ornoth

I’ve experienced some synchronicity regarding waterfalls and Buddhism recently, and I thought both of the following images were strong enough to warrant mentioning here. Both, of course, deal with our ignoring the fact of our own mortality, and what it means for how we live our brief lives.

The first is a poem by Kay Ryan. It goes as follows:

As though the river were a floor,
we position our table and chairs upon it,
eat, sit, and have conversation.
As it moves along we notice, as calmly
as though dining room paintings were being replaced,
the changing scenes along the shore.
We know—we do know—that this is the Niagara River,
but it’s hard to remember what that means.

She wrote it when her partner was diagnosed with cancer, and I think it captures perfectly the illusion most people live under: the ludicrous denial that we will all die, and not too long from now, either.

To most people, that will sound morbid and depressing, but I can’t think of any more valuable thing to hear. It’s the same message that people who are diagnosed with cancer hear, and often it’s the most liberating, life-changing message they’ve ever heard. Life is brief; there’s no escaping that fact, so don’t squander this precious treasure you’ve been given.

One of the ways philosophers have attempted to define intelligence is the knowledge of one’s own mortality. I think in many ways the measure of intelligence is in how one lives one’s life in response to that knowledge.

The second waterfall is something similar, an image described by Suzuki Roshi, the influential Soto Zen priest who founded the San Francisco Zen Center, in his “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind”. When he visited Yosemite National Park, he observed several high waterfalls. He reflected on how the water was unified in one stream until it got to the precipice, and then as it fell, the water separated into millions of tiny droplets. How long and difficult the journey must be for those droplets, falling thirteen hundred feet onto the rocks below! He compares the droplets to our many separate lives, returning eventually to the oneness of all life.

Now, I’m not really bought into the universal oneness of all life, but the waterfall metaphor is still a valuable and stirring one. It illustrates how ephemeral our lives are, and how separate and individual we think we are, despite the fact that we are all traveling the same, well-worn and inescapable path into the abyss of death. All the commotion we make, pretending death doesn’t exist or at least won’t come for Me, seems a bit silly as we plummet headlong through our brief existence.

The question is: how would you live your life, if you knew it were going to end?

And more importantly: what is stopping you from living that way, since you know full well that your life is going to end?

I always feel some degree of trepidation relating my philosophical revelations. Either they sound like trite, self-evident aphorisms, or they take so much abstract language to relate that they come across completely flat on paper.

Last night I had another interesting revelation. Like the others, it’s going to take some background.

Many Buddhist sects express some form of belief in reincarnation. Throughout his multiple lives, a man must attempt to perform meritorious acts in order to accumulate positive karma and promote one’s future wisdom.

In addition, nearly all schools of Buddhism promote a belief in the unity of all life, some dialect of the concept that we are all truly one in essence.

The point of these tenets is to help adherents overcome the problem of ego. Buddhism stresses compassion above all other values, and modeling compassion requires a certain suppression of the ego’s belief that it is more important than anyone else. It is difficult to express true loving compassion while we’re busy defending our ego’s self-conception of us as somehow special, better, and more important than everyone else.

However, I’ve always had an innate aversion to both of these concepts. I couldn’t explain why, other than indicating a stubborn belief that we are nothing more than bio-mechanical organisms that live briefly and die, and our consciousness, in whatever high esteem we hold it, dies with the meat that houses it. And although we have self-evident dependencies, we are not “one”.

Okay, that’s the background. Now let’s set the scene for the revelation.

I am presently reading “The History of Surrealism”, a horribly dry but authoritative account of the movement, originally written in French by Maurice Nadeau back in 1940. Here is a particular passage where Nadeau speaks about the movement’s primary leader, André Breton.

Life and the dream, he had shown, were two communicating vessels, in which events were homologous, it being impossible for the individual to assert that the latter was more real than the former. This time he went further: he abolished any frontier between the objective and the subjective. There exists, according to Breton, between man and the world, a perpetual and continuous correspondence. There exists, above all, a continuity of events which can be antecedently perceived and whose correspondences remain invisible. Yet self-analysis permits their observation.

Upon reading this, a couple things struck me.

First, the last two lines are a fairly concise statement of a Buddhist approach to life: there is something to life that is beyond its appearance to our mundane senses, and contemplative meditation allows us to access that. Now, the surrealists had a general familiarity with Buddhism, so this isn’t necessarily an independent observation, but it did put me in the mindset of interpreting this passage from a Buddhist perspective. Which led to the following.

It seems to me that Breton, as depicted in this passage, is a bit strident in his insistence upon some existence beyond objective reality. I felt this was an expression of a powerful fear of death, of the very impermanence that Buddhism teaches us to accept.

Or does it?

Breton’s unchecked ego brought him to this conceptual argument in order to bolster the idea that he would somehow live beyond his meat. But in reincarnation and the mystical oneness of all life, Buddhism also seems to provide psychological crutches that allow the overpowering ego to avoid facing death!

In a word, Buddhism’s concepts of karma, reincarnation, and the oneness of all life, while helpful in allowing the individual to suppress ego in order to cultivate a healthy sense of compassion, can also be viewed as the sheerest vanity, providing the ego with ample ways of rationalizing away the blunt, absolutely immutable fact of our impermanence and death.

I find this particularly ironic, because Buddhism is all about mastering one’s ego and accepting the fact that we die. To realize that such an obvious, ego-driven aversion to death can be found within Buddhism’s core tenets was a real revelation.

Entries tagged with unity

A River of Thought

I’m gonna live forever; baby remember my name…

Ornoth's profile

Links

Frequent topics