Calming the Mind Among Bodies Laid Bare

[DoYouEverWonder]

April 29, 2006




For centuries in Asia, Buddhist monks have meditated among the dead, contemplating the transience and preciousness of life. The practice typically takes place on charnel ground, among bodies decomposing and festering in the open air.

For obvious reasons, the practice has not made much headway among American Buddhists.

"We sanitize death a lot in the West," said Rande Brown, executive director of the Tricycle Foundation, a Buddhist organization.

But months ago, visiting the cadaver exhibit, "Bodies ... the Exhibition," upstairs from the Baby Gap at South Street Seaport, Ms. Brown, a Buddhist who once traveled to India to meditate among bodies awaiting cremation, had a brainstorm.

"It just quickly came to me," she said. "I called the Bodies exhibit and told them, 'I'd really like to do a meditation in your space.'"

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/29/nyregion/29buddhist.html

[rodeodance]

1. "We sanitize death a lot in the West," --by not even showing troop coffins

[NMMNG]

2. Yes

And bodies are dressed up and made up with cosmetics. If they are too "damaged" by an accident or other cause of death there is a closed casket at the wake. We have dozens of euphemisms to tone down the experience of death. Deceased, dearly departed, passed over, internment, burial chamber, eternal rest, gone heavenward and so on. Anything to numb us so we don't have to face reality.

[Dogmudgeon]

3. Not that sanitizing death is very successful

With no afterlife, this is a freak show of the absurd; in the event there is an afterlife, our morbid concern with death will seem like an obscene fetish. I am personally of the freak-show-of-the-absurd school. I'd like to be proven wrong. Fuck all that -- as Woody Allen once wrote, I'd like to achieve immortality by not dying.

No matter what one's take is on an afterlife, our sanitization of death has failed miserably. My father's body ended up looking like some kind of a monkey, and my grandmother's was done well, but it didn't look like her at all. But it was a kind of comfort to my mother, who lost her husband and then her own mother.

I was with my father thirty minutes before he died, and I was with my grandmother while she died, and I held her hand as her heart finally failed to achieve contraction and her death came. She didn't die alone, and we were there to help her feel less afraid. That was what counted to me. They fought the Grim Reaper as long as they could, and after they died, I resolved to make the effort some day to kick the man with the scythe in the ass personally.

It's impossible for the human mind to deal with death "properly". Perhaps we ought not even try, because everything we do try ends up devaluing life. This is why I don't believe in an afterlife, but also don't believe in saying I know for certain.

I want to believe I will be loved. I want to believe my life has value. And I want to believe that death is merely a restroom break on a very, very long journey.

Failing the mental trick of convincing myself that I'm really not just a whole bunch of synchonized quanta in an infinitely improbable universe, I will fight for life any way I can.

--p!

[TallahasseeGrannie]

4. I'd like to see the exhibit but more for understanding

the anatomy than spiritual reasons. Although the best meditations I have ever had were when I was in boarding school and would sit in the nun's graveyard. Very soothing place.

Of course at that time there were a few nuns I would have liked to see interred there immediately. Happily for them it didn't happen.

T-Grannie