Fishes’ Eyes Swim with Tears

By Gerry Hōshō Rickard

Over the course of the last year, two of my good friends passed away.

John and André were both a huge part of my life after I moved to Amsterdam for work in the late nineties. Although I had known John (also an Irishman) from earlier, I met André (an Amsterdammer) just as I moved there. And, through this, they also met each other.

I guess I’m at the age now when the loss of good friends happens. I have, of course, lost people in my life before this, but as you pass your 60’s you move, as they say, further up the queue. There’s something about when your friends die that truly brings up the fact of your own impermanence in this world—it’s time to be confronted with our own death.

This isn’t to sound maudlin or pitiful. This is the reality of our lives. At some point, we will no longer be on this planet as we are now.

As a practicing Buddhist and meditation teacher, impermanence is something that is part of my teaching to others and something that I also recognise in my day-to-day life. Everything changes, nothing lasts. The moment of our birth is the moment of our dying. These are more than just words—they are universal truths that we can’t deny.

I can and do, however, take solace in my practice. Through practice and the dharma, I have come to realise that death is only relevant to the world of form. Our bodies of form will perish. Our absolute, formless nature, our buddha nature, will not. Anything which has been created by different conditions (for example our personality, our ego, our sense of self, our bodies) can only be impermanent. Our true unconditioned essence isn’t. It is something that has never been born and, in that “unbornness” can never die.

But even though I have found peace and stillness through my meditation practice and Buddhist teachings, I still grieve.

What do I grieve for?

I remember the good times, the trips to Japan for the football (soccer to you guys) World Cup, the many concerts we experienced together where music, beer and other substances gave us (before I discovered meditation) our transcendental experiences. I grieve for those times when we felt invincible as we celebrated life to the full, not thinking of a future, certainly not thinking of our last days on this planet. I grieve for the times of innocence, or stupidity, or both—the “glory” days.

I grieve for the lost friendship in which all our experiences and parts of our lives together were shared. Above all, I grieve that their presence will no longer be part of my life; the calls that we will never make again, the meals together, the beers, the good times. And as we say in Ireland, the craic.

I grieve for a future that will never come, a future where I imagined ourselves sitting by the fireside in our old age, sipping a glass of whiskey and reminiscing together about all the above. And, yes, I know that the past and the future don’t exist and are only thoughts and concepts of our working mind. But that doesn’t negate the real sadness that is here.

What Buddhism has also taught me, however, is that the reality of our lives is both absolute and relative.

Joy and grief are two sides of the same coin. We cannot know one without knowing the other. A life of just pure joy cannot exist. For then, how we would we know grief? Each day has its dawn and dusk. Each life has its birth and death. Life is death, death is life. 

It reminds me of the story of Chan Master Lin Chi whose grief was so evident when his teacher, Huang Po, passed away. During the funeral Lin Chi wept openly in front of his disciples who, when seeing this, were totally shocked. He had always taught them about their eternal, non-dying true nature and that it was only the form of our body that actually died. So when they asked him why he was grieving, he answered, “I know there is no death. But tears are coming. Who am I to stop them?”

This beautiful and wise response summarises the non-dual nature of our lives. Just as we cannot know darkness without knowing light, realizing our true nature doesn’t cut us off from our human emotions. We are not one, or the other, we are both. And neither does one contradict the other. Lin Chi, although enlightened, was showing that the humanness of his grief also belongs and that they can live together side by side. It is because we know impermanence that we can grieve for those we have lost. It is because we experience attachment through loving another person that their passing causes sadness.

The teachings are there to allow all of this but not to become too attached to it.

It’s okay to have memories and think back about our times together, but the teachings remind me not to grasp onto and cling to them and, in doing so, sink deeper into the grief that is there. Feel it, allow it to go through me, but don’t wallow in it. Or don’t wallow in thoughts about a non-existent future.

The reality is that my friends are gone.

Contemplating our deaths is found in many of the Buddhist traditions. As Prince Siddartha, the Buddha to be turned to practice when confronted by the truths of sickness, old age, and death. Maranasati, or death awareness meditation, has been around since the beginning of Buddhism. In early Buddhism, monks would also sit in the charnel grounds, where bodies were left to decompose and were in various states of decay, and meditate on the realities of life and death. Tibetan/Vajrayana Buddhism has the bardo yoga contemplations which prepare us for the transition from life, to death, and beyond.

Sickness, old age and death. If we are lucky enough to be blessed by old(er) age, then the loss of friends is inevitable. And so we must grieve. As the poet Basho wrote:

Each moment is a parting of ways in this phantom world of ours, yet I wept salty tears now to say goodbye.

Spring passes—
birds cry, fishes’
eyes swim with tears

Living through and being with our grief, no matter how hard it may be, can help us accept the inevitable losses in our lives. It can also help us to let go of clinging to the past and open us up to remembering with fondness and love. And to realise the futility of living in a future that will never exist.

As Roshi Joan Halifax writes:

Illness comes. If we are lucky, we grow old. What we love changes and is lost. This can be dismaying to see. It can also, slowly, open another way of living.

 

Gerry Hōshō Rickard is an Irishman living in Mozambique. He has a master’s degree in teaching mindfulness from the University of Bangor in Wales, and now teaches, leads retreats and online sessions in Mozambique and beyond (www.mindwise.me). A practicing Zen Buddhist he received the precepts from Roshi Joan Halifax at the Upaya Zen Centre in Santa Fe. His articles are part of his way to attempt to live up to his dharma name, Hōshō, which means “voice of the dharma.”

 

 

Photo: Pixabay

Editor: Dana Gornall

 

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