Three Prayers for the Dying

 I thought of this series, and even this post, when I woke up this morning.  I have a good friend whose father is dying, and I strongly felt that I was meant to pass this on to her.  But also............. I feel this is among the work I've done over the years that is most personally meaningful to me, that says what I want to say or rather, sense.   

Form is Empty, Empty is Form

I did these 3 pieces in 2009 as "prayers" for my brother. He had been in a coma for three years before he died.   He was a great admirer of Buddhism, and I wanted to honor that when I made them. 

They speak much better to me than words. I had all of these wonderful casts of hands, and also tiles I made that I imprinted words and letters into..........words, syllables, sentences are what we create the stories of our lives with......

But before the words, are the feelings, the belonging, the empathy, the response, the one who sees and experiences. Perhaps dying is shattering all those "vessels" of words and ideas and constructs (and terra cotta pottery shards imprinted with words seems like a good medium for that concept) that we have allowed to define who we are are. Perhaps, leaving all the words and vessels behind, at last, we fly.

"Form is empty, emptiness is form.
Likewise, sensation, discrimination,
conditioning, and awareness are empty.
In this way, Shariputra, all things are emptiness;
they are without defining characteristics;
they are not born, they do not cease"

The Heart Sutra

Somewhere within the "hoop" of who we are, within the space between the child and the old man or woman, the beginning place and the ending place.........in the middle is the heart. I think that above all is where our "soul making" has gone on.

Holy Mother Take My Hand 

I think this is my favorite. The Mother's Hand takes ours, and regardless of what artifice and awards and self-hate we have accumulated, as it dissolves in the greater being, the River,  of Her compassion, we see that we are all just children. From that perspective, from the banks of the "Rio Grande", it is hard to conceive of not forgiving, and cherishing, everyone.

Dream Weaver 

Somehow this image is very important to me. We ourselves are the great work of art in progress, and we ourselves are all connected to the Web of being. These are hands of the Dream Weaver, weaving a new dream in the silence, the dark, the depths of our innermost being.

Here are some verses from the Weaver Song performed every year at the Spiral Dance Ritual in San Francisco, which I used to participate in when I lived there.

No one knows why we are born

A web is made, a web is torn

But love is the home that we come from

and at the core we all are one

Of life's Spring may we drink deep

and awake to dream and die to sleep

and dreaming weave another form

a shining thread of life reborn

Weaver, Weaver, weave our thread

whole and strong into your Web

Healer, Healer, heal our pain

in love may we return again

~~~Starhawk

The Buddha's Eyes

I found this essay by my friend, Felicia Miller, who became a Buddhist, in my files the other day, something she wrote and shared with me  toward the end of her life (she passed in 2009 ).  And then I found a poem she gave me long before that time, when we were both young students during  halcyon years at Berkeley.  I just felt like sharing and pairing the two here as I remember my friend as well.  

I think Felicia would see the connection.  There are gaps in a life, but again, the same song, no gaps, just an open window.

THE BUDDHA'S EYES

This longing to see the gaze of the Buddha, what is it? What would it be to look into this ancient, ancient man’s eyes? 

Like entering the tractor beam of a powerful darshan? Perhaps, but not only, also something else. “The taste of freedom is everywhere in my teachings,” the Buddha said. Maybe like looking through a window to see a limitless sky.

My friend Claude told me about a ritual that Korean priests perform to bind the community to the temple and to each other. They go to the temple hall and attach strings from the lanterns that hang near the ceiling and run these strings from each one around the temple, going from each to each. All the strings converge at the eyes of the  Buddha above the alter. Like the tiny buddhas in a certain Tibetan practice that we picture streaming through the practitioners’ eyes,  back and forth moving along rays of light that connect us all. After the Korean temple ritual is completed,  priests cut the strings into  threads of protection  for others to wear. People tie them around their necks or wrists and wear them until they disintegrate. Protected by the community, the sangha, protected by the dharma, protected by the Buddha.

So what would I be looking for, if I could look into the Buddha’s eyes? 

Surfing Amazon, I came across a book titled “To See the Buddha.” An image of curious eyes accompany the caption, “Look inside this book.” I look, and find: “the Buddha is an absent presence.” Present and absent, yes. The Buddha is an act of the imagination, really, an absence we fill with our desire to be ruled no more by desire.

In Sri Lanka, an artist has finished an image of the Buddha. The last thing he must do is to paint the Buddha’s eyes. He does not do this painting the  vacant lids up close. Instead, he  holds up a mirror, using  the reflection in the mirror to guide him. The statue’s eyes are thus  not part of the representation of  form.  They are a  gap  introduced through the device of the mirror’s reflection. A point of reflection for the artist,  a gesture that says “This is a statue of the Buddha, but not the Buddha. This isn’t it.” 

A gap. Bardos at every level of being - at the end of life, and at the ends and beginnings of every breath, if we can but look for them. 

The Buddha is a presence that denotes absence.  We  stand and stare, but to see the gaze of the Buddha, one would have to look with the eyes of the Buddha. A shift somehow.  A trick with incense and mirrors.  What does one see through the Buddha’s eyes? 

What is seeing when no one is looking? Nagarjuna says “the horizon of enlightenment is the same as the horizon of samsara.” The same, only different, but not.

Felicia Miller  (2009)

Someone was the Sun

            calling from across

                        the little island fields

we turned,  and took the last

          glimpse of the closing lid

"Let's go, shall we?"

I could not answer

         but only followed after

         just someone's glance

                    along the rock path.

Felicia Miller (1972)

"The Buddha's Last Instruction"

The Buddha’s Last Instruction

“Make of yourself a light,” 

said the Buddha,
before he died.

I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal – a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.

An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.

The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.

No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.

And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire –
clearly I’m not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something 
of inexplicable value.

Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.

~ Mary Oliver ~