The Eastern Way of Death
Lay down all thought, surrender to the void
By SOPHIE MAJESKI
I so envied the anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson, daughter of Margaret Meade and Gregory Bateson, who had written a beautiful essay more than a decade earlier about sitting with her father while he died peacefully at a Zen Buddhist retreat on the Pacific Coast near San Francisco. In exquisite detail, Bateson described the days leading up to and following her father's death, feeling the spirit leave his body, watching his body slowly change color and texture, watching it disappear into a crematorium, the odors of death and decay and burning, the texture of ashes and bits of bone.
What I envied her was the intimacy of the experience, the profound peace of that intimacy. It seems no accident that the old Zen masters used the word "intimate" to describe the moment of enlightenment, the moment of true knowing. In affluent, secular societies, we put our faith in the mind, and the body is its servant. So that death, which the mind can neither fully explain nor control, is an affront, the body's unkind rebellion. We can't "know" it with our minds, and so we are uncomfortable, because we do not recognize other forms of knowing. We want to control the things we get close to.
It is often argued that Asians -- steeped in the cosmologies of Buddhism and Taoism and Hinduism with their emphases on the disciplines of meditation and yoga, their insistence that the body and mind and spirit are not separate and, therefore, not hierarchical -- are more comfortable than Westerners with the idea of death. "We in the West tend to ignore, push aside or recoil from death," writes Nancy Wilson Ross in her highly regarded survey, "Buddhism: A Way of Life and Thought" (Vintage, 1981). "Some part of our unexpressed fear and repugnance must surely be related to that ego identification with the body and mind which the Buddha was so interested in dispelling and which is the aim of all Buddhist meditation techniques.
"Asians in general," she continues, "Tibetans in particular, have an altogether different attitude towards the physical body when it is no longer occupied by its departed consciousness; in fact, they often offer corpses as a supreme act of charity to hungry birds or animals...Tibetans' casual attitude toward corpses is, however, in marked contrast to their attentive behavior at the very hour of death and immediately after it has occurred." Tibetan Buddhists see life as an opportunity to prepare for death, and death as an opportunity to become fully enlightened, and the dying person is encouraged to remain fully and even preternaturally conscious, ripe for the possibility of liberation from illusion, from suffering. In Tibetan Buddhism, the ultimate practice is to experience the stages of death during meditation so that one will be ready and unafraid when the actual moment arrives.
Zen, which with Tibetan and Theravada are the three main forms of Buddhism practiced in the West, is less flamboyantly focused on the specifics of death. Zen is a stark practice, meditation is "one-pointed," its object a koan -- one of those extra-logical parables, the sound of one hand clapping, your original face before your parents were born -- or the breath, or the true identity of this creature we call the self, or nothing at all. Theravada, a form that originated in Southeast Asia, includes among its practices a meditation on death and rebirth. Yet, the differences are in some ways insignificant, a matter of emphasis and technique. In all forms of Buddhist practice -- and in Hinduism and Taoism, as well -- the absolute acceptance of impermanence, of death's inevitability, is a condition of liberation from existential anguish.
In Hindu cosmology we are all manifestations of the divine, playing at life, forgetting, as children forget themselves in the middle of a game, that we are aspects of divinity at play. In the game, as in the delusions from which the Buddha of legend hoped to free the world, we experience ourselves as distinct personalities; to be liberated is to understand that the game, the personality, our individual suffering, are not the big picture. That we die and are reborn with each moment that passes. That death and birth are aspects of one another, just as creation and destruction are both embodied in Shiva, a single Hindu deity. That we are not separate from the great cosmic dance.
Robert Aitken, the dean of American Zen, refers in his most recent book of essays, "Original Dwelling Place" (Counterpoint), to a koan posed by the Buddhist teacher Tou-shuai: "When you are freed from birth and death, you will know where to go. When your elements scatter, where do you go?" "This is an ultimate kind of koan," Aitken explains. "Understanding it involves cutting your bondage to the endless fluctuation -- cutting your attachment to the sequence of your movie and finding your home in its particular frames."
Or, as the 14th-century Zen master Bassui counsels: "Ending your days like clouds fading in the sky, you will eventually be freed from your painful bondage to endless change."
But it would be a mistake to draw too crude a distinction between the religious traditions of East and West on the matter of death. The closer one gets to the spirit of a faith, the more the cultural distinctions fall away. The mystics of every tradition seem more closely aligned to one another than they do to the more conventional members of their own sects. As the great 19th-century Hindu saint Ramakrishna, who made it his life's work to study and practice all of the world's great religions, once wrote: "As one can ascend to the top of a house by means of a ladder or a bamboo or a staircase or a rope, so diverse are the ways and means to approach God."
What is missing, in our affluent society, is not the wisdom of the East, but the wisdom of spirituality. Religion itself, when it becomes institutionalized, loses touch with the transcendent. It becomes sanitized, all mystery, including death, wrapped safely in platitudes. Princeton University historian Elaine Pagels suggested in her book "The Gnostic Gospels" that recently recovered early-Christian texts prove the existence of a strain of Christianity that emphasized the same unmediated experience of the divine promulgated in Buddhism. But the Gnostics were marginalized as heretics, destroyed by the hierarchical institution of the Church. Huston Smith, our contemporary Ramakrishna, author of the classic text "The World's Religions" and professor of religion at UC-Berkeley, likes to retell a story by Lincoln Steffens about a man who climbed to the top of a mountain and seized the Truth. One of Satan's lieutenants reported the disturbing news, but the demon was sanguine. "Don't worry," he said. "I'll tempt him to institutionalize it."
"Death is the most important question of our time...in good part because we refuse to face it," Smith wrote in the foreword to Glenn Mullin's "Death and Dying: The Tibetan Tradition" (Arkana, 1981). "Having escaped the mechanomorphic view of reality that modern science seemed in its infancy to decree -- it no longer does, but our thought forms have not caught up with that fact -- Asia has been spared the impact of death as a blank wall and continues to approach it as we too once did, as a doorway through which one passes into a different kind of existence."
And this is where Asia, and particularly Tibet "where the archaic perspective has remained most completely intact," can teach us, he says. Deploring the contemporary medical tendency to think of death in military terms, he calls for a willingness to welcome death, to sanctify it, when the purpose of the body "has been fulfilled."
"Because the Promethian dream never touched her, Tibet was able to retain toward death a wakeful watch," he writes. Like Mary Catherine Bateson, whose wakeful watch resulted in so fulfilling and intimate an experience of her father's death, because she was willing to face without hesitation its mystery.
Illustration by Richard Downs