Equality
The world is on fire!
And are you laughing?
You are deep in the dark.
Will you not ask for light?
For behold your body
A painted puppet, a toy,
Jointed and sick and full of false imaginings,
A shadow that shifts and fades.
How frail it is!
Frail and pestilent,
It sickens, festers and dies.
Like every living thing
In the end it sickens and dies.
Behold these whitened bones,
The hollow shells and husks of a dying summer.
And are you laughing?
You are a house of bones,
Flesh and blood for plaster.
Pride lives in you,
And hypocrisy, decay and death.
Shambhala Pocket Dhammapada, Verse 11, p.40-41
The common realities of each human life are its unpredictability, frailty and mortality. As a hospice nurse during the height of AIDS death rates in the U.S., I tended hundreds of dying patients over five years. Most were in their thirties and forties. Some were younger.
Encountering sickness and death, especially in the young, is enlightening. The caregiver quickly learns that the good suffer as deeply and horribly as the evil, as society or religion would classify them. There is no morality in death or disabling disease. There is only human suffering.
Perhaps you would like to try a simple exercise. When you find yourself looking over another human being today, perhaps someone superficially different in appearance or age from yourself, allow yourself to think that she is built from exactly the same materials as you are. Her bones are essentially the same, in the same basic configuration. Her blood looks the same, smells the same, tastes the same as your own. Her eyes see as yours see. Her ears hear as yours hear. She breathes and exhales the same air to stay alive.
I used this exercise frequently at the death beds of my patients, as they were breathing their last breaths. In a sense, I walked with them in that transition. I tried to learn what they were learning. And, years later, as I approached possible death on two occasions, I found I could draw on those deathbed experiences to face my situations without regrets and fear. Perhaps this is a piece of what the Buddha suggests. Compassion comes from allowing yourself to be fully human, equal to every man and woman and child, all of us walking through this world with what coincidence and our best efforts afford us.
And are you laughing?
You are deep in the dark.
Will you not ask for light?
For behold your body
A painted puppet, a toy,
Jointed and sick and full of false imaginings,
A shadow that shifts and fades.
How frail it is!
Frail and pestilent,
It sickens, festers and dies.
Like every living thing
In the end it sickens and dies.
Behold these whitened bones,
The hollow shells and husks of a dying summer.
And are you laughing?
You are a house of bones,
Flesh and blood for plaster.
Pride lives in you,
And hypocrisy, decay and death.
Shambhala Pocket Dhammapada, Verse 11, p.40-41
The common realities of each human life are its unpredictability, frailty and mortality. As a hospice nurse during the height of AIDS death rates in the U.S., I tended hundreds of dying patients over five years. Most were in their thirties and forties. Some were younger. Encountering sickness and death, especially in the young, is enlightening. The caregiver quickly learns that the good suffer as deeply and horribly as the evil, as society or religion would classify them. There is no morality in death or disabling disease. There is only human suffering.
Perhaps you would like to try a simple exercise. When you find yourself looking over another human being today, perhaps someone superficially different in appearance or age from yourself, allow yourself to think that she is built from exactly the same materials as you are. Her bones are essentially the same, in the same basic configuration. Her blood looks the same, smells the same, tastes the same as your own. Her eyes see as yours see. Her ears hear as yours hear. She breathes and exhales the same air to stay alive.
I used this exercise frequently at the death beds of my patients, as they were breathing their last breaths. In a sense, I walked with them in that transition. I tried to learn what they were learning. And, years later, as I approached possible death on two occasions, I found I could draw on those deathbed experiences to face my situations without regrets and fear. Perhaps this is a piece of what the Buddha suggests. Compassion comes from allowing yourself to be fully human, equal to every man and woman and child, all of us walking through this world with what coincidence and our best efforts afford us.
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