So last Sunday, my neighbor sat down with his morning paper and never got up. They found him hours later, but from his new perspective, it could have been light years. He had been a neighborhood fixture, one of those guys that never stops moving: mowing a lawn, plowing a garden, outside and always visible…until he wasn’t.
This being the small town South, I stopped by the funeral home to pay my respects. What I saw was a dressed up doll, with all the inner light of a storefront mannequin, a parody of the sentience that had lived there…until it didn’t.
While not a new thought, I’m wondering again about all of this, knowing it’s a futile and rhetorical exercise. It’s no surprise we create mythologies around death: to explain, to comfort, to fill negative space. Ironically, most people take the “life” part of this for granted. It’s the cessation of life we struggle with. Yet we know nor no more about the one than the other. We exist as dolls in a dollhouse, with all the understanding that entails.
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I do not agree that meditating on the phenomenon and meaning of Death is futile and merely rhetorical. Such meditation can focus the mind on what matters most to YOU apart from what matters most to the great unwashed masses whose values are determined socially rather than individually.
Thanks, Michael. You are correct. And, to be clear, “meditating on” as you suggest is a different (and potentially productive). Whereas, “wondering about” as I said is indeed pointless because we never know any of this…it’s rhetorical simply because it engages the mind, probably more as displacement activity. Anyway, thanks also for the meditations you addd below. I will explore them. And thanks for reading.
A Buddhist Meditation On Death
Excerpted with permission from “The Zen of Living & Dying” by Philip Kapleau.
Meditations on death are a means of purifying the mind in order to gain a crucial revelation of the meaning and significance of life. As such, death meditations have been regarded as an indispensable element in a wide array of cultures: the Egyptian and Indian, the Chinese and Japanese, the Hellenic and Roman, the Hebrew and Islamic, in both their ancient and modern forms. Because of death’s general unfathomableness and the dread and terror it inspires in most people, the conquest of death, or deathlessness, has a central place in the teachings of all religions. Unless this fear and terror is replaced by comfort and hope, a tranquil mind state is impossible. The unwillingness to think of death is itself a kind of death, for the poignancy of life is inseparable from the knowledge of its decay.
Let us now focus on the meditation itself. Masters of old advise, “Stick the word death on your forehead and keep it there.” In the beginning it is effective to harmonize the inhalations and exhalations with the soft vocalization of the word death. Later the word may be uttered only on the exhalation. One need not visualize the word itself, unless picturing it helps keep it in mind. The mind should be fully concentrated on the meaning of the word death; care should be taken to avoid a mechanical repetition of it.
A Meditation on Death Using Beads
Many years ago in Burma I stayed at the home of a businessman with a spiritual outlook on life. He meditated every day, and to judge from his serene, radiant countenance and deep contentment (he was sixty-five at the time), his meditations, though informal, were most effective.
This is how he performed them: Every morning he rose at five and seated himself, with his feet firmly on the ground, on a park bench overlooking a brook that flowed through his property. He told me he made it a point not to slouch or lean back, but to sit erect. In his right hand he held a long string of smooth beads, which he rubbed one at a time while he visualized each member of his family, then his friends, and lastly those about whom he had harbored unkind thoughts. All these people he then embraced mentally, directing thoughts of loving kindness toward them. This exercise over, he began concentrating on the word death, more or less in the manner outlined above, fingering each bead as he focused on the word. This type of meditation is suitable for beginners and advanced students alike.
Nine Cemetery (Charnel Ground) Contemplations Meditation
First, imagine a corpse before starting the Nava Sīvathika, or Nine Cemetery Contemplations meditation. Take a look at the corpse a few times from head to toe in your mind. Now, think about how it is left in an empty cemetery. Think about this corpse being left in an empty cemetery for some time.
(1) Next, think like this: two days have gone by. The corpse is swollen. Its lips are swollen. It has a darker color. Now, three days are gone. The corpse is swollen more than before. Its lips are swollen. Its face is swollen and distorted. The mouth is open. Its color is darker than before. Now, it has been a few days. The whole corpse is swollen. The lips are swollen. The face is swollen and distorted. The mouth is open. The eyes are open. The legs and hands are also swollen. The stomach is swollen. Now, the corpse is dark blue and pus is coming out from its mouth. Pus is coming out from its nose, ears, eyes, and all the openings of the body. The corpse’s skin has cracked, and pus is coming out from those cracks.
My body is also like this. Someday, this will happen to my body too. The bodies of others will also reach this state of flowing pus. Everyone’s body will become like this at one point. (Contemplate in this manner repeatedly and get that perception established well in your mind.)
(2) Next, the corpse in the cemetery is eaten by animals. Crows have landed on the corpse and pecked the flesh out of it and eaten it. They dug out the corpse’s eyes. Wolves have come and eaten the corpse’s flesh, dragging it by its hands and legs. Dogs have eaten the corpse’s flesh, dragging it here and there. There are pieces of flesh around the corpse. Its hands and legs are twisted. Intestines are dragged out from the dead body. Birds drag and eat those intestines.
This will happen to my body too. One day, my body will also become like this. Others’ bodies will also be eaten by animals like this. Everyone’s body will be eaten by animals like this. (Contemplate in this manner repeatedly and get that perception established well in your mind.)
(3) Next, the corpse’s bones can be seen scattered here and there. Some flesh that is left after being eaten by animals can be seen on some parts of the dead body. The whole skeleton is wrapped in tendons. It is smeared with blood.
This will happen to my body too. One day, my body will also become like this. Others’ bodies also will be reduced to skeletons like this. Everyone’s body will become like this. (Contemplate in this manner repeatedly and get that perception established well in your mind.)
(4) Next, the skeleton of that corpse is completely open. There is no flesh at all. The entire skeleton is coiled with tendons and smeared with blood.
This will happen to my body as well. One day, my body will also become just a skeleton smeared with blood without any flesh. Others’ bodies also have the same nature. Everyone’s body will become like this. (Contemplate in this manner repeatedly and get that perception established well in your mind.)
(5) Next, the corpse is only a skeleton. The skeleton is coiled with tendons, but no flesh is present. Blood and pus is gone. Only the skeleton with tendons is left.
This will happen to my body as well. One day, my body will become like this. Others’ bodies will also become like this. Everyone’s body will become like this. (Contemplate in this manner repeatedly and get that perception established well in your mind.)
(6) Next, that corpse’s skeleton is scattered here and there. The skull is in one place. The neck bones are in another. Collar bones, shoulder bones, finger bones, back bones, hip bones, thigh bones, calf bones, leg bones, and foot bones are scattered in all other directions. The entire skeleton is now scattered.
This will happen to my body too. The skeleton of my body will also be scattered like this. Others’ skeletons will also be scattered like this. Everyone’s skeleton will be scattered like this. (Contemplate in this manner repeatedly and get that perception established well in your mind.)
(7) Next, the color of the skeleton is white, like that of a conch shell. All the bones that have been scattered here and there now have this white color.
The skeleton of my body will also turn this white color. The color of skeletons of others’ bodies will also transform into this white color, like that of a conch shell. Everyone’s skeleton will change to a white color and decay. (Contemplate in this manner repeatedly and get that perception established well in your mind.)
(8) There are now bones heaped up here and there. These bones have been aged for a long time now. These bones cannot be identified now as one thing or another. It is only a heap of decayed white bones gathered together.
This will happen to the skeleton of my body as well. Someday, this body’s skeleton will also be decayed and heaped up. Others’ bodies are also like this. The skeletons of everyone’s body will decay like this. (Contemplate in this manner repeatedly and get that perception established well in your mind.)
(9) Next, a skeleton cannot be seen. Pieces of bones have deteriorated completely. It has transformed into a white powder. It has become soil in the earth. Those bones have deteriorated entirely.
My body will also decay and transform into soil in the earth. Bodies of others will also decay and transform into soil in the earth. Everyone’s body will also decay and transform into soil in the earth like this. (Contemplate in this manner repeatedly and get that perception established well in your mind.)