amandus

The other day I went to visit an elderly man staying in a hermitage close to our monastery. He’s a long term anagārika, and much loved by many in the temple. He came to Bodhinyana 40 years ago and has stayed ever since, so he’s been a part of this place from it’s inception.

A few months back he got into a bad accident while cycling down a hill next to the retreat centre from our monastery and ended up with a flayed lung, several broken ribs, severe bruising, and concussion. After a stint in hospital, he has returned to stay in the hermitage, being cared for by one of the monks. He is 80 years old, and lucky to be alive.

Earlier today a younger monk had seen him briefly at the hermitage, and sensing a need for company from the older man, he mentioned he would come back later in the day. I joined them also.

I’d seen this man when he had just gone to hospital right after his accident, but somehow the hospital setting was a stark contrast to seeing him in his home, in his bed, slightly propped up and eyes dilating in recollection as we walked in. We could both tell he was grateful we had paid him a visit.

We chatted a while, and despite us both keeping him in good spirits, one could sense a quiet sadness and loneliness in him, and a fragility that I hadn’t seen in him until now. I could see that this was affecting the younger monk, perhaps not used to interactions with the aged and frail, and he stumbled for words occasionally, ever curious about the old man’s condition.

I could see this young man’s eyes pouring over the effects of age and the potential for death up close, reflected in the pallid gaunt of the old man. It was troubling him. He moved back and forth between concern for the other, and a kind of internal panic at the prospect of his own inevitable fate, perhaps imagining his reflection in the face of the man before him.

The old man looked up at us with moist eyes, his crumpled body a tiny figurine, limbs barely visible under his thin woollen bed-spread. He had become small, as the old do. His eyes remained bright though, and we talked a little of the accident and how he felt now, making jokes and wincing with him when he laughed.

We’d rather not think about death, but here it is. Here it is as open and raw as you like it, and it’s a mistake not to let it into your heart. We live such a sanitised existence in modern times that many people have not had interactions with people in frail condition, nor seen a dead body.

I remember the first body that really shook me was my Nan’s body. By that stage I had fairly squared with the realities of dying, and in her funeral proceedings, although I felt sad, I didn’t cry. I remember feeling I didn’t need to, with the assurance that she was in another place now; she had not gone, just changed state.

After the funeral though, when we were able to spend some time alone with her body, and my mother, brother, sister and I walked in to the parlour alone; I looked down to see the flecked, white make-up covering her face, her rouge cheeks, and the soft, sinuous veins in her eyelids, when it really hit me what a body is.

We are not our body, that much was clear. This was not a person lying before me - the mind had gone, and although the other members of my family were looking at her body like it was her, or used to be her, I felt intrinsically that it wasn’t her, and never really was.

What do we mean when we talk about death? In our culture, materialism is so ingrained in us that even those of us that encounter teachings that propose a different existential possibility; still, I think, often have a latent tendency towards annihilationism. Like, we think there is something there that we have to protect, we think that when we die, that thing will be destroyed.

The Buddha didn’t hold this view, of course. The way he talks about it is a continuation, like we’re going on a voyage to a far away land; we don’t know where we’re going, but it is somewhere, it’s not nowhere.

Have we prepared for that journey? How might we even do that? The Buddha praises bringing death to mind often, and one of the reasons for that is because when we think about our death, it calls to mind how we are living, and whether we are making the right kind of choices in this life. The choices are what we can take with us on our journey from life to life. We can’t take anything else, all we have is our mind, and the mind is shaped by our choices, our actions that constitute what kind of person we have been in this life.

Our acts of kindness, of virtue, of generosity - these are the things we can take with us from life to life. Committing ourselves to positive actions, not just with our body, but in the way we think about and perceive those around us, will ensure we are holding ourselves in good stead for death. This practice is really a preparation for death.

Our meditation is, of course, a preparation for death also. Death is the ultimate letting go that we all must face, and so when we purify our minds and let go of negativity and anguish in the mind, this is death practice, we are learning how to die.

Every day we are stepping into a world which is beyond our calculation. There are sinews of possibilities and connections operating behind an invisible membrane that we can’t touch, and we are not in control of any of it, although we prop up illusions to the contrary out of the need for control we don’t have. The majority of people live their lives like this, always hiding from the plain truth of things - we don’t know when this time of death will come, or how it will come, and we cannot control that.

Contemplating death isn’t meant to freak us out. It’s to help us grow up and take stock of our life and how we are living it. By letting death into our heart we are actually learning how to live. It motivates us to reflect on the choices we are making, the way we are behaving, the things we are doing and not doing, how we are spending our time, who we are spending it with, and whether we are living for ourselves, or something greater than ourselves. When we die, if we are fortunate enough to be in bed as this old anagārika is, this is what will come flooding back, if we even get that chance at all.

So we must flood this life with positive emotions, with doing good, with thinking well. We must commit to this because this is all that really matters in the end, isn’t it? It’s in this way that we start to become prepared for our death, we start to live life according to the reality of that, which is how to live well and true in this life, so that when our time comes, we can die well, with the assurance that we lived well.

I look at the old man and the young man before me, and me, middle aged in the middle. All walks of life in this room, all chapters in a man’s life laid out in the bodies which inhabit it. I see myself in the young monk, brimming with promise and a brazen inquiry, bold and yet frightened; I see the possibility of myself in this old man too, his eyes warm, but filled with the yearning for release from his pain. It’s in these moments that we give shape to love and learn how to die.

It’s right here, and always has been.

• Peace.