During my late wife’s final weeks I spent a lot of time thinking about who we were together, who I would be after she died … and who she would be after she died. Fortunately I had spent the ten years beforehand diving deep into the dharma, i.e. secular westernized Buddhism, so I had a good grounding in the matter, and was ready to hear a couple of things that came along at just the right time.
One was, of all things, the final episode of The Good Place. I had some issues with how the show would lapse too easily into sitcom tropes, but along the way it raised some deep matters regarding life and death and was occasionally profound, so I stuck with it. I won’t bother to set up this last speech by one of the main characters, it speaks for itself:
Picture a wave. In the ocean. You can see it, measure it, its height, the way the sunlight refracts when it passes through. And it’s there. And you can see it, you know what it is. It’s a wave.
And then it crashes in the shore and it’s gone. But the water is still there. The wave was just a different way for the water to be, for a little while. You know it’s one conception of death for Buddhists: the wave returns to the ocean, where it came from and where it’s supposed to be.
I’m sure that metaphor has been used before, with more or less those words. But I hadn’t heard it, at least quite so simply and directly, and I was able to grasp the point.
At the same time I ran across The Art of Living, a posthumous collections of writings by Thich Nhat Hanh, a Zen Buddhist monk who I had read extensively but never on the nature of the self, as far as I can remember. And this book was all about that. Here is a section that helped clear things up for me.
When we think or work or breathe, many of us believe there must be a person, an actor, behind our actions. We believe there must be “someone” doing the action. But when the wind blows, there is no blower behind the wind. There is only the wind, and if it does not blow, it is not the wind at all. When we say “It is raining,” there does not need to be a rainer in order to have the rain. Who is the “it” that is raining? There is only raining. Raining is happening.
In the same way, outside of our actions, there is no person, no thing we can call our “self.” When we think, we are our thinking. When we work, we are the working. When we breathe, we are the breathing. When we act, we are our actions. […]
The most accurate way to describe the process of thinking is not that there is “someone” thinking but that thinking is manifesting, as the result of a remarkable, wondrous coming together of conditions. We do not need to have a self in order to think; there is thinking and only thinking. There is not an additional separate entity doing the thinking. Insofar as there is a thinker, the thinker comes into existence at the same time as the thinking.
There are the actions of thinking, feeling, and perceiving, but there is no actor or separate self-entity doing the thinking, feeling, and perceiving.
After reading that I understood.
Something else he wrote about impermanence surprised me:
Impermanence is something wonderful. If things were not impermanent, life would not be possible. A seed could never become a plant of corn; the child couldn’t grow into a young adult; there could never be healing and transformation; we could never realize our dreams. So impermanence is very important for life. Thanks to impermanence, everything is possible.
Good point!
It’s a superb metaphor. Very Taoist in outlook, predating the arrival of Buddhism, whether in China or much farther “West.” Not to take anything away from the wisdom of the dharma.
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