By Guy Newland
Aren't Buddhists supposed to have transcended grief? What were we expecting? Was the Buddha not clear enough? We just need to "let go."
When I was a young instructor at Mary Washington College, a student paper shocked me by arguing that Vietnamese Buddhists do not mourn their dead family members because they know that they are going on to future lives. Giving this writer skillful guidance was my first big teaching challenge.
Most of us would not think this way, but we may fall into subtler missteps. Having met some Dharma and engaged it, many come to feel that they have taken death and impermanence into account.
We might have. But probably not. Like everyone else, Buddhists seldom die as they expect. We die in some other way, too soon or too late, in ways we never imagined. We die in fear, and sadness, and in disappointment. Death is what happens when we are making other plans. And if our lives are committed to service, we will die while we still have critical work to do.
When Dainin Katagiri Roshi was dying of cancer, he told his frightened students, "I see you are watching me closely; you want to see how a Zen master dies. I'll show you." He kicked violently and screamed, "I don't want to die!" Then he looked at them: "I don't know how I will die . . . Remember, there is no right way." None of us know how we will face death.
Let's not fool ourselves. Meditation on death and impermanence does not magically make us invulnerable or transhuman. Losing those we love hurts. When his daughter died of smallpox, Kobayashi Issa wrote:
The world of dew
Is indeed a world of dew.
And yet, and yet...
Issa comments on his poem:
I knew that it was no use to cry, that water once flown past the bridge does not return and scattered blossoms are gone beyond recall. Yet try as I would, I could not, simply could not cut the binding cord of human love.
The Buddha teaches that all that arises is ephemeral, vanishing like a drop of dew in the morning sun. And this is true. Issa cannot evade the full force of this fact; as a Buddhist, he has long known this well - or thought he had. Now this little girl's death hurts him bone-deep, cuts him to the core. To be utterly heart-wrecked and, at the same time, strangely grateful for some lost grace - this is what it will always mean to be a human who loves another mortal.
So we may have unrealistic expectations about how well our practice has prepared us to die or to lose someone whom we love more than our own lives. We may feel worse than we had expected to feel. You are practicing, your spouse dies - and suddenly it seems as though someone clubbed you in the head. Your grief may be complicated by useless disappointment in yourself-or in the Dharma itself.
One woman came to me in a difficult grief after losing a parent. She made a commitment to intensive religious practice with the belief that she had taken the prospect of losing her parent into account. When grief hit her hard, she was doubly tormented. Because she felt so bad about her parent's death, she felt like a failure as a Buddhist.
Soko Morinaga tells a similar story. His friend Miss Okamoto was a dedicated Zen practitioner for decades, but as death approached she was terrified - and also profoundly ashamed of her terror.
I did not find my wife's death at all surprising. I had a vague idea that she would outlive me, but I also knew that she expected to die first. I wasn't startled that she died. And yet: I was shocked; it was a physical shock.
Shock does not have to involve surprise. It took me months to understand. It is like someone informing you that he is going to punch you in the head - and then punching you in the head. You're not surprised, but you do have a concussion.
Shock and pain are not a personal failure. It is cruel to judge ourselves so harshly; it is unhelpful to blame ourselves for being human.
Knowing the first noble truth does not exempt us from it.
Excerpt from A Buddhist Grief Observed
By Guy Newland
wisdompubs.org/grief-observed
