Golden Opportunities

“What is a day worth?”

- Chakdud Tulku Rinpoche -

Dispensing good advice about practice comes easily to us armchair Buddhists. Milarepa noted that, “Dharma practitioners may talk with elation, but when a task is set them they are wrecked and lost.” Still, while I rarely encounter real difficulty in life, and skillfully avoid it as soon as it appears on the horizon, when others are in deep trouble it usually seems obvious to me what they can and should do.

After all, what is a day worth? Shouldn’t we who have taken refuge and have the professed aim of enlightenment want to make the most of every breath, every day, and every situation? Ajahn Chah urged us to be old before we are old and die before we die: To contemplate the facts of aging and death, to stop thinking we are young and therefore have plenty of time, to realize that every moment we are older than we were the moment before, and to die to ordinary concerns.

An old friend had a major stroke at age 54. Naturally, he was quite distraught over what had befallen him. A very sporadic spiritual practitioner, he had long been in the habit of seeking words of advice that would instantly ease his mind and change his life, no matter that there was no such thing to be had from others. After much discussion, the best I had to offer him was to say that everyone is headed for a state of disability to some degree or another, should they live long enough; he had just gotten there early. His illness qualified him for a decent Social Security stipend, so his basic needs were guaranteed, and I urged him to make the most of his newfound “freedom” and use his time to calm his mind and engage in various contemplations.

When someone is incarcerated, should they have the good fortune to come across Dharma, they are usually advised to consider that “we are all doing time” and that we are all imprisoned by our habits and by the limitations of aging, illness and death. Easy to say and hard to do, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t some pith to such statements. Those who meet with terminal illness or the death of loved ones are reminded that we are all in the same boat in that regard—as Ajahn Chah would put it, we are all facing the executioner, it’s just a matter of who goes first and who later.

When we see someone dying and going through physical and emotional suffering, the party line may be that they are experiencing great purification, and therefore we needn’t feel too pained by what we observe. If we are sincere Buddhists, when death is approaching we would (theoretically, at least) see our plight as a great opportunity and even welcome it with joy, and want to make the most of each day remaining to us. But such advice might not be appropriate for those who have no faith or conceptual Dharmic framework. As Ajahn Chah said, in such situations we should of course treat the dying with love and compassion, but rather than expecting to become their saviors, we should be using the opportunity to contemplate our own mortality and to be aware of the way our minds are working, which would include our ideas about what we should be doing and how the person should be dying.

“Dying before you die” can be approached from different angles. Creativity could be employed. We might try imagining ourselves going through stages of physical decline, see the habitual reactions to that, and then imagine alternate outcomes, reprogramming ourselves for the future. The loss of physical capability and the weakening of the sense faculties could be grieved over as undeserved misfortune, or they could be taken as opportunity to withdraw attention within and cultivate something beyond the realm of the senses. Not seeing or hearing clearly would certainly reduce distraction. The Argentine writer Borges, for example, said that losing his sight in old age helped him see his inner world more clearly. Again, probably not an easy task, but as the unloved but sometimes wise Luang Por Noo remarked, “Anyone can do what’s easy, but what’s the point?”

When Luang Por Sumedho sent out an email from his retreat in 2012, he wrote about approaching age 80, the age at which the Lord Buddha passed from this world. It sounded to some of us as if he were saying goodbye. When I saw him in early 2013, he had recently been to India and Nepal visiting holy sites, among them Kusinagara, where the Buddha entered parinirvana, and I wondered if he had been rehearsing. I mentioned this to Ajahn Pasanno, who said that Luang Por is not planning on going anywhere, as far as he could see, but rather was seizing the bull by the horns, actively taking up mortality as a meditation object.

Ajahn Chah said, “It’s much better if you’ve already learned to swim when your boat capsizes.” Another wise mentor pointed out that medical students get a thorough training in various procedures before they actually start practicing medicine—they don’t set broken limbs on the spot with mere book knowledge and no hands-on training, for example. We would probably all do well to actively contemplate the basic facts of our existence while we are still in good functioning condition. It may seem quite obvious that everyone ages and dies, that we are all prisoners of habit, that karma has to be paid off, and so on, and therefore we tend to think we can deal with those things when they come upon us; but for a number of reasons that may not necessarily be so. In any event, what else have we got to do now that is so much more important?