The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [31]
The Buddha wrote: “Of all mindfulness meditations, that on death is supreme.” Koheleth in Ecclesiastes added this beautiful tangle of thoughts: “It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting: for that is the end of all men; and the living will lay it to his heart. Sorrow is better than laughter: for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.” The great Epicurus held that the “true understanding of the fact that death is nothing to us renders enjoyable the mortality of existence, not by adding infinite time but by taking away the yearning for immortality.” The crowning insight comes from Aurelius: If, instead of fearing death, “you shall fear never to have begun to live according to nature—then you will be a man worthy of the universe that has produced you, and you will cease to be a stranger in your native land, and to wonder at things that happen daily as if they were something unexpected, and to be dependent on this or that.”2 Pay attention to living fully and you won’t worry about death.
When Christianity arose, the wisdom to remember death was very well established. St. Gregory (329–388) was forever quoting Plato’s advice to practice regular “meditation upon death.” Ash Wednesday is a holiday devoted to remembering death. Each year, on the day after Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday, the priest takes ashes (from burning last year’s Palm Sunday palms, and then mixing with a little olive oil to make them sticky) and rubs them on people’s foreheads, in the shape of a cross. It used to be that clerics, who all wore what we think of as monk’s tonsures (a shaved top of the head), would get their ashes in the tonsure. It must have been eerie to talk to a man, then see him turn to go and be confronted with this reminder that he was a man marked for death. Whether you get it coming or going, the minister of the rite marks you with ash and says, “Remember, man, that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Catholics fast that day and don’t wash off the smudge until after nightfall.
Plato would have loved it. He warned against poetic fantasies, so we generally think he would have found the promise of a Christian afterlife a little silly, but he loved the idea of enacting one’s philosophy in ritual. The ancient philosophers always said that remembering death took active meditations and gestures. Ash Wednesday leads up to Easter, a holiday whose meaning is a fantasy of resurrection. But in and of itself, the holiday is philosophical and somber. Ash Wednesday arose from Christianity’s two greatest sources: the Jewish influence came from the Jews’ remembrance of death in a day of fasting on Yom Kippur. On this holiday Jews concentrate their minds on death, and rhythmically beat their fist against their heart. The Greek influence was in part as a supposed bad example: the holiday of Lent was set up as a specific refusal to join in the wild party of the Sacred Mysteries.
Christians also persisted in citing ancient calls to remember death. St. John Climacus, who wrote in the late 500s, advised people to “let the memory of death sleep and awake with you,” and St. Benedict’s guidebook for monasteries, known as his Rule (c. 530), advised monks to “see death before one daily.” Eventually, Christianity formulated the idea of death as the time of reckoning, and of either torture or reward. Still, the fundamental message was that the contemplation of death was itself curative. Whatever you believe about