I’m taking part in my meditation teacher Shinzen Young’s Home Practice Program this weekend, a chance to take a mini retreat and meditate with people around the world employing extremely effective guided techniques via a telephone conference call. The work we’re doing this weekend brought to mind the double whammy we orchestrated for our Winter Break this year, filling our personal time for renewal and retreat with Shinzen’s year-end, year-beginning retreat, and then only days later leaving for Viet Nam. Talk about generating the energy of some serious after shock, after glow, and widening freedom! Having returned home now to the western USA, I had a chance to review some of the retreat dharma talks and Group Process AMA’s or Ask Me Anything sessions (Shinzen being the Me in AMA), and discovered an interesting link between the trip and retreat.
One fascinating aspect of Vietnamese culture is the rich, colorful relationship Vietnamese people share with death, as well as a connection to the family’s or Gai Dinh’s ancestral line. Altars acknowledging life’s spiritual source are ubiquitous — within every business, in every home, even out in the rice fields, with small huts dedicated to the land God, tiny ladders included to assist deities in accessing offerings of fruit and candy. At funerals, grieving family members don white rather than black, hearses morph into ornate dragon mobiles, and the whole procession is often followed up with a Ha Noi marching jazz band, complete with a bugle corps, booming bass drum and higher-stepping, baton-wielding drum major. My guide in the north on this trip Dinh Quang Tuâń enlightened me to a ghastly ritual around burial. After three years entombed in a concrete crypt, a decomposed body is exhumed in preparation for its final resting spot amongst other family graves. Bones are washed clean and then arranged in a certain ceremonial container or smaller casket. Putting gloves and socks on the putrefying corpses’ hands and feet help retrieve hand and foot bones. Pretty hardcore, hands on stuff, as Tuâń admitted it took him days afterward to reacquire an appetite.
Not to shock with esoteric, Vietnamese death rituals, but readers of this blog or Higher Haven visitors know I’m a major fan of conveying how our practices provide real resources in the face of death and the looming reality of impermanence. Death rightly considered can be considered a great renewal, the shaking off of the old and transition into a new state. Per Shinzen’s counsel, “Death isn’t something you solve, death is something you resolve,” informing one’s life’s focus and decisions. As the Lakota people are fond of saying: “We were born to die”. When you have some resolution with the Mother of All Fears, you have a healthier relationship with death, life, and fear in general.
This story has been up for six weeks, posted February 12th, but I’m so happy to make this cool new addition, inspired by my friend Aaron giving it a read and shouting me out this early Sunday morning. Aaron is the not at all ugly American who played a critical role in my first trip to VN in December 2007. “Just read your last two blog posts Lovely,” texted Aaron. “And I have witnessed the exhumation Ceremony in real life once, with a friends’ family, gruesome and touching at the same time.” I was thrilled by this, and so Aaron went on to explain beautifully: “Yes, that Ceremony was amazing. It was a full moon, a bit drizzly and I was observing the family exhume the body, as non-members of the Gai Dinh or family cannot assist. And then the unboxing and the cleaning of the bones, it was all quite amazing and made me feel very organic and human, detached and spiritual. A few days later we carried the little box with the bones, all carefully laid, to the family cemetery, some distance away in the country, the place of final rest.”
Cut to being back now and reviewing some of the retreat materials, I was so moved by the very first question from the AMA or Ask Me Anything sessions. As to those concrete resources in the face of the dying process and our own mortality, it’s here confirmed by a very cool exchange between Shinzen and fellow student Ian on a zoom call.
IAN: “Happy New Year Shinzen. And happy new year to all my fellow travelers in this room. Before I ask my question, I want to say thank you to you Shinzen for all the work you’ve done for us all. And thank you for the way in which you model kindness, generosity and joyful service, as it’s very meaningful to me.” Ian then goes on to ask Shinzen about a particular technique Shinzen employs when teaching children how to meditate that involves interlocking the fingers and lightly touching the thumbs, and to focus on the thumbs. “Every now and then I have a moment of extraordinary stillness, where just that sensation is alive within me. And I’m incredibly alert, but I also feel incredibly small, as I’m just reduced to that tiny perception. And I had the thought the other day, I wonder if this is what it’s like to have a conscious, peaceful death? Curious if this is what it's like being on the brink of death. And so inspired by that thought I wanted to ask you: is that part of what we’re doing here? Are we learning how to shake hands with death? I had the hunch that’s one of the things we’re learning to do.”
Shinzen: “Poetically speaking, we are shaking hands and becoming intimate with the death activity. But we’re also shaking hands with and becoming intimate with the life activity. Both. That’s poetically speaking. Physically speaking, if you’re prepared to experience as T.S. Elliot put it, ”Your greatness flicker” He has a line in Prufrock, one of his poems, something like, you know Death’s coat man? He has this line — “And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, and in short, I was afraid” So when we all are well aware that all the great stuff we’re doing, it’s all going to be taken away, it will flicker away and the coach man says, ‘It’s time to go.’
In Prufrock he was afraid, but if you become intimate with the death force, like you say, very small (Shin touches his thumbs together), you also become intimate with the life force, with the forces of expansion, whether you’re aware of it or not, that smallness was informed by an invigorating vastness. And so, in our practice, as we become intimate with life, we are also intimate with death forces, affirmation and negation, call it what you want. To that extent we are well prepared for the physical dying process and the prospect thereof. You can’t predict with certainty, but there’s a high probability it will be a liberating experience. I’m not saying it won’t be challenging, but it will be familiar territory. And you’ll know what to do.”
