Matthew 27:50-51 (KJV): Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost. And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent.
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“My master [Jamyang Khyentse] passed away in ‘the sleeping lion’s posture’…“ says Sogyal Rinpoche, “Crowds of people were there, filing around the temple, to show their respect. Then something extraordinary happened. An incandescent, milky light, looking like a thin and luminous fog, began to appear and gradually spread everywhere. The palace temple had four large electric lights outside; normally, at that time of the evening they shone brightly…Yet they were dimmed by this mysterious light. Apa Pant…was the first to ring and inquire what on earth it could be. Then many others started to call; this strange, unearthly light was seen by hundreds of people. One of the other masters then told us that such manifestations of light are said in the Tantras to be a sign of someone attaining Buddhahood” – Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, p. 275.
It is strange to think that the death of a Buddhist master could be connected to a milky, luminous fog. It feels like mythic hyperbole to consider Jesus’ death accompanied by an earthquake and the splitting of rocks. Wendell Berry asks a question, “Why do the health of the body and the health of the earth decline together?” He asks, “Why does modern society exist under constant threat of the same suffering, deprivation, spite, contempt, and obliteration that it has imposed on other people and other creatures?” Forty years ago, another Buddhist teacher pointed out that, despite our resistance to “superstitious views” linking harmony in nature with harmony in human affairs, we are beginning to acknowledge “the connections between the social [or societal problems] and the natural, or environmental, problems that we are facing.” We destroy our environment as we destroy one another.
Berry again, “The willingness to abuse other bodies is the willingness to abuse one’s own. To damage the earth is to damage your children. To despise the ground is to despise its fruit; to despise the fruit is to despise its eaters. The wholeness of health is broken by despite.” Teachers like Jamyang Khyentse and Jesus recognize this deep inter-being nature of reality. Jesus notes that there is no distance between caring for him and caring for the hungry, thirsty, naked, sick, imprisoned, or stranger (Matthew 25). Jesus points out that if his followers stop singing out their praise songs, the stones themselves will start to sing (Luke 19:40). The soil, the fruit, the children, the teachers, the sick, the imprisoned, the stones themselves – why do the health of the body and the health of the earth decline together?
There are rare beings who embrace the deep ecology of our mutual belonging, who live in near-constant awareness of our inter-being natures, and who, through their lives and teachings, work to give the rest of us some little glimpses of this Heaven on Earth. Upon the death of such a rare teacher, the sky itself just might respond with a mysterious incandescence that dims electric lights, causing people to phone each other in wonder. With the dying of such a precious teacher, rocks may begin to rent themselves in two, the earth may suddenly shake and quake in homage. Why do such reactions make sense? Because there is no distance – no distance between these teachers and the sky and the rocks and the earth and the rest of us.
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Time alone in nature can be a beautiful practice as we contemplate the death of Jesus or one of our other teachers, as we reflect on the death or dying of a loved one, as we contemplate our own mortality. The water flowing in the creek, the pebbles, the grains of sand, the wind wandering over the grass, a single bird’s song, a solitary insect, the roughness of the tree’s bark – what feelings, thoughts, moods, words, silences are emanating from them to you? (Do not grapple for too many explanatory words, just experience.)
(Music: Courtesy of Adrian Von Ziegler, “Circle of Life.” )