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More about that Death Stuff

There’s a brief teaching my dharma teacher Wangdor Rimpoche gives frequently. It’s a favorite of mine. In the middle of a lengthier Dzogchen transmission, he looks around the room, smiles, and says, “You know, you’re all gonna die someday.” And then he laughs.

And then everyone else laughs.

Everybody laughs because what he’s saying is perfectly true. And because it takes an enlightened master to remind us of something obvious we don’t usually think about. For whatever reason though, we seem to be in a time when, like it or not, we have to think about it.

After posting about Tiger yesterday, I got a number of heartfelt comments. Long distance hugs to y’all. Sarah’s comment gave me quite a shock. You see, on this end of the planet US news doesn’t come out this way very often. Yes, some folks have TV, but they mostly use it to watch either broadcasts from His Holiness (if they’re Tibetan) or bad Bollywood movies from 1968 (if they’re Indian). Newspapers tend to focus on regional happenings here in the state of Himachal Pradesh. So you can imagine how it felt to read about this catastrophe out at Virginia Tech. One lone crazy person with a gun. 33 fatalities. Hundreds of relatives to wonder “Why? Why the fuck did that have to happen?”

This morning I did what I could do: go down to the lake on kora, and say extra prayers for the lost and wounded. Healing prayers for those suffering grief. General prayers to cope with the unconscious cruelty of big K Karma.

Yesterday Pia and I had long discussions about karma, and what it meant for Tiger, and for Chime, and the tom intent on killing her brood. The tomcat may not really consciously think in so many words, “I’m gonna kill me some kittens today.” It’s just part of the evolutionary programming for securing territory. Where we got to with it is that the tom’s instinct for kitty-killing is one of the hellish aspects of the animal realms, dooming him to a lower rebirth as a bug or something until he could get past such bad karma.

But what about human youngling killers? What are we to think of them? After all, they’re not operating on instinct. They really do get up in the morning and think “I’m gonna kill me some kids today.” The easy answer is that they’ll end up in some hell realm or other for a few hundred millenia. And some day, they’ll begin the slow accumulation of better karma.

How lives happen, how deaths happen…seems there’s no escaping the great wheel.

I’ve heard from other friends who have lost loved ones recently. The big “Why?” question seems to be reverberating in a lot of heads right now. In India catastrophes on the scale of Virginia Tech happen pretty frequently–trains derail and buses go over the high side. A common story in the Indian news these days is about the farmers who are so far in debt they’re committing suicide as a way out of their situations.

Then there’s the other side of the wheel, the one headed upwards. For every bit of horrible downward karma there seems to be good stuff headed up. There are all those people who, when faced with a disaster, rush to help rather than stand back or run away. Or those folks who are willing to just listen, or offer a shoulder to cry on when tears come. We often ponder Chime’s karma in taking shelter in our house to begin with, and getting all of her kittens blessed by an enlightened master. There’s this idea that Smoke (and maybe Tiger) will return as humans someday.

I wonder what they’ll be like. Maybe they’ll be people who’ll help others get further up the wheel of karma..

April 16th, 2007 Posted by admin | General, India, Tibetan Buddhism | 4 comments