Grief

Just a quick question before we get started.

Q: What are the suttas dealing with hell? How do we get out?

A: The suttas are Majjhima 129 and Majjhima 130. As for how to get out, think of all the good things you’ve done in the past. There’s a story in the Tibetan tradition. Two hell beings are being forced to draw a heavy cart, and a hell warden is beating one of the hell beings very severely with a whip. The other hell being feels compassion for the one who is being whipped and pleads with the hell warden to stop. It was the first time that hell being felt compassion since he’d arrived in hell, and he immediately got out of hell. So, there’s hope.

Tonight’s topic is grief over the loss of a loved one. We’ll start with a story of another king. His name is King Pasenadi, and among his queens was Mallikā, who introduced him to the Buddha and was very dear to him.

Once in Sāvatthī, which was Pasenadi’s capital city, a man lost his only son. Day after day, he would go to the charnel ground and cry, “Where are you, my only son? Where are you, my only son?” One day, on the way back home, he stopped off to pay respects to the Buddha. The Buddha asked him, “What have you been doing? You look as if you’re out of your mind.” And the man said, “Well, yes, I just lost my only son, and day after day I go to the charnel ground and cry out, ‘Where are you, my only son? Where are you, my only son?’” Then the Buddha said, “Yes, there’s a lot of pain and suffering that comes from loved ones.” The man said, “How can that be? There’s only happiness and joy that comes from one’s loved ones.” See how deluded he was.

So he leaves the Buddha and goes and talks to a group of gamblers. The gamblers say, “Yeah, the Buddha’s wrong and you’re right. You get only happiness and joy from loved ones.” He agrees with the gamblers and goes home.

This story gets to the ear of the king, so he calls Mallikā in and he says, “This Buddha of yours says that pain and suffering come from loved ones. What does he mean by that? You get only happiness and joy from loved ones.” Mallikā says, “Well, if he says that, it must be true.” Pasenadi replies, “What kind of person are you? Everything the Buddha says, you say it must be true, true, true. Get out of my sight.”

So Mallikā calls in one of their counselors and tells him, “Go ask the Buddha what he meant by saying that.” So the counselor goes to see the Buddha, and the Buddha explains by telling stories of various people in Sāvatthī who lost their loved ones and, as a result, went out of their minds. One, for example, was a man who lost his wife and went crazy. He went from street to street, saying, “Have you seen my wife? Have you seen my wife?” Then there was the story of a woman who lost her husband and went from street to street asking, “Have you seen my husband? Have you seen my husband?” Many stories of this sort.

He ends with a story where a young woman who’s been married to a young man gets taken back by her relatives so that they can marry her off to somebody else. She gets in touch with her original husband and says, “My relatives are trying to take me away from you.” So he finds her, kills her, and then kills himself, with the idea that they would be together when they’re dead. The Buddha concluded, “This is what I mean when I say that there’s a lot of pain and suffering that comes from loved ones.”

So the counselor comes back to the palace and tells all this to Mallikā. Then Mallikā goes to see the king. But instead of repeating the Buddha’s stories, she comes up with a strategy of her own. She says to the king, “Do you love your son?” And he says, “Of course.” Then she says, “What if your son died, what would that do to you?” He says, “That would change my life.” “Do you love me?” “Of course, I love you.” “What would it do to you if I died?” He says, “It would change my life.” She says, “That’s what the Buddha meant.” So the king gets up, figures out which direction the Buddha is, and then, for the first time, pays homage to the Buddha in that direction.

It actually happened that, as they got older, Mallikā did die before the king did. And it so happened that Pasenadi was talking with the Buddha at the time. A courtier came up and whispered the news in Pasenadi’s ear that Mallikā had died. The king was totally dejected. His shoulders drooped and he was at a loss for words.

So the Buddha recommended three steps for how to deal with grief.

The first step is to reflect on the universality of grief: “To the extent that beings are born, they suffer aging, illness, and death. There are no exceptions.” Not even for kings.

The second step is learning how to express your grief in skillful ways. The Buddha said this includes giving eulogies, dedicating gifts, and listening to the Dhamma. This is to show appreciation for those who have passed away.

The third is to realize that there’s still good work to be done in the world. In other words, the loss of someone you’ve loved doesn’t mean that the world no longer has meaning. Your enemies would be pleased if they found out that you were giving yourself over self-indulgently to grief, and your loved ones would be sad to see this happen. You yourself wouldn’t be able to accomplish your worthwhile aims. So the Buddha recommends that you should ask yourself, “What important work am I doing now?”

Here, I’d like to stop to note the fact that when the Canon talks about the drawbacks or sufferings of human life, it often focuses on the sufferings of kings. In effect, the message is that this is as good as human life gets, and even then there’s suffering. It also focuses on the dangers of kingship. In your quest for power, you do many unskillful things that make it harder and harder to hear and understand the Dhamma. Pasenadi is a case in point. He’s often shown as being somewhat scatter-brained in his questions to the Buddha. Even his Pāli grammar is bad. And when he announces his Dhamma realizations to the Buddha, they’re often very rudimentary.

So, not only do kings suffer, but their power and status also put them in positions where they’re likely to do unskillful things and, as a result, they fall deeper than ordinary people.

The point that the Canon is making here is that the good things in the world are not really good. The way Ajaan Lee puts this point is that the truth of the world isn’t good, and the goodness of the world isn’t true. If you want something true and good, you have look to the Dhamma.

To get back to the topic of grief: The general pattern for traditional funeral observances around the world is to allow those who are grieving to give expression to their love for the lost one, but also to remind them that there are still good reasons to live. This is what you see everywhere, from the most primitive societies to the most advanced. What’s distinctive about the Buddhist approach is which expressions of love the Buddhist texts encourage and how they define the reasons for living.

The Dhamma approaches the problem of grief in two ways. On the one hand, it offers advice in what we would call symptom management, and on the other hand it prescribes a cure. Both approaches follow the same three steps of the Buddha’s advice to Pasenadi, but obviously, the cure goes deeper into each step. This two-pronged approach is similar to what doctors and psychotherapists do when they’re treating their patients: First they try to manage the patients’ symptoms to calm the patient down, and then they focus on the causes of the patient’s illness to effect a genuine cure.

• So let’s start with symptom management. You start with a reflection on the general nature of aging, illness, and death—that all beings suffer loss in this way—and this is meant to change the focus of your attention from your own loss to the fact of loss all over the world. This is meant transform your grief over your own loss into compassion for others.

This connects with the aesthetic theory they had in ancient India on how a dramatic presentation gives artistic pleasure. The people who gave plays in India noticed a paradox. They found that audiences would often enjoy seeing somebody suffer on stage, and this was not out of maliciousness, but out of sympathy. So the question was, how do you explain this? The person on stage is supposed to be portraying real sadness and suffering, but can you say that the audience is feeling the same emotion as the character on the stage? Well, no. After all, they’re enjoying the spectacle.

So, the theory they came up with is that the audience doesn’t experience the same emotion. They taste the emotion, and the taste is related to but different from the emotion itself. In other words, they experienced it at one remove. And so the theorists devised a list of the emotions that could be portrayed on stage, and the corresponding taste that came from each emotion. When grief was being portrayed on the stage, the audience, at one remove, would taste compassion. That’s what they would enjoy.

The same principle applies in real life. If you can step back from your grief and reflect on the fact that all people suffer loss, you feel compassion for everybody. That then becomes compassion for yourself because you’re stepping back from your loss a bit. Your own grief becomes more bearable at the same time that you’re not denying it. This compassion thus turns grief into a more healing, expansive, uplifting emotion. It’s an emotion that nourishes the heart and enables you to interact with others with more understanding.

So, that’s the first step in symptom management: stepping back from your own grief and seeing it in the context of everybody else’s grief. The resulting sense of compassion helps you connect with other people.

The second step deals with expressing feelings of appreciation. You hold funeral observances for giving skillful expression to your appreciation for loved ones. Among the observances that the Buddha mentioned as potentially useful were eulogies, donations, and the recital of wise sayings. These three activities have since formed the core of funeral observances in many Buddhist traditions. If you actually want to help the person who has passed on, you make gifts and do good in other ways, and then dedicate the merit to your loved one. To heal the wound in your own heart and to encourage goodness in the people who are still alive, you express your appreciation for the loved one’s goodness. To remind you of the continued value of Dhamma practice, you listen to passages of Dhamma. Weeping and wailing, the Buddha notes, accomplish none of this. They destroy your health, cause distress to those who love you, and please those who hate or despise you.

The Buddha mentioned this last point as motivation for gathering your energy for the third step, which is to remind yourself that there are still good things to accomplish in your life. Once you’ve broadened your heart with compassion and you’ve expressed your appreciation for your loved one’s goodness, it puts you in a good position to provide a wise answer for that question, “What important work am I doing now?” The wise response is not to define important in terms of the pressing responsibilities of the daily grind. Instead, you should think about what’s important in terms of the future course of your life as a whole.

This means developing good qualities like conviction, virtue, generosity, learning, and discernment, and the sublime attitudes, as we discussed the other day. These are the qualities that can help guarantee good opportunities for rebirth when you approach your own death. If you want to meet your loved one again in a future life, these qualities guarantee that you will have the opportunity to meet in positive circumstances. As the Canon says, the vows made by people who are virtuous tend to come true.

When we take these three steps in grief management—seeing the universality of loss, expressing appreciation for the lost one, and then determining what you should do with your life now—and view them in terms of the seven strengths, it’s easy to see how they employ and foster the first four.

Conviction reminds you that you can’t just wallow in your sorrow. Given your conviction in the need to continue creating new kamma for the sake of your own long-term happiness, you have to get to work to manage at least the symptoms of your grief.

The reflection on how excessive grief distresses your loved ones and pleases your enemies should appeal to your sense of shame.

The reflection on how grief destroys your health and interferes with the work that needs to be done to keep yourself from falling into even greater suffering should appeal to your sense of compunction.

And finally, persistence is what actually allows you to think in these terms and to pull you out of your grieving thoughts into a more ennobling compassion for all, and then to act on that compassion for your own good and for the good of others.

Now, as we noted, these steps are simply basic instructions in symptom management. They’re designed to assuage the pangs of grief, to make sure that the grief doesn’t become self-indulgent and ruin your life. But they can’t tell you how to remove the arrow of grief from your heart. For those instructions, you have to go to the Buddha’s more advanced instructions for going entirely beyond grief.

• His total cure, as we said, follows the same three steps: accepting the universality of loss, expressing your appreciation for what has been lost, and then directing your focus to the good things that still need to be done. But now we pursue these steps on a deeper level based on understanding the psychology of grief.

There’s a story in the Canon. Ven. Sāriputta’s been meditating one afternoon and then, at the end of his meditation, he comes out and talks to some of the other monks. He says, “I was reflecting, ‘Is there any change that could happen in the world that would cause me grief?’ And I realized there was nothing.” Now, this gets Ānanda upset. He says, “Wait a minute. What if the Buddha passed away?”

And these are Sāriputta’s words: “Even if there were a change or alteration in the Teacher”—that’s their way of talking about the Buddha, and that’s the polite way of saying that the Buddha dies—“there would arise within me no sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, or despair. Still, I would have this thought, ‘What a great being of great might, great power, has disappeared. For if the Blessed One were to remain for a long time, that would be for the benefit of many people, for the happiness of many people, out of sympathy for the world, for the welfare, benefit, and happiness of devas and human beings.’”

Now, notice that Sāriputta makes no mention of “my loss” or “what I’ve lost” in the Buddha’s passing away. Ānanda notices this, too, and he comments that this is a sign that Sāriputta has no conceit, which means no sense of “I am.”

This is an astute comment. Grief hurts because we feel that we’ve lost a part of ourselves. Our sense of “I am” needs to feed, and we feed on the people around us. We internalize them and make them part of ourselves. But if we can remove that sense of “I am,” then we don’t feel that a part of ourselves has been taken away when people near and dear to us have died. So, to gain total release from grief, we have to stop laying claim to things as “me” and “mine.”

This is where the three steps come in. First we reflect on the universality of loss, to develop not only compassion but also a sense of saṁvega, which means a sense of terror and dismay over the cycle of birth and death. You see that it just keeps going on and on and on, arriving nowhere, causing a lot of suffering in the process, and you say, “There must be a way out.” You think about what the Buddha said about the tears that you’ve shed over the loss of your loved ones: They’re more than the water in all the oceans of the Earth. There’s a highway in California that we use often that goes right next to the ocean, and every time I go past, I think, “Oh my gosh, that’s an awful lot of water.”

Thinking about this leads to what the Buddha calls renunciation distress: the realization that there is a deathless goal that people have attained, but you haven’t attained there yet. Actually, this kind of distress offers you some hope because it assumes there is a way out. It’s distressing because you haven’t gotten there yet, but still it’s better than what he calls household distress, which he defines as not getting the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, etc., that you want. That kind of distress is hopeless, because even though you may eventually get the things you want, they’re going to leave you again. Renunciation distress, though, contains an element of hope because it assumes that there is a way out to total freedom.

As for the step of appreciation, this goes in two ways. First you think about your loved ones and say, “If I followed the path of practice, I could dedicate the merit of that to them.” There’s a passage where the Buddha says that when you attain the stages of awakening, then the amount of merit that goes to those who have helped you now and in the past grows greater and greater. He recommends this line of thinking as one of the motivations for practicing. So you practice as a way of paying your debt of gratitude for those who have helped you.

The other direction in which your appreciation goes is to the Buddha himself. You think of all the difficulties he went through to find the way out. You also have appreciation for the Sangha that has kept the memory of the Buddha’s accomplishment alive. Appreciation here is expressed by practicing the Dhamma in accordance with the Dhamma, and not in accordance with your own likes and dislikes. This means that you become a new “you.” You’re defined not by your grief, but by the noble desire to do what’s required to follow the path.

As for the third step, which is about the work that needs to be done: The irony is that Sāriputta actually died before the Buddha. Ānanda brings the news to the Buddha, telling the Buddha that he himself lost his bearings on hearing the news of Sāriputta’s death. So the Buddha chides him, and these are the words he uses, “When Sāriputta passed away, did he take virtue along with him?” “No.” “Concentration?” “No.” “Discernment?” “No.” “Release?” “No.” “Knowledge and vision of release?” “No.” In other words, the good work of the world, the best work of the world, which is the path to total release of suffering, is still there to be done. So you give yourself to the work of the noble eightfold path.

Now, when that work is done, the mind no longer creates a sense of “me” and “mine” that has to feed on things that change. That’s because it’s found a happiness that doesn’t change and doesn’t have the slightest need to feed. In that sense, the mind no longer turns itself into a being. Remember that beings are defined by their attachment to how they feed. When the mind no longer takes on the identity of a being anywhere at all, it’s said to be everywhere released. In this way you realize that the Buddha’s words to King Pasenadi—“to the extent there are beings”—turn out to have a limit. Going beyond that limit, the mind no longer stabs itself with the arrows of grief. From that point on, as long as it continues to live in the world, it will know loss but not suffer from it. When it’s gone beyond the world, it will enter a dimension beyond space and time where there’s no possibility of loss at all.

That’s where the three steps in the Buddha’s total cure for grief can take you: to freedom from having to experience grief over sorrow ever again.

Here, too, it’s easy to see how this cure employs and fosters all seven of the strengths that have formed the framework for the discussion throughout this retreat. You start with conviction in the Buddha’s awakening, which is what motivates you to take on the difficult work of dismantling your sense of “I.” Your appreciation of the Buddha’s accomplishment, the hard work and compassion that went into it, gives you a sense of shame around the idea of not following the path all the way to the end. Your sense of compunction, when fully developed, is what sparks you to go beyond mere grief management to settling for nothing less than the total cure. Your persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment do the actual work of abandoning the last traces of conceit. This allows you to go beyond the birth, aging, illness, death, and sorrow that being a “being” entails.

It was through these strengths that the bodhisatta, the Buddha-to-be, became the Buddha. They helped him develop the undaunted heart that allowed him to attempt and complete the work of the path of the deathless. When you develop these strengths, you can develop the same undaunted heart as well.

As a poem in the Canon says,

“With arrow pulled out,
      independent,
      attaining peace of awareness,
      all grief transcended,
      free of grief,
      you’re unbound.”