How Does a Buddhist Monk Face Death?
An e-mail interview in the New York Times between George Yancy and Geshe Dadul Namgyal, a Tibetan Buddhist monk
If somehow you can take these words and make them useful…make them meaningful and relevant insofar as you react to your own death…then he has been successful in delivering his message.
But from my frame of mind, reading this sort of thing is the equivalent of encountering a Hallmark greeting card…or interpreting a numbingly vague horoscope in the newspaper. In terms of both life and death, it really tells me nothing at all.
Virtually anyone can read it and fit it snuggly into lives that from day to day span the entire moral and political spectrum. Almost any behaviors can be rationalized because who is to say what it means to be connected to reality. It doesn’t even make the attempt to deal with the consequences of conflicting goods attached to one or another religious narrative that, down through the ages have precipiated all manner of ghastly human deaths.
It is just another “world of words” that some feel compelled to create and then sustain in their head because in there it really doesn’t matter the extent to which the dots can be connected between the words and the world that we live in. Only that in believing them it makes you feel less disturbed and perturbed about all the terrible things that can unfold on this side of the grave by feeling so much better about all the wonderful things that will unfold on the other side of it.
And I suspect my own inflection here encompasses some measure of the bitterness I feel at having lost the capacity to think myself into believing it as well.