Death Is Normal

There’s a chant that we frequently repeat on the subject of aging, illness, death, and separation. The Thai translation is, “Aging is normal… illness is normal… death is normal.”

When we look at these things from a distance, they do seem normal. The news that there have been people dying in different parts of the world comes every day. Yet when it comes up close, to someone who’s close to us, it doesn’t seem normal at all. But we’ve got to get it into the right perspective.

There was a king at the time of the Buddha named Pasenadi and he’d come to see the Buddha one day. As he was talking to the Buddha, one of his courtiers came up and whispered in his ear that his favorite queen had died. The king just broke down. The Buddha saw that and asked him, “When has it ever been the case that something that has been born does not age, grow ill, and die?"

This is the nature of the world. It happens all over the place. It’s good to think about that when a death comes near. On the one hand, it reminds you that you’re not being singled out for something unusual. The grief you have can be turned to compassion as you think about all the people in the world who’ve suffered a loss. You see them walking up and down the streets all the time. They’re everywhere—people carrying a loss around. That thought transmutes your grief into compassion, which is a more uplifting and more useful emotion.

But before you get there, you do have to think about the particularity of this particular loss. And here the Buddha recommended to the king that there can be eulogies, gifts, listening to wise sayings, as a way of expressing your grief, your sense of loss, expressing your appreciation for the person who’s passed away.

There are some strange thoughts out there that the Buddha would not have you grieve over loss. That’s not the case. Arahants don’t grieve—but then arahants are arahants. Those of us who are not yet there have to give some expression to our grief. Otherwise, we carry it around. So there are traditions in Buddhist countries that you give gifts to the monks and dedicate the merit to the person who’s passed away. Or you take on some extra precepts and then dedicate the merit to the person who’s passed away. Or you meditate.

When you meditate to you dedicate merit, try to be really strict with yourself that you’re going to make your mind One as much as you can. The values of the mind are, in some ways, inverse to the values of the world. In the world, the more things you have, the better. For the mind, it’s not the case that the more thoughts you have, the better. Actually, it’s better to strip things down, to get the mind centered around one thought.

Think of a rare fruit in the market. If there’s only one instance of that fruit, it’s going to have a really high price. If there are lots of them, sometimes you can’t sell them in time. They just go rotten; they get thrown away. Our thoughts are like that: When there’s one really good thought, it has a lot of worth, a lot of value.

So try to make your mind as One as you can with the breath. And from there, radiant thoughts of goodwill—to the person who’s died and to all the people who have died today. In that way, you can help the others at the same time as you’re soothing your own mind. It’s good to listen to wise sayings to help put things into perspective, to remind yourself that as long as there is still craving in the mind, it’s going to be subject to these things: aging, illness, death, and separation. You have to start thinking about the fact that you’re going to go too, someday. Are you ready to go?

There’s a textbook in Thailand that explains the different ceremonies conducted by monks. It divides ceremonies into two types: those that are auspicious and those that are inauspicious. You might wonder, what’s an inauspicious ceremony? Anything connected with death. Yet that’s a brahmanical attitude. Brahmans feel that death is polluting, and you need to have all sorts of chants to protect yourself when you encounter a dead person.

But the Buddha’s attitude is expressed in a sutta where he says that if you see a corpse, reflect on the fact that your body is of the same nature. Someday it’s going to be like that. That gets you to thinking: one, about the value of your attachment to the body; and then, two, what will your mind have left when it has to leave the body? You want it to have good qualities.

As the Buddha said, when you survey your mind and find that there’s anything unskillful in it, you should have the same attitude as a man whose turban or hair is on fire. You gather all your mindfulness and alertness, and put all your efforts into putting out the fire. So when greed comes up, think of it as a fire in the mind. Anger, delusion: These are fires in the mind.

This is one of the reasons why the Buddha chose nibbana as the name for the goal. Fires, in those times, were believed to be an expression of the fire element which, when it was provoked, would latch on to its fuel and then flame up, agitated and hot. But when it could let go of its fuel, then the fire would go out and return to a latent form of the fire element. In the same way, when the mind is attached to greed, aversion, and delusion, it’s going to burn. But when it can let go, it’s freed. Notice: The greed and aversion and delusion don’t latch on to us. We’re the ones latching on to them. When we let go, that’s how we’re freed.

When you think about this, then any ceremonies around death become auspicious. As the Buddha said, heedfulness is an auspicious sign for the mind. So, as the Buddha told the king, once you’ve expressed your grief, remind yourself that you have work that needs to be done. If there’s no work in the world outside, there’s still plenty of work inside the mind—and that’s always worth doing.

The good thing about the work inside the mind is that when you do it, you’re not the only one who benefits. You can dedicate the merit to others who have passed away. You can spread goodwill to those all around you—because you’ve trained your mind to be less oppressive to itself and less oppressive to others. As you lessen the greed, aversion, and delusion in your mind, the people around you are less subject to these things. And that’s a gift right there.