| A Path Beyond Suffering: Working the Buddhist Method by John Cunyus Searchlight Press Who Are You Looking For? 144 pages ISBN: 978-0-9644609-6-6 |
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Words, Images, and Layout ©2008 John G. Cunyus All Rights Reserved John Cunyus is a freelance philosopher working in North Texas. www.johncunyus.com |
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| Death on the Wheel of Existence From A Path Beyond Suffering: Working the Buddhist Method, by John Cunyus) A dear friend of mine died of cancer recently. He was the kind of friend who stands by you when times are tough. He always had a smile on his face and brought a smile to mine. His family reflects him, too. I know how hard losing a loved one is. I’ve been through it personally and been with others through it probably about five hundred times now, as a minister. I’ve seen sadness and loss. Let’s examine my friend’s passing, in light of the Wheel of Existence. Why did my friend die? Was it something he deserved? Was God punishing him for sin? Was there a transcendent meaning to his suffering? Was his suffering meaningless? In the simplest terms, he died because he had been born. Birth is 100% fatal, given enough time. This is the fundamental reason for his suffering. He was born because his parents existed. They continued existing because they were attached to various things in their life: among them, their own lives, each other (at least long enough to give birth to my friend), family, and friends. They desired the things they were attached to. They found meaning in them. The things they enjoyed sustained them through good times and bad. It is well to desire such things. They felt desire because they felt sensations. They preferred good sensations to indifferent or painful ones. Again, that is no surprise. We all prefer something that feels good, rather than something that feels bad. They felt sensations because they had contact with different things. They had contact through their senses: sight, sound, touch, taste, smell, and imagination. Those senses existed because there was a world outside of them. They knew the world outside them because they were conscious. They were conscious of the outside world because it changed constantly. Where there is no change, there is no need for consciousness. It changed constantly because there is uncertainty at its core. Why such uncertainty exists, no one knows. When this whole process began, we can only guess, not having been there ourselves. The point of all this is that the reason my friend died was because he had been born. The only way to avoid death is to avoid birth. None of us had a choice when it came to being born. I don’t remember asking for it, do you? Neither do we have a choice when it comes to dying. Gautama believed he had lived countless lives in the past. According to the Buddhist scriptures, he could remember each of those lives clearly. He spoke about them in his teaching as casually as we would speak about our own memories of past events. For Gautama, life as we normally live it had no redeeming characteristics. He had been born, lived, suffered, and died too many times to harbor hopes about anything in the physical world outside him. Nirvana, total extinction, was his purpose. I understand and respect that, of course. I know my children are the dance of skandhas. They are as frail and fallible as me, yet I love them. I know full well what will happen to them, in the end. They will die, as will I. We won’t die because we’ ve done anything in particular wrong or because we deserve it in a moral sense. We will die because we were born. In the interim, while there is life, I will love and enjoy them as well as I am able. I will remind myself of what they (and I) are: flesh and blood, carne y hueso. I’ll remind myself we are not permanent beings. We and everything about us will come to an end, sometime in the not too distant future. Yet while I have life, I will love them. I will not abandon them until I must. Gautama’s method helps me keep my balance. It allows me to understand suffering in a non- personal way. His method allows me see clearly what’s at stake in this world and what isn’t. Some of what’s at stake is worth suffering for. I choose to suffer for some things. The method reminds me it is a choice. Other suffering comes as a matter of course. It isn’t personal. So be it. ©2008, John G. Cunyus, www.JohnCunyus.com All Rights Reserved |
