The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [12]
There was another speaker, but at the end of the nurse’s presentation, I began feeling intense pains in my abdomen. Even though my surgeon had told me that when the cancer returns it wouldn’t give me dramatic pain, I excused myself and left anyway, feeling a little panicked.
The next morning I received an e-mail announcing that Jim had died at nine o’clock the previous night. I realized my pains began shortly afterward. I had never believed in prophetic feelings. Those that I had experienced, I always credited to coincidence. When other people would tell me about theirs, I would listen politely and think, “Give me a break! Who could believe that?” Now I don’t question them.
The e-mail said his body would be removed from the House at eleven in the morning. Anyone who would like to say good-bye could sit with him until then. I arrived at nine and sat alone at the side of the bed. It was the first time I saw him looking peaceful. I felt I was looking at the face of a sixty-seven-year-old baby, content to just be. When I went home, I reread one of my favorite passages from the Buddha’s teachings:
This existence of ours is as transient as autumn colds.
To watch the birth and death of beings
is like looking at the movements of a dance.
A lifetime is like a flash of lightning in the sky,
rushing by, like a torrent down a steep mountain.1
After Jim died, I asked my wife and children to forgive me for a number of thoughtless things I had done. Fortunately, they weren’t in the same league with the death of Jim’s daughter, but I often ask myself, What if they were? How could I ask for forgiveness for something that was “terrible”? I’m not sure I could, although after Jim I was inspired to help other people do the same thing. I helped one woman write a letter asking for forgiveness from her adult daughter, whom she felt she had neglected as a child. For another patient, a phone call to an answering machine was all he could do. It seems to me that asking for forgiveness is redemptive, not necessarily in any religious sense, but it seems to remove something that makes the journey more difficult.
There’s an old Buddhist story about a monk who would walk around with two bags of pebbles tied to his waist. One bag contained white pebbles and the second, black ones. Whenever he did something virtuous he took out a white pebble and put it in his pocket. Whenever he did something that was hurtful to someone, he took out a black one. At the end of the day he looked at the number of white and black pebbles in his pocket. If the whites outnumbered the blacks, it was a good day. Since seeing the pain of someone who desperately wants forgiveness before they die, I understand how important it is to ask now—and to forgive others now, too. I’ve found that when I ask for forgiveness for something I did that was thoughtless, some of my black stones magically become white.
1. From the Diamond Sutra, in Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994), 25.
The Whole Way
Joan Sutherland
Traditionally in Asia, meditation and enlightenment were the province of monastics and yogis, while laypeople generally followed a path of faith and gathering merit. In the West a different model is evolving, in which lay practitioners meditate and seek enlightenment while still pursuing a life of family, career, and social engagement. The Zen teacher Joan Sutherland, one of Western Buddhism’s most insightful and elegant writers, argues that the new model is truer to the spirit of Buddhism, making the depth of the dharma available to many more people and relevant to all aspects of life.
Being human is a complicated affair,