Living Meaningfully

　　Dying Joyfully

　　by Ajahn Brahmavamso

　　Address by Ven. Ajahn Brahmavamso to the Global Conference on Buddhism 2002

　　8th December 2002, Sham Alam, Malaysia

　　In this presentation, I will use stories and anecdotes, as well as some jokes, to demonstrate how we can find out for ourselves the meaning of life, in order to live meaningfully. Then I will go on to show that living life meaningfully, according to the Dharma, will take the grief out of loss, and let us die joyfully.

　　~O~

　　In the summer of 1969, just after my 18th birthday, I was enjoying my first experience of tropical jungles. I was travelling in the Yucatan Peninsula of Northeast Guatemala, heading for the recently discovered pyramids of the vanished Mayan civilization.

　　In those days, travel was difficult. It took me three or four days to cover the few hundred kilometres from Guatemala City to the ruined temple complex known as Tical. I travelled up narrow rainforest rivers on oil-soaked fishing boats, down winding dirt roads balanced atop heavily loaded trucks, and through small jungle paths on ramshackle rickshaws. It was a region remote, poor and pristine.

　　When I finally arrived at the extensive complex of abandoned temples and ancient pyramids, I had neither guide nor guide book to tell me the meaning of those impressive stone monuments pointing to the sky. Nobody was around. So I started climbing one of the tall pyramids.

　　On reaching the top, I suddenly knew the meaning of the pyramid, its purpose.

　　For the previous three days, I had been travelling exclusively through jungle. The roads, paths and rivers were like tunnels through the dense greenery. Jungle quickly made a ceiling above any new thoroughfare. I hadn”t seen the horizon for many days. Indeed, I hadn”t seen far distances at all. I was in jungle.

　　On top of that pyramid, I was above all the tangle of the jungle. Not only could I see where I was in the map-like panorama spread before me, but also I could now see in all directions, with nothing between infinity and me.

　　Standing up there as if on top of the world, I imagined what it might have been like for a young Mayan Indian who had been born in the jungle, raised in the jungle, who had lived all their life in the jungle. I pictured them in some religious rite of passage being led gently by the hand, by a wise old holy man, up to the summit of a pyramid for the very first time. When they rose above the tree line and beheld their jungle world unfolded and spread out before them, when they gazed beyond the limits of their world to the horizon and above, they would see emptiness above and around, with no thing and no body between them and the infinite. Their hearts would resonate with the clear symbols of Truth. Insights would flower and give their fruit. They would understand their place in their home world, and they would have seen the infinite, the emptiness, which embraces it all. Their life would have found its meaning.

　　~O~

　　Living meaningfully requires such deep insights. We all need to grant ourselves the time and the peace to climb that pyramid inside each one of us, to rise above and beyond the tangled jungle that is our life, if only for a short time. Then we will see for ourselves our place among things, the overview of our life-journey, and gaze unimpeded at the infinity holding it all. Call that meditation if you will, silent knowing or still seeing. It is just like the Mayan Indian ascending the pyramid and transcending his jungle home, so as to find meaning.

　　~O~

　　I could tell you what "living meaningfully" is, but that would just add one more philosophy to the confusion of spiritual sciences that you may already be burdened with. One of be beauties of Buddhism is that it does not tell you what to believe, but it tells …

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