Advice for someone who is dying – Part 3

Even if you find yourself thinking, that’s alright too, as long as you think wisely. Don’t think foolishly.

If you think of your children, think of them with wisdom, not with foolishness. Whatever the mind turns to, then think and know that thing with wisdom, aware of its nature. If you know something with wisdom, then you let it go and there’s no suffering. The mind is bright, joyful, and at peace, and turning away from distractions, it is undivided. Right now, what you can look to for help and support is your breath.

This is your own work, nobody else’s. Leave others to do their own work. You have your own duty and responsibility and you don’t have to take on those of your family. Don’t take anything else on; let it all go. That letting go will make your mind calm. Your sole responsibility right now is to focus your mind and bring it to peace. Leave everything else to others. Forms, sounds, odors, tastes—leave them to others to attend to. Put everything behind you and do your own work, fulfill your own responsibility. Whatever arises in your mind—be it fear of pain, fear of death, anxiety about others or whatever—say to it, “Don’t disturb me. You’re not my business any more.” Just keep saying this to yourself when you see those dhammas arise.

The world is the very mental state that is agitating you at this moment. “What will this person do? When I’m dead, who will look after them? How will they manage?” This is all just “the world.” Even the mere arising of a thought fearing death or pain is the world. Throw the world away! The world is the way it is. If you allow it to arise in the mind and dominate consciousness, then the mind becomes obscured and can’t see itself. So whatever appears in the mind, just say “This isn’t my business. It’s impermanent, unsatisfactory, and not-self.”

Find your real home

Thinking that you’d like to go on living for a long time will make you suffer. But thinking you’d like to die right away or die very quickly isn’t right either. It’s suffering, isn’t it? Conditions don’t belong to us, they follow their own natural laws. You can’t do anything about the way the body is. You can prettify it a little, make it look attractive and clean for a while, like the young girls who paint their lips and let their nails grow long, but when old age arrives, everyone’s in the same boat. That’s the way the body is, you can’t make it any other way. But what you can improve and beautify is the mind.

Anyone can build a house of wood and bricks, but the Buddha taught that that sort of home is not our real home; it’s only nominally ours. It is a home in the world and it follows the ways of the world. Our real home is inner peace. An external, material home may well be pretty but it is not very peaceful. There’s this worry and then that, this anxiety and then that. So we say it is not our real home, it is external to us. Sooner or later we’ll have to give it up. It’s not a place we can live in permanently because it doesn’t truly belong to us, it’s part of the world.

Our body is the same: we take it to be self, to be “me” and “mine,” but in fact it’s not really so at all. It’s another worldly home. Your body has followed its natural course from birth until now; it’s old and sick and you can’t forbid it from doing that. That’s the way it is. Wanting it to be different would be as foolish as wanting a duck to be like a chicken. When you see that that’s impossible—that a duck has to be a duck, that a chicken has to be a chicken and that bodies have to get old and die— you will find strength and energy. However much you want the body to go on and last for a long time, it won’t do that.

Conditions are impermanent and unstable; having come into being they disappear, having arisen they pass away. And yet everyone wants them to be permanent. This is foolishness.

As soon as we’re born, we’re dead. Our birth and our death are just one thing. It’s like a tree: when there’s a root there must be twigs. When there are twigs, there must be a root. You can’t have one without the other. It’s a little funny to see how at a death people are so grief-stricken and distracted, fearful and sad, and at a birth how happy and delighted. It’s delusion; nobody has ever looked at this clearly. I think if you really want to cry, then it would be better to do so when someone’s born. For actually birth is death, death is birth, the root is the twig, the twig is the root. If you’ve got to cry, cry at the root, cry at the birth. Look closely: if there were no birth, there would be no death. Can you understand this?

Don’t think a lot. Just think, “This is the way things are.” It’s your work, your duty. Right now nobody can help you; there is nothing that your family and your possessions can do for you. All that can help you now is correct awareness.

To be continued

BY AJAHN CHAH – Lion’s Roar