Beyond the Sky and the Earth_ A Journey Into Bhutan - Jamie Zeppa [114]
“How awful,” I say to Chhoden.
She shakes her head. “No, madam. We have to tell like that. If we show how much we loved him, his spirit won’t want to leave and then it will be stuck here. It has to know it’s dead.” She says some people know immediately that they are dead, but others just wander around, sitting down with their family to eat, wondering why no one will speak to them. “That’s why we leave food out near the body, so that the person will not feel so bad.”
More wood is added to the fire and the cloth covering the body shrivels up. Tashi’s brother walks around the pyre with a bottle, pouring water into the dust. “The water is offered to the dead person, for the terrible thirst the fire causes,” Chhoden says. Everyone stands and watches the flames, and what I thought would be unbearably gruesome is merely a sad fact: the flesh melts away and the bones turn grey and crumble, falling into the cinders at the bottom of the pyre. Someday that will be me, I think.
There is none of the sanitized grief that I associate with death in my own culture. Tears are hidden not for the sake of appearances—there is no need to hold up well in the eyes of the community—but for the sake of the dead, so that they will be able to leave behind this lifetime. Grief is everywhere, in the stunned expressions of Tashi’s friends, in his mother’s collapsed face, but there is also a stoic acceptance.
“Everyone dies,” Nima tells me after the cremation. “This is what the Buddha taught.” And he relates the story of the mustard seed: a woman, deranged with grief at the death of her small child, goes to the Buddha and begs him to restore her child to life. He tells her that he will, if she can bring him a handful of mustard seeds from a house in the village where no one has ever died. The woman goes from door to door, and although everyone is willing to give her a handful of mustard seeds, she can find no household that has not known death. Realizing the universality of death, she brings her son to the cremation ground, and returns to become a disciple of the Buddha.
“But the fact that everyone has to die does not make it any less sad,” I tell Nima. “Because each person is unique, their personality and relationships and life.”
But Nima says, “Not so unique, miss. Everyone is born, everyone grows up, everyone wants the same thing—to be happy, and everyone avoids the same things—pain and unhappiness, and in the end, everyone dies, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but within those parameters, every individual’s life is unique and precious, what they think and how they react.”
“But see, miss. If I think how many countless times I have been reborn in this world, we say millions of times, then how many times have I been happy already? How many times have I married and had children and fulfilled all my goals, and how many times have I suffered and died? Then I think I must have experienced everything by now, but I am still here, so I have not learned anything. Then I feel tired, miss. I feel tired of this life and I think I should become a monk and go to a cave and find a way out of all this coming and going in circles.”
Later, in meditation, these words come back to me. It is like something opening in my head, too fast for words. Imusthave experienced everything by now, but I am still here, so I have not learned anything. In a moment, I grasp it. Not the Buddhist theory of the self, how there is no essential Jamie Zeppa, how she is only a collection of changing conditions, attributes and desires common to all sentient beings, but the experience of that fact. Everything falls away. It is the experience of pure freedom, a momentary glimpse of how it would be—to be in the world and not be attached to it, to move through it, experiencing it and letting it go. It is impossible to put the feeling, the certainty, into words, but later, I know that this is the moment I became a Buddhist.
I come out of the meditation and the feeling dissipates slowly, dissolving into the common