Life and Death in the Stream

Today I took a little hike up into the woods uphill from the Tekishin Zen center in Kameoka (just outside Kyoto), where I'm spending a few days. I sat zazen by the stream for a while, watching the water eddy around the rocks.

I've written about the precepts, about the Noble Truths, about magic and mysticism, but I haven't much touched on the big one, the thing so many people turn to religion for comfort regarding: death.

The most popular way to deal with death, of course, is to deny it, to believe in a survival of the self in some sort of afterlife. The most popular way to dodge death in our culture is to believe, "I'm going to Heaven when I die" -- never mind that, as Mark Twain pointed out in his satirical story Letters from Earth, the popular notion of Heaven sounds like an awful, dreary place.

An alternative dodge, long popular in the East and gaining in the West, is to say, "I will be re-incarnated when I die". It's thought by many that the Buddha taught re-incarnation -- indeed, the emphasis on re-incarnation seems to be one of the big draws of Tibetan Buddhism for Westerners -- but the truth is tangled. As a teacher in a culture that accepted reincarnation, the Buddha used parables that included it as a teaching tool. The tales of the "past lives" of the Buddha mostly likely either arose from this practice, or were added by later devotees who applied their notions of transmigration of souls to the story of their favorite holy man.

When pressed by one of his monks, the Buddha said that asking about the afterlife, or other metaphysical issues, was like a man shot with a poisoned arrow who insisted that his physician tell him all about the clan and caste and appearance of the shooter, the construction of the arrow, and so on, before removing it. The Buddha tells us that the trouble we stir up (karma) will keep going after we die, but as for the rest, the lessons about the origin and end of suffering apply regardless of whether we continue to persist in some form after our death.

Of course, the Buddha's injunction has not stopped various Buddhist schools from laying down all sorts of teachings about reincarnation and other metaphysical topics.

The idea of reincarnation came into Paganism partly through these Buddhists. We can track it back through Gardner, who picked it up in while living in Ceylon and who wanted to be reborn in a witch coven; and Crowley, who believed himself to be the reincarnation of Eliphas Levi; back through the Theosophists, who picked it up both from Buddhist and Hindu sources in the East and in some Western mystery traditions, such as the Pythagorean. (Yes, in addition to being the mathematician who came up with the famous theorem, Pythagoras was also a mystic.)

Re-incarnation is sometimes argued as being "natural", the way of the seasons. Plants die in the fall and return in the spring, after all, and so many Pagans are prepared to project this on to our lives as individuals. As one chant goes, "Hoof and horn, hoof and horn / All the dies shall be re-born / Corn and grain, corn and grain / all that falls shall rise again."

But when the corn falls, are the stalks that rise again the next spring the same plants of corn? Am I the same as my grandfather? And if I and my brother -- the last, so far, of his descendants -- don't have kids, then what?

Let's go back to the stream. Sit near some rocks in it's flow. Perhaps you'll see a spot where whirlpools form for a bit, a knot of water that takes on a perceptible form for a few seconds from certain conditions, then melts away as conditions change.

But then, a little later, in the same spot, another whirlpool forms.

Is it the same whirlpool?

The question as phrased does not admit of an accurate answer. "Same" is a construction of mind.

Indeed, as the water flows downstream, and the molecules pass through the whirlpool, we might ask if the whirlpool is the same from moment to moment.

Consider the puzzle of Ulysses' ship -- during the voyage, every single plank and nail and bit of rigging is replaced. Is it the "same" ship that pulls into the final harbor as that which set out?

Now consider -- is it the "same" Tom Swiss that writes this, as the infant that fell into this world thirty-seven years ago? Every atom has been replaced over the years, every cell is different.

The Buddha taught that the idea of a distinct, persistent "self" is an illusion, just as the idea of a whirlpool separate from the stream, or a ship separate from the boards and other parts that make it up. Saying it's the "same" whirlpool, or ship, or person, is just an idea.

If the person I think I am is only a mental construction, if "I" am a character in the story my brain is telling, then how can this fictional thing be re-incarnated or be re-born?

Better -- how can it die? This is the up side of anatman! If there is nothing to be reborn, it's because there is nothing to die in the first place. One story about Zen Master Bankei says that he was very scared of death as a child. When he had his great enlightenment, he realized that "he" could never die, because "he" had never been born.

If our usual idea of "self" is wrong, than what am I?

Psychologically, we're conglomerations of mental energy, thoughts and ideas and beliefs the have been part of many other people. A fellow once told me that he had been Jesus is a past life. If I'd been a little quicker-minded and brave enough, I should have told me[*], "me too". We're all the re-incarnations of everyone, past, present, and future.

[* That's a typo but I think I'll leave it in!]

If we look more deeply we see that we are interconnected with not just our fellow humans, but with all life on Earth. Indeed if we look deep enough we can even see that "interconnected" is the wrong word, implying distinct units. In truth, to draw a line around a piece of this life and call it "me" is arbitrary.

In his commentary on the Heart Sutra, Thich Nhat Hanh talks about how he saw this in contemplating the relationship between a leaf and a tree:

I asked the leaf whether it was scared because it was autumn and the other leaves were falling. The leaf told me, No. During the whole spring and summer I was very alive. I worked hard and helped nourish the tree, and much of me is in the tree. Please do not say that I am just this form, because the form of leaf is only tiny part of me. I am the whole tree, and when I go back to the soil, I will continue to nourish the tree. That's why I do not worry. As I leave this branch and float to the ground, I will wave to the tree and tell her, 'I will see you again very soon.'"

...

You have to see life. You should not say, life of the leaf, you should only speak of life in the leaf and life in the tree. My life is just Life, and you can see it in me and in the tree.

But now we face a problem not encountered by the Buddha; we know that the biosphere is not immortal. In fact, it is rather sick at the moment, and it is quite possible that we humans will kill it.

Oh, certainly life on Earth is going to survive, at least until the Sun swallows the planet, and maybe even then some hardy rock-dwelling extremophile bacteria will live on. But taken as a whole system, there have been mass extinctions, cometary and asteroid impacts and super-volcanoes and ice ages and warming trends, that have wiped out enough life so that today's Gaia, the biosphere considered as a whole as an organism, is probably about the dozenth or so to develop here.

Now, just as the whirlpool is one with the stream, so the stream is one with the rains and the clouds. So even if the stream dries up, the wise whirlpool knows that its true self continues. And the rains and clouds are one with the great oceans, so drought is no end. And the oceans are one with the planet, so even if they soaked into the ground, no problem. And when the sun boils and bakes the planet and all the water is gone, this wise whirlpool knows the in the H2O that forms it, the hydrogen is condensed from the big bang, the oxygen is the smoke from the fire of old stars. So perhaps, if it is wise, the whirlpool does not fear the end of the stream, the ocean, or even the world itself.

And someday life on Earth will end. Maybe a big rock from the sky will get us; maybe the sun will swallow the planet. Even if we consider far-out science fiction scenarios where we build planetary defenses against asteroid impacts, and maybe move the planet's orbit, the universe is finite and the energy runs out eventually.

And in the big picture, with the right understanding, we can be okay with that.

But it would be a damn shame, aesthetically speaking, if we did it to ourselves. Even the most equanimous spiritual masters like the Buddha, unperturbed by death, know that how we get there can be beautiful or disharmonious.

We can't live forever, and neither can the Earth. But we can work to make our lives, and the life of the Earth, the most beautiful that they can be.