The Death of Buddha

Today, across Japan, The Americas and Europe many temples will ceremonially display large images like this one in memory of the death of sage of the Shakyas, Siddhārtha Gautama, the man most of us know by the title Buddha, which means "Awakened One."*  He was 80 years old when he died. If you click on the image to expand it, you'll see images of life - plants blooming out of season, animals bearing gifts of flowers, Buddhist monastics and saints bearing bowls filled with lotus blooms --symbols of eternity --and  look on with equanimity, while bodhisattva's, kings, queens, Japanese demigods, and even heaven itself with gods all are weeping.

15th Century Japanese painting on silk The Death of Buddha
(74 x 43 5/16 in.)  The Metropolitan Museum of Art

But in his death, Zen Buddhists celebrate and remember him not as a god, not as a being touched by some mysterious divinity or sainthood, but as a man who reached through the complexities of self -- memory, desire and fear -- to find a way forward out of the irreality we construct and construe as truth. This is actually how Buddhists traditionally call their practice: "The Way."

Siddhārtha Gautama was born a son of the ruling class of the Shakyas, a people living in the North East of the Indian Subcontinent in the 5th century B.C.E.. After a pampered and protected early life, he confronted the sorrows of his world at age 29. He then gave up his princely title to pursue wisdom rather than power. After a six year trek through the competing mystical and ascetic practices of the Vedic world, which then as today saw many spiritual teachers rise and fall, he found an alternative, what Buddhist's call "the middle way," that neither rejects life and experience, nor indulges transient pleasures and fears in an attempt to flee from suffering. This way is called the Eightfold Path:

1. Right seeing  - viewing as things are rather than as we wish them to be.
   
   
2. Right thought - understanding freed of the passions, desires and possessiveness that influences everyday thinking,
   
   
3. Right speech- communication freed from self-deception (passion, aggression, and stupidity)
   
   
4. Right activity - action freed from self deception (passion, aggression, and stupidity) which mean not only not killing, avoiding self indulgence, and sexual misconduct, but the just relations with the world around us: action as compassion and generosity.
   
   
5. Right livelihood - ways of living in the world that are not founded on increased distortions of reality, deception and theft of either goods or life.
   
   
6. Right effort - When we perceive clearly, think completely, talk, act and live in a way that recognises the world (and ourselves) for what it is, rather than what we desire or fear it to be, we are ready to make a leap, not of faith as Kierkegaard, the Christian theologian taught, but of our own effort and will to stay with the real, rather than within the piteous graspings born of desire or fear.
   
   
7. Right mindfulness - making the leap, having the will to stay in the world as it is, rather than the falsity of our own passion, needs, wants, and foolishness is to sense the world and our selves as it is - and having grasped this this, to remain there is right mindfulness, the way of awakening to real freedom.
   
   
8. Right practice - the methods, that strand of Buddhist teaching called Zen says are the surest path to genuine freedom from our passions, aggression, and foolishness or stupidity is through the practice of zazen and a cluster of related disciplines like koan study, and that these are not just tools to get to some other place or understanding, but are themselves liberation. 

Awakening or enlightenment doesn't remove us from the world. Like Siddhārtha Gautama, when we experience awakening we will continue to live, and will someday die. But in life and death alike we know the world and our lives with a beautiful and terrible clarity, that brings with it genuine benevolence, care, and love.

There are Zen monasteries, communities and sitting groups across North America, and I'd encourage all my readers to find and join one. There are, regrettably, a number of "fake" teachers, especially on the internet. If you're looking for a group or teacher and are unsure of how to distinguish the real from the fake, feel free to email or comment here, and I'll try to be of help.

You can find a series of brief lectures on the Eightfold Path here, given by Anzan Hoshin Roshi of the White Wind Zen Community in Canada.
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* Japan, whose Zen practice laid the groundwork for much of the growth of Buddhism in North America and Europe adopted the Western calendar in the late 19th Century, fixing religious and secular remembrances to dates in a 365 day calendar. Much of the rest of Buddhism ties these dates to a lunar calendar, so the date seems to wander in the eyes of the West.