run with the Wolves', by Clarissa Pincola Estes, has a
description of Skeleton Woman. She says that if we embody the old
wise woman she welcomes death to her heart, death to her fire.
She knows death as life-giver, as death-dealer. And women
unconsciously practise these cycles of birth, death, and renewal
every month, through the constant cycles of the filling and
emptying of our life blood: every moon cycle. The cycles o
Skeleton Woman flow deep through our bodies, throughout our
entire life. This is indeed a series of births and deaths. But if
we hold on to life with fear of death, o losing our car, our
house, our friends, our children, this fear creates something
like dead fingernails in the mind. The essential life and love
can never leave you because you are that.. And when we awake we
hold to nothing. It is neither conscious nor unconscious. It is
that pure heart of awareness. It is that true nakedness beyond
all appearance. Everything exists in its light. The essence of
awareness neither dies nor is reborn. It is this changeless
reality. And life and death then are married in the emptiness. In
the Hekiganroku, Case 3, 'Great Master Baso is unwell,' this
master is dying and the head monk asks him, 'How is your
reverence feeling these days?' And the great master says,
'Sun-faced Buddha, moon-faced Buddha.' What did he mean?
'Sun-faced Buddha, moon-faced Buddha.' This man is dying. Whether
he is sick or well, the master is at peace. In other words, he
sees all experience as Buddha-nature.

When I was in San Francisco a couple of years ago I had a
wonderful opportunity. I was visiting John Tarrant Roshi and
staying with Governor Jerry Brown, an ex-Jesuit. One night he
said, 'There is a remarkable man over at Berkeley: why don't we
go and meet him?' The man's name was Father Bede Griffith: some
of you may have met him or know of him. He was a Christian priest
who lived in India for something like thirty years, and who
seemed to be able to assimilate all kinds of practices in his
ashram. When they were chanting, one minute it was Buddhist
chanting, the next minute Hindu, the next minute Christian. He
would include all of these things. We went to the No Gate Zen
Centre in Berkeley. There was a small Zen sesshin happening
downstairs, with a Zen teacher giving a talk. We trudged upstairs
to meet Father Bede Griffith. When we walked in, he was sitting
on his bed. He was quite old and not very well and could not walk
easily. He was dressed in his orange loincloth, which he wears
all the time. He was a wonderful little old man, with silvery
hair and a long white beard. Jerry happened to ask him a really
interesting question. He said, 'What is death?' And Father Bede
Griffith all of a sudden became excited and brighteyed and filled
with joy and enthusiasm, and said, 'Death is a sacrament. I am
completely looking forward to my death.' I was sitting right next
to him on the bed and I was stunned. I never met anyone with such
an enthusiasm for death, and such joy and love for death. 'I am
completely looking forward to my death.' His attitude about death
meant that he was living life to its fullest. His gift of no fear
is the greatest gift we can give to ourselves or to others. When
we give this gift then life is a sacrament, we meet life to its
fullest.

May all beings receive the gift of no fear.

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