Everybody is worried
about dying, the Tibetan teacher Sogyal
Rinpoche said. "But to die is
extremely simple. You breathe out,
and you don't breathe in."
A ripple of laughter passed through the 400 people crowded
into a conference
room recently at Interface in Cambridge, a
center for alternative religious,
health and psychological
programs.
They'd come to see a lama, a Tibetan monk, who is noted for
his ability to
speak to Westerners and who, in a little less
than a year, has sold nearly
100,000 copies of a book of Buddhist
teachings, "The Tibetan Book of Living
and Dying."
Rinpoche - a religious
title meaning "precious one" - left his
homeland as a child in 1959,
studied in Catholic schools in India
and in Britain at Trinity College, Cambridge,
and set out to
bring the ancient tradition of Tibet to bear on the anxieties
of
men and women in Europe and North America.
"I'm
not a very good lama," he insisted to an interviewer. He
speaks often
of his own teachers, his "masters," some of whom he
served as translator
when they came to the West.
The
book is the result of doing what his teachers told him, to
pass on the ancient
teaching to a new world, as "a service to
humanity." That includes,
he says, teaching Westerners
"discernment": which Buddhist teachings
to use and which to
ignore, how to find a teacher and persevere on the path
to
enlightenment.
And he is
succeeding in drawing new students to Buddhism, said
Steve Zimmerman of Watertown,
who leads classes at Rinpoche's
local Rigpa center there. "Because he
was raised largely in the
West, he has much greater understanding of Westerners."
David F. Gibbs, 45, a social worker at the Merrimack Valley
Hospice in Lowell,
said he once found Tibetan Buddhism "too
ritualistic and elaborate, beyond
my cultural experience."
Now
he finds Rinpoche's teaching has helped him "develop more
compassion and
understanding," in seeing how the people who come
to the hospice "are
distinct from their behavior, how they are
more than what they are thinking
or feeling or doing."
For
part of the 10 years he spent preparing the book, Rinpoche
worked in the hospice
movement in Britain, helping those who face
imminent death as a result of cancer,
AIDS or other serious
illnesses. He came to believe that much of what is wrong
in
Western society arises from the denial of death.
"I
feel this denial of death actually complicates problems
that exist in Western
society," Rinpoche said in the interview.
"It is why there is no
long-term vision, not very much thought for
the consequences of actions, little
or no compassion."
"People
see death as terrible, as tragic. Because they want to
live, they see death
as the enemy of life and therefore deny
death, which then becomes even more
fearful and monstrous."
Beneath
this fear of death lies "the ultimate fear . . . the
fear of looking into
ourselves," he said.
But death
can be a friend, he told the crowd at Interface.
"Death holds the key
to the meaning of life," which is why
Trappist brothers regularly greet
each other with the Latin
phrase memento mori, "remember you are dying,"
Rinpoche said.
"Remembering
. . . brings life into focus . . . It sorts out
your priorities, so you do
not live a trivial life . . . It helps
you take care of the most important
things in life first. Don't
worry about dying; that will happen successfully
whether you
worry about it or not."
He warns his students not to think about death "when you are
depressed,"
but rather "when you are on holiday or impressed by
music or natural beauty."
But he knows that "when I am not practicing," or meditating in
a
disciplined way, "I am afraid of death." He has worried, too,
about
the death of the lamas with whom he left Tibet. "A whole
generation of
legendary masters is passing away - sometimes I
wonder what the future is going
to hold," he said.
Rinpoche
is hopeful when he remembers living teachers, such as
the Dalai Lama, who wrote
the foreword to his book. But he knows
that the possible loss of Tibet is another
experience of
impermanence, of death, like that all human beings must face.
His goal is to help the dying, those who care for them, and
all who listen,
to "face our own mortality and realize how much
love, how much compassion
is in you," he told an interviewer.
"This
dying forces you to look into yourself. And in this,
compassion is the only
way. Love is the only way."
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