Wesak

A stone stature of the seated Buddha, with its head and two lower arms severed off, was photographed in Wat Maha That, one of the many ruin temples in Ayutthaya, Thailand. About 240 years ago, the invading Burmese army, destroyed everything Thai in the city and many of the wreckages still remain today.

This picture of the Buddha, at the moment of enlightenment, with his right hand touching the earth and the left hand calling the earth to witness it, captures the mood and essence of the Wesak celebration, in May every year. This visualization, brings together, the time when Siddhartha Gautama became a Buddha, when he was born (563BC) and when he died (483 BC) and also his teachings about spiritual liberation and human insights.

Ayutthaya, in the 14th and 15th century, was the second Capital of Thailand after Sukhothai. It was the greatest inland port at that time but it was in constant war with invading neighbours, wanting to take over its power and wealth.

Some of the best Thai Buddhist art flourished during that time but in 1765 the invading army from Burma, over ran the city within two years, and in its wake, desecrated everything sacred to the Thais, including manuscripts, temples and sculptures.

The Mon people (Thais and Burmese), who were mostly Theravada Buddhist, were at war with each other constantly, in their history, and they are now still at war, not only with their neighbours, but also with their own people. This is true too of many parts of the world today; we are endlessly at war with each other, many of these conflicts are in the name of religion, race, power and greed (for oil and other limited natural resources).

When will we ever learn to live and share with our neighbours?

A thin line

In the last few weeks, there has been a lot of news from all over the world, of countless deaths, due to natural or man made courses (famines, earthquakes, cyclones, droughts, starvations, floods, prisons, wars, massacres, revolutions, global warming etc.).

There is but a thin line, between life and death, and each of us crosses it and back, many times in our daily life. If we didn’t die today, we live for another day, and so on. But one of those day it will be our turn. This page is dedicated to all those of our distant blood brothers and sisters (related millions of years ago from the middle of Africa), young and old, near and far, all colours, cultures or creeds.

May you all find rest, some how, somewhere, sometime. Who knows, perhaps we’ll all meet in another form someday?

The first week of April, during the annual remembrance festival, my cousins and I went to visit the graves of our relatives (our grand father and mother and uncle). We all recalled in our own ways, our gratitude to our parents and our parent’s parents. We are glad to be here.

Our ancestors, either buried or cremated, not physically with us, silent, but are not forgotten. They are still alive in our mind. I guess, in their spirit world, they too are seeking out their missing ones, dead or life, in their own form, to tell stories about themselves and to listen to news of other persons or events.

Two years ago, my mother died, in the hospital; she was in a coma for forty days. It was my good fortune, to have my mother, to know her only when she decided to let you into her thoughts, was by her side and to share a house together, almost all her eighty years of life. Of course, there were many times over the years, we each thought the other was unthinking and that we had injured each other, by words and/or deeds, assured that we were not continuing to be together anymore, but then we stayed on anyway.

What I find most amazing is the fact that we have ancestors, relatives, brothers and sisters, not of our choosing, nether did they particularly had any interest in us, but yet we are part of this humanity. We are all related by blood and could reach each other, if we so desire, but often don’t, for mutual comfort, to help each other, to dispel our pains, fears, longings etc.

April is usually the time of the year when many Malaysian Chinese remember their dead by visiting the grave yard. This is a spring festival with a long tradition from China. This practice of keeping the dead alive takes many forms and expressions through out the world and every society and tribe has their own way of recalling their dead.

This is not ancestor worship like turning our fore fathers and mothers into some kind of gods but just an act to keep them in our mind. Our parents and grand parents are only dead if we stop thinking of them, giving thanks to them, being grateful to them for bring us into this world (sometime not of our own choosing).

Many people believe that the dead can speak on demand and they can have a direct line to their past, but if you don’t, the job of discovering, both the absence and presence simultaneously, of our lost ones, can be a difficult mental space to learn to grasp. For the rest, the usual way to remember our forebears, it may just be an act of conjuring up the thought of them (pleasant or otherwise).

The task is even more complicated if you happen to want to go seeking as far back as whom really our first ancestors were. Our ancient origins may be many many millions of years old, coming out from what is Africa today, to settle in different parts the earth. We may all have mix-blood down the line and are all even distant blood brothers and sisters (at war or at peace).

Fifteen

What is left now, after my mother’s funeral and then followed by the cremation of her body is just fragments of reality and memory of her.

The following day, we went back to the crematorium to collect her bones and ashes. We have decided to keep some of the bones and scatter the rest down a river, in an orang asli village in a forest, named, Janda Baik (good widow).

My mother would have objected to keeping any dead person’s belongings or parts of their remains in the home of the living. We didn’t mind that ourselves. Infact, we find that keeping a small portion of her bones, which had been through an inferno, helps us remember her better. The portions in the bottle, is my mother’s new reality. Our memory of her past and her ‘presence’ in our house, create moments of awareness which gives access to a connection with her even tough she had gone.

My sister and her husband had also taken another small part of our mother’s bones back to thier home as a treasured memory of our mother.

These broken pieces of her skull represent both the reality of our mother’s past and her present state of being, whatever form it may take. Memories, thoughts and perceptions will slowly fade in time; but how long will items like the burnt skull segments last in a bottle? How will my son  remember his grandmother in 50 years time? What sort of memory will my son have of me and his mother when we are both gone?

Is this what life is all about, just fragments of reality and memory, in the end?

Fourteen

The food and drinks that was offered up to me, on the offering table, at the foot of my coffin, during the funeral wake at my house, was both intimate and magical; they connected me (wherever I may be and in whatever appropriate form I am in) with my family.

It was intimate because food and drinks are consumed and taken into our bodies, the fabric of our being – they become us and we become them. The act of offering it up to me to imbibe was an act of faith on my children’s part, and that’s the magical touch.

Their intention, although focused on the food as is understood in the physical world, has transformed it into some sort of power that could be received in other worlds as whatever it is that is wanted. So, in some way, our world mixes into their worlds and helps and sustains them.

In the last few years of my last life, I shared a house with my son and his family. We did not often sit down to eat the family meals together at home. Somehow, we each had our own taste and our taste was not shared by the others in the family as often as we would have like. What I miss most, from where I am now, is not being able to eat some meals with my son and his family. Perhaps in my next life, this issue about sharing food with people in the material world may be different – more intimate?

However, from where I am and in the form that I am in, the food and drinks that are offered to me reach me in a transformed state. This mysterious quality goes a long way to satisfy both the needs of the dead and the living. Let’s eat.

Thirteen

Nothing can really help us prepare for dying – ours as well as those of our love ones. During the two night’s wake of my mother’s funeral, it was hard to keep a stable mind. In those few days my mind was dulled out with all that was going on around me.

There was the dead body in the coffin with its attending props and happenings. There were the people who came to pay their last respect, to talk, to laugh, to query etc…. Of course we were being watched and judged by all the eyes present as to the manner we were fulfilling our filial duties.

When we have to bury our parent, even when we can hardly keep a clear mind, nonetheless, at a deeper level, we can only trust our own understanding. This is the emotional consciousness we have gain from our parents, seeing how they went about doing things, sorting what was truly important and what was not, in their life.

But my mother’s ways of seeing things are her own and I look at things a little differently. What was for sure, to me, was that she had become the sounds of the chanting, drumming, talking, laughing and crying; she had also taken on as the smells of dead body, the burning incenses, candles and the fading flowers; finally, looking around, she appeared to have taken on the appearances of everyone and everything in the surroundings. Was it my hallucination?

This intuition that I was doing what I thought was most appropriate, at that time, for my mother, was all I had, to keep me going. But how long can I be sure of keeping this inner knowledge? What other resources will I need to help me to live and to die?

Twelve

My frozen body was brought back from the hospital to my last home. Now, I have two homes (actually every star is my home) and I can move freely from one to the other. It is hard for the living to grasp this state of being – to be everywhere, invisible, formless and in a sea of red. There is really no way of putting words to this transformation.

The three hired nuns, who chanted prayers at my wake for two nights, also helped those present to understand that there is a real connection being forged through the two evening’s activities. Of course, even then, as we were all acting it out in the rituals, in my former house, I and my children and friends could hardly believe that it had happened. Why has this to happen? The nuns in their natural way would say that my dead body is no longer me. That is just a shell. They also said that my soul has gone to where all such spirits would go. But this is not as simple as what the nuns had made it out to be.

I can imagine that my children will not put with such easy answers. To them the living, it is up to them to bear their dead in their memory. What is happening is that they have allowed their power of imagination to mix their physical world into the spirit worlds. However, despite its magical power, there is no way of communicating, between them and us, in the usual manner of using words. The connection is there but there is no way of expressing it to each other. They cannot know what I am thinking and I cannot know what is in their minds. It is now all about relying on our sensations and intuitions. How will this give comfort and help my children and sustain them in the days to come?

Eleven

Two days later, we went to the hospital mortuary to retrieve our mother’s corpse. The white body wrapping was unwrapped at the face, for us to identify the person. The look of my mother’s pale and frozen face had a certain stillness – a different stillness I had not experienced before.

I remember the quietness of my mother sleeping in her bed at home and also the oblivion when she was in a coma at the hospital bed. But this new stiffness brings up age old questions: Is that all there is? When will it be my turn? How cold is it like to be dead frozen? How hot is it, to be burning in a gas furnace? What come next? Do the dead know and care?

No one can really be sure about many matters of life and death. But the dead do matter. My mother’s death does matter to us in ways that we are only beginning to understand. As we stood around the mortuary watching the undertakers clean and dress the stiff body, she was with us. She is not dead. Her body may already be decaying inside, but she has been transformed to become the strongest memory, in my inner life. Is this what some may call clinging to the dead?

My mother has become a new mental reality – memories making up of all the hauntingly happy, sad, quiet and turbulent times of our family life. Besides, there was also all her personal remnants which we will bring home to lay in wake. The last funeral rights at our home will also be a way for all of our family members and friends to come to meet and get to know the new perception of my mother’s being and not being.

Ten

My mother’s body was pushed out from the CICU, on a body trolley, along the corridors of the hospital, on the way to the mortuary. These were the same passages, 40 days ago, that she was pushed through, on her way to the operating theater, for her fatal surgery. On the first trip, it was day light, but now, the last journey, it was in the dark of night.

Accompanying the trolley, it was difficult holding on to what was real and what was imaginary. What was there to hold on to – was it the body, the soul or what else? Just a while ago, there was my mother’s whole life time and now, it is just the dead body rolling along. How to make sense of our past, present and future? Was it all planned or mindlessness existence? How about thinking of it as continuous change, moving from one reality to another and another forever etc…?

I think that there is no single meaning or truth to our life, on earth or beyond. We live life according to our own understanding or lack of it, which ever may be the case. My mother, in her own way, had a pretty fulfilled life, more or less. Who is to judge?

There was an endless and random series of images and words passing through my mind as I went about making plans for the funeral. My mother’s body will be in the mortuary for a few days. This will give my sister and her husband, just enough time, to fly back from abroad, to take part in the last ceremony. When they arrive, we will then bring the corpse back to our house. The wake will be for two nights.