DYING AND LIVING
Dialogue 10P: There must be a way of learning how to die. To know how to die is of
tremendous importance to each one of us.
K: How do the traditionalists and the professionals—by the professionals I mean
the gurus, the Śaṅkarācāryas, the Ādi Śaṅkarācāryas, the yogis—answer this
question?
P: Tradition divides life into various stages. There is brahmacarya, a stage of
celibacy when, as a student, the boy learns from a guru. The second stage is that
of gṛhastha, when a man gets married, has children, seeks to accumulate wealth
and so on. He also supports the sannyāsi and the children, and thereby supports
society. In the third stage, the vānaprastha, a man walks out of the pursuit of
worldly things and faces the stage of preparation for the final stage which is
sannyāsa, in which there is a giving up of name, home, identity—a symbolic
donning of the saffron robe.
There is also a belief that at the moment of death, all man’s past comes into
focus. If his karma, his actions within this life, have been good, then the last
thought which remains with him at the time of death continues. That is carried
over into the next life. They also speak of the essential need for the mind to be
quiet and fully awake at the time of death for the quenching of karma.
K: Will a traditional man go through all this or, is it just a lot of words?
P: Generally sir, the orthodox Hindu has the Gītā chanted at the time of death so
that his mind cuts itself away from the immediacy of fear, of family, of wealth,
etc. This does not answer my question. How is the individual to learn how to die?
K: Take a leaf in the spring—how delicate it is, and yet it has the extraordinary
strength to stand the wind; in summer it matures; in autumn it turns yellow; and
then it dies. It is one of the most beautiful things to see. The whole thing is a
movement of beauty, a movement of the vulnerable. The leaf that is very, very
tender, becomes rich, takes shape, meets summer and, when autumn comes, turns
gold. There is never any sense of ugliness, never a withering away in
midsummer. It is a perpetual movement from beauty to beauty. There is fullness
in the spring leaf as well as in the dying leaf. I do not know if you see that.
Why cannot man live and die that way? What is the thing that is destroying
him from the beginning till the end? Look at a boy of ten or twelve or thirteen—
how full of laughter he is. By fourteen he becomes tough and hard; his whole
manner and face change; he is caught in a pattern.