Who the hell denies death?[dizzy]
Having gotten word just this week of the death of a college friend, having gone through my mother's slow cancer, having been in the room after telling the doctor to pull the plug on my still semi-conscious father who was choking to death, a handful of miscarrages, almost losing our baby daughter last year to a blood infection that put her in the ICU, having pulled a guy out of a car covered in blood near death ... I went to two funerals this past year for disabled young people at the place I volunteer whose twisted bodies just gave out before the age of 25 ...
... what are you talking about???
When have you ever heard any Buddhist say that this life doesn't sometimes suck, with sickness, old age and death? Open the news ... did you see that knifing in England today? What people are capable of ...
(not for the squeemish)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?annotat...&v=1TtRMC4zF3A
Buddhists go right into the heart of the ugly. We don't turn away. Here, in our Sangha, we have war veterans, folks in the medical professions, a funeral director, law enforcement, ambulance drivers. I (my wife too) was a friggin' hospice volunteer who worked bedside in the care center for 5 years with hundreds of terminal patients, babies on up, and their families, with all one can imagine experiencing in such a place.
What may be confusing folks is that Buddhists ... the Buddha ... somehow found something that is simultaneously beyond and through-and-through the sickness, old age and death. (Or, if not, a whole lot of Buddhists have been wasting their time for 2500 years).
Death ... no death, at once. Dogen said die die, right to the death ... live live, as if your life depended on it! He wrote in Zenki ...
Life is the manifestation of all functions,
Death is the manifestation of all functions.
We turn away from death? Baloney.
I will say that, yes, some folks don't "get this" as easily as others . That is probably why old time Buddhist said that some may pierce it in a moment, but some may take lifetimes and lifetimes.
Gassho, J