..续本文上一页back to India. I had always had a childhood fear that I was going to die young: I carried that fear with me almost every day. I know some of you here also have that fear. That morning I woke up and I thought, ”Well, I”m going to die.” Instead of saying to myself, as I would usually say, ”Oh Subhana, don”t be so paranoid, so depressive,” after meditating on death for two weeks up in Kopan monastery, I thought, ”Well, OK, I”ll just go with it.” So I decided that every single thing I did that day should be complete in itself. Every movement Ñ lifting the arm, bringing it back Ñ was complete; there was death in that moment. Drinking my tea: that was the last moment I was going to drink a cup of tea. Eating my toast: that was the last time. So there was an incredible preciousness about each and every thing. And it took an incredibly long time to pack my bag Ñ I thought maybe I was stalling too, about getting on that plane.
Eventually in the afternoon I got on the plane: it took me all day to get there. We were in a light aircraft, going through a turbulent cloud formation out of Kathmandu; the little plane was bouncing all over the place. I thought, ”This is just like my life: being in one endless turbulent cloud formation, bouncing up and down all over the place.” Then in the next moment the plane came through into an open blue sky, very clear; you could see the patchwork fields of India below. And although it was not an awakening experience, it gave me hope and inspiration. It gave me a glimpse that maybe there is something that does not die, that cannot be destroyed, and every now and then we get a glimpse of it. That there is something greater that contains all this.
Another reason the Tibetan lamas would say why it was so important to meditate on death and the hell realms was because it gave a story, an explanation, about the six realms of existence. These are the Tushita heaven or heavenly realms; the demigods; the human realms; the animal realms; the hungry ghosts, or demons and spirits, or Preta realms; and the hell realms. The lamas would say that it was so precious to be born in the human realm. If you are in the hell realms there is so much pain and suffering that one can only survive; all one can do is cope with the pain. So in the hell realms there is no spirit of inquiry for realisation, to attain the Way. The same with the other extreme of the heavenly, blissful realm. It is so blissful, so pleasant, we are having such a good time being blissed out, that there is no inquiry in that realm either. The human realm was always considered the middle path, the middle realm, where there is a balance of pleasure and pain. It enables us to explore more deeply into the meaning of life. You can think of ”realms”; sometimes I find it more helpful to think of them as states of mind rather than realms. We can go through those states of mind even in one day, here in sesshin. If we translate the realms to the now, this middle realm is a balance of pleasure and pain: don”t get stuck in heaven! That is not the Way. Some equanimity is the middle ground, is the perfect ripe place for awakening the mind.
When we think of birth and death we encounter the concept of karma. I was recently reading ”The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying”, by Sogyal Rinpoche. He gives a lovely metaphor about karma and rebirth that I thought I would like to share with you. I always stayed right away from the concept of karma. Somehow I could never get my head around it, how to put it all together. Sogyal illustrates it in the following example.
The successive existences in a series of rebirths are not like the pearls of a pearl necklace, where they are held together on a thread all the way through, like a permanent soul. It is not like that, …
《Death is a Sacrament Teisho》全文未完，请进入下页继续阅读…