the self-generated pains that we can avoid if we wake up to what we are doing, and stop doing it. And finally there are the pains that must simply be borne – par excellence the sadness of bereavement, the sensations of sickness, the dependency of disability, the decline to old age, and the final unknown of our own death.
The remarkable discovery that Buddhism can make available to us is that even physical pain changes in its quality and intensity when we give up the abortive attempt to avoid it. There was an unsensational programme on the television the other day about a clinic in America that was treating children who had some rare disease or other, I forget what it was, that required daily injections directly into the spine which were, undeniably, intensely painful. Their special approach was to teach the children everything they could about the injections, to allow them to practise giving the injections themselves to life-size dummies, and to encourage parents to be involved all the time. What they did not do was tell the children that it wouldn’t hurt, nor did they tell them to be ‘brave’. Through this process the children, incredibly, were able to stay completely relaxed and peaceful throughout the injections, experiencing the pain, but not resisting it. Precisely by not resisting, the experience became bearable. Millions of mothers have thanked their ante-natal classes for something of the same transformation of labour. Thousands of meditators, as we shall see later, have learnt to sit peacefully through long retreats while strong sensations of various sorts arise and fade away in different parts of their bodies. It is no mere fatalism, but active intelligence, to give up trying to avoid the inevitable, for in doing so it actually becomes less aversive. (As I heard a politician say on the radio a year or so back, ‘We must plan for the inevitable; and unfortunately these days the inevitable all too frequently happens.’)
To the medical profession, there are no two ways about it: pain and death are the enemy, to be reduced and postponed wherever and for as long as possible. In a sense this is the easy way out of the impossible moral dilemma with which medical technology has confronted us. If we have drugs that can soften pain and prolong life, then it is hard not to use them, or at least to believe that we ought to use them. In the old days, doctors did what they could, and lots of people died anyway. Now they are frequently confronted with a choice that they would rather not have to make. In many individual cases it looks as if the best thing to do is to keep on trying your hardest to keep people alive – despite the increasing misgivings of families and patients themselves. Yet the collective upshot of these individual decisions is an increasingly elderly, infirm and dependent population, many of whom have had enough.
The decisions involved are truly difficult, for families and especially for doctors, and I would cope no better if I were in their shoes, I am sure. But the medical profession has largely brought the difficulties on themselves. By persisting in treating pain and death as technical problems that can and should be fixed, they have educated the world at large to think likewise, and have undermined the vital resources of serenity and acceptance that we are all going to need sooner or later. And at the end, when medical science has given its all and ‘failed’, as it must, dead bodies are spirited away and either hidden or spruced up as if they were going to a party. How many dead bodies have you seen in your life? How many opportunities have you or your children had to get used to the physical fact of death? If your teenage daughter persisted in writing English assignments around the theme of her parents dying, and what it is like being an orphan, would you feel this was a healthy attempt to deal in imagination with the greatest and most legitimate fear of all, or would you think her ‘morbid’ and try to encourage a more cheerful outlook?
How at ease are you with bereavement – can you feel sadness and regret without also feeling anger and guilt? Is death to you the enemy of life, or simply one of many threads that run inextricably through it? And what of your own death? Some people are scared of the fact of being dead, and hope for some kind of Hereafter, so that it shall not end. To them for death to be a full stop makes a mockery of life. Others feel less worried about death itself, but are scared of dying – of the unknown process with its fierce connotations of pain, loss of control, and loss of consciousness. Perhaps you are not aware of any apprehension at all – but do you act, in your daily life, as if death were a friendly acquaintance that could stroll over and tap you on the shoulder at any moment?
There is a Sufi story about a man who was walking in the market place one afternoon when someone tugged at his sleeve. ‘I am Death,’ said the figure. ‘I just came to warn you that we have an appointment at six o’clock tomorrow morning.’ The man was very scared, but he thought he would make good use of the advance information. Cashing in his shares, he bought the three finest, fastest horses in the town, and packing just a towel and a few valuables, he set off across the desert to a distant town where he hoped Death would not be able to find him. All night he rode like the wind, exhausting one horse after the other, until, as six o’clock approached he came to a small oasis where he dismounted for a quick drink before continuing. As he walked over to the well, the figure who had been sitting quietly beside it looked at his watch and stood up, saying, ‘It’s remarkable. I really didn’t think you were going to be able to make it.’
One’s attitude to death is very important in Buddhism. When we forget our mortality and the mortality of our loved ones, it is possible for our priorities to go haywire, and for us to become bamboozled into thinking that all kinds of peripheral things – wealth, status, popularity – are of the essence. Sometimes it takes an angina attack or a stroke to remind us of what we value most. In one of his books about the Yacqui Indian sage Don Juan, Carlos Castaneda reports him as saying, ‘When your death makes a gesture to you, an enormous weight of triviality drops away.’ Though, being forgetful, it is perfectly possible for us to pick it up again!
The Buddhist scholar Edward Conze summed up the issue in a rather mordant fashion in his Buddhism: Its Essence and Development first published in 1951, before the abolition of capital punishment in England.
I sometimes believe that the English persist in the gentle habit of executing criminals by hanging, because this form of execution affords such a close parallel to the course of human life. At the moment of conception we jump, as it were, off a board, with a noose around our necks. In due course we will be strangled – it is only a matter of sooner or later. We are all the time aware of our perilous condition, whether we dare face it or not. How can one be at one’s ease in the interval?
And that brings us back, perhaps a little clarified, to the crucial question with which we started this chapter. Let us leave it with a cryptic answer from a tenth century Zen Master, Bunan:
While living
Be a dead man Be thoroughly dead, Act as you like, And all will be well.
3 NO HARD FEELINGS
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favour fire.
But if I had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.
– Robert Frost
